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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

#281

Post by ignoranceprior »

icebraining wrote: post #172
cirno wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The archives are not easily indexable by search engines, they're posted as multi-GB gzip-compressed WARC files.

But someone could hypothetically convert the WARC files back to static HTML and host them on the clear web.

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

#282

Post by Alex3917 »

Diagon wrote: post #156
mtmail wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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...

That's right, but (our main concern) is that the archives are being deleted. With no further history being recorded, it's utility for some purposes is limited. I have also come across some complaints that even as a list-serve it can be problematic. Posts, for example, are no longer coming in order.

But as a mailing list, each subscriber has the entire archive, at least from the date they joined. And any one of them can make it publicly accessible at any point in the future. In practice it will undoubtedly result in the destruction of enormous amounts of human knowledge, but at least in theory not much is getting immediately lost.

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

#283

Post by zfxfr »

There must be something I am missing somewhere.

1) I have been a member of a group for many years (Gann study group) . Last Friday I received a notification from the owner who was explaining the group was closing so he set up a new one somewhere else. I thought it would be nice if I made a backup. So I found a python script on github (there are dozen of scripts in various languages which can be used to backup a yahoo group there). It took me a couple of minute to get it working and then a while later. Voila ! I had it nicely packed on my hard drive. So why is it so hard to back up a group? I don't understand the problem.

2) "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."

What? Well OK why not.. But? They are a phone company. There must be someone able to scrape all this data? I don't get it? There are so many ways to extract data from yahoo group.

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

#284

Post by logicallee »

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…

how much storage do you think in total all of the Yahoo Groups content takes?

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

#285

Post by paggle »

Diagon wrote: post #200
paggle wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it’s not that the post is immediately bad. It’s that I had an alt account for a completely different side of myself and made one errant post with that alt account to a forum linkable to my real identity. So it’s not a serious concern but I’ll be glad when it’s gone.

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

#286

Post by Diagon »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #281
icebraining wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The archives are not easily indexable by search engines, they're posted as multi-GB gzip-compressed WARC files.

But someone could hypothetically convert the WARC files back to static HTML and host them on the clear web.

Hypothetically, yes; but right now all this stuff is available on the clearnet and searchable. So obviously any potential harm of the present situation, is decreased. And, unless your argument is that we should delete all fora on the web because someone may have said something embarrassing on them, then I think you'd probably want to come down on the side of preservation.

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

#287

Post by Diagon »

zfxfr wrote: post #283

There must be something I am missing somewhere. 1) I have been a member of a group for many years (Gann study group) . Last Friday I received a notification from the owner who was explaining the group was closing so he set up a new one somewhere else. I thought it would be nice if I made a backup. So I found a python script on github (there are dozen of scripts in various languages which can be used to backup a yahoo…

Most people running these groups are not technical. Even if they got the word in time, the only option many of them could find was PGOnline, a Win pay software, which by this point Yahoo has blocked. Furthermore, even if they got it, what do they do with it? For many groups, the archives are a resource to be referred to. They need to be hosted somewhere, preferably with some kind of front-end search engine. Even better if the search engine integrates with any new posts on the forum they move to.

The Archive Team has been taking requests for backups of groups for people who don't have the technical facility to run the python scripts. They then intend to make them available on the internet archive. The next project is making some kind of front end, in case group owners want to host that somewhere. Some of us, for example, will be doing that behind some kind of a forum login, so it won't be search engine indexed.

As for your point 2, that was cut/pasted from the link in the OP, where it's describing that many groups are still using the platform. More relevant to this project, is that many groups are losing their archives, and those archives contain anything from scientific data, to hobbyist & howto information, to art and literature, etc.

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

#288

Post by Diagon »

paggle wrote: post #285
Diagon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it’s not that the post is immediately bad. It’s that I had an alt account for a completely different side of myself and made one errant post with that alt account to a forum linkable to my real identity. So it’s not a serious concern but I’ll be glad when it’s gone.

It's been eating at you, I can tell.

Well, all I can say is, don't add that to the list of groups that this team is trying to archive (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--10nDq...) and if it does end up on archive.org, you will find another post on this thread saying that they are very responsive to takedown requests. (info@archive.org)

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

#289

Post by iforgotpassword »

empath75 wrote: post #120
h2odragon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>open source the q link server code what a lovely thought. Thanks for the effort, even tho it didnt pan out. if you've got the dvd torrent it out :) now im wondering if there's a stratus emulator anywhere and/or the os code. Them things were nasty... individually battery backed hard drives was just the beginning. The slot cards looked like someone had dumped yellow patchwire spaghetti all over them.

Nah I don’t have the dvd and gave up trying to get it released because it wasn’t my job.

If you ever bump into this person again please consider suggesting this. If they don't feel comfortable releasing it to the public directly, there should be contacts at archive.org that would help releasing it anonymously.

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

#290

Post by CriticalCathed »

john_moscow wrote: post #234
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…

Pure speculation, but if you publish something created by another person without an explicit permission by them, it may open you up for a lawsuit. If some groups required explicit approval by a moderator in order to read the posts, I would take it as they didn't want the content to go public. So technically, some legal troll could post some copyrighted information, wait for it to be published on Archive, and then sue…

Groups can be private or not. Require approval, or not. The archiving team isn't attempting to break into private groups and archive them. Only public groups are going to be collected.
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