Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14 • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by blotter_paper » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:03 AM UTC

wolfgang42 wrote: post #142

aspaceman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I read aspaceman's orginal post as speculation rather than an implicit claim of insider knowledge. I do see how it could be taken the other way.

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

#212

Post by sincerely » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:08 AM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #112

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…

We don't think it's necessary to preserve everything that's ever spoken verbally. We don't lament that everyday conversation is ephemeral. People are conflating internet discussion content with written content because it's stored as text. Whereas the more legitimate comparison is to verbal communication.

>We don't lament that everyday conversation is ephemeral.

Linguists definitely do.

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

#213

Post by egfx » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:11 AM UTC

In the early 2000’s there existed two main ecosystems in mobile software J2ME and BREW (not counting Symbian) the latter BREW, operated by Verizon. I had cofounded a QA consulting company that heavily based itself off BREW’s highly extensive developer portal. Then one day without warning, the developer portal disappeared. Luckily I had the foresight to download all the documentation a week before. My cofounder, a Microsoft developer was dumbfounded.

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

#214

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

oieoeireoes wrote: post #202

Verizon claimed that the archivists violated the "terms of service" [1], but I couldn't find any reference to automation, downloading, crawling, or denial of service attacks that might apply. Does anyone have an idea of exactly what term or terms were violated by the archivists? [1] https://www.verizonmedia.com/policies/us/en/verizonmedia/ter...

AFAIK they hadn't started doing mass-archiving either. They were still setting up.

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

#215

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

fl0under wrote: post #201

I had just recently been reading about Arweave [0], a sort of distributed file storage that claims to permanently store files/webpages using various incentives. Seems like something like this would be a good way to archive this sort of information or build sites like Yahoo groups on top of this file storage in the first place. [0] https://www.arweave.org/

Storage isn't really the problem in this case, collecting the data is the problem because yahoo/verizon are actively hostile.

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

#216

Post by Diagon » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #198

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?

Yes, it wasn't me who started the groups in mind, and these were quite early, starting in the late 90's. While many members were researchers, on the whole they were not in computer fields- chemistry, biology, medicine... On top of that, people of that vintage knew very little about the internet.

There have also been many other comments here about other types of groups, from bird watchers to people building rockets to histories of WWII, that would certainly not have had this kind of technical background.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #27

I'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.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

jijji wrote: post #101

what a PR mess for verizon

Not really. Few people today care about Yahoo Groups, and I suspect many people wish old posts they made to the Internet would just "disappear."

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

#219

Post by danShumway » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #189

Verizon isn’t a charity. Why would they offer any assistance?

They're also not monetizing the content or doing anything with it. They're just going to throw it away. Why would they go out of their way to block archival attempts?

This is the corporate equivalent of throwing your old computer into an empty ditch on the side of the road, and getting mad when someone responsible comes by to recycle it for you.

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

#220

Post by wanderer2323 » Mon, Dec 09, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

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…

It went pretty good for the first 10-20 or so groups but now I get the multiples of the really annoying captchas (click until none remain) per group... Damnit yahoo...