CEOP show Maddie is missing on 30th April 2007

AndyB wrote:Thanks chirpy.

<snip>

So what WBM seem to be saying is that:
30/04/2007 no archive of CEOP was taken

31/07/2007 mccann.html was archived from the CEOP site (perhaps with the homepage as well) and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly 3 seconds past 11:58 on 30/04/2007

07/10/2007 the CEOP home page was archived and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly the same time.

This doesn't sound very plausible to me, not with the timestamps being identical. Besides, by 07/10/2007 mccann.html was linked from the home page so it should have been archived but it isn't there. What happened to it? And another thing, the home page archive for 07/10/2007 exists and so clearly wasn't misfiled as 30/04 unless they're saying it was filed correctly AND misfiled at the same time. It just doesn't ring true for me

On this I would agree with you, although not for the same reasons. I firmly believe that the 20070430115803 timestamp was erroneous, but it doesn't make sense to me that crawls done at various different times were all in error and yet managed to be put in the same timestamp folder. That would to me be illogical. I think it more likely that everything in that 20070430115803 folder was crawled at the same time, but at a much later date.

And I believe neither of the dates they've given are correct. The home page had latest news on it dated 23rd October 2007. Therefore I would expect the crawl to have occurred at or after that date.

And as I mentioned earlier, if Wayback are convinced that the time-stamp is an error, then it makes perfect sense that they just moved that folder somewhere else until they can figure out how to file it correctly. Therefore, at the current time all pages that were previously under that folder will be missing, and users will be redirected to the closest chronological page. It's no great conspiracy involving the CIA, FBI, or the Illuminati - they've just moved a folder until they can figure out where it should go.

Has anyone successfully found another page which answers WLBTS query of future events being on a page. Although there has been debate over JavaScript etc. no evidence of another similar page has been produced afaik.

WLBTS wrote:

AndyB wrote:Thanks chirpy.

<snip>

So what WBM seem to be saying is that:
30/04/2007 no archive of CEOP was taken

31/07/2007 mccann.html was archived from the CEOP site (perhaps with the homepage as well) and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly 3 seconds past 11:58 on 30/04/2007

07/10/2007 the CEOP home page was archived and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly the same time.

This doesn't sound very plausible to me, not with the timestamps being identical. Besides, by 07/10/2007 mccann.html was linked from the home page so it should have been archived but it isn't there. What happened to it? And another thing, the home page archive for 07/10/2007 exists and so clearly wasn't misfiled as 30/04 unless they're saying it was filed correctly AND misfiled at the same time. It just doesn't ring true for me

On this I would agree with you, although not for the same reasons.  I firmly believe that the 20070430115803 timestamp was erroneous, but it doesn't make sense to me that crawls done at various different times were all in error and yet managed to be put in the same timestamp folder.  That would to me be illogical.  I think it more likely that everything in that 20070430115803 folder was crawled at the same time, but at a much later date.

And I believe neither of the dates they've given are correct.  The home page had latest news on it dated 23rd October 2007.  Therefore I would expect the crawl to have occurred at or after that date.

And as I mentioned earlier, if Wayback are convinced that the time-stamp is an error, then it makes perfect sense that they just moved that folder somewhere else until they can figure out how to file it correctly.  Therefore, at the current time all pages that were previously under that folder will be missing, and users will be redirected to the closest chronological page.  It's no great conspiracy involving the CIA, FBI, or the Illuminati - they've just moved a folder until they can figure out where it should go.

Surely taking out folders (with no holding statement) calls into question the whole integrity of WBM I.e. we found an error, we can't really explain it however trust our data to be used in your up and coming litigation

Hongkong Phooey wrote:
Surely taking out folders (with no holding statement) calls into question the whole integrity of WBM I.e. we found an error, we can't really explain it however trust our data to be used in your up and coming litigation

It's worth remembering that WBM is a voluntary, non-profit organisation providing a service that is not required by law.  The way people have spoken about them it is as if they are some kind of governmental records department.  It's entirely up to them what they do with bad data.  They must have felt that the 30th April time-stamp was in error, and are figuring out what to do with it now.  They won't be doing anything at the moment - it is the weekend.

If a legal case has future problems because of this, why should WBM care?  They're just providing a useful service.  Obviously they would prefer that they didn't make mistakes.  But they're not the electoral register or HMRC, they provide an interesting service that doesn't have to exist at all while not making any profit.  They should be commended for what they do.

WLBTS wrote:

AndyB wrote:Thanks chirpy.

