Attila Girl emails to let me know that the various photos of Muslim protesters promising violence and vengeance I linked in yesterday’s post—“Protest pics that might not make the Transnationalist Progressives’ photo album”—have been replaced by a single, fairly-innocuous crowd shot saddled with the equally innocuous title, “Muslims Offended by Danish Cartoons.”
Is this typical of Reuters (and by “typical,” I’m being straightforward: does the Reuters feed on the Yahoo website act in such a way that specific URLs to individual photos are only temporarily stored in a specific location)?
Or is this an instance of Reuters—either intentionally or inadvertantly—airbrushing out of recent history the more bloodthirsty and vile photographic captures of this (curiously coordinated) uprising in the Muslim street?
To be fair, the pictures can still be found by those interested in running through the 226 in the collection. But it is it Reuters policy to change the URLs within a day?
Could very well be. I honestly don’t know. But I feel compelled to raise the question now that it’s been brought to my attention. And now that a delightfully ironic riff on a Dylan anthem to change has been ruined by some French tech geeks.
I’ve never had any trouble digging up older pics and articles through the Yahoo! links before. I vote deliberate.
As a professional technologist with some background in Large Website Design and Management: I detect a whiff of airbrushing.
The URLs to which you linked, such as this one are clearly, from this web geek’s perspective, intended to act as permanent unique anchors. To then obfuscate them—intercepting browser requests for those URLs and redirecting the browser to something comparatively innocuous—seems deliberate to me.
I suppose the test of that would be to find a genuinely innocuous pic and see if a link to it is still “live” a week hence.
If it was deliberate, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time. (Completely off topic, but kudos to Slayer Daddy for recognizing one of the great underappreciated films of the Seventies, The Wind and the Lion. Single best portrayal of Teddy Roosevelt ever, and Sean Connery manages to make the part of the Raisuli work, even with a Scottish brogue.)
The thing that most interests me in those placards the Submitters are waving around is how uniform the handwriting is. It looks like a lot of them got their signs from the same guy.
Perhaps Reuters will soon be placing photos on their site of a few peace loving Muslims roasting blessed meat on the grill.
You know, they wouldn’t want anyone to see photos of hot dogs getting cooked on the charred remains of an embassy or two.
Sooner or later we will reach a point in time where even Reuters will have to admit the fact that these loons are nothing less than certifiably crazy. Apparently we aren’t quite there yet.
If the URL address RS pasted above is the same format as the one you had originally, I’m thinking it’s not deliberate. I think it just changed to a slideshow. Here’s the URL to a Corretta Scott King slideshow: link
Unless they changed it for all the slideshows, maybe it was just a temporary thing.
Formatting seems to be askew here, but I just wanted to point out that I didn’t post the url above. The expertise in that post should be credited to another – I’d say whom, but I can’t make out names in this format.
Oops, sorry about the margins.
That was in the address bar for the second picture, and I think it just redirects to the first picture in the slideshow. The way I’ve generally linked to pictures from Yahoo is to View Image and then use that URL, because I’ve run into weirdness before. The pictures you linked to are still in the slideshow, like this one, this one, this one IIRC. Take that for what it’s worth.
Okay – horizontal scrolling, that’s the ticket. The url was from Russ’s comment.
I think that Reuters is deliberately airbruhing this over. Get the herd back on the ‘religion of peace meme.’
Just like the boycott of 9/11 images.
If this link goes to the first slide of the Corretta Scott King slideshow, we can probably rule out deliberate. If it goes to the second slide, then I dunno.
Which is why I broke up the URL across multiple lines in my comment.
So anyway, back on point… the changing-to-a-slideshow option is a reasonable one… but the links to the individual image pages still ought not to have needed changing. Not to say that they didn’t change, just saying that it would be unnecessary.
And not particularly smart, if you want people permalinking to your image pages. But maybe I give them too much credit.
I’ll say it again since it obviously bears repeating: have a long URL?
Use Tinyurl.com and avoid boning the page formatting…
Looks like it goes to the second slide, dorkafork.
Me, I have NO idea. All’s I know is, they fucked up my original post, which was touching and brilliant as a tribute to bloodlust, counterposed as is was with the Dylan anthem to coming change.
So, you know. Screw Reuters.
I don’t go to urls where I can’t see the way first, so tiny is a non-starter for me. Unnecessary here anyway with the handy-dandy http button right up there to the left of the bold button.
I suppose that’s what she said too
Well, not to rain on the parade or anything, but I’ve frequently found that Yahoo changes its news photos links, so that even after only a few hours my links went to different photos. There’s a way to get around it, but I’ve never had the motivation to investigate it thoroughly. For one thing, you could do a link to the image itself, but then you don’t get the juicy goodness of a Reuters caption.
It is sorta ironic a techie pissing match erupted out of this.
So perhaps the whole point of this discussion is to remind folks of the aphorism, “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
‘Cause, frankly, unnecessarily changing the URL of something you’ve published, to which people are linking, is really dumb.
LOL @ Mark.
I’ll second the idea of Tinyurl being a non-starter. If there’s no hint as to what I’ll be putting my virtual foot into, I don’t think so.
And I’ve also noticed what Angie has noticed about the links changing frequently.
Anything involving Bob Dylan and Islamonutters is ironic by definition, Jeff. Unless, of course, you menat Dylan Thomas, in which case it would be…still ironic. Cuz, you know, it might actually end with a really big bang.
Or even if you “meant” Dylan Thomas.
Ah, but then there’s stupid malice, which just screws everything all the hell up… and you don’t even want to think about malicious stupidity…
It’s pretty easy to carp about not seeing the URL’s referenced by a Tinyurl link but I’m not hearing single pragmatic solution to the problem from any of the respondents. For example, simply pointing to the http button as a fix doesn’t cut it since it requires the same subset of people who’re unaware of the linewrap concept to edit the html coding the button produces so that it doesn’t just quote back the URL pasted in. That’s why I suggested the low-tech solution to those folks in the first place.
