Invasion of Iraq

Introduction

When the US & the UK invaded Iraq in March 2003 I decided to keep a running update of my thoughts. Each week’s thoughts are on a separate page with the dates and times when they were last updated.

• Week one 27 March 2003, 07:49 GMT
• Week two 1 April 2003, 20:28 BST
• Week three 10 April 2003, 01:21 BST
• Week four 12 April 2003, 11:02 BST

Someone doesn’t like me?

Here’s an oddity. Some search engines are indexing weeks 1 and 3 but not weeks 2 and 4. Week 2 I can understand as it does contain a one or two choice words. Week 4 though contains nothing obnoxious that I can see. It does however have some not very nice things to say about someone in the US government.

Given that for some reason this site gets visited by someone (or something) from a US military address around the middle of most months one is left wondering whether someone has been asking search engines to cut certain pages from their output. The phrase which I think may have caused offence also appears on a few other web sites and, guess what, those pages don’t appear in the same search engines as exclude mine. You will understand that I’m being a little circumspect here so as to avoid offending the search engines themselves.

The US military visits started a long time before I put up these pages and I never have been able to suss out what they find so interesting.

Hmmm…

Someone else doesn’t like me?

…but this time I think it’s a machine. When I tried to access the first of these Iraq rants from work I found that the online filtering service which the school uses had categorised it as a Criminal Skills site and wouldn’t let me have it. Of course, I emailed the service’s support desk straight away and asked them why. Their reply was that the categorisation had probably been made by their Artificial Intelligence program which isn’t 100% effective. They did say they’d now recategorised it as harmless though. Leaves me wondering just how many of the other sites the service claims are dodgy are in fact completely innocent. Not that the filters are that good anyway. They’re almost trivially easy to get around.