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Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?
- valtron 13y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20110414214749/http://ssnat.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110414214749/http://ssnat.com/
- jbrooksuk 13y agoThat clears things up — cheers!
- alanh 13y agoI get an empty download file… is that expected? (Must be a Wayback Machine glitch, maybe caused by the surge of popularity, I figure. It was supposed to have content about school shooters)
- pcrh 13y agoIn case anyone else is wondering what this is: http://pastebin.com/weQzr4Kp http://pastebin.com/weQzr4Kp
- danabenson 13y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20110629140903/http://ssnat.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110629140903/http://ssnat.com/
- logic 13y agoAnd then a robots.txt appears, preventing access to the historical content (via archive.org, anyway).
- geuis 13y agoSorry, but I don't know the context of this story. Can someone explain?
- hdevalence 13y agoThe page was cited in a Supreme Court decision, but of course giving a URL is far less permanent than giving a citation to an article in a newspaper, magazine, journal, etc. Since the Supreme Court just gave the URL, if it weren't for the Wayback machine coincidentally happening to grab it, we would never be able to see what Justice Alito was actually referring to.
- avree 13y agoHere's the NYT article it vaguely references. Lot more content, plus an explanation. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-court-opinions-clicks-that-lead-nowhere.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-cou... It's basically highlighting how there's a lot of linkrot, which makes re-reading old Supreme Court decisions difficult.
- 3JPLW 13y agoHere's a good link for context - a NYT article from September 23, "In Supreme Court Opinions, Web Links to Nowhere:" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-court-opinions-clicks-that-lead-nowhere.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-cou... From the first two paragraphs: "Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study[1], 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work. This can sometimes be amusing. A link in a 2011 Supreme Court opinion[2] about violent video games by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. now leads to a mischievous error message[3]." 1. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/09/22/perma/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/09/22/... 2. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1448.ZC.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-1448.ZC.html 3. http://ssnat.com/ http://ssnat.com/
- pinko 13y agoI love the new, "And if you quoted this in the NY Times, will you do a correction for the now changed text?" line. That wasn't there when the NYT story broke, obviously. Very clever.
- bcoates 13y agoI'm more worried that the Justice Alito is apparently unaware of the phenomenon of vaporware: There are games in which a player can take on the identity and reenact the killings carried out by the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. But both the news article and the now defunct website he cites clearly state that the game doesn't exist. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/20/school-shooter-video-game-reenacts-columbine-virginia-tech-killings/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/20/school-shooter-video-gam...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ctdonath 13y agoThere was at least one (probably more) paltry DOOM map mods depicting Columbine High School. Not finished products, very poorly done, but enough to fulfill Alito's claim. In the spirit of the reference, there was a high-quality simulation of the JFK assassination, with the user acting as Oswald. Made a big splash of outrage in the news and was soon pulled (the contest to reenact "the shot" didn't help). It's still available if you look. BUT...keep in mind endless movies & books depicting gratuitous violence. Alito hasn't articulated a difference on "freedom of speech" grounds.
- VMG 13y agoOne of the columbine shooters himself has made custom Doom maps: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
- pygy_ 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Columbine_Massacre_RPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Columbine_Massacre_RPG!
- anonymoushn 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Tech_Rampage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Tech_Rampage
- raykay 13y agoThat's a 200 disguised as a 404. Shame!
- gavinpc 13y agoWhat's more, this 404 page (real or feigned) requires jQuery. Now that's penetration.
- FridayWithJohn 13y agoHad to use the good old "Wayback machine" to see what was originally on that site that warranted some citing in court case. Looks like it was all about the school shootings. here's the link: http://bit.ly/1bF1kB4 http://bit.ly/1bF1kB4
- thrush 13y agoI think HN recommends not using link shorteners. It's nice to know that people aren't tracking your clicks.
- FridayWithJohn 13y agooh, thanks. Didn't know that. Won't do it in the future :-)
- coldpie 13y agoSo, what's the solution, here? It seems reasonable for a court opinion to include a copy of the source, if possible. What about for something like a YouTube video, which could disappear at any time, but can't be represented on paper? How would you agree on a digital format for representing a supreme court opinion?
- martindale 13y agoBuild awareness of the importance of the permanence of URIs and what they mean to Hypertext. The only full solution is a cultural one, not a technological one.
- dionidium 13y agoWhile I agree that there's a necessary cultural aspect here, it does not seem sufficient in this context. If the highest court in the land is citing a source in a decision, then that source needs to be available, by technological solution, if necessary, regardless of external, cultural forces.
- jerf 13y agoCulture isn't going to encourage people to host websites they're no longer interested in, where by "host websites" read "pay money for". The only solution is some form of legalized archiving. We need the right to copy for archiving without profit, or something. Not sketching out a full, legal solution here, just pointing out that it has to include some form of right-to-archive.
