By G.F. | SEATTLE
MARK PILGRIM is something of a celebrity among internet buffs. He is acclaimed for his advocacy of web standards, books and a sometimes prickly manner. So it came as a shock to many when, on October 4th, Mr Pilgrim apparently took down his various websites, deleted online code repositories that he owned, killed his Twitter account, removed a Google+ presence and disabled various e-mail addresses.
More troubling, though, was how Mr Pilgrim performed this virtual wipe. He did not proceed in the usual fashion, by switching off the assorted digital outlets entirely, which would have meant that anyone who wanted to access them would have met with a hung connection which, after a few failed attempts, a web browser would stop trying to establish. No. Mr Pilgrim set his servers to respond to incoming browser request with an enigmatic status code number 410.
Status codes are dispatched all the time. These codes are part of Hypertext Transfer Protocol, better known as HTTP, the language spoken between web browsers and servers. A browser asking for a web page or image typically gets code 200 ("hunky dory") or 304 ("page unchanged since the last time it was accessed). Readers will also have seen 404 ("Not Found"), the response code for a missing page, typically from a mistyped URL or outdated inbound link.
But 410 is altogether more serious. It means "gone". According to the internet specification which defines such things "this condition is expected to be considered permanent." Eric Meyer, an internet pundit who knows as much as anyone about the code that controls the appearance of web pages, stumbled on the 410 status across Mr Pilgrim's many sites. He posted a blog entry about Mr Pilgrim's sudden self-exile. He also quoted Mr Pilgrim's own cryptic words about the 410 status code: "Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things."
Mr Meyer feared that Mr Pilgrim's deletion of online information and accounts portended something rather more permanent. He raised an alarm, which was promptly picked up and disseminated by thousands of people, most of whom did not know Mr Pilgrim personally, only his work. (Admittedly, others were less perturbed, pointing out that gamers are known occasionally to commit a form of vicarious—and completely innocuous—suicide by destroying a character they have created.) Mr Pilgrim's colleagues at Google says that the police were notified (several times) and sent a car around to check on his well being, only to find him in fine fettle. Shortly after that intervention another colleague posted a tweet saying:
Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.
The scare subsided after follow-up Twitter messages were published and Mr Meyer updated his fearful post. The whole incident remains mysterious; Mr Pilgrim has kept mum about his motivations. But it does show that the internet, often mocked as impersonal and uncaring, can be quite the reverse.
