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

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141–150 of 424 posts

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

#141
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something you know from the inside, or your (probably good) guess?

Just a guess to be clear. Not an employee myself. I would imagine there's a lot of porn, sex work, stuff Verizon is trying to wash its hands of lately with Tumblr. EDIT: Ah yes HN - where admitting that you're just speculating wildly like everyone else gets you the downvotes -_-

weak speculation gets downvotes m8

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

#142
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something you know from the inside, or your (probably good) guess?

Just a guess to be clear. Not an employee myself. I would imagine there's a lot of porn, sex work, stuff Verizon is trying to wash its hands of lately with Tumblr. EDIT: Ah yes HN - where admitting that you're just speculating wildly like everyone else gets you the downvotes -_-

Speculating wildly is OK. Speculating wildly using definitive-sounding statements, particularly in a thread directed specifically towards employees of a company, is extremely misleading.

If you had started with “Not related to Verizon in any way, but IMO...” that would have been perfectly fine, but given where and how you made the statements it looks remarkably like you were claiming inside knowledge of the situation, and then feigning innocence when called out.

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

#143
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?)

“My understanding is that [the group] will still function as a mailing list, which is for all practical purposes, what people use this as,” https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/17/20919630/yahoo-groups-uk...

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

#144

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…

It is a lot of resources thrown at saving, not the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, but the public toilet block graffiti wall. Ask an antiquarian about the value of graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii and other archaeological sites sometime. The great historians of the day wrote about their contemporary culture, while the vandals and miscreants and lowlifes and commoners contributed to that culture. Having acces…

Ha, ha! Well, there's some high quality material there too, but I take your point. In the right context, like "history from below," all kinds of material can be high quality!

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

#145
post #118
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot the password to the account.

I see, yes. They have been negligent in many ways. Can you contact the owner of the group or a moderator and make the request? (We even have groups whose owners have been locked out. Who do you contact at yahoo?)

I don’t want to draw any attention to the post. It’s made it ~15 years in silence so I don’t want to make a change of strategy.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two reasons: (a) If we hit Yahoo with everything we've got, groups would have almost certainly crashed, or at least become unbearably slow. That's not a reasonable thing to do, and would be (IMHO) grounds for Verison banning us. (b) We were still testing / writing the scripts to do the actual archiving. Most of the groups we did save before the banning were from test runs of the archiving script. And sure, given hind…

OK, thanks for explaining this. Just my 2 cents then: big companies make decisions like this based on the potential PR win/loss. If ignoring you keeps the PR delta at 0, while allowing to export the data exposes them to even a minimal risk (I dunno, someone's private details buried in), they will ignore, or even actively resist you.

Politically, you need to arrange it so that cooperating with you will give Verizon a small PR boost, while ignoring you will be seen negatively by the public. This thread had a good example of interesting data that is worth preserving, so I would try reaching out to news companies (NY Times and whatnot) to see if anyone wants to publish a piece. Phrasing this positively and ensuring enough people see it, would greatly increase the chances of cooperation from Verizon.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). Things shouldn't be like this. The price per unit of storage and bandwidth falls fast (and, except for the sites dealing with user-generated videos, faster than the amount and size of content grows). Laws shouldn't apply retroactively. The problem really i…

If you are a company, GDPR does apply to data on physical letters and local emails. A large part of the preparation for the introduction of GDPR enforcement was companies getting a handle on what they had stored in various media.

actually email and letters are something which the gdpr falls short in some countries. especially germany. since basically the constitution is above the gdpr and depending on the letter/email the content of the letter does not need to be acknowledged or showed (gdpr also means you can access your data) to the person who want his data deleted/showed/whatever.

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

#148

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.

I agree on the first point. The second is perhaps understandable if you read the whole exchange. You know they initially gave us 13 days before they cut off storing any more of the group emails (that is, new emails)? With an outcry, they increased that to 20. Many thousands of people were scrambling to find a new home. We are now reaching the end of the line (the last week) before the archives themselves are gone, and they have blocked the main concerted attempt to save some of that history. So, some level of frustration is in order.

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

#149

There have to be some Verizon or Yahoo employees on HN who are reading this. Can any of you shed some light on why Verizon and Yahoo aren't cooperating with the Archive Team to archive this valuable historical content? (If you don't feel comfortable commenting with your regular HN account, maybe you could do so with a throwaway account?) Also, is it possible for any of you to bring this issue to the attention of uppe…

Probably not very helpful/informational but: I work for VzM, but not historically directly on Yahoo products (product teams have been merged/consolidated etc. over the past few years, but there's still strong tendencies toward products people came from). So I wouldn't be very clued into what's happening with Yahoo Groups internally. And I've heard nothing about this internally. At all. As it stands, it's 2:30pm in SV…

I hope this doesn't sound naive, but what does the M in VzM stand for?

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry about that. The current (as of 2100 UTC) set of groups being sent out to be joined were ones submitted through our nomination form: https://tinyurl.com/savegroups I did specify that groups requiring approval to join shouldn't be submitted, but not everyone took notice. (And then there was the several dozen Google Groups URLs that were submitted!)

It seems a weird set of groups. Like, lots of three-to-five person groups roleplaying doctor who, spiderman and things like that. Is this the long tail of what hasn't been archived or is there not even a good way to tell post/member count without loading up through the extensions?

Yeah not volunteering for that mate.
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