alt Hacker NewsCIA to Sunset the World Factbook
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20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.
If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Of all the organisations you’d think the CIA would understand the value of soft power and having some level of control of facts being published
The Internet Archive has a mirror:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest. This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
I really wish more people funded Britannica or some other traditional encyclopedia.
Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
Discussed a few days ago as well
That sucks. It was the first thing I would check when someone said, "Hey, do you want to go to São Paulo/Oman/Laos?"
What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
3rd discussion, simultaneously on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808
in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural conclusion
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted.”
George Orwell (1984)
It's time to sunset the CIA. “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
The only useful thing CIA ever did is gone. :(
My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the world as simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say. To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship and study, which invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.
End of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.
No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)
Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
facts?
where we're going, we don't need "facts"
A shared knowledge of factual information is the enemy of a fascist state.
Not that that has anything to do with the current administration deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served countless people for 80 years.
I don't understand why they created or obtained control of the world Factbook in the first place, anyone have a story around this?
I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend legitimacy to their organization.
This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
Trump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a natural replacement
What took so long? They've had Wikipedia for years already.
I cannot escape the overall impression that Trump is bankrupting America and we increasingly cannot afford to provide even the most basic of government services.
Facts always create problems for authoritarian regimes.
So they do everything they can do get rid of facts.
The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated.
This regime is following the standard path to authoritarianism.
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ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too much about the rise of fascism.
It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments, but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda, that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.
As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been heavily cited lately to argue against the idea of a genocide in Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.
That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to many.
It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.
An outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.
Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.