Re: Steve Marsden's WBM screenshot: The CEOP Home page for April 30, 2007 also refers to Missing Madeleine.

by HKP 02.07.15 21:42

@Rustyjames. Agree with the timestamp however taking the whole of 30/04 is enough to see error. I'll try loading your link into excel also. From my analysis you can see that leading up to the 30th everything was OK, there is then a 10 day gap to 10/05 and everything seems basically OK for the rest of May.

by rustyjames 02.07.15 22:20

Syn wrote:Problem with subsets says Chris Butler....

.... that brings us right back to the beginning where I posted this on 17th June when this merry go round first started.

I have now underlined the relevant part

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

@Tony

There seems to be confusion with all the references to "subsets".

As far as I can tell the first mention of "subset" is something HiDeHo heard but didn't really understand in her phone conversation with Chris Butler. He could have been talking about a subset of anything - e.g. a subset of indexes are wrong etc, etc.

Syn then found the snippet above from a Wayback user manual here - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I don't believe that reference to "subset" has anything to do with what Chris Butler may have referred to.

The manual page was last updated in 2011 and was already talking about deprecating the JavaScript method in favour of server side re-writing of URLs, and from the source of pages I've seen that's what they have done. This also only refers to the "replay" of the page - it has nothing to do with the original capture of the page's data.

However for completion I'll try and explain what that highlighted section is referring to as simply as I can because I know not everyone follows the technical discussions.

A web page uses a language called HTML to tell your browser how it would like information displayed. As well as content in the HTML there can be links to things like images contained in separate files. Either in the HTML, or imported from separate files, there can also be some small bits of code written in something called JavaScript that runs in your browser to do more interesting and dynamic things like modifying the page, performing actions if you move your mouse over something, fetching data without having to reload the page etc, etc.

The problem for Wayback is when it "replays", i.e. recreates the page for you to view, the page contains links to other content. If it just presented the page as it originally was then those links would try and fetch the info from the real page rather than their archived copy of information.

Therefore they have to change all the links to point back into the Wayback machine. From the description above it seems at one point they did some of that using JavaScript in the browser - that means the page would have been downloaded with its original links, but the code they added would tell your browser to change the links before it finished displaying the page.

As far as I can tell that is no longer the case - all the links appear to be changed on their server before the page is even sent to you.

The references to Flash and PDF are there because those and other similar content can also contain links out to external content, however manipulating them are far harder to achieve.

Hope that helps.

by rustyjames 02.07.15 22:23

@hkp - from my link you'll see the index contains stuff on 1st, 2nd and 3rd May etc.

by **PeterMac** 02.07.15 22:29

HKP wrote:@Rustyjames. Agree with the timestamp however taking the whole of 30/04 is enough to see error. I'll try loading your link into excel also. From my analysis you can see that leading up to the 30th everything was OK, there is then a 10 day gap to 10/05 and everything seems basically OK for the rest of May.

I do not pretend to understand this,
BUT
Isn't it EXTRAORDINARY that
The dogs are wrong, but just ONCE - out of 200 times, and in 14 different places.
The PJ and all the successive Senior Investigating Officers and the Public Prosecutor et al. are wrong, but just ONCE - out of all the investigations they have ever done
The Wayback Machine is wrong - but just ONCE out of many years of operation and UNIQUELY in the McCanns' case.

What a frightening "coincidence", Kate,
":As a lawyer once said to me, apropos another matter, ‘One coincidence, two coincidences – maybe they’re still coincidences. Any more than that and it stops being coincidence.’

from 'madeleine' by Kate McCann. [Lower case 'madeleine' is correct. She did not even give her deceased daughter the honour of having her name rendered properly]

by HKP 02.07.15 22:35

@Rustyjames
That's interesting there was a gap in the downloaded data, I'll look forward to looking at your stuff tomorrow, since my laptop packed in I got an iPad and android tablet, hopeless for this sort of thing big grin

by siobhan3443 02.07.15 22:38

suddenly the accurate secret files are no longer accurate

interesting

by **Tony Bennett** 02.07.15 22:49

rustyjames wrote:
Syn wrote:Problem with subsets says Chris Butler....

.... that brings us right back to the beginning where I posted this on 17th June when this merry go round first started.

