The following article was originally to be found at this address. http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/statements/100298philbin.html

It has been now been removed.

Here it is: http://www.kitcomm.com/comments/gold/1998q4/1998_10/981025.053022.sharefine.htm

Other articles that have been removed: There have been 3 articles that were about Martial Law. A couple on cars and a couple on the GPS system.

All now lost to cyberspace. I wonder why???

-- Nick Laird (sharefin@cairns.net.au), October 25, 1998

Answers

I don't have any trouble finding Philbin's report, using the first URL. As a matter of fact, I had clicked on it from the GN Links, this morning, before I realized that I'd read it before

-- rocky (rknolls@hotmail.com), October 25, 1998.

I noticed that Nick is from Australia. Are other foreign nationals having difficulty accessing any internet information ending in .gov? Well lurkers, care to reply?

-- R. D..Herring (drherr@erols.com), October 25, 1998.

As of 14:12 GMT today, when I tried accessing http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/statements/100298philbin.html from a domain in the USA, I got a 404 Not Found.

When I tried other documents in the /~y2k/statements/ index, I succeeded in getting every one I tried except for 100298philbin.html, but I tried only a few.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), October 25, 1998.

Just tried the philbin link above. Got 404 message. Went to GN and tried to jump from his link. Got 404. Ditto on the link from GN to the article on Emergency Services (http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/statements/100298dodd.html) Hmmmmm....

-- Faith Weaver (faith-weaver@usa.net), October 25, 1998.

UPDATE:

As of 14:35 GMT, I _can_ access the Philbin page.

When I first tried the following two pages, I got 404s but later did succeed in getting the pages:

100298cass 100298gordon

I've tried the 100298bennett page several times, but always get 404.

My opinion: there's an intermittent access problem, not some conspiracy to hide these pages.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), October 25, 1998.

And now, 1445 GMT, I can get to the Bennett page, too.

Sure looks like an intermittent technical problem to me.

If you haven't been able to get a page, try again every 5-10 minutes.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), October 25, 1998.

You can look in the sub-directory: http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/statements/

And there are no files dated in October.

If you are sourcing these October articles which page are you sourcing them from?

-- Nick Laird (sharefin@cairns.net.au), October 25, 1998.

I have no trouble accessing the link as of 11:30am CST

However, a friend sent me a note yesterday indicating he was getting 404 not founds. He eventually got it. I agree it is more likely to be intermittent server/network problems rather than any deliberate attempt at supressing information.

Still, this brings up a good point that maybe some of this information should be mirrored for just such circumstances.

I do wish we had archived the Milwaukee Sentinal-Journal article that was almost certainly delibrately pulled. I've got hard copies but I sure wish that I had saved the HTML file. I've considered re-entering the text manually simply to make it available to the number of people who have inquired about it.

The other problem we see here with respect to maintaining this information is that many newspapers still don't take full advantage of the Internet. They treat their on-line editions as they do their printed editions -- i.e. if it's a week old, it's 'old news' and gets removed. With the low cost of disk space these days and the availability of archiving/indexing software, there's really no reason to do this.

Still, I will begin to archive what I can. I just don't have a great deal of time to do this however. If others can do the same we should have at least a little insulation against accidental, managerial, or even deliberate 'information outages'.

Arnie

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), October 25, 1998.

Got to "philbin" multiple times without a problem. Thought there might be server ISP/network problems for some outside the US. Have heard a VERY unverified statement that there is some suppresion efforts going on regarding Y2K data out of the US gov. Could be done by playing with how priority is assigned to a given data request, although that doesn't explain missing lib entries.

-- R. D..Herring (drherr@erols.com), October 25, 1998.

And now all the files are accessable in the directory. After a 6-10 hour absence? Case closed I suppose

-- Nick Laird (sharefin@cairns.net.au), October 26, 1998.

i've been getting the 404 message when the web is busy and/or the site i want is being accessed a lot. so i just keep trying. i tend to go online early in the morning (i'm on E.S.T.) because that works much better. 4-5 pm locally is a zoo with all the businesses online, then evenings are busy with the surfers online. i guess the early bird really does get the worm. unfortunately, the problem will only get worse this year, as people start downloading the microsoft patches. SR1 and SR2 patches take about 6 hours to download and install, per person. yikes! better do it now while you have a chance to get it.

-- Jocelyne Slough (jonslough@tln.net), October 26, 1998.

i should have added that the patches are for microsoft office 97, and you can save yourself some hassle by buying the cd-rom set. now would be better than later.

-- Jocelyne Slough (jonslough@tln.net), October 26, 1998.