When I was at aol I tried to get them to open source the q link server code from the 1980s. Someone actually got it on DVD for me and everything but after the Verizon merger they fired the entire legal team that was responsible for authorizing open source release and it just stalled.
Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
21–30 of 424 posts
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can imagine it's easier and safer (from a legal perspective) to just delete the data and therefore no longer be responsible for the content. Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR. I mean, the GDPR makes things kind of difficult in this regard, and I suspect even archives are liable if somebody takes an issue with content they are hosting.
This seems relatively cheap to fix. Spin off Yahoo Groups as a new corporation, and have that corporation subsequently donate all its assets. If the corporation somehow manages to get sued, it doesn't really matter, since it has no assets. Or spin it off and sell it.
No non-privately owned company would ever willingly put itself through the legal and tax requirements for spinning off a new company with part of its assets just to do the right, non-profitable thing, with those assets.
Also, in my opinion, no privately owned company either, unless the owner was soon dying of something and wanted to get in good with their creator.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#23What prevents Verizon from donating the Yahoo Groups database to the Internet Archive? What does Verizon have to gain from preventing the archival of Yahoo Groups?
It's simply way too much work. Dying projects generating no revenues don't get the luxury of having tens of people assigned to work on them.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#24What prevents Verizon from donating the Yahoo Groups database to the Internet Archive? What does Verizon have to gain from preventing the archival of Yahoo Groups?
Companies don't typically operate that way. All else being equal (especially when there's no $$$ in it for them) when given the choice between doing something and doing nothing, they usually choose to do nothing. It's often not malicious, but an overabundance of caution. (i.e. lawyers raising red flags about liability, 'our IP' etc... it's a real pain even from the inside getting large companies to do anything different from the status quo)
My bet would be that Verizon's network monitoring system/team sees the archive team's attempts as some sort of anomaly to be stopped. It's possible, though I wouldn't bet on it given Verizon's history re: public relations, that making noise might alter the equation and get them to allow the archive team to continue.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#25And this is the dangers of relying on a private, corporate, for-profit law-bound organization. They're susceptible to abiding by the laws and of course, there is a cost attached to all of this.
Exploiting a free resource, as we all do these days (reddit, youtube, facebook, hackernews itself etc) is all well and good but maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform).
I mean, Google+, MySpace, Bebo, IMDB comments is now dead and gone, how useful was the data really? I'm sure some people might go to archives but I would imagine 95% of the data is just "rot" that has no value or substance.
History is lost all the time, we barely know what we've been up to the last few thousand years only now can we so extensively document our world with the precision and quality afforded to us.
But in the end, time moves on and some of that history is lost, it hurts, but whose to say any archived history will be preserved anyhow? We're still relying on our storage technology being readable years/decades/centuries from now, which is not a given.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#26I wonder if a small scraper script that an existing member of the group could download and run under their existing, valid account, would work?
Like a TCL language 'starpack' , a single binary Go program or something else?
Can you script a browser to do some crawling for you?
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#27I'm confused why Archive.org is attempting to archive and expose to the public what is essentially private communications?
My usage of Yahoo groups in the early 2000s was mostly to communicate with my high school / college / dorm groups and the last thing I want is for embarrassing messages from 20 years ago sent to a private group to be archived.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#28I wonder if a small scraper script that an existing member of the group could download and run under their existing, valid account, would work? Like a TCL language 'starpack' , a single binary Go program or something else? Can you script a browser to do some crawling for you?
Like.... Selenium or puppeteer?
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#29Let's collectively DDoS attack Verizon and Yahoo.
Don't do this, but if you do, please wait until after the 14th.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#30disclaimer: I'm a Member of Archive Team who's helping coordinate the joining of Yahoo Groups in preparation for archival. Yahoo's banning of a large amount of the accounts we were using is a huge setback for us. In total we lost over access to over 55,000 Yahoo Groups, many of these will now not be archived and will be lost when Yahoo deletes everything on December 14. Particularly disastrous was the loss of access…
I imagine you guys already know this but considering we’re up against the timeline, I’d use the captcha solving service (easy to google yourself) and Luminati to distribute the IP addresses while swallowing my ethical qualms.