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Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

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Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#51

Post by Diagon »

john_moscow wrote: post #46
betamaxthetape wrote: post #3

disclaimer: 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…

Forgive my naivety, but why would blocking of your accounts delete the data you have already backed up? This sounds like you are doing it the wrong WAY, IMO.

They hadn't backed up yet. They had set up accounts with yahoo that they were then planning to use to back up those groups. Backups themselves were starting, but they had to go slowly enough not to bog down yahoo's servers.

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#52

Post by userbinator »

therein wrote: post #34
Waterluvian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo Answers is an invaluable trove of insight into an intellectual class of people that I think a lot of us regularly forget exist.

It is an absolute trove of insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

Before clicking that link I guessed at what it would be, and I was wrong but not far (I was expecting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY )

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#53

Post by tedunangst »

Diagon wrote: post #2

Extensive history is about to be lost. Despite being broken, many organizations still use it. Examples from that post: A police cooperative in Washington DC that was using them as a network to communicate with their respective neighborhoods with over 17,000 members. A phone company in the UK that assigns phone numbers using the groups and now will lose all those phone designations when it’s deleted. A Birding group i…

> A phone company in the UK that assigns phone numbers using the groups and now will lose all those phone designations when it’s deleted.

Wow, somebody invented a database that's even worse than an Excel file on a network share.

(Also, how are they going to assign new numbers when archive.org takes over? Is archive.org going to give them write access?)

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#54

Post by Diagon »

qxnqd wrote: post #44

Why does everything need to be archived? Why can't the stupid things I said 20 years ago in a forum just vanish someday? (I never posted there but you get my point)

It's not stupid. There were serious groups using that platform. While I never thought it was a good idea, they nevertheless did. My personal concern is community driven medical/biohacking research groups that go back to at least the late 1990's.

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#55

Post by patcon »

dessant wrote: post #6

What 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?

Maybe those who care (we?) could organize a campaign to get customers to commit to leaving Verizon if they let the messages be deleted without archive? That would convert it into the language they understand.

To raise the perceived threat level, many folks could support in building tooling or docs to help ppl migrate as easily and streamlined as possible, to minimize the tax on consumer time that they rely on. (E.g., help on comparable plans, cheat sheet for call centre keywords, etc.)

Maybe something team "Do Not Pay" could help run with...! [1]

[1]: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/28/parking-tickets-plus-plus....

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#57

Post by userbinator »

raverbashing wrote: post #40

I find it curious that at the same time we discuss the 'right to be forgotten' laws there's also the opposite problem of preventing the internet from forgetting something.

That's why I'm not a fan of those laws --- in addition to the fact that in practice they turn into something more like "right to rewrite history".

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#58

Post by sdenton4 »

saagarjha wrote: post #37
amluto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d assume the law is smarter than this, because companies would otherwise continually spin of new corporations to get rid of their liabilities with no assets as a sort of lightning rod for lawsuits.

This is, iiuc, how the movie and construction industries work. Spin up a minicorp for every big risky project to shield the mother ship.

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#59

Post by OnlineGladiator »

piroux wrote: post #49
jedberg wrote: post #10

It's like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. We don't know exactly what was in the library when it burned. We assume it was all great works of intellectualism, but it could very well have been the fanfics of their time.

Except that the Library of Alexandria never actuelly burnt ! That is a very good ol' myth ;) - https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perni... - https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-li... - https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-knowled... But anyway, no one should delete human littérature, be it inadvertently or by lack of effort.

Whoa. I guess what they say is true - say a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.

Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14

#60

Post by coldpie »

raverbashing wrote: post #40

I find it curious that at the same time we discuss the 'right to be forgotten' laws there's also the opposite problem of preventing the internet from forgetting something.

Yes! They're both really interesting problems and there's no right answer! You're right to be curious, it's a fascinating set of issues.
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