Craig Murray’s Blog Reverts to 2009

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What on earth is going on?

craigmurray

Craig’s Blog craigmurray.org.uk has reverted to 2009.

All posts since May 2009 have vanished. Is there anything special about the page currently displayed?

Suggestions welcome.

**UPDATE**

Clark has been in contact with Craig (see comments below) and whatever has happened to the blog has NOT been authorised by Craig. Clark is now attempting to contact expathos hosting by email. FURTHER UPDATE: Richard at expathos has explained the situation in a comment here and will get the problem addressed on Monday. Monday: Craig’s blog is back up to date. Thanks Richard Kastelein.

Meanwhile there’s a very recent interview with Craig, originally linked by Mary, which you can find in the comments as well.

339 thoughts on “Craig Murray’s Blog Reverts to 2009”

  2. Today would seem a strange day to do it. I was planning on checking later to see if Craig had written a Mandela post. I’m sure a lot of others will check today for that reason. The timing doesn’t make sense to me unless it was done before the death was announced. Makes it look as if Craig is using the death of Mandela to publicise something else which I am sure was not his intention.

  4. Surely Craig couldn’t have been aware of the active Ardin/Assange thread if he agreed to this?

    Keep us informed Clark if you discover anything more.

  5. I’m ‘phoning about, trying to find out more, but I haven’t discovered much yet. I think there were other threads still open; one of the Al Hilli threads, I’m pretty sure.

  6. I’ve e-mailed Tim Ireland and sent a comment to his Nadine Dorries page. Grief, you need a lot of JavaScript to make comments work at Bloggerheads.

    I haven’t got anything back yet. Still haven’t reached Craig by ‘phone.

  7. Craig Murray ‘phoned me when he noticed that he had some missed calls. He’s in Ghana, and has been there for some months, with just a couple of week-long periods back in England.

    Craig stated that he did not arrange with Tim Ireland to do whatever has been done to his blog. Craig finds it very unlikely that Tim would have done this without asking him.

    Craig also said that he didn’t ask Jon to close comments, back in November, but that Jon told him after he’d done it, and Craig approved Jon’s decision.

    Craig still isn’t very well, but he says that he does intend to continue blogging when he feels up to it.

  10. Ben, tea took me a while; I just got back.

    Nothing to report. No more ‘phone calls, no e-mails.

    Earth to Jon, Earth to Jon…

  13. Ben, wow, thanks for the Chris Hadfield Space Oddity link! So wonderful that an optimistic re-make of that song was actually recorded on the International Space Station.

  14. Ben….Cheers. for that Oddity features

    Clark i heard that before …too lazy too check if that was for real…Effin Brill

  22. Evening all. Strange business regarding Craig’s blog. It looks as though the whole new platform has been disabled and the site is reverting to the old platform by default. Has Craig missed some expiry/renewal deadline?

  23. MJ, nothing is out of date:

    [email protected]:~$ whois craigmurray.org.uk
    …..

    Registrar:
    Fasthosts Internet Ltd [Tag = LIVEDOMAINS]
    URL: http://www.fasthosts.co.uk

    Relevant dates:
    Registered on: 15-Mar-2005
    Expiry date: 15-Mar-2014
    Last updated: 13-Feb-2013

    Registration status:
    Registered until expiry date.

    Name servers:
    ns1.expathos.eu
    ns2.expathos.eu

    WHOIS lookup made at 15:02:23 07-Dec-2013

  25. The IP address returned by DNS has changed. It was:

    Was: 94.124.88.232
    Now: 194.50.163.175

    Also, putting 94.124.88.232 into the browser’s address bar used to return a message from the Apache server rather than Craig’s site itself. Additional sites were hosted at the same IP address, so additional information was needed to reach Craig’s.

    But putting 194.50.163.175 into a browser’s address bar takes you straight to this oddly old page.

  26. Clark: that’s the domain name. We know that’s still OK because content is still accessible from Craig’s url. I was thinking more of the blog hosting platform.

  28. Hi everyone. May I join as a camp follower! (Ben @ 3.16pm)

    Good to see the familiar names and I love that pup on an earlier post. My brother and wife have a 11 yr old female JRT. Amazingly feisty and affectionate. I was house sitting when they were away and she had just had pups. Having worked at a vets I knew that she had developed mastitis and I took her to the vets. The treatment was to inject antibiotic into the infected teats and she didn’t have howl which did not surprise me.

    Five years later, she still gives me the cold shoulder having once been very friendly. I reckon she remembers the incident and holds me entirely responsible. 🙂

    So sad that Craig’s voice, and our voices in turn, have been silenced when there are very important matters and events to discuss. I miss him, all of you and the blog for the information it provided.

    This has been a strange week for computer stories – the RBS system crash, the NATs failure today, Craig’s blog disappearing yesterday and yesterday NatWest customers could not use their cards because of a system surge. The latter is part of RBS. We are obviously totally reliant on computer systems and vulnerable when they go wrong.

    PS Thought you would like these pups. Did the Dad have a step ladder? One of those silly season stories except it’s not the silly season…yet.
    Rottweiler and Westie have puppies, called Wotties
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/25231134

    Thanks to AlcAnon for hosting this. Clark pointed the way.

  29. Welcome Mary.

    I wonder if the new censor is part of what’s happening in your innertubes. When we first went online we had youngins of tender age and so we set filters for websearch.

    The ridiculous overkill of those functions took neutral keywords and extrapolated ‘PORN’ making my navigation a pain in the arse. Just sayin’.

  31. Okay it seems all expathos sites and the expathos nameservers currently point to one IP address which is 194.50.163.175 and is also where Craig’s blog has moved to.

    Richard Kastelein at expathos might have some answers.

