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ONE OF the eerie things about the World Wide Web is how some sites become frozen in time when an untimely event befalls their creators. Many of these ghost sites belong to failed companies whose clocks stopped when the money ran out, but whose websites were not auctioned off with the office furniture.

They are often like an electronic Pompeii, preserved exactly as they were at the moment when the final redundancy notices were handed out. Some come complete with phone numbers where you can leave messages that are never returned, or they invite visitors to apply for long-vanished positions…

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