Comments on: Don't worry your pretty little head about it.

Don't worry your pretty little head about it.

dejah420 — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:12:14 -0800

White House "disappears" women's info. The Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women's Bureau Web site, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare. There's a long article about it over at Salon, behind the premium wall.

By: plemeljr

plemeljr — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:23:30 -0800

OK, lazyweb...how hard would it be to create a nightly crawl of every government page, save it, and have the page checked against the last night's page for differences? Sort of an archive.gov for the masses. I suspect not hard, but the real problem would be storage and creating an useful interface to navigate the changes. That, and how to adjudicate what is a distortion or a legitimate deletion.

By: ewkpates

ewkpates — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:42:51 -0800

Oppression begins and ends with data.

By: fatbobsmith

fatbobsmith — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:14:16 -0800

**insert obligatory 1984 quote here**

By: muppetboy

muppetboy — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:21:10 -0800

honestly, who would expect better of the bush administration?

By: Joey Michaels

Joey Michaels — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:21:43 -0800

**insert obligatory Animal Farm quote here**

By: oissubke

oissubke — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:37:30 -0800

**insert obligatory Dude Where's my Car quote here**

By: lodurr

lodurr — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:42:21 -0800

"the real problem would be storage and creating an useful interface to navigate the changes. That, and how to adjudicate what is a distortion or a legitimate deletion." My first thought was, "storage shouldn't be a problem, since you'd only capture delta." But then I remembered how many damn gov't sites that there are.... Interesting idea, though...

By: livii

livii — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:10:41 -0800

Thanks for posting this; I hadn't seen any news on the release of the report (sadly enough). Couldn't believe the part about wanting to have "upbeat" stories for news agencies, such as that the pay equity gap is the smallest it's ever been. Optimism is all well and good there's still this thing called reality, and given that people can be swayed by headlines, false hope stories are worrisome.

By: jakestone

jakestone — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:13:47 -0800

Actually, it would take a long while. About 3 months ago, I attempted a wget of whitehouse.gov. I don't recall the specifics now, but I put it at a friendly retrieval rate so it wouldn't look like a DDOS attempt, eliminated requests for pictures, and let it roll its merry way. 1 week and 40 GB later, it still wasn't finished. I had tons of PDF files, and Ghu knows how many html documents. I did a quick check of the files using MD5 checksums, and there weren't any duplicates. So, to answer plemeljr's question, I don't think it'd be very hard, but it'd require a decent amount of bandwidth and storage to make it happen.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:16:36 -0800

* insert Winger lyrics *

By: fenriq

fenriq — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:22:28 -0800

Why am I not surprised in the least by this? The regime that lies more often than it tells the truth. plemeljr has a good idea, just a question of who's got the time and the money to make it happen. And livii, reality and ShrubCo have only met briefly while passing in the hallways once.

By: chicobangs

chicobangs — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 12:48:51 -0800

fenriq, you really think El Chimpo & reality are even in the same zip code these days?

By: LeLiLo

LeLiLo — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:08:54 -0800

Oppression begins and ends with data. Speaking of data manipulation, I didn't want to clog the front page with more Iraq stuff, but a librarian just emailed me The Case of the Disappearing Article, from two weeks ago, about how Time magazine last year 'lost' a 1998 article that was on their web site, in which George Bush I listed reasons why invading Iraq would be a bad idea. The article also mentions The Memory Hole, which tries to keep track of things like this, and which we've discussed a number of times.

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:21:27 -0800

"OK ladies. Back to the kitchen!........

The boys'll take care of business from now on. "

By: memnock

memnock — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 20:49:56 -0800

* insert The State quote. again! *

By: reklaw

reklaw — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:25:29 -0800

* insert obligatory The Handmaid's Tale quote here * or, you know, not.