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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

#301

Post by ajsnigrutin »

tcd wrote: post #25

And this is the dangers of relying on a private, corporate, for-profit law-bound organization. They're susceptible to abiding by the laws and of course, there is a cost attached to all of this. Exploiting a free resource, as we all do these days (reddit, youtube, facebook, hackernews itself etc) is all well and good but maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR…

We cannot excpect a private company to continue paying for resources they don't want to.

But giving a "export all the data in xml/json/whatever" button, and maybe even opensourcing the now-abandoned component serving this data, would be nice move. The first part could even become a regulative requirement some day.

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

#302

Post by adventskalender »

ar-jan wrote: post #98
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…

btw, maybe Mechanical Turk could help with the captcha part?

A couple of years ago I saw somebody giving a talk, where they demonstrated a CAPCHA-Solving API, with people from India solving the CAPCHAs for a few cents.

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

#303

Post by Kovah »

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…

The stuff stored in the Yahoo groups is material from the beginning of the internet. When people explored what could be possible and how easy is was to connect globally. You have a valid point, but it's also one of these things in our generation that we have to live with. We explored and tried things. Only now we look back and see what those explorations of our younger selfes really are; sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing. However, if you are cautious, you may be able to delete your stuff or at least make it anonymous by deleting that said account. If not, you have live with it. Those of all these people can now learn from it and can educate their kids in being careful with the internet. (Or at least this is what it should be)

The dogma, that "everything posted to the internet will stay on the internet" , may not be entirely true for this first generation, because now large parts are already gone. But I am certain that this will be very true for the current generation, because I really doubt that Facebook and others will ever freely delete large datasets of user content.

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

#304

Post by Angostura »

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…

Have you posted this on Reddit anywhere? Possibly /technology?

You might even get the admins to make an announcement.

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

#305

Post by Diagon »

breakingcups wrote: post #299
Diagon wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are going to groups.io, but I certainly wouldn't want to suggest anyone move to another centralized system. The best thing to do is probably just to get a VPS and install phpBB or something. For group owners, importing our Yahoo archives there is going to be the next task.

Yeah, a PHPBB forum on a random VPS run by a random user has a much higher chance of surviving..

The point is they then own their data. If they want to move it to archive.org or anyplace else, they can. Unlike the situation we find ourselves in now.

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

#306

Post by ygthrowaway »

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.

It was someone quite high up in the company who was the first to raise in Slack actually; though it's clear were similarly not highly clued in to this before yesterday, and no substantive replies or info yet (just other colleagues with similar concerns).

I'm guessing this will blow up later this morning when people start waking for the work week.

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

#307

Post by Diagon »

philpem wrote: post #298
Alex3917 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difficulty in a lot of cases is finding someone who has a complete copy of the group. Yahoo Groups also had file, photo and database features, and archives of those are likely to be incomplete. You'd have to go through the member list (primarily early members) and find someone who still had a copy of all the messages. The other problem is making it available - I ran a Yahoo group for many years, and have Mbox and…

I have the same problem. I used some old script back in 2006 to download a couple of groups in ... I think it's Mbox format. It's just not clear what to do with it.

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

#308

Post by ajsnigrutin »

piroux wrote: post #188
phendrenad2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait the library wasn't lost due to that fire, but the contents were slowly lost due to the passage of time and people not caring or having access to copy it's contents? That makes the analogy way better, but the "burning" part is sadly wrong.

Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to convey by "lack of efforts". 2000 years ago, as a civilization, even if we failed to care enough for the Works stored in the Library, their loss would not have happened if access was not limited, which would have helped in their dissemination and issuing of copies. Today, as a civilization, if we fail to implement to right process to backup on time what matters to us, we will rep…

The main difference is, that then, "backup" ment copying everything by hand, and now, it means one simple copy-paste. Considering the size and price of modern hard drives, and relatively small size of old archives, any one individual can backup a huge amount of data (and even offer/share it as a download link/torrent seed/etc).

Their whole Library would probably fit even on a smallest now-available sd card.

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

#309

Post by jonathanstrange »

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.

Historians would love to preserve spoken communication and there are many projects recording everyday conversations. There are even projects of recording the typical sounds of the environment in certain areas at a certain time. However, many forms of spoken everyday conversation fall under restrictive privacy laws, which poses strict limits to such preservation efforts.

The texts on the internet at a given time, on the other hand, are public and reflect the opinions and ways of living of a large number of people at that time. There is no doubt that these could be analysed in the future to give us historical insights in ways we cannot even conceive yet. (Think e.g. about getting them data mined and analysed by advanced A.I. to give new insights into the time period.)

The worth of the data is so obvious that it's really hard for me to understand why you and some other people don't think these are interesting data points for research on how we lived in, say, 200, 500, or even 10000 years from now. The data is not only interesting to historians, but also to economists, political scientists, and linguistics, btw.

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

#310

Post by Diagon »

ygthrowaway wrote: post #306
rkagerer wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was someone quite high up in the company who was the first to raise in Slack actually; though it's clear were similarly not highly clued in to this before yesterday, and no substantive replies or info yet (just other colleagues with similar concerns). I'm guessing this will blow up later this morning when people start waking for the work week.

Thanks. We also noticed that BoingBoing picked it up. Their graphics are a bit crude - but that's BoingBoing. We're trying to be more polite here: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-swear-2.htm...
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