<snip>

So what WBM seem to be saying is that:
30/04/2007 no archive of CEOP was taken

31/07/2007 mccann.html was archived from the CEOP site (perhaps with the homepage as well) and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly 3 seconds past 11:58 on 30/04/2007

07/10/2007 the CEOP home page was archived and this was misfiled as having been archived at exactly the same time.

This doesn't sound very plausible to me, not with the timestamps being identical. Besides, by 07/10/2007 mccann.html was linked from the home page so it should have been archived but it isn't there. What happened to it? And another thing, the home page archive for 07/10/2007 exists and so clearly wasn't misfiled as 30/04 unless they're saying it was filed correctly AND misfiled at the same time. It just doesn't ring true for me

On this I would agree with you, although not for the same reasons.  I firmly believe that the 20070430115803 timestamp was erroneous, but it doesn't make sense to me that crawls done at various different times were all in error and yet managed to be put in the same timestamp folder.  That would to me be illogical.  I think it more likely that everything in that 20070430115803 folder was crawled at the same time, but at a much later date.

And I believe neither of the dates they've given are correct.  The home page had latest news on it dated 23rd October 2007.  Therefore I would expect the crawl to have occurred at or after that date.

And as I mentioned earlier, if Wayback are convinced that the time-stamp is an error, then it makes perfect sense that they just moved that folder somewhere else until they can figure out how to file it correctly.  Therefore, at the current time all pages that were previously under that folder will be missing, and users will be redirected to the closest chronological page.  It's no great conspiracy involving the CIA, FBI, or the Illuminati - they've just moved a folder until they can figure out where it should go.

I'm still struggling to understand how a crawl on say 25/10/2007 can end up believing that the date is actually 30/04/2007 but, because its a possibility lets for the moment say that's what happened. Wouldn't you expect there to be many thousands of other sites archived the same day with similarly incorrect timestamps?

Irrespective of whether mccann.html was crawled on 30/04/2007 or not I agree that there's probably no conspiracy here. Just a panicking IT manager who really doesn't want the whole world to realise just how flaky the WBM software really is. Did you get a reply from them BTW?

AndyB wrote:
I'm still struggling to understand how a crawl on say 25/10/2007 can end up believing that the date is actually 30/04/2007 but, because its a possibility lets for the moment say that's what happened. Wouldn't you expect there to be many thousands of other sites archived the same day with similarly incorrect timestamps?

Irrespective of whether mccann.html was crawled on 30/04/2007 or not I agree that there's probably no conspiracy here. Just a panicking IT manager who really doesn't want the whole world to realise just how flaky the WBM software really is. Did you get a reply from them BTW?

On the first point, no, I wouldn't automatically expect to see that.  I've seen something that to me points at a bug causing an incorrect time-stamp, which may have any cause, hardware, software, or even simple human error.  I can't comment on how widespread the result of the bug would be.  We could only know that if we knew what caused this particular output that I am convinced is erroneous.

I've not received a reply from WBM yet, but I didn't expect to receive one yet.  It's the weekend after all.  They might take a couple of weeks to sort out what has gone wrong, and I doubt they will be replying to many people now as they're probably inundated with emails by now, so they'll wait until they have a stock answer and just send that.

I do hope that they're fully transparent about what went wrong, but whatever they say, I am certain that many people here will not believe it anyway.  Operation Grange confirmed that the Smith family made the e-fits, but that didn't stop Tony from just carrying on claiming that OG was lying.  That's the way I expect it will play out here.  I'll look at the answers when they are available and make up my mind whether they make sense.

Just a thought....

The home page had latest news on it dated 23rd October 2007.

Has anyone actually checked this "latest news" to see whether it really did happen on 23 October? Or was it just something somebody made up?

chirpyinsect wrote:

Mimi wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:

canada12 wrote:I'm still quite astounded that an entity like WBM [based in the US] would tamper with files that could potentially have a link to an ongoing police investigation in the UK.

However, having said that, I'm also equally persuaded that if the police investigation in the UK needed any information about these files, they should be able to access the full dossier of information from WBM if required.

And I still want to believe this is something OG was aware of even before we were, and they have been watching what's been happening, making notes, and investigating.

Let's hope they have been waiting to see who did something about this and the audit trail leads in a certain direction. Living in hope.

Makes sense to me. But then I'm an eternal optimist.

