Did the Wayback Machine Catch Russian-Backed Rebels Claiming Responsibility for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17?

Screen Shot 2014-07-19 at 11.16.42 AM

If you’re a long-time read­er of Open Cul­ture, you know all about Archive.org — a non-prof­it that hous­es all kinds of fas­ci­nat­ing textsaudiomov­ing images, and soft­ware. And don’t for­get archived web pages. Since 1996, Archive’s “Way­back Machine” has been tak­ing snap­shots of web­sites, pro­duc­ing a his­tor­i­cal record of this still fair­ly new thing called “the web.” Right now, the Way­back Machine holds 417 bil­lion snap­shots of web sites, includ­ing one page show­ing that “Igor Girkin, a Ukrain­ian sep­a­ratist leader also known as Strelkov, claimed respon­si­bil­i­ty on a pop­u­lar Russ­ian social-net­work­ing site for the down­ing of what he thought was a Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary trans­port plane short­ly before reports that Malaysian Air­lines Flight MH17 had crashed near the rebel held Ukrain­ian city of Donet­sk.” (This quote comes from The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, which has more on the sto­ry.) Girk­in’s post was cap­tured by the Way­back Machine at 15:22:22 on July 17. By 16:56, Girk­in’s post was tak­en offline — but not before Archive.org had its copy.

To keep tabs on this sto­ry, fol­low Archive’s Twit­ter and Face­book pages.


by | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (3)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Scott Swank says:

    Could some­one kind­ly pro­vide a trans­la­tion?

  • Scott Swank says:

    From the CSM arti­cle,

    “In the vicin­i­ty of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying some­where in the Progress Mine. We have issued warn­ings not to fly in our air­space. We have video con­firm­ing. The bird fell on a waste heap. Res­i­den­tial areas were not hit. Civil­ians were not injured.”

  • Vlad says:

    It’s the fake account on “Vkon­tak­te”.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast