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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

#221

Post by rkagerer »

ygthrowaway wrote: post #100
pmoriarty wrote: post #11

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any of you shed some light on why Verizon and Yahoo aren't cooperating with the Archive Team to archive this valuable historical content?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…

Maybe you could be the one to raise it on the Slack channel and (even better) get some eyeballs with authority clued in on the matter.

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

#222

Post by companyhen »

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/

Arweave is doing great stuff but I think it'd still run into a similar situation as archive.org -- Check out the arweave discord dev community if you haven't though!

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

#223

Post by Diagon »

egfx wrote: post #213

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 Mic…

Yes, this was incredibly sudden, and with not support for getting out. They gave 13 days notice of intention to shut down new additions to message archives (extended to 20 days after some commotion). That was October 21, I believe. They have offered a broken group downloader that produces incomplete results. Desperate group owners have been using a Windows piece of software called PGDownload, but Verizon has blocked that. Now the only organized effort is being actively interfered with. Dumbfounding is indeed the word.

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

#224

Post by nikanj »

danShumway wrote: post #219
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.

Corporate DNA in the US seems to be build around two basic principles:

1) Use whatever means to get yourself forward

2) Do whatever you can to hold everyone else back

The Groups thing is a wonderful example of #2 in action. It’s not about preventing access to Groups in particular, just the general principle of preventing and hindering all and always

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

#225

Post by rkagerer »

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…

Thanks for fighting the good fight!

I assumed I could help by going to a web page and solving a bunch of captchas for you, but when I read those instructions I found there's more involved (forging a Yahoo account, installing an extension) and it turned me off.

If captcha's are the bottleneck, maybe some generous soul here could figure out a way to automate the rest and just give me a page I can go solve captchas? Further reducing the friction might help get you some more uptick from the community - more monkeys like me banging at typewriters.

Sorry I wasn't more help, and best of luck with your efforts.

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

#228

Post by mbreese »

danShumway wrote: post #219
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.

There are probably really costs here. From their initial message in the post, it sounded like it would cost them “something” to allow all of the data to be archived. I could imagine that the data for these groups was expected to fall into a 80:20 distribution between cold data and hot data (Or 90:9:1 between archived data, read only, and read/write). If you start pulling data from the archive or cold tier, then you could disrupt that storage pattern. Moving the data around could end up causing some kind of monetary cost.

But it seems strange to me that they would actively try to thwart these efforts and remove the possibility for a great deal of good will.

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

#229

Post by Diagon »

danShumway wrote: post #219
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.

That is one hell of an analogy. I'm going to try to use it.

(There is one guy I came across trying trying to monetize what he could download of some archives. He used the Windows software PGDownload to do it. It's a lot of alt-med stuff: https://groups.rifeforum.com)

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

#230

Post by notduncansmith »

rkagerer wrote: post #221
ygthrowaway wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe you could be the one to raise it on the Slack channel and (even better) get some eyeballs with authority clued in on the matter.

Seems risky at this point, since they’ve already posted here. Probably better to wait quietly and report.
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