[seqfan] Re: Links to trottermath.net currently malicious - maybe we link to a clean copy?

[Georg.Fischer]

Dear seqfans,

http://www.trottermath.net was hacked between
26-May-2016 (archive.org still ok) and 18-Nov-2017.
Terry Trotter's own content may be accessed via the
Internet archive at 
https://web.archive.org/web/20041209003827/http://www.trottermath.net:80/contents.html

Terry died in 2014 (see <https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Terrel_Trotter,_Jr.>)

After 2004, somebody else continued the site and moved it
to Wordpress. It seems that he abandoned that Wordpress
installation in 2011, and finally the site was hacked -
a common problem with Wordpress sites which are not updated.

I still managed to save the content of all subdirectories
of the current site starting at
http://www.trottermath.net/numthry
with the following Unix command:
   wget -mr http://www.trottermath.net/numthry/
   Total wall clock time: 5m 11s
   Downloaded: 1002 files, 25M in 34s (771 KB/s)

A mirroring from the Internet archive is a bit more difficult,
but possible too.

I do not think that the current site will ever by repaired,
therefore one remedy for the OEIS links would be to insert the 
archive.org links to the 2004 version (I would go back to 2004, not to 
2015/2016).

After the geocities' desaster I am personally not convinced that the
Internet archive will keep all old pages in the far future (for
example they may  throw something before the last valid capture).
I hope and think that the OEIS will be more stable.
Also, I think that Terry's contributions deserve a dignified
rest more close to their subject.

Therefore I propose that we copy all of Terry's pages
which are referenced by OEIS sequences, and that we store them
on the OEIS server.

I would volunteer to build that mirror directory structure,
test the internal links, and to pack all in a ZIP file which
could be unpacked on the OEIS server by an administrator.
Thereafter, the 31 references which are currently marked by
a warning note could be redirected to the mirrored pages
in a stable manner.
----
I agree with Hugo Pfoertner that this problem will continue.
For example, there are 22 sequences (A060570 etc.) with broken
references to a paper "M. Latapy, Tilings of Zonotopes".
I wrote to <Matthieu.Latapy at lip6.fr>, but I got no answer so far.

Best regards - Georg Fischer


Am 29.03.2018 um 14:02 schrieb Hugo Pfoertner:
> Since Terry Trotter passed away in 2004,
> http://www.guardiansofdarkness.com/GoD/trotter.html , it's anyway
> astounding that his web site has survived for such a long time. Perhaps his
> heirs have now given up maintaining the site. We all know that this is a
> long-term problem somehow to be tackled by a general procedure for all OEIS
> external links.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 1:40 PM, Hugo Pfoertner <yae9911 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I would guess that the site owner T. Trotter is no longer actively
>> maintaining the pages. The latest sequence referring to Trotter's web pages
>> is from the year 2011. We could therefore safely replace all original links
>> by archived copies in the Wayback machine.
>> I tried https://web.archive.org/web/20150120050207/http://
>> trottermath.net/polygonal-numbers/ and it seems to be unaffected by any
>> hacks.
>>
>> Best regards
>> Hugo
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 1:20 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The Chrome browser will warn you if you try to go to any of those links.
>>>
>>> These links all used to be valid, and there is a chance they will
>>> be valid again when that web site has been rescued.
>>>
>>> So should we delete those links, or maybe it would be better to add a
>>> comment at the end of the link saying something like
>>>
>>> [On March 29 2018 this site appears to have been hacked. Proceed with
>>> great
>>> caution.] ?
>>>
>>> After all, our policy is not to delete broken links.
>>>
>>> I am not sure - what do others think?
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>> Neil
>>>
>>> Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
>>> 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
>>> Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
>>> Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
>>> Email: njasloane at gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 5:29 AM, Joerg Arndt <arndt at jjj.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>> All these links should be removed ASAP:
>>>>    https://oeis.org/search?q=%22trottermath.net%22&fmt=short
>>>>
>>>> The site has been hacked and contains all kind
>>>> of malicious stuff.
>>>>