Web Expert Opinions Requested – Re:Archive.org

Questions
1

Respected Web Experts & Hackers,

I am not a hacker, and my question is not directly hacking related as I don’t want to hack anything.
The reason for me posting on this forum is that I am looking for reliable expert insights and opinion on an issue that is important for me (and others as well). Perhaps the most qualified experts in this subject can be found in this community, so I will try my luck here. If anybody can suggest another forum they consider more suited to my question, please let me know.

Introduction to the question:
I am involved in scientific research concerning phenomena that challenge some highly protected old (pseudo-)scientific dogmas, because they threaten the rule and power of the energy lobby. Physics professor Dr. Daniel Sheehan has published few papers about a new discovery/invention called solid-state Maxwell Demon that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because it converts ambient heat energy into mechanical energy (without the need for temperature difference). It has met great opposition, and has been mostly ignored when not attacked.

Dr. Sheehan and his colleges have published their research progress on at least two websites some years ago, but by now both websites have been taken down. The site URLs:

http://www.paradigmenergy.com
http://www.alternative-renewable-energy.com

It is quite possible that the websites have disappeared because this invention, and the underlying principle can be made into practical products that are too disruptive to publish in detail for the whole world. This could be also the reason why no further developments are being published. Even though his websites have been taken offline, you can still find traces of them at archive.org.

The question:
When you display the page of http://www.alternative-renewable-energy.com as it has been (allegedly) archived on 30.10.2008:

http://web.archive.org/web/20081030015646/http://www.alternative-renewable-energy.com:80/
(backed up also at http://archive.is/y2YuY)

you will see a weird occurrence. On this snapshot of the page that supposed to have been taken in 2008, you can see also posts made in 2009, 2010, and 2012. If it was really archived in 2008, then how come it has posts made at later dates?

I suspect foul play, like trying to create false proof of earlier history (that didn’t really exist) at a later date, but making a mistake by not deleting links to future posts that should not have existed in 2008. Or alternatively, the original websites could have been purged from archive.org and falsified copies planted in their place to mislead people.

I would highly appreciate a detailed analysis of how could this happen, and what are the possible explanations observed on the archived pages of those websites. If you can discover other weird features that indicate foul play and manipulation, that would be also very valuable.

Thanks for your efforts and time in advance, knowing the accurate reliable truth about these things can help us a lot.

Best regards,
Z_L

2

It is indeed an interesting concept, although I have two theories:

  1. They actually exploited archive.org with an 0day (unlikely)
  2. They made the posts well in advance (actually in 2008), but they set the publish dates ten years in advance.
3

One of the major papers of Dr. Sheehan about the invention titled “A Solid-State Maxwell Demon” was published in 2002, so this is an old story. Next came the two websites in 2008-2009, but www.paradigmenergy.com was later abandoned and they switched to www.alternative-renewable-energy.com. Interestingly none of these two websites were actually started out as originally meant for publishing the information and research progress of this invention. If things would have been developing naturally, like you discover something, then the natural course of action would have been to start your own website to publish your results. Alternatively, if you are looking for faster publicity, then you would try to publish it on relevant, well established popular websites with large traffic. None of these sites fit the bill.

If you look at the history of these sites on archive.org, you will see that both have been started up years earlier than anything being published on those sites about the invention. It looks like some agencies/corporations have put up these sites as idle dummy sites, doing essentially nothing useful until the opportunity came up to host Dr. Sheehan’s discoveries. The first relevant page on paradigmenergy appeared in 2009:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090425063121/http://www.paradigmenergy.com

The archive history page of alternative-renewable-energy.com at:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050515000000*/http://alternative-renewable-energy.com:80/

shows that there has been a capture on 30.10.2005, but when you click on that link it will show you a snapshot allegedly taken on 02.05.2006 which is at later date, and shows sponsored links only, like when a site is down and used for adverts only. How can a link on an archived page point to pages that didn’t exist at the time of taking the snapshot? This is again weird, and it is not the fault of the original site owners, but rather the mess created at archive.org.

The first data capture that actually shows the first appearance of the discovery on the site is the already mentioned 30.10.2008 link that by the way loads only after several reloads for me:
http://web.archive.org/web/20081030015646/http://alternative-renewable-energy.com:80/
The last I could load after several trial is from 2013:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130521162908/http://alternative-renewable-energy.com/

Regarding your theories pry0cc, you are right that the 0day exploit is so unlikely, that I think we should not even consider it. The reason for this assumption is that when it comes to new disruptive discoveries, especially concerning the energy sector that rakes in trillions dollars, then there is no need to externally hack a website that they actually own. I assume people here know that there is a very well funded and well organized Mafia, or if you like global conspiracy, where all the major MSM media, corporations, military, system of education and healthcare, politics etc. is owned and/or controlled by the richest people on the planet. Archive.org claims that they have archived 334 billion web pages, which requires enormous and very expensive resources that only the richest oligarchs can afford. So if there was a foul play around these websites, we can safely assume that the archive was part of it.

