Random Access Memories

Now to start with I in no way condone the actions in Austin, Texas this morning. Violence does not solve problems. Killing innocent people is horrible. Period.

But when something like this happens in our modern era and online information turns up about it that information seems to vanish at a shocking pace.

Case in point, Joe Stack’s website at embeddedart.com. If you went there after about 10am PST this morning you got this message. You could still see the cache of the page on Google, but that was cleared about an hour later.

For future reference I post a cache of the original site here.

Strangely enough the hosting company T35.net returned the page as it was originally while I was writing this for unknown reasons. Then by the time I finished writing the site was offline again and pointing to http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html. That page says the original replacement message said the page was taken down at the request of the FBI. Perhaps in all fairness the company was not the one covering it’s butt, rather it was the Feds.

When I emailed the webmaster at T35 they responded with: “Yes, we did receive several requests from the FBI (to remove the page). They were made over the phone.”. I would give a lot to know what the FBI was thinking when it made those requests.

Likely, we’ll never know the whole truth.