CIA to Sunset the World Factbook(abc.net.au) |
CIA to Sunset the World Factbook(abc.net.au) |
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.
The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on Wikipedia.
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.
If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
yeah it's game-able, and a bad actor can ruin work, but we're comparing it to a literal singular gospel source of information from a three letter agency.
p.s. I noticed I used an em dash, appropriately or not. i'm leaving it in. I like it. maybe im turning bot. changing the way I speak/type to avoid being taken that way irks me to hell.
If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is true, you can use that to double-check another part of the government that's misleading you on that same data. You can also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the systems.
Here's one hot take:
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...
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.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).
It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
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.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet Archive will become out of date.
The issues start when you try to compare data, because different sources will use different methodologies
That's one way of putting it.
Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts.
Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great deal of discussion.
What else are you looking for with "traditional editorial structures"? Consistency in quality and completeness, which Wikipedia lacks. However, whenever an article has lower standards, Wikipedia is happy to point that out to the reader, and allow further refinement. A more traditional encyclopedia would simply omit the article entirely.
I'm not really seeing what a traditional editorial structure would be gaining anyone, seems like it would just be a smaller encyclopedia.
That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.
Thanks, stranger.
It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.
Discussed a few days ago as well
What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
"The C Programming Language"?
Less tongue-in-cheek: I'm sure your embassy issues travel advisories.
In its own FAQs[0], the CIA previously noted that many third-party companies that once provided free data now require expensive subscriptions or restrict use via licensing. These likely made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Factbook’s rigorous standards for comprehensive global data.
Ensuring the accuracy of thousands of data points for 258 international entities required a "monstrous workload" of vetting and reviewing by highly trained officers. Given the "do more with less" mandate, this is the result.
[0]https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
This ending seems fitting for the world where artificially manufacturing consent is rampant.
As Nietzsche once said: "There are no facts, only interpretations"
If you happen across a random book burning, can you confidently assume which side they are voting for.
Nowadays, nobody even pretends to not be a liar, from any side. There is no debate that even attempts to look at the facts - it's vibes all the way down and fuck you if you don't agree, only money and guns matter. In the long run, this can't hold.
Spoiler: The CIA was formed around rich people's interests and continue to represent them, not in fact, the American people. Harsh reality but helpful to know.
George Orwell (1984)
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.
> In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic studies as CIA’s publication of basic intelligence. It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factb...
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/canada/
[2] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/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.
Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
where we're going, we don't need "facts"
To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us from the WHO, and doing everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a few big changes.
Seems like it's to manufacture consent for a narrow overton window of capital interests, which is nothing new to this administration in particular. It keeps up the illusion of democracy by looking like changes are happening all the time as a result of voting, but really it's a race to the bottom except for the uber wealthy.
Since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3 of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness. Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
We're given two shit options which come about through a broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-approved narratives that are disseminated.
The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki...
Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have, thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an archaic consumption-based economy.
The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.
at least them, yes
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
"President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was and has weakened America's ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive. Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...
They'll just blame liberals and double down on the authoritarianism as they've always done.
The administration is dispensing with the institutions of soft power. I don't think it's the main goal so much as a consequence of their worldview. Soft power is essentially worthless to people who have no interest in maintaining a facade of international cooperation.
Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?
And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
We are fucking cooked.
Who is supposed to defend liberty across the globe? Do you think the US has been doing that and should be doing that?
The point of OP was that the facts from the CIA can’t be trusted. That they can lie about the facts.
The question of article quality has been studied from the very beginning. Wikipedia almost always wins.
For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll estimates after decrying them as inflated for years. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent
Well, except for the very obvious political bias
https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...
If you look at the sentiment for public figures given, the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he was credibly accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time. Someone with that on their record will probably be read as negative, but, I mean, not the editors’ fault!
Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
"The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."
It is a report generated by this conservative organization (that presumably gets donations from many other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report itself is suspect?
Is that a bias or just reality?
Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations?
If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
That order was not perfect, but the alternative is going back to the naked power struggles of the XIX century, which ended in global carneficine - and the next time it will be so much worse.
It's always held, management just changes. Money and power are two fundamental constants to human nature.