- chimeracoder 13y ago> We need the right to copy for archiving without profit, or something. Just throwing it out there - this is (in some sense) one of the intended purposes of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress already even announced a few years back that they were planning on archiving every public tweet. Having them archive every video referenced in official documents (such as a Supreme Court decision) isn't that much of a stretch.
- 13y ago
- martindale 13y agoNow's as good a time as any to refer to Timothy Berners-Lee's 1998 essay, "Cool URIs don't change": http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
- moocowduckquack 13y agoUnfortunately the solution has been in vapourware hell since 1960 - http://xanadu.com/ http://xanadu.com/
- rayiner 13y agoThis is an interesting demonstration of the dangers of mutability in the presence of shared state.
- rogerallen 13y ago:^) http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbarry/2613013337/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbarry/2613013337/
- AsymetricCom 13y agomaybe shared state is the mistake. mutability is kind of a physical law.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jaysonelliot 13y agoI publish a print magazine. Up to this point, we've avoided printing URLs in the magazine, because our printed issues may last longer than the links will stay live. To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessary (and allowed by copyright). The side benefit is that all our printed links can be easy to read and type, an important usability concern when dealing with print. A little self-referential branding on the shortener doesn't hurt, either.
- ynniv 13y agoExcept that your shortener service won't last as long as your print issues either. With the original URL there's still the hope that the Wayback Machine is still maintained and had visited the page. It's a hard problem.
- VMG 13y agoThey could simply list the expanded links on the last page of the magazine.
- jlgreco 13y agoExactly, or even just issue a yearly book containing the entire mapping. That would save printing since most people probably don't currently care about the expanded form, though in the future they would still be able to look it up in the library system. (They could also start doing this now, while they can't just retroactively add the expanded forms to editions they have already printed.)
- telephonetemp 13y agoDoes any existing publication do this? Because providing both shortened and full URLs like this sounds like a great (i.e., retrospectively obvious) way to achieve a balance between "UX" of the magazine and longevity.
- ademarre 13y agoThe point "about the transience of linked information" has been made. But the problem isn't new to anyone, including NYT. It should pointed out that Justice Alito included a date with the URL, which allows the URL to function as a citation even after the content changes. It's no different than citing an unpublished source.
- frossie 13y agoIn fact the actual court decision quoted has everything you would want to know about what was on the web page: 14 Webley, “School Shooter” Video Game to Reenact Columbine, Virginia Tech Killings, Time (Apr. 20, 2011), http://newsfeed.time.com/2011 http://newsfeed.time.com/2011 / 04 / 20 / school - shooter - video - game - reenacts-columbine-virginia-tech-killings. After a Web site that made School Shooter available for download removed it in response to mounting criticism, the developer stated that it may make the game available on its own Web site. Inside the Sick Site of a School Shooter Mod (Mar. 26, 2011), http://ssnat.com http://ssnat.com.
- sbierwagen 13y agoBeen a solved problem for a while: http://webcitation.org/ http://webcitation.org/
- thrush 13y agofound the original page! http://web.archive.org/web/20110414214749/http://ssnat.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110414214749/http://ssnat.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- afandian 13y agoThe industry standard for citations between scholarly publications is CrossRef, which is the official DOI link registration agency for scholarly and professional publications. I don't know what the original document said, but if it was a scholarly publication, the citation should/could have been done by DOI. DOIs resolve to URLs, but publishers have a mandate to keep them up-to-date. http://crossref.org http://crossref.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier http://www.doi.org/ http://www.doi.org/ (I work for CrossRef)
- edsu 13y agoThe trouble is, what is "scholarly" is a blurred line at best.
- rayiner 13y agoFor people positing hypothetical solutions to this problem, consider this exercise. Look at this case: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12540929439695130589&q=175+U.S.+211&hl=en&as_sdt=2,39 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1254092943969513.... This is a Supreme Court case from 1899. There is a citation to a Sixth Circuit case on page 238 (after "'reserved' cities") that has disappeared in the Google Scholar copy, but appears in Westlaw as: 54 U.S. App. 723, 85 Fed. Rep. 271, 29 C.C.A. 141, 46 L.R.A. 122. Westlaw still happily pulls up this 114 year-old citation to the Federal Reporter. That's the sort of time scale legal documents need to operate on. I'm not really convinced anything on the internet as we know it today can offer permanence comparable to printing out a bunch of copies and shipping them around the country.
- shocks 13y agoI think this when I see journals (looking at you New Scientist...) use link shorteners like bit.ly. What are they thinking? ;/
- triplesec 13y agoAll I can say is: Epic Troll! Brilliant.
- Inetgate 13y agoI wonder why this 404 page returns http 200 status code.
- yeukhon 13y agoWow. There is a whole point why we were taught not to trust a web site in general. Printed materials usually last longer. I am so thankful to learn about this case tonight. Thanks!