I can't imagine WBM removing anything based on the say so of TM or JG. They just don't wield that much power. Even an instruction from the UK police would require some sort of official request. So, IF they have whooshed it, who would be powerful enough to get an archive company to basically discredit past court cases and leave themselves open to possible law suits.

I can. Not necessarily them personally, but if the secret services are involved, it could well extend to the CIA/FBI.  Not only that but we know how quickly CR can threaten litigation.

Kind of where I was going Mimi.Don't know about the CR bit as that would take time to set up and would it even apply in the US?

Well they managed to get to Amazon and Pat Brown with threats. I would think CR still monitor CMoMM and twitter - all it takes is an official looking email (or just a phone call) - could be done in an afternoon.

Mimi. Who would CR be acting on behalf of. CEOP ?  Not the Macs as it is not them who are directly implicated. 
?

WLBTS wrote:

AndyB wrote:
I'm still struggling to understand how a crawl on say 25/10/2007 can end up believing that the date is actually 30/04/2007 but, because its a possibility lets for the moment say that's what happened. Wouldn't you expect there to be many thousands of other sites archived the same day with similarly incorrect timestamps?

Irrespective of whether mccann.html was crawled on 30/04/2007 or not I agree that there's probably no conspiracy here. Just a panicking IT manager who really doesn't want the whole world to realise just how flaky the WBM software really is. Did you get a reply from them BTW?

On the first point, no, I wouldn't automatically expect to see that

I would expect it. The date is a constant (at least until it changes at midnight) and the machine either thinks its 25/10/2007 or it thinks its 30/04/2007. It's the same hardware and software that archives other sites and it doesn't seem credible that it should flip from one date to another just for the couple of microseconds that it archived the CEOP site. As for human involvement, I'm not sure what sort of thing you're thinking of but if its something like an operator getting a parameter wrong then I would expect that same thing - lots of other sites with the same issue.

chirpyinsect wrote:Mimi. Who would CR be acting on behalf of. CEOP ?  Not the Macs as it is not them who are directly implicated. 
?

I`m not sure it`s even CEOP - wouldn`t it just be JG? And may not even be CR - could be any aggressive lawyers.

I don`t know anything about computing and all this teccie speke is way above me, but I wasn`t surprised at what Stevo found considering IMO JG was involved BEFORE MBM went missing and that JG knew both GM and DP well before this event. Just my opinion.

JG and McCanns combined, is my guess.

In reply to BB over the way I saw the Ceop home page ( not the mccann.html.) one before it was whooshed. Realise that is only hearsay but thinking someone will perhaps have saved it. I didn't because although I can copy to the clipboard on my tablet, I can't work out how to get it to reproduce pics.
Anyway I typed www.ceop.gov.uk into the search bar on WB and the 30 Apr did have news from Oct on it. I am positive of that.
Maybe Stevo has it saved.

Hongkong Phooey wrote:Has anyone successfully found another page which answers WLBTS query of future events being on a page. Although there has been debate over JavaScript etc. no evidence of another similar page has been produced afaik.

I found another little site of mine on Wayback that has a Javascript date and clock in it. I looked back to 2011 and the page was, indeed, a page from 2011, because it had some events on it that happened then. I also had a javascript rolling news feed from a newspaper on it. Now here's the funny thing - the Javascript clock and date are showing details from today, and the newspaper feed is showing headlines from 2011.

The clock/date are using the local computer to get their information, and the newspaper feed is using a script on a totally different server to get theirs. If it's going back to the newspaper to run the script, it should be generating headlines from today. But it's going to some sort of archived version of the paper instead. It's all very confusing, even for me

What it does prove is that we can't take screenshots at face value, we have to see the code! Else anyone could look at that page and say, look the wee clock says it's 13:34 on Sunday 21/06/15, so why am I seeing "latest headlines" for something that happened 4 years ago? I still have no explanation as to why "future" events would appear, at least not without seeing the code behind it

My gut feeling is still that the content is more likely to be wrong than the date.

chirpyinsect wrote:In reply to BB over the way I saw the Ceop home page ( not the mccann.html.) one before it was whooshed. Realise that is only hearsay but thinking someone will perhaps have saved it. I didn't because although I can copy to the clipboard on my tablet, I can't work out how to get it to reproduce pics.
Anyway I typed www.ceop.gov.uk into the search bar on WB and the 30 Apr did have news from Oct on it. I am positive of that.
Maybe Stevo has it saved.

Not saying I disbelieve you Chirpy, because Andy has said the same thing.  It's another one of these things that I won't be happy with until I can explain it, to my own satisfaction, at any rate.  You say you have the picture, what does the actual content say? You haven't by any chance saved the whole thing as a complete webpage?