So, let’s hear ‘em, gang…
For malicious stupidity, no need to go farther than right here.
TW: ya, there’s a lot of it there.
I seem to get crossed up constantly with attempts at links and downloads, especially from Michelle Malkins site. Is it because my email service is through them?
I’ve commented several times about the Reuturds stories. That is what they are stories/fables. The obvious disregard for any truth but their version, coupled with their predilections for a nonexistent reality can be read daily, if you can stomach it. Is there any doubt who’s side they’re on?
I’ve run into this very same problem several times with Yahoo photo links. Even links that don’t look like slideshows really all end up in the slideshow machine. And instead of simply adding the latest image to the end of the stack, and have the “viewer” decrement towards zero, they made the disasterous decision to always insert new images at the front of the stack, ensuring that the number of the image will not resolve for more than a few hours, if that.
By the way I made a list of all of the signs I saw in pictures at getty images. Some of these appeared multiple times, and all seemed to have been drawn by hand with a large marker. They’re CAPS SHOUTING, because the originals were also in all capital letters.
All of the grammatical mistakes were in the originals.
ANNIHILATE THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
AS MUSLIMS WE ARE PREPARED TO FIGHT
BBC BRITISH BROADCASTING CRUSADERS
BBC GO TO HELL!
BE PREPARED FOR THE _REAL_ HOLOCAUST [real is underlined]
BEHEAD THE ONE WHO INSULTS THE PROPHET.
BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
BUTCHER THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
EUROPE IS THE CANCER. ISLAM IS THE ANSWER
EUROPE WILL PAY. BIN LADIN IS WAY
EUROPE YOU WILL PAY FANTASTIC 4 ARE ON THEIR WAY YOU
EUROPE YOU WILL PAY. DEMOLITION IS ON THE WAY
EUROPE YOU WILL PAY. YOUR 9/11 IS ON IT’S WAY
EUROPE YOU WILL PAY. YOUR EXTERMINATION IS ON IT’S WAY
EUROPE YOU’LL COME CRAWLING WHEN THE MUJAHIDEEN COME ROARING
EXTERMINATE THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
EXTERMINATE THOSE WHO SLANDER ISLAM
FREE SPEECH GO TO HELL
FREEDOM GO TO HELL
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION GO TO HELL
JIHAD AGAINST EUROPEAN CRUSADERS
MASSACRE THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
SLAY THOSE WHO INSULT ISLAM
While I wasn’t surprised by the one that read “THE _REAL_ [underlined] HOLOCAUST IS ON THE WAY” because I’ve gotten used to genocidal Jew hatred, I was actually a bit shocked when I read ones like “EUROPE YOU WILL PAY. YOUR EXTERMINATION IS ON IT’S WAY”
I did not know that radical Muslims plan (or want) to exterminate Europeans as a whole. But ther was more than one such sign, so apparently the group as a whole thought that “EXTERMINATION” was on message.
By the way I found it curious that all of the placards were hand lettered similarly, as if they had a single person make all of their signs.
That implies that they chose their threatening messages as a group.
Reread those messages and consider that a leader chose or at least approved ALL of those messages.
On second thought, the person who wrote the gramatically complex and sophisticated “Europe, you’ll come crawling when the Mujahideen come roaring” can’t possibly be the same person who wrote the mistake “Europe will pay/Bin Laudin is way”
They must have made their signs together and just copied each other’s lettering style.
By the way the getty images I was referring to show a demonstration in London at the Danish embassy
Glad I posted the pictures and cartoons here before the MSM decided to re-write hostory… AGAIN!
Even the longest of links can be handled with the http:// button as far as I know. Highlight the word you want to make into a link, press http:// button, paste link, enter, bingo. No editing required.
It can be if you know what you’re doing. But given the relatively high percentage of links that get munged during posting, I’d say my point still stands.
It can be if you know what you’re doing. But given the relatively high percentage of links that get munged during posting, I’d say my point still stands.
Hence the preview button.
And now, of course, the obvious question. If it’s as simple as you say, why are people screwing it up as often as they do? Thus, the *LOWTECH* recommendation I made. But that route apparently ticks off a few who’d prefer not to firewall up properly and would rather the rest of us skate around a mangled page as a result for their convenience. And I’d bet Jeff was not entirely thrilled to have to come in and repair the HTML coding to straighten the mess out in this particular thread this time around.
If you guys aren’t willing to be serious about this, why are you wasting your time and mine?
I think your point is valid – never said it wasn’t. But, using the http:// seems as low-tech as it gets. No more effort required than using tinyurl, and you don’t have to open a second browser window to go to tinyurl.com (something that can really confuse novices as well). I’m just guessing, but I bet that people who can’t operate the http:// button can’t do the tinyurl properly either. Both require the same level of understanding of html (i.e. none). Yes, people screw it up here…but they’d probably also screw up the tinyurl (if they knew about it), and if and once they mastered the tinyurl process, they’d be able to master the http:// button. Just a guess though.
Hence, because of a general lack of understanding of how the web is managed, people are easily manipulated by Reuters, AP, etc. who post links that are only valid for a few minutes or so.
Using the “http://” button or the “a href” tags in conjunction with the preview button is just as easy, if not easier than using tinyurl. At least for me.
Er. And blind links are easily as annoying as bunged up page formatting. A matter of preference I suppose.
*sigh*
So far, it seems the “printer-friendly” URLs have not changed.
So here are “You dug your grave—lie in it,” “Massacre those who insult Islam,” “Behead those who insult Islam,” and “Freedom, Go to Hell.”