Shit. That was a really valuable resource in the newsroom.
For over half a century, the CIA’s World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world—population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, “Okay, at least some tax dollars are going toward something genuinely helpful.”
And then, this week, the CIA just… deleted it. No warning. No explanation. Every single page now redirects to a brief announcement that the Factbook has “sunset.” That’s it. That’s all you get.
Simon Willison, who first spotted the disappearance, didn’t mince words about what happened:
In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they’ve not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they’ve also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement.
The Factbook has been released into the public domain since the start. There’s no reason not to continue to serve archived versions – a banner at the top of the page saying it’s no longer maintained would be much better than removing all of that valuable content entirely.
Incidentally, “stay curious” is how NotebookLM usually signs off at the end of a deep dive. Could just be coincidence.
Probably not.
These shitheels are too dumb to figure any of this out for themselves, they definitely used a llm. I don’t think that I could view any evidence that supporting that as a coincidence.
Federal government can no longer be trusted for providing any data or resource.
What a time to be alive.
A lot of it talked about political structure and how democratic a place is and violence and stuff. They don’t want usians to see how similar we are getting to his trumphole countries.