Have signed up here now in the hope that new members are more welcome here than they are elsewhere. I hope that's the case

Resistor, you make some interesting points, particularly as regards XML files, which I'll come back to in a moment. But first I was horrified to read that Wayback had archived one of your orphan pages. I have masses of orphan pages on my web host, and I would be mortified if any were made public in any way, they're orphans for a reason, to keep them private.

So I tested out whether Wayback had archived some of them, not all at the moment because there are so many, but tried quite a few and I'm relieved to find, as I thought, that Wayback doesn't archive orphan pages. And indeed that is logical, because Wayback is concerned with taking a snapshot of what is ON the Internet, not what is hidden on web hosts worldwide.

Your page that did get archived then, was archived because Wayback was "told" by some means, that it was there.

You mentioned XML files in an earlier post, and an XML file is used for a sitemap, so it is possible that a crawler finds a page by reading the sitemap.xml file on the web host. I say possible because generally the sitemap.xml file has to be submitted to the crawler, they don't just find them.

A robots.txt file, on the other hand, requesting to crawlers to exclude certain pages, IS read from the server by crawlers and doesn't have to be submitted.

And did the WB crawler, incredibly and fortuitously, catch it in that testing window, and index it?

This is the same point I made elsewhere. I stick by my assertion that orphan pages are not archived by Wayback, the crawler simply doesn't know they're there unless "told" in some way, via a hyperlink for example.

So for me, there is no question that the CEOP page in question WAS live in order to be archived. And as you say,  did the crawler just happen to visit the page at that moment. Obviously no-one can give a definitive answer to that, except perhaps the Wayback people, but my answer would be that yes it's possible, but not very likely.

All that of course is assuming the page WAS archived on 30th April 2007, or actually another date, about which you will notice I've made no comment. My only concern is regards orphan pages, because once it's understood that the page had to be live to be archived, the debate can then centre on whether or not the date of archiving is correct.

In other words, it focuses the debate and therefore makes it more productive

chirpyinsect wrote:In reply to BB over the way I saw the Ceop home page ( not the mccann.html.) one before it was whooshed. Realise that is only hearsay but thinking someone will perhaps have saved it. I didn't because although I can copy to the clipboard on my tablet, I can't work out how to get it to reproduce pics.
Anyway I typed www.ceop.gov.uk into the search bar on WB and the 30 Apr did have news from Oct on it. I am positive of that.
Maybe Stevo has it saved.

Yes it did but I think BB is about to jump to a conclusion that, although logical, might not be correct. He seems to be coming to the same conclusion that WLBTS has - that because the ceop home page contains links to news articles from October (@ resistor, yes they were genuine) the page must have been archived in October and misplaced in a folder that makes it look like it was archived in April. However, it is possible that when WBM recreated the CEOP home page (which it does for every page every time someone asks to look at it) it puts the wrong news in. WLBTS has asked WBM for their copy of the original page to confirm this one way or the other.

Hello Nuala. My xml sitemap file is/was updated automatically, every time a new file is/was uploaded to the server, which I did not manage, 1&1 did. Quite possibly the 1&1 people just submit everything on their servers to crawlers, unless you specifically write your own robots.txt (which I didn't bother with, none of my stuff is that sensitive).

Do you know if crawlers can read referer logs? I've hunted around and nobody seems to know the answer. If they can, then bingo - the mccann file has possibly been found via another site that someone has gone to, from it.

I still think that the most likely explanation was that the site was live when captured. But how, we will probably never know. And I do not believe the date was wrong.

AndyB wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:In reply to BB over the way I saw the Ceop home page ( not the mccann.html.) one before it was whooshed. Realise that is only hearsay but thinking someone will perhaps have saved it. I didn't because although I can copy to the clipboard on my tablet, I can't work out how to get it to reproduce pics.
Anyway I typed www.ceop.gov.uk into the search bar on WB and the 30 Apr did have news from Oct on it. I am positive of that.
Maybe Stevo has it saved.

Yes it did but I think BB is about to jump to a conclusion that, although logical, might not be correct. He seems to be coming to the same conclusion that WLBTS has - that because the ceop home page contains links to news articles from October (@ resistor, yes they were genuine) the page must have been archived in October and misplaced in a folder that makes it look like it was archived in April. However, it is possible that when WBM recreated the CEOP home page (which it does for every page every time someone asks to look at it) it puts the wrong news in. WLBTS has asked WBM for their copy of the original page to confirm this one way or the other.

