Dead 2.0 Takes Itself Offline - Technology Evangelist

Dead 2.0, the critical Web 2.0 site written by an anonymous blogger went offline earlier this week after pulling a Lieberman. A Lieberman being a site that goes offline due to excessive bandwidth use, causing the host to suspend the site like Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman experienced earlier this year in the run-up to the Democratic primary race against Ned Lamont.

Back to Dead 2.0: now the site has been password protected, forcing a login screen on anyone typing in the domain or attempting to visit the site through bookmark or search engine. It looks like "Skeptic" has chosen to disappear from the blogosphere. Will we hear more from the mystery blogger?

For those interested in getting caught up on this story by reading the Dead 2.0 archives, there are ways to do so. In most cases, Archive.org will have this content, but not in this case. But one site that does is Bloglines.

If you happen to know Dead 2.0's previous RSS feed URL, you could add that to your Bloglines subscriptions, then refresh the feed to show everything Bloglines has on file. It looks like this will take you back all the way to the very first post on dead20.com.

I bring this up not to cause any damage to Skeptic, but to point out that it's nearly impossible to erase the web's memory. I happen to mention one tactic that works today, but I'm sure there are plenty more for people with some technical skills and a little motivation.

Comments

1. Posted by: Stepehn on October 1, 2006 3:50 AM:

Ed,

Bloglines may have the archives, but if Skeptic asks them to delete them, writing from the domain dead20.com domain, they will, and they would be required to do so by the DMCA. He owns the copyright. I've had stuff deleted myself. You can also get stuff from mailing list archives and Google Groups taken off. You can also demand that people who quote e-mail from you delete it. It just takes some work to track all this stuff down. Again, a DMCA notification is easy and very effective.

Using the "noarchive" attribute in your HTML makes things a little easier. If Google doesn't show a cache, then the noarchive is working.

Also, a Google search for "copyright myths" turns up several good pages that debunk popular beliefs about copyright, fair use, e-mail, and the like.

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