Goodbye Download Squad! Content no longer accessible
The Download Squad, up until its shut down in April 2011, was one of the go-to blogs for tech enthusiasts. It concentrated on software reviews and news but also other things that the majority of popular tech sites out there don't cover anymore or only occasionally.
Up until its shut down it was one of the few sites that I visited regularly for "real" tech news and it was almost certain that I discovered something new or interesting.
The site lived on for a while as part of Switched, another of AOL's properties but that turned out to be only a temporary solution as Switched too was shut down eventually.
The Download Squad content itself remained online however which meant that most links that pointed to Download Squad articles worked fine even though they were displayed on other properties.
If you try to load an old link right now you will notice that this is no longer the case. Many of the former links seem to have been redirected to the Engadget frontpage instead, which is owned by AOL as well.
It is interesting to note that this is not the destination for all links though. While deep links seem to link to Engadget, the main domain link links to The Huffington Post website instead (you guessed it, also owned by AOL).
This means that all articles that were published by the Download Squad are no longer available on the Internet.
You may still get some back on Archive.org or other archival sites but there is no guarantee that these sites have backed up all articles.
A quick check on the Wayback Machine of Archive.org revealed that many of the articles are still accessible on it. Webmasters who have referenced the Download Squad in the past may want to replace the old links with Archive.org links instead as they provide value to readers while the plain redirect to Engadget does not at all.
As a tech enthusiast, it is sad to realize that all the great content that was published on the site by its many authors is gone for good. While some is certainly out of date, others are still great and useful.
Now You: What is your take on this?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.