1. It is possible that October stuff has been archived under an April date, but it's not very likely - and it proves that Wayback's housekeeping is pretty naff.
2. If it puts in the wrong content at replay, that undermines all their credibility as well.
3. If it turns out that the April 30 date is incorrect, then that has shot their credibility too.
4. I think it will be a cold day in Hell before they give that source code to WLBTS or anyone else.
5. Even if they do come up with a plausible explanation now, I think they're pretty much screwed anyway.

Nuala wrote:I stick by my assertion that orphan pages are not archived by Wayback, the crawler simply doesn't know they're there unless "told" in some way, via a hyperlink for example.

So for me, there is no question that the CEOP page in question WAS live in order to be archived. And as you say,  did the crawler just happen to visit the page at that moment. Obviously no-one can give a definitive answer to that, except perhaps the Wayback people, but my answer would be that yes it's possible, but not very likely.

If that's true, how do you explain http://web.archive.org/web/20080118235202/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/mccann.html ?

The most recent archive prior to that http://web.archive.org/web/20071012051850/http://www.ceop.gov.uk/ doesn't have any links to mccann.html that I can see.

Sorry, I'm not being rude but what sort of background do you have that qualifies you to be so certain about how all crawlers work?

@WLBTS If Nuala is right about it not being possible to archive unlinked pages, the 30/04/2007 mccann.html cannot have been archived post 23/10/2007 because it looks like by that point there were no links to mccann.html

As I said in an earlier post, there is software you can buy to run through a server that specifically seeks out orphaned pages. So clearly it is possible to find them.

AndyB wrote:

@WLBTS If Nuala is right about it not being possible to archive unlinked pages, the 30/04/2007 mccann.html cannot have been archived post 23/10/2007 because it looks like by that point there were no links to mccann.html

Actually, that's not strictly true - there are some crawlers that when they find it once, they will go back, even though all links to that URL have since been removed, and the page has now become an orphan.

It also raises the possibility that mcann.html may have existed long before 30 April 2007!

See, more questions than answers, again.  Please make it stop!

Hi Resistor, if 1and1 is automatically updating the sitemap.xml file on the host when you add a page then that could certainly explain how your orphan page was found by Wayback.

I confess I'm still a little surprised by that because you said Google hadn't indexed it. Google not indexing it doesn't surprise me, because Google is very clever and won't index an orphan page even if it's included in a sitemap.xml. Google only wants to index pages that are visible to the public, so what surprises me is, I would have thought Wayback was the same. But anyway, I'm not sure it makes much difference because something we have to remember is that the archiving of the page in question took place back in 2007, and how things were done then won't necessarily be the same as how they're done now.

1and1 didn't have it's "instant site" software (or whatever it's called) for example, it simply didn't exist back then, and technology changes so fast that it's difficult to remember how primitive things were eight years ago

No, crawlers don't read referer logs, they don't find pages in that way.

Resistor wrote:

AndyB wrote:

@WLBTS If Nuala is right about it not being possible to archive unlinked pages, the 30/04/2007 mccann.html cannot have been archived post 23/10/2007 because it looks like by that point there were no links to mccann.html

Actually, that's not strictly true - there are some crawlers that when they find it once, they will go back, even though all links to that URL have since been removed, and the page has now become an orphan.

It also raises the possibility that mcann.html may have existed long before 30 April 2007!

See, more questions than answers, again.  Please make it stop!

Fair enough. Actually that archive of mccann.html does prove that WBM's crawler works differently from the way that Nuala expects. It seems that only mccann.html was archived that day. Nothing else was whether linked or not. Sorry if that raises more questions

Resistor wrote:

chirpyinsect wrote:In reply to BB over the way I saw the Ceop home page ( not the mccann.html.) one before it was whooshed. Realise that is only hearsay but thinking someone will perhaps have saved it. I didn't because although I can copy to the clipboard on my tablet, I can't work out how to get it to reproduce pics.
Anyway I typed www.ceop.gov.uk into the search bar on WB and the 30 Apr did have news from Oct on it. I am positive of that.
Maybe Stevo has it saved.

Not saying I disbelieve you Chirpy, because Andy has said the same thing.  It's another one of these things that I won't be happy with until I can explain it, to my own satisfaction, at any rate.  You say you have the picture, what does the actual content say?  You haven't by any chance saved the whole thing as a complete webpage?

Is this any good?