    PS Welcome to all 🙂 Mary, the puppy JRT is doing amazingly well you’ll be glad to hear.

  32. Anyone contacting me via my mobile; I have no credit so I can’t respond via that channel.

    Yes, it is looking like there may be a misconfiguration of the DNS server belonging to expathos.eu

  33. On another blog hosting topic…

    Looking into my spam stats I’ve just noticed the daily volume of spam to WordPress blogs worldwide now exceeds real posts by over thirty to one! See http://akismet.com/about/ . Last I checked over 160 million spam comments had been detected by akismet worldwide so far TODAY.

    The huge surge in spam is almost forcing WP blog owners to run the akismet anti-spam plugin. Which basically means that software on Automattic (the company behind WordPress) servers actually reads every blog comment to check for spam. So now a direct feed of the comment contents on most of the active WordPress blogs goes direct to Automattic servers as a “side-effect” of the spam problem! That’s over and above the Gravatar info they already get.

  34. I put this link on the Al Hilli thread and Jon acknowledged it. I thought that Craig looked much thinner judging from the looseness of his jacket. Hope he is OK.

    He gave the Tomlinson lecture at Nottingham Uni on 14 November. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/institute-activities/tomlinson-lecture.aspx

    This is an interview with him.
    http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/11/we-still-receive-intelligence-obtained-from-torture-impact-interviews-former-british-ambassador-craig-murray/

  35. Spam of all sorts is a pain. Most people don’t know how to keep their e-mail address from being discovered by spammers. The spam accumulates like a snowdrift in their Inboxes, and legitimate e-mails are lost in the inundation. So most e-mail providers now supply spam filtering by default, but this doesn’t really help as it suffers from both false positives and false negatives. The false negatives just lead to the occasional spam in ones Inbox. The false positives mean that a few legitimate e-mails end up in ones Spam folder, so you still have to search through all the spam, but now there are two folders to look through instead of one!

    It’s depressing how much commercial systems just degrade things, without even trying to.

  36. Mary, thanks for that link. I’ll include the picture (dated 14th November 2013) you refer to here.

    “We still receive intelligence obtained from torture”: Impact Interviews Former British Ambassador Craig Murray


    Craig Murray, a human rights activist and the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, was the keynote speaker at the annual Tomlinson Memorial Lecture 2013 at the University of Nottingham. Murray became a renowned UK public figure in 2003 after taking a stand on the ‘War On Terror’

    Full interview at Mary’s link http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/11/we-still-receive-intelligence-obtained-from-torture-impact-interviews-former-british-ambassador-craig-murray/

  37. I’ve sent an e-mail to Richard Kastelein.

    Squonk, Richard’s e-mail address is at the expathos.eu domain, of course. With the misconfiguration there, is he likely to receive my e-mail?

    Does anyone have a Twitter account? If so, would they try to contact Richard through Twitter please?

  38. I think Craig lost a fair bit of weight at the festival. He did work very hard indeed. He was up until five or six in the morning every night; a few hours sleep, and then back working again before lunch time.

    But I think that part of his weight loss is due to his medical and other problems. He did say that his time at the festival did him a power of good.

  39. Squonk, Richard’s e-mail address is at the expathos.eu domain, of course. With the misconfiguration there, is he likely to receive my e-mail?

    I’ve just checked and there is no SMTP server running on port 25 so he won’t be receiving any email at that address. MX record points to mail.expathos.eu which is currently 194.50.163.175 again.

    I’ve just noticed via search that he has a new site with contact details at http://www.richardkastelein.com/contact

    Contact

    email – expatforums AT gmail DOT com

    That should hopefully get him. He has his cellphone number at the link as well.

  40. The new IP address, 194.50.163.175 does show up as being in the Netherlands which is where expathos.eu are based, and the connection is through CJ2 Hosting & Development, which is one of the right names.

  42. I said I’d “sent messages by both routes” – I meant the gmail address and the contact page. I didn’t try texting his mobile as (argh!) I have no credit on my mobile. I don’t normally ‘phone mobiles as I usually manage to interrupt something.

  46. Cheers AA…
    Sent him a wee message but not sure it went through, think one is best to friend him first…i’ll keep ya’s posted…
    But Really gotta Dash for now

  47. I still haven’t had any reply from Richard Kastelein.

    BrianFujisan, thanks for that. I’m off out now, too. If I haven’t had a reply from Richard by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll try ‘phoning his mobile from my landline.

    Best wishes to All.

  48. Hi all, I have been in Germany all day with missus and kids…. Craig was supposed to be moved to his own server a few months ago as I no longer could bear the cost of hosting. I spent thousands of pounds of my own money hosting him on his own virtual server for years. Seems there are some issues as I recently upgraded to new servers. I will find out more on monday and get it sorted. I left politics for technology in 2010 so moving on as well. Someone else is responsible for managing his account now I believe.

    Best

    Richard

  49. Thanks very much Richard for taking time to comment here. I’ll update the main post. Hopefully something can be worked out with Craig regarding alternative hosting in the near future.

    Hope you have a good rest of the weekend.

    While Craig Murray’s blog remains generally off-line for new commnts, anyone is of course more than welcome to comment on anything, that might be of interest, here 🙂

  50. Hi from Stockholm/Sweden.

    For some strange reason, Craigs blog is geo-blocked. Anyone with a swedish ip gets his latest updated blog, while ip from other counties reverts to the old 2009 blog.
    I have been doing test on 3 different computers in sweden via vpn thru US,UK,Au,Japan with the exact same result-only swedish ip gets thru. Maybe some tech wizard can explain this sudden change. The most interesting query is if this is a bug or if someone did this on purpose.

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