How much of that actually came from soft power rather than "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
Actually, I don't think that's necessarily the case. Look at the Chagos deal: that's the new reality created by international organizations catching up with the naked power of the original occupation, and pushing it into a corner. Again, far from perfect outcome (why Mauritius, etc etc), but quite a step forward from brutal colonialism. Humanity wins some and loses some, but at least we're still in the game. If we just give up and accept that might makes right, we slide backwards into the jungle.
Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility. (Credibility and cultural attraction? Pretty sure these have little correlation. Dictators can make creditable threats.) Further, its a debatable claim that there is a 'core currency' of soft power.
As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill for your personal meaning of Credibility. But I can attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger than any International Relations Realist practitioner would make.
What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.
> His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions
What's "kid gloves" about that?
Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia page:
> Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Note how the atrocities are last, same as Mao.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
It's a shame we can't have nice things.
Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.
There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.
One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.
Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.
0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...
https://github.com/xvxx/phetch
It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.
Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]
What does that even mean?
This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.
Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.
I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.
Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.
[1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...
American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non Americans here.
Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don’t want young Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian website.
Primary sources aren't completely disallowed, but they are definitely discouraged.
I do, when I’m reading something and accuracy matters. Anybody who cares about accuracy will investigate the sources. I know people will complain that “nobody” does this, but it is essential, without checking sources you are just casually reading. That goes for books and all media consumption. If a book or any media (ahem Tucker) doesn’t give you enough information to be able to look something up, that is rather a red flag of obfuscation.
Take population estimates for instance. Much of the world either doesn’t have the state capacity or can’t be trusted to maintain accurate, publicly known population figures. There are some countries where they haven’t had a census in decades and their official population figures are entrusted to numbers provided by regional governments which receive national funding on a per capita basis. Every region has an incentive to inflate their population numbers and, in a system where they’re all competing for funding from the central government, this eventually becomes common practice. Even national governments have little incentive to share honest figures with the rest of the world, and national governments that aren’t even accountable to their own people like China and Russia are also well practiced in keeping secrets. And population is probably one of the easiest things to measure.
The problem is that some people just accept the first number they find and are militant about not thinking beyond that point. If you tell them the radiation meter tops out at 3.6 roentgen, they say “3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible”.
That’s why I used to like Quora - you would often see an answer provided by the primary (and only definitive) source for questions.
But to put it with John Steward, what if reality itself has a left leaning bias?
What if left leaning people have empirically broader empathy [0] which could imply that right leaning people have in tendency worse personalities. I guess you would attest yet another biased article here.
PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.
gopher:// or ftp://
If you deny this argument do you claim:
1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or
2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or
3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your organization or country.
...and then china moved in.
The real problem is that the problem isnt binary or immediately causal. "This happened, and then that happened".
These problems are slowly developing with more than 1 term in the equation.
China doesnt build silk road 2.0 because of one little decision. It's an accumulation, and by then it's too late.
Everyone has to end up filtering at some point or it’s all just noise.
We have plenty of bits, at least.
And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.
I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.
I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.
And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!
"The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources originated with the academic discipline of historiography. The point was to give historians a handy way to indicate how close the source of a piece of information was to the actual events.[a]
Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events", rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source was a source that was created at about the same time as the event, regardless of the source's contents. So while a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an ancient dictionary is actually a primary source—for the meanings of words in the ancient world."
"All sources are primary for something
Every source is the primary source for something, whether it be the name of the author, its title, its date of publication, and so forth. For example, no matter what kind of book it is, the copyright page inside the front of a book is a primary source for the date of the book's publication. Even if the book would normally be considered a secondary source, if the statement that you are using this source to support is the date of its own publication, then you are using that book as a primary source."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
Perhaps the jist is more about 'Primary' means different things to different groups in different context. And just saying the plain sentence "Wikipedia doesn't use Primary" is a really shallow incorrect take.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source
"For example, a memoir is a primary source when it is used to study its author's life or personal relationships, but the same text becomes a secondary source if it is used to investigate broader cultural or social conditions. Thus, the categories “primary” and “secondary” are relative and depend on the historical context and the purpose of the study. "Primary" and "secondary" should be understood as relative terms, with sources categorized according to specific historical contexts and what is being studied."
Drowning beneath your inability to Google.
