311–320 of 424 posts
You're still using a yahoo.com email address to organize?
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any of you shed some light on why Verizon and Yahoo aren't cooperating with the Archive Team to archive this valuable historical content?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…
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…
AT and the Internet Archive have succeeded in preserving other content, though not all projects are successful. You can see a partial listing at https://www.archiveteam.org/
Even as notorious a "wasteland" as Google+ (a naming I've had some role in establishing: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq) had many millions of actual active users, and tens of thousands of active communities (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...).
Unlike numerous other shutdowns, Google announced the G+ shutdown well in advance, though they "accelerated" the schedule twice, from "sometime in August 2019" to April 1, 2019, the eventual shutdown date. The tools Google offered for archiving and migrating content, whilst among the best in the industry (an exceptionally low bar), were incredibly insufficient: buggy, incomplete, duplicative, and not readily portable). It was largely third-party tools and assistance -- the Friends+Me Google+ archiver and ArchiveTeam most especially -- that meaningful preservation was possible.
The conceit of large-scale, free-to-use services has been convenience, capability, and trust, the last a point Google explicitly made in its original G+ announcement:
You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data....
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-p...
That trust has been repeatedly violated.
And in actively opposing archival efforts, Google, Yahoo, Flikr, and others, are violating that trust only so much the more.
In the G+ shutdown, it was the active dismissal, obstruction, and interference of Google and its user-based support team (the so-called "Top Contributors") which were most disappointing. Long-time Google supporter Loren Weinstein made this point specifically and repeatedly:
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-be...
I'll note that this tends to strongly reduce the value proposition of all Web 2.0 / SaaS offerings, given that even the very largest and wealthiest companies are willing to act in this manner.
The consistency of this behaviour and attitude across multiple service providers makes me think that the behaviour and practices are not coincidental or unintentional.
An injunction filed on behalf of Yahoo Groups users to maintain access, delay deletion, and facilitate archival, specifically.
Is anyone working on this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would fall under "marketing" from a accountant's perspective.
Then again, maybe they figure they’ll get more press coverage by being dicks about it than they would by being decent.
Also I believe they come to it as a media corporation - access to content has to be restricted, so they can charge. If archive.org has too many texts/videos/... people don't watch their movie (not that it works that way ...)
Blog author and people here believe that outsiders with no connection to these groups have an inherent right to download and republish all this information despite having no license to do so. Yahoo/Verizon seems to think differently.
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…
The mean post size on G+ was rougly the same as on Twitter: about 120 characters. (Quite possibly because most G+ posts were themselves repurposed Twitter content.)
Static content does not require ongoing moderation, though it's possible that problematic content will be periodically identified.
The bigger challenge is actually in the publishing engines. Even where these are static, it's possible that vulnerabilities will be identified. That was Google's (not especially convincing) excuse.
A challenge of the Internet Archive / Archive Team method of archival and access is that in preserving the original formatting and packaging of content, the bandwidth and storage requirements are increased tremendously. By about two orders of magnitude in the case of G+.
Were the Archive to focus on the actual originally-authored content rather than all the associated chrome, both factors would be tremendously reduced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Blame risk-externalising business practices and willful ignorance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
First, to Hell with whoever downvoted me, probably lawyers (not you, johannes). Second, I get there are occasionally complicating factors, BUT - licensing can't be difficult at most times, since the company often owns what the worker produces - for better or worse, it's simple that way. As for third party work, are you talking about library imports, or copy and paste? The logistics of solving those problems are eithe…
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.
When the G+ shutdown was announced (see earlier comment, I was one of the "Plexodus" organisers), the whole question of what to do about Communities migration hadn't even occurred to me. It wasn't until a community moderator happened to mention that they had a group with 400,000 subscribers and no idea at all to even begin that I started looking into this.
The first result was to create at least a framework for organising and planning: https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...
It's a really basic thing. I've found no evidence that any such guide has ever existed online. I make no claims that what I came up with was the best, or even effective. It does seem to have been the first. Win, me.
We created a "short FAQ", formatted for posting to G+, which we posted again and again and again and again and again, to as many communities and spaces as we could. Because when you're trying to reach a mass audience (10ks to millions of users, 10ks to 8.1 million communities), mass repetition is necessary.
https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/G%2BMM_Short_FAQ
It's hard enough to motivate people to turn up at one place once every couple of years to mark a few spots on paper, when they all know that this happens regularly -- election turnouts tend around 30-40%. Getting mass compliance on a complicated, unexpected, and technical process (with social and legal entanglements) is far harder.
Many groups glide by on minimum maintenance for years. Whatever initial technical competence was required to set up the group be long-lost. At best, moderation skills are known (and even that is a long stretch). Migration is an entirely different skillset, one rarely exercised, and, as noted above, extraordinarily poorly supported.
TL;DR: your expectations are entirely unreasonable.