I have now underlined the relevant part

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

@Tony

There seems to be confusion with all the references to "subsets".

As far as I can tell the first mention of "subset" is something HiDeHo heard but didn't really understand in her phone conversation with Chris Butler. He could have been talking about a subset of anything - e.g. a subset of indexes are wrong etc, etc.

Syn then found the snippet above from a Wayback user manual here - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I don't believe that reference to "subset" has anything to do with what Chris Butler may have referred to.

The manual page was last updated in 2011 and was already talking about deprecating the JavaScript method in favour of server side re-writing of URLs, and from the source of pages I've seen that's what they have done. This also only refers to the "replay" of the page - it has nothing to do with the original capture of the page's data.

However for completion I'll try and explain what that highlighted section is referring to as simply as I can because I know not everyone follows the technical discussions.

A web page uses a language called HTML to tell your browser how it would like information displayed. As well as content in the HTML there can be links to things like images contained in separate files. Either in the HTML, or imported from separate files, there can also be some small bits of code written in something called JavaScript that runs in your browser to do more interesting and dynamic things like modifying the page, performing actions if you move your mouse over something, fetching data without having to reload the page etc, etc.

The problem for Wayback is when it "replays", i.e. recreates the page for you to view, the page contains links to other content. If it just presented the page as it originally was then those links would try and fetch the info from the real page rather than their archived copy of information.

Therefore they have to change all the links to point back into the Wayback machine. From the description above it seems at one point they did some of that using JavaScript in the browser - that means the page would have been downloaded with its original links, but the code they added would tell your browser to change the links before it finished displaying the page.

As far as I can tell that is no longer the case - all the links appear to be changed on their server before the page is even sent to you.

The references to Flash and PDF are there because those and other similar content can also contain links out to external content, however manipulating them are far harder to achieve.

Hope that helps.

Anything like this which breaks down the technical jargon in a way that non-tecchies can understand is very helpful to me - and I'm sure to many others - thank you very much.

You wrote: "A web page uses a language called HTML to tell your browser how it would like information displayed. As well as content in the HTML there can be links to things like images contained in separate files".

It's the case of folk like Dr Martin Roberts, 'whodunit', 'HKP' and 'Resistor' and others, isn't it, that BOTH a page AND an image were captured at 11.58.03 seconds on 30 April?

The case espoused by e.g. HideHo, Nuala, Syn and Blue Bag on here amounts to this, doesn't it? - 'There are thousands of alleged 'captures' of data all pointing to 11.58.03 secs on 30 April on the CEOP site - and that is so blatantly obviously wrong that any recorded time-stamp of 11.58.03 seconds on the CEOP page is utterly meaningless, a mistake, and should be disregarded.

That still means I don't know if ANYTHING at all happened with regard to the Wayback Machine and CEOP on 30 April 2007 at 11.58.03 secs

Or have I misunderstood it?

by HKP 02.07.15 22:58

@Siobhan

Interestingly we were blindly following the recommended route by WBM:-
"You can see a listing of the dates of the specific URL by replacing the date code with an asterisk (*), ie: http: // web .archive. org/*/www .yoursite. com"

Rustyjames comes along with a better methodology and it gets looked at, it's how issue resolvement works

Anything to add which is not just a sarcastic comment.

by rustyjames 02.07.15 23:03

Yes in the index there are 3786 entries "captured" in that 1 second which makes no sense. A link to just that day is below - this also includes the news articles in the future in the list.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

However an index is only a processed view of what are in the .arc capture files, and we are also looking at something that could have been modified in their attempts to correct it, so it's frustratingly difficult trying to derive from it.

by suzysu 02.07.15 23:05

Tony Bennett wrote:
rustyjames wrote:
Syn wrote:Problem with subsets says Chris Butler....

.... that brings us right back to the beginning where I posted this on 17th June when this merry go round first started.

I have now underlined the relevant part

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

@Tony

There seems to be confusion with all the references to "subsets".

As far as I can tell the first mention of "subset" is something HiDeHo heard but didn't really understand in her phone conversation with Chris Butler. He could have been talking about a subset of anything - e.g. a subset of indexes are wrong etc, etc.

