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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

#191

Post by CamperBob2 »

Diagon wrote: post #144
CamperBob2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

To be clear, I wasn't comparing the fanfic authors and other Yahoo Groups contributors to vandals scribbling dicks all over Pompeii. Just saying that all other things being equal, future historians will prefer to have too much data to work with than too little.

By definition, we don't have the benefit of hindsight until it's too late.

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

#192

Post by Diagon »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #171

Why wouldn't these groups for which Yahoo seems to be a critical service have done this work weeks ago? Either it's important and you make an effort yourself, or you do nothing, which clearly indicates that it is not important. I'm having a hard time getting worked into a lather over this one like it seems everyone else is - it's been announced for 2 months - ample time to save what you needed.

Actually, it's not. We were given 13 days for the shutoff of archives, with another 7 when there was an outcry. Most owners of groups are non-technical and have no idea how to get their data; this is why the archive team put up a request page for owners who wanted their groups archived (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--10nDq...). Their more crowd sourced approach, which has been hard at work for these months, has been actively interfered with by Verizon (see the link of the OP). Verizon should be supporting this attempt to preserve this material.

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

#193

Post by wyattpeak »

perl4ever wrote: post #187
wyattpeak wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite important that it wasn't Christians. A large part of the public understanding of history is based on a belief that progress through the early Middle Ages was held back primarily by Christian repression of free thought. There are people who very seriously believe that we'd be flying between stars by now if Christianity had never become predominant. You don't have to be a Christian apologist to think that it…

Do people generally think it was Christians? Without looking it up, I would have said "barbarians", which may not rule out Christians but doesn't specify them either.

I think the majority of people have never thought about it one way or the other (and would probably think similarly to you), but there is a substantial group of people who do. While it's by no means predominant, you come across the idea with fair regularity on atheist discussion boards.

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

#194

Post by drawkbox »

This is why the change in ownership to private equity of .ORG TLD is problematic.

What if the owners, or owners after it is sold further down the line, of the .ORG TLD prevent archiving? Or charge more for that? That would greatly affect web archive.org and Wikipedia.org.

This move on preventing archival actions is probably setup to allow them to block it later after the sale goes through and say that it was a policy before they started it. A bit like how they lifted .ORG pricing limits just before .ORG TLD was sold to Ethos Capital.

.ORG TLD looks to be targeted right now.

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

#195

Post by johannes1234321 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #140
tempestn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

For new code it is indeed "simple". Old code however likely contains third party provided code, be it from libraries or code provided by contractors, where no (clear) license permitting relicensing of the source is available. This can be quite complex historic work as version history might not exist (which code come from where?) and documentation is limited (paper contracts lost in archives) and so on.

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

#197

Post by big_chungus »

merb wrote: post #147
donaltroddyn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All true, but costs of hosting and serving aside, there is a non-zero legal cost with hosting and serving the content. Blame bureaucrats, parasite lawyers, and our litigious society.

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

#198

Post by crankylinuxuser »

So this is a serious question:

Why in the hell weren't you using something more backupable, like IRC with a bot, or something like this? Given it's biohacking, and not some older-tech thing, you should have 100% known better.

Why didn't you?

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

#199

Post by tbrownaw »

cirno wrote: post #155
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…

What about people who don't want stupid comments they made online when they were 14 permanently indexed and searchable for all of time by the Archive Team? Yes, they may have posted to Yahoo! Groups back in 1999 when they didn't know better, but now it's 2019 and you have people digging up decades-old dirt on people to try and destroy their reputations and careers. Given that search engines have zero ethics when it c…

Given that search engines have zero ethics when it comes to removing embarrassing (but not illegal) content,

Ethics are about codified sets of rules. Perhaps they're just following a set of rules that doesn't promote hiding things to make people feel better?

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

#200

Post by Diagon »

paggle wrote: post #145
Diagon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I will say that if these are backed up, they will be less accessible than they would with Yahoo. Someone will have to download a large archive (gigabytes, depending on teh group) and then search through it for themselves.
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