- guardian.co.uk, Friday August 8 2008 00.01 BST
- The Guardian, Friday August 8 2008
While everyone must empathise with the Fairbrother family's distress (Mystery of the bowdlerised blog as Beijing frees four after Tibet protest, August 7), perhaps we should not accept claims of hacking too quickly. The Internet Archives website stores historical versions of many websites. The page that was allegedly hacked is indexed, and going to web.archive.org/web/20061019002939/http://www.whatabouttibet.com/lucyf.html confirms that the text is unchanged since it was seen by the Archives in October 2006. Of course, it is possible that the Internet Archives website was also hacked into. But the effort required increases dramatically, and I doubt that someone would go to this much effort to make a pro-Tibet protester appear more moderate in her opinions than she actually is. In the end, memories are unreliable, people change their views over time and, sadly, writers often write much less beautifully in their online postings than they do otherwise.
Zhou Fang
Peterborough
