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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

#131

Post by derefr »

tcd wrote: post #7
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?

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.

> Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR.

So, by analogy, if Twitter did allow people to download an archive of any public Twitter account's history... what would the GDPR require them to do? Wrap those archives in some sort of auto-expiring DRM?

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

#132

Post by gatherhunterer »

The current administration put Verizon’s chief counsel into the position of FCC Chairman. I would not expect Verizon to answer to anyone.

Also, it is shame that the person in direct contact with Yahoo over this is sending angry emails in all caps. The Internet Archive deserves better.

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

#133

Post by WalterBright »

Thorentis wrote: post #78

I'm genuinely curious from an ideological perspective, why archivists think all this material is worth saving? People often compare the shutting down of sites or the banning of content (e.g. When Tumblr banned porn, or now yahoo shutting down groups) to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. But there is a huge difference. The LoA held knowledge collated and collected by the best thinkers of the time. The Internet…

> I'm genuinely curious from an ideological perspective, why archivists think all this material is worth saving?

It's easier to just save it all and let gawd sort it out.

You never know what some future person might find interesting. For example, my father took lots and lots of pictures, but they're all set in the living room and kitchen. No pictures of the rest of the house. I'm sure the thought of photographing other rooms simply never occurred to him as being interesting.

For another example, many people are interested in where/when/why certain words first appeared, like the origin of "OK". Massive archives of text that are searchable would help with this.

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

#134

Post by CriticalCathed »

vermilingua wrote: post #119
ar-jan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btw, maybe Mechanical Turk could help with the captcha part?

I feel like there must be some protection in place against using mTurk with captcha, or it would have already been abused.

Mturk's turnaround for this stuff can't be fast enough to work would be my guess. I know jobs I put up there for transcription, despite a generous bonus, were always delayed for at the very least hours.

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

#135

Post by Avamander »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #50
stavros wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would donate my IP/bandwidth to archive.org if I could run a scraper easily.

You can install ArchiveTeam Warrior: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warr...

Unfortunately it doesn't offer a qemu-compatible image or an image that would work when converted, it's a shame and shooting itself in the foot.

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

#136

Post by derefr »

sdenton4 wrote: post #58
saagarjha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you create the SPV in advance, it's very clear what part of the work done by the organization attaches to it (because the organization ensures that all its processes explicitly specify the legal compartment they're running under.)

When you create an SPV after-the-fact, you have to go back and reverse-engineer a separation of liabilities from documents that don't specify whether they're work done for the organization or the SPV (because the SPV didn't exist.)

It's like a divorce. (Or, for an even more on-the-nose analogy, it's like trying to use a condom after-the-fact by extracting any bodily contamination and putting it in the condom.)

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

#137

Post by crazysim »

ArtDev wrote: post #123
pariahHN wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we still had the Library of Alexandria, it may have shed zero light on the actual lives of citizens. Archiving content on the internet means capturing thousands of individual level perspectives and experiences. We don't know what will end up being important to historians 50 or 100 years from now. I would bet there are dozens if not hundreds of historians that would give anything for a record of their favorite…

For example: World War two groups where many of the the members have passed away by now. There could be first hand accounts of history that has already been lost to time.

Could?

More like definitely.

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

#138

Post by Diagon »

ar-jan wrote: post #96
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…

Just solved a bunch of captchas, but Chrome crashed a few times during. Due to the addon?

I checked on IRC. One person says they've been using it for hours on chromium without a problem. "I've been using Edge (Chromium) for past few hours, no issues. Could be unrelated, could be related. May help to use a standalone chromium build for this."

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

#139

Post by withinrafael »

ar-jan wrote: post #96
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…

Just solved a bunch of captchas, but Chrome crashed a few times during. Due to the addon?

I've been using Edge (Chromium) for past few hours, no issues yet. Plugin could be unrelated to your crashing. May help to use a standalone Chromium build for this https://chromium.woolyss.com/

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

#140

Post by unethical_ban »

tempestn wrote: post #61
empath75 wrote: post #21

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.

Open sourcing code can be tricky—there's quite a bit of review that needs to go into doing it right, as well as more work if you want the release to actually be reasonably useful. Blocking this archiving effort is on a whole other level. We're talking about saving information that was already public. All they have to do to allow this to happen is... nothing. I can't comprehend why Verizon/Yahoo would go out of their…

It depends on the size of the codebase and how shitty your programmers are, but if you aren't greedy or scared of over-litigation, it isn't hard at all.

I have written great contributions to a python API library that could be of benefit to the community around it. The code has nothing to do with my company's core competency, and the code is used for internal orchestration, so "exposing insecure code" is an unlikely concern.

It is easier for a lawyer, especially a luddite, to say "no" than to help their employees give back to the world.

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