What do you mean by your second theory? They have created the posts in 2008, but some of those posts were deceptively dated into the future, to create the impression as if one would have been posted in 2012 for example? This would be the reasonable explanation if we would assume that the archive was working accurately and was not part of the falsification.

But if we agree that the deceivers did have free access to the archive to do as they like, then the pages could have been created also at a later date, like in 2012 with back-date pages falsely indicating that they have been posted in 2008.

Whatever the case is, I think we can agree on one thing for sure, that there must have been some deceptive manipulation to create these archived pages. This is the main reason for posting my question, to at least be absolutely certain that a foul play must have been perpetuated by some agencies. Do you agree about this?

Does anybody know any possible explanation how could this situation arise without a deceptive manipulation? Like playing to be the advocate of the involved parties for the sake of argument…

It is also important to keep in mind the motive, like a good detective. Would anybody be motivated to take down websites dealing in this business, and even falsify their online trace to mislead potential future followers?

4

I am not expecting members of this forum to be interested in the invention described earlier, but just in case someone who doesn’t hate electronics and physics wants to know more; here is a video Dr. Sheehan published about the significance and impact this discovery could have on our every day lives, if it would be accessible to the public.

Perpetual Computing with Perfect Cooling. Second Law of Thermodynamics violation

Description:
Daniel Sheehan presents a potential violation to the Second law of thermodynamics in physics, He offers a Perpetual motion machine of the second kind which is a p-n diode. it can be said to be a Maxwell’s demon, Original date of video: 2010.

5

So, I guess you can relax regarding this site. Archive.org is redirecting dead links of pages to the newest version they’ve got in their databases. They mentioned this in their FAQ:

This one

Are all the pages associated with a site archived on the same date?

Probably not. Some users get confused about the temporal browsing that the Wayback Machine allows. If a user enters a URL into the Wayback Machine and clicks on a date, that date is only for that page. If a user then clicks on a link on an archived page to continue browsing, the Wayback Machine will grab the closest date to the one originally requested a display it. If the requested page has not been archived, but still available on the live web, the Wayback Machine will grab the live page and it will be displayed with today’s date in the date code.

For example, a user starts on this page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000619182857/http://www.archive.org/

which is the June 19th 2000 version of archive.org

Then the user clicks on the “Internet Archive Colloquium 2000 a Success” link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000706194131/www.archive.org/news/index.html

note that the date for this page is July 6th, 2000

https://archive.org/legal/faq.php

And when a website gets redirected this seems to happen even to landing pages (the first page you browser gets when you visiting a website).

Here an example. If you take your website down for some reason (maintenance or so…) you can send every visiting browser a redirect request to another site (eg. your Facebook page). So your visitor will never see a broken landing page but instead the website you have specified in your redirect request.
When archive.org comes by at this point and tries to backup your site it is probably not following the redirect link. But instead stores some other information in its database (the redirect header itself (?) I’m not really sure about that).

Anyway, this backup of the alternative-energy website is simply redirecting you to the 2013 version of it.

Oh, and no offense man, but if you really want to know what exactly happened to his research, simply write an email or call him or whatever.

6

Thanks Rot127 for the insights, that explains why links on an archived page can lead to pages archived at a later date, or even to a live page (although I would prefer if they would not, and rather indicate non-archived content).

But it still can’t explain why a page claimed and signed to have been archived in 2008 displays a page that contains 2013 content. The discussed page archived in 2008 has got this signature in the URL: 20081030015646 confirming that this specific snapshot was made in 2008. However, the content of the page itself couldn’t have existed in 2008, because it contains excerpts of posts made at later dates. Please note that not only links on that page refer to pages archived in 2013, but the content of the page itself is also composed of texts taken from the ‘future’. The very purpose of archive.org is to freeze the momentary state of a page and store a record of it. It makes absolutely no sense at all to mark a snapshot with a date of 2008 and artificially recompose it from snippets taken from pages created later. If this would be allowed, then the main function of the archive.org would be lost. If anything is wrong with the page at the time of taking the snapshot, like redirects, 404 error pages etc., then that is the fact and reality, which is valuable information for later use, and should be stored as such.