Syn then found the snippet above from a Wayback user manual here - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

I don't believe that reference to "subset" has anything to do with what Chris Butler may have referred to.

The manual page was last updated in 2011 and was already talking about deprecating the JavaScript method in favour of server side re-writing of URLs, and from the source of pages I've seen that's what they have done. This also only refers to the "replay" of the page - it has nothing to do with the original capture of the page's data.

However for completion I'll try and explain what that highlighted section is referring to as simply as I can because I know not everyone follows the technical discussions.

A web page uses a language called HTML to tell your browser how it would like information displayed. As well as content in the HTML there can be links to things like images contained in separate files. Either in the HTML, or imported from separate files, there can also be some small bits of code written in something called JavaScript that runs in your browser to do more interesting and dynamic things like modifying the page, performing actions if you move your mouse over something, fetching data without having to reload the page etc, etc.

The problem for Wayback is when it "replays", i.e. recreates the page for you to view, the page contains links to other content. If it just presented the page as it originally was then those links would try and fetch the info from the real page rather than their archived copy of information.

Therefore they have to change all the links to point back into the Wayback machine. From the description above it seems at one point they did some of that using JavaScript in the browser - that means the page would have been downloaded with its original links, but the code they added would tell your browser to change the links before it finished displaying the page.

As far as I can tell that is no longer the case - all the links appear to be changed on their server before the page is even sent to you.

The references to Flash and PDF are there because those and other similar content can also contain links out to external content, however manipulating them are far harder to achieve.

Hope that helps.
Anything like this which breaks down the technical jargon in a way that non-tecchies can understand is very helpful to me - and I'm sure to many others - thank you very much.

You wrote: "A web page uses a language called HTML to tell your browser how it would like information displayed. As well as content in the HTML there can be links to things like images contained in separate files".

It's the case of folk like Dr Martin Roberts, 'whodunit', 'HKP' and 'Resistor' and others, isn't it, that BOTH a page AND an image were captured at 11.58.03 seconds on 30 April?

The case espoused by e.g. HideHo, Nuala, Syn and Blue Bag on here amounts to this, doesn't it? - 'There are thousands of alleged 'captures' of data all pointing to 11.58.03 secs on 30 April on the CEOP site - and that is so blatantly obviously wrong that any recorded time-stamp of 11.58.03 seconds on the CEOP page is utterly meaningless, a mistake, and should be disregarded.

That still means I don't know if ANYTHING at all happened with regard to the Wayback Machine and CEOP on 30 April 2007 at 11.58.03 secs

Or have I misunderstood it?

++++++++++++

Thank you, Tony. A very clear summary!

by **Tony Bennett** 02.07.15 23:06

The poll I set up on the other Wayback thread is of mild interest.

The results so far in brief:

35 have voted, of whom

16 say it's way to complex, leaving 19 who give an opinion.

Of those 19:

3 say 'it's a glitch/error' and

15 say its a genuine capture of a McCann.html page on the CEOP website on 30 April,

with 1 who says there must be some other explanation.

SUMMARY: 'Syn' and 'Nuala' have some work to do in shifting forum opinion on this issue

by rustyjames 02.07.15 23:09

HKP wrote:
Rustyjames comes along with a better methodology and it gets looked at, it's how issue resolvement works

Actually I was quoting the method nearly two weeks ago :-) - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Oh and if you look here - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] there is the following:

Wayback CDX Server API

The CDX Server is another API which allows for complex querying, filtering and analysis of Wayback capture data. If you are looking for more in depth information about Wayback machine data, please take a look at the CDX server API.

by HKP 02.07.15 23:17

@Rustyjames
The rest of us were just not clever enough to pick up on it. The Dr Roberts link is the way that the Wayback FAQ‘s tell you to query it so I (and others) blindly followed that. It will be interesting to compare the two to see what or if any correlation.

by HKP 02.07.15 23:22

@Rustyjames.
Yep I was right, the rest of us weren't clever enough to pick up on it (I'm only speaking for myself here not barring everybody with the same brush).

