First off, Stanley *did* say why they removed the history from Wayback. It was in the last two paragraphs of the CNET article.
As for why CNET doesn’t include Stanley giving the explanation I did, I can certainly speculate as to a few possibilities that are possible and consistent with what we know:
- He didn’t know. He asked his programmers what happened, but didn’t grill them on the WHY behind the changes. If it was the WND article that got CNET’s attention (which seems probable), that was only a day before the CNET article. It’s not like he had time to undertake an extensive investigation.
- He didn’t say because CNET didn’t ask.
- He didn’t say because he didn’t think CNET would care. CNET is a tech website, and its primary interest in the story was tech-related. It’s not like this was a story at a legal website.
- He *did* say, but CNET didn’t include it. Again, not CNET’s primary interest in the story.
- For what it’s worth, he also did pretty much say “Nothing sinister - just a batch program update gone wrong.” He just didn’t expand on that extensively.
He did expand on it a little, because one thing he *did* say that’s perfectly consistent with my analysis is “It was just the U.S. Supreme Court cases, not the state, federal appellate and district court cases.” Changing reporter citations would indeed only apply to Supreme Court cases.
One thing that’s handy about my analysis is that it should operate awfully well as a scientific hypothesis. Based on the evidence we’ve seen from selected portions of five cases, I’ve made a prediction about what we could expect to see in the rest of those cases, as well as in the 20 other cases that Leo and Danae haven’t even NAMED yet. That’s quite the testable data set. Once they publish those screenshots (and if they were thorough researchers, they ought to have full grabs of the entire decisions, not just selected samples), we’ll see if my hypothesis checks out. If we consistently find pre-1875 citations affected in the same way (name and old citation replaced by hyperlinked new citation) but post-1875 citations unaffected, my hypothesis is validated. On the other hand, my hypothesis could easily be defeated if they post full screengrabs showing Minor and Slaughterhouse being affected, but other pre-1875 cases in the same decisions NOT being affected.
If it was happening to ALL pre-1875 cases in those 25 decisions, then that certainly deflates the argument that they were singling out Minor and Slaughterhouse. On the other hand, if their screengrabs show Minor and Slaughterhouse being affected but other pre-1875 cases NOT being affected, then my hypothesis has a problem.
Meanwhile, as we wait for those screengrabs to appear, you might be able to use your coding experience to draw some conclusions of your own. The CNET article includes the code that went wrong:
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/24/justia.png
Now I don’t understand a lick of that, but I do see that the difference in the two codes immediately follows some code that includes ‘volume’ and ‘U’ and ‘S’ and ‘page.’
What would that change result in? And would it be consistent with my hypothesis?
Interesting post on your part. One mistake my post made was to make an assumption about underlying codebase. I assumed a dotnet model; perl might be so dramatically different to render my analysis moot. In dotnet, you would index and find with Regex and deliver with a SQL or ODBC conduit (unless you loved way-overcomplicating things and making them prone to fail). I am still unconvinced that parsing would happen in the Regex, the code snippet does not show delivery of the found data; of course, I am not a Perl guru. Perhaps John Robinson, who runs Free Republic on Perl, can add something to this discussion, as he is a Perl guru.
Just getting home from trick-or-treat. Tired head. Tired feet. Much research to do ... Back later for discussion. Good points consider and test.
Think about this for a moment... Stanley says that what happened was due to “errors”. He is calling this deliberate act an error. So when he says he blocked the Wayback Machine because of “errors” he means he blocked access to the Wayback Machine because of the deliberatly corrupted cases.
It really is just as simple as that.
If nothing else, people who depended on that resource for information for schoolwork, or research, or legal cases might have missed or otherwise incorrect cases need to know if their work was affected.
This was just wrong. If it was an accident, then say so and show why. Own up to it and come completely clean, admit how many cases were ACTUALLY corrupted. That’s honorable at least.