OK, I am explaining how it would make best sense for archive.org to function from user’s point of view who is looking for the true past state of web pages. But of course, mega sites like this don’t usually operate the most logical way, because that would not allow any leeway for manipulations. But in this case even they agree that the page marked with a certain date signature in URL does contain the state of the page taken on that day, except perhaps links on it might lead to pages archived at later dates. But not the non-link content! Here is the relevant sentence on their FAQ page confirming this:

> If a user enters a URL into the Wayback Machine and clicks on a date, that date is only for that page.

The date is only for that page, but certainly valid for the non-link textual content of that page. So unless further facts and arguments can be brought up to defend the ‘innocence’ of all participants and lack of any manipulation, I still think that there is a foul play involved.

Writing an email to Dr. Sheehan to ask what is going on was the natural first thought, and we have discussed this option on another forum. A member on that forum has sent an email to his university address, but unsurprisingly didn’t receive a reply. Some more facts to consider:

The US patent office constantly filters the patent applications and appropriates those that they deem to threaten their power structure and financial interests (or blocks them for years). Of course, they do that under the excuse of “protecting national security”, but that is just dust thrown into your eyes, so you shouldn’t see the truth. Here is an essential reading for those who don’t know what is really going on: “Government Secrecy Orders on Patents Have Stifled More Than 5,000 Inventions”

If a secrecy order has been put on his invention (which is almost certain), then he would be forbidden to tell you the truth. So you would either not get a response from him at all, or get some evasive false reply. Even the fact of it being under secrecy order is a secret, so in that case all he could do is to lie.

I have made a patent search under Sheehan’s name as inventor and found some, but those are not about this diode. There is nothing about this invention in the patent office, which is simply unbelievable. The only reasonable explanation is that it is under secrecy order. If that is true, then people won’t see this coming to the market any time soon, unless Russia or China starts mass producing and selling it to the whole world. Even that is improbable, because the same power structure rules those countries as well, and they are not interested in empowering their subjects.

Any further insights, comments from anybody about the archived pages issue? Thanks again for your contributions.

7

Guess, I was a bit unclear with my explanation.
Archive.org doesn’t have a proper HTML website of the 2008 version. So they redirect you to the latest version of it.
Hope this picture of the developer tools (you can open them by pressing F12 in Chrome/Firefox) make it easier to understand. You can see there all the traffic between your browser and the archive.org server:

  1. Green - Filters for URLs which have 2008 in it.
  2. Pink - This is the javascript for the time line of the WaybackMachine.
  3. Yellow - This is the page it wants to load (…/landing.php) which was probably the landing page back in 2008. But it gets a 302 (redirect) code back, which redirects your browser to:
  4. Red - the archive.org link to the 2013 version of the website. Your browser will follow this immediately.

LeastCostTheory

I agree with you that archive.org shouldn’t redirect you to the last backup of this site (in this case 2013). But, well, its a pretty big system. Bugs happen and I have no idea what the developers thought back then.

Hopefully, this gives your a deeper understanding of the technical aspect of your problem (this was at least my target).

8

Thank you Rot127 for the detailed explanation and the snapshot. Now I get your point, which means that despite the URL indicating a 2008 content, it loads and displays 2013 pages.

This is bad; in fact worse than my original hypothesis. Originally I thought that some archived pages of this specific website might have been manipulated, but otherwise the archived pages generally displayed on archive.org could be trusted to be true states on the displayed dates. The truth seems to be the other way around. That this specific site might have not been manipulated, but the displayed pages can’t be trusted to be the true states of those pages on the claimed dates. I mean trusted by the general (non-expert and non-hacker) public, who just blindly beleive the displayed date signature in the URLs, and don’t know that they should use the developer tools to realize the truth.

As mentioned earlier, I consider this showing of the latest content instead of the requested one to be a sneaky bad practice. But if for whatever excuse they do that, then at least they should also change the date-time signature in the URL as well, to reflect the true date of the displayed data. By not doing that, they deceive the users; as simple as that.

It gets even worse when you display the blog archived in 2011:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110210005808/http://www.alternative-renewable-energy.com:80/blog
In this case apparently they have archived that page in 2011 and most of the content seems to originate from that date. However, some gifs and js files get loaded from 2013 and mixed into the 2011 content, so that the unsuspecting public would never know about this toxic shake. Perhaps the policy makers at archive.org want to make their content unusable for historic fact finding, forensics, and court cases to the general public, forcing them to use their paid service.

Anyway, it looks like my original question has been satisfactorily answered and explained now, and I thank you for the excellent help. It was a good idea to post this case in this forum. But any additional information and comment is still appreciated until the thread gets closed.

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