The Wayback doesn't show captures on all of the days that the data does, any idea why that would be?

by Nuala 02.07.15 23:35

@ Tony Bennett

SUMMARY: 'Syn' and 'Nuala' have some work to do in shifting forum opinion on this issue

As I think I've said before, the answer you get to a question might depend on the question you ask in the first place. In your poll you have this as an option and four people have voted for that option:

3. Wayback captured a 'mccann html' file that had already been set up as a 'dummy file', but with no content on it

The mccann.html file most certainly had content on it, so anyone voting for that option didn't understand that was the case, and that option should never have been in the poll.

If you skew the questions you skew the answers.

Not saying that was on purpose at all, just a lack of understanding (as you've admitted) of the technicalities.

by HKP 02.07.15 23:36

@Rustyyjames.
The last post was supposed to say the 'Wayback calendar' doesn't show

by Nuala 02.07.15 23:37

@ Siobhan

suddenly the accurate secret files are no longer accurate

interesting

Yes indeed.

by HKP 02.07.15 23:53

@Rustyjames
Over on the other forum Seahorse has found another site with the same timestamp try:-

w w w. codexgeo. co. uk

Acknowledgment to Seahorse.

by Nuala 03.07.15 0:18

Quoting Dr Roberts:

A 'capture' just the wrong side of 10.00 p.m. on the night of 3 May would be enough to convince me.

Indeed so. That's been obvious all along. When people are desperate for their version of events to be the version of events, regardless of the evidence to the contrary, they lose credibility.

Anyone admitting they would believe a 'capture' just the wrong side of 10pm 3rd May 2007 in order to back up their own theories isn't interested in the truth, just validation.

by **Tony Bennett** 03.07.15 0:51

Nuala wrote:Quoting Dr Roberts:

A 'capture' just the wrong side of 10.00 p.m. on the night of 3 May would be enough to convince me.

Indeed so. That's been obvious all along. When people are desperate for their version of events to be the version of events, regardless of the evidence to the contrary, they lose credibility.

Anyone admitting they would believe a 'capture' just the wrong side of 10pm 3rd May 2007 in order to back up their own theories isn't interested in the truth, just validation.

@ Nuala I think you make a perfectly valid point about the above statement by Dr Martin Roberts.

But to use the six words he uses: "would be enough to convince me" to extrapolate from those six words that Martin Roberts 'isn't interested in the truth' would IMO, based on my reading of nearly all of his articles, be quite untrue.

But perhaps you meant simply that he is not interested in the truth about the alleged 'capture'.

by HKP 03.07.15 9:03

After last nights revelation of a different data set being available I’ve had a look and can now see the differences. The link from Rustyjames takes you to an advanced search which is much more accurate. The general search that most had been using was the same as in the example of WBM’s faq’s which gave dates in whole days and the number of captures some of which are in a date range.

For example I’ll use the controversial mccann.html url

General search= range between 30/04/07 to 04/08/09  Captures = 11

Advanced search (timestamped) = 9 (for 2007 only the other 2 will be outwith that year)

20070430115803

20070513020901

20070520033832

20070522035225

20070613040605

20070706183353

20070708201551

20070713232146

20070824232043

Given that I had previously stated that there were 3015 urls from 30/04 and the advanced search has revealed 3786 I think I can explain that as well. There were 2495 unique (30/04) dates and 520 with a date range of 30/04 onwards and ‘x’ number of captures, duplicates etc. Now that we have the actual timestamped data it’s 3786 total.

Finally there was a question yesterday from  Siobahn about the validity of my stated data due to her not being able to find 10/05/07 in the data, the advanced search gives a total of 40 captures for that day, I had stated 36 and have to admit I was a lot closer than her!!!

by HKP 03.07.15 9:07

Apologies again for these font sizes!!!!!!!!

by HelenMeg 03.07.15 9:15

HKP wrote:Apologies again for these font sizes!!!!!!!!

@HKP Trying to understand the debate / discussion...but are you able to give a clue as to what you currently think based on findings so far... are you able to say whether you veer towards
the CEOP Mc Cann file being captured on the 30th April 2007 or that it was probably not...?

by Amy Dean 03.07.15 9:27

We are on page 56 now, Siobhan.

by Amy Dean 03.07.15 9:35

Apologies, I misread it.

Steve Marsden's WBM screenshot: The CEOP Home page for April 30, 2007 also refers to Missing Madeleine.