The moral of all this is that if you want to disappear silently, you should disappear silently. Silently on the internet does not mean deleting your content. It means leaving it there.

This was not unexpected. Several years ago there was an enigmatic post in his blog, a comparison with David Salinger author of The Catcher in the Rye, after publishing that book Salinger disappeared from public presence and hide from any form of popularity. The best friend of Mark died from drug consumption not long ago, and he was really disappointed about that. One time Mark said that all his activity in the web was of no use for getting a good friend. He think that you can have only one friend that survive you, and that friend is not here ...

No wonder people imagine strange things happening when someone decide to disappear in the web.

Did anyone manage to fork Dive Into HTML5's mercurial repository at hg.diveintohtml5.org recently? I had started translating the book to Spanish and now I'm left stranded!

I am sorry, but I was out of the loop. What exactly happened to the original site?

google maps key error on http://diveintohtml5.info/detect.html

There's this, too: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/

I'm not very educated in all this legal stuff, so i have few questions regarded license of this book. First: does license CC-BY-3.0 allow me to download this book for free, make any changes to format or content of the book, including downloading to my Kindle? Amazon sells O'reilly version for kindle for 15.49$, and i can't find 'mobi' version at any legal sources, so is it ok if i make one myself? And if i will, is it ok to share it with everyone?

Secondly, as i understand, there is no problems with translating the book to any language and then sharing it for free with everyone?

I just discovered that those resources were down. Is there any mirror of dive into python available? A good friend wants to learn python and that was a terrific resource.

I wish Mark all the best. I know what is to loose a good friend. Still what he created was beautiful and those resources are too good to vanish.

feedparser.org is also down.

This was a project Mark worked on his employer's time. Thats why it is different.

So Mark deletes this from the Internet, and a bunch of other people put it back up? For people that were concerned enough about him to send the police to his house a few hours ago, it seems weird that they are now saying "fuck the author's wishes" and putting it back online.

I guess if there isn't enough Internet Drama, we have to make our own? Can we go back to whining about node.js? At least I found that mildly funny...

Being concerned about the author's well-being doesn't imply that one ought to 'respect his wishes' with regard to a CC-licensed work that many other people rely upon as a productive resource.

Mark has produced some exceptional reference works and released them under an open license. They certainly ought not be removed from existence on anyone's personal whim, original author or not, no matter how much we sympathize with his situation, whatever that might be.

Actually, by releasing the content under a CC license, the author clearly chose to have this exact phenomenon happen. He may no longer wish to host the books himself, which is reasonable and acceptable -- but since the CC license allows republishing, this behavior by others is also reasonable and acceptable. The only drama being made by this action is by wonks like you who ignore the basic facts of sharing based licensing to cop some sort of bs superior attitude.

Not to be a dick but pretty sure it's well-recognized as an infallible truth that once you put something on the Internet, it's in the world forever. It is never gone, no matter what you want.

I'm sure Mr. Pilgrim is well aware of this fact.

I like the idea that 'the people' who called the police and 'the people' who got diveintohtml5.info up and running are obviously the same people, cause they like, use the internet and stuff.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I agree it is good that someone had the good taste to bury the HN stories.

But DiveInto* is good content, and the internet needs more content like it.

Shows one downside of digital publishing, where the author can just throw a fit and delete all their good content. If it was on books, they couldn't do a thing.

Dude, it was CC licensed.

Just because he took down his copy doesn't mean he wanted it to disappear completely. Where did he explicitly state that? Nowhere! You're making a big leap there.