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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

#331

Post by big_chungus »

dredmorbius wrote: post #318
big_chungus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those costs reflect the actual social costs of that hosting. Prior to GDPR and similar legislation, those risks were externalised onto users and society at large. They're now being shifted, properly, to where they should have been borne in the first place, on the service providers themselves. Blame risk-externalising business practices and willful ignorance.

What social coast is there to distributing content contributed by people who agreed to terms according to those terms? Users transmitted data about themselves to a party after reading that party's terms of service and agreeing to the things it promised to do with the data. To paraphrase a popular talking point, two consenting IP addresses should be able to send whatever data they want between each other.

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

#332

Post by dredmorbius »

big_chungus wrote: post #331
dredmorbius wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those costs reflect the actual social costs of that hosting. Prior to GDPR and similar legislation, those risks were externalised onto users and society at large. They're now being shifted, properly, to where they should have been borne in the first place, on the service providers themselves. Blame risk-externalising business practices and willful ignorance.

What social coast is there to distributing content contributed by people who agreed to terms according to those terms? Users transmitted data about themselves to a party after reading that party's terms of service and agreeing to the things it promised to do with the data. To paraphrase a popular talking point, two consenting IP addresses should be able to send whatever data they want between each other.

1. Terms of use can change at any time.

2. Technical capabilities have expanded massively. When Yahoo Groups launched, enterprise storage of more than a few hundred GB was highly unusual. I worked for a Very Impressive Service Agency which was lucky to claim two Sun Starfire servers, only one of which was Large File (> 2 GB) at about the time, for analytic use.

By the late 2000s, AOL were deploying massive-RAM based systems to be able to perform whole-dataset operations in memory.

For the past ~5-8 years, large-scale SSD drives have been A Thing, now available in the terabyte range, for a price. Again, the level of analysis and expolration possible have made tremendous leaps.

3. There is the concept of manifest vs. latent functions, and awareness. The full realm of possibilities of technical systems are rarely apparent to their creators, let alone nontechnical users. See (very generally): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...

The marketing and disclosures of such services rarely include such disclaimers as "use of this system may subject you to a lifetime of personal and social profiling, grammar-based context analysis, GD ML AI based image content analysis, and imperil the global liberal social democratic experiment."

Hiding behind the figleaf of "you should have considered all possible future implications of your present actions and will have no future recourse" is grossly flawed, and quite frankly, professional malfeasance and malice aforethought given current understanding.

The awareness of risks has changed, and is unambiguous. Providers should foot the costs, or mitigate them accordingly.

(I suspect that at least in part, the actions of Yahoo, Google, and others, reflects this changed awareness, though I'm not aware any providers have explicitly stated this.)

Again: the risks always existed. The previous state was made possible only by pretending they did not. They do. Practices must change.

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

#333

Post by hiccuphippo »

jefftk wrote: post #262
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many non-technical readers are a) going to see that HN post, and b) have any idea what the gobbledygook in those first few posts means?

Yahoo sent out email notifications to every group owner and member. I got mine on November 1st. Yahoo is definitely handling this badly: they should have offered an export tool, given a longer window, and been clearer in their messaging. But the claim that they didn't notify people (and just put the information up in a place no one would see) is wrong.

They could have put a notice in the footer they always add to the messages.

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

#334

Post by marapuru »

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…

> The LoA held knowledge collated and collected by the best thinkers of the time.

... that had access to writing services and were wealthy enough to have their thoughts stored.

There could have been many odd voices out there that would've told us an entire different story. But these are unknown because they didn't have access.

Now we are in the era of (almost) universal access to storing our thoughts and we still don't listen to the everyone or mark them as uninteresting and not worthy.

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

#335

Post by gerbilly »

It's a shame. I guess the lawyers got involved.

Maybe the only good thing to come from this is that it reminds us to think twice before entrusting all our data to cloud based software companies.

And if you do put your app/data in the 'cloud' make sure you have offline backups.

Cloud platforms are like share cropping (farming on rented land).

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

#336

Post by BlueTemplar »

oneepic wrote: post #280
BlueTemplar wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P2P software has solved this problem a while ago?

With modifications, maybe. Like, you don't have to store everything on the service's end until you're ready to delete it. Also we don't seem to have a P2P service with the kind of contract I mentioned.

Redundancy is built-in P2P, so deletion is not an issue. (Popularity is - but systems like Flixxo have tried to tackle the issue...) Also, what about IPFS ?

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

#337

Post by BlueTemplar »

anticensor wrote: post #272
BlueTemplar wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that "deleting" is problematic in itself, especially for "cloud" data, considering how storage works, especially transistor one like SSD's !

Mark it inaccessible and write the new data over it in the next write cycle.

That doesn't work on SSDs, and the data might be even theoretically recoverable on HDDs : https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12503/can-wiped... > Therefore, you should assume there is no reliable way to securely erase individual files on a SSD; you need to sanitize the whole drive, as an entire unit.

There's a reason why when security is deemed important, the storage is physically destroyed instead.

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

#338

Post by plorg »

jefftk wrote: post #262
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many non-technical readers are a) going to see that HN post, and b) have any idea what the gobbledygook in those first few posts means?

Yahoo sent out email notifications to every group owner and member. I got mine on November 1st. Yahoo is definitely handling this badly: they should have offered an export tool, given a longer window, and been clearer in their messaging. But the claim that they didn't notify people (and just put the information up in a place no one would see) is wrong.

I was a member of a single Yahoo group, a local recycling cooperative. I got a notification about the shutdown in mid-November and promptly sent a download request (not a full export). It took literally weeks before I was notified that the download was ready.

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

#339

Post by tossAfterUsing »

i can't possibly be the only person here who has been expecting this type of fuckery for 10+ years, right?

it's taken me that long to get to a place where i feel confident that my own personal archive of data isn't going to disappear from control.

side note: it's too bad that ssbc isn't quite ready to deploy at scale for the types of folks who rely on Yahoo Groups for this service. sure seems like a great resource.

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

#340

Post by nicoburns »

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…

Hmm... a standalone viewer for these formats (that exposed a webserver that could be accessed in a browser) sounds like it would pretty trivial given a parser for the email format itself. Especially maildir!

How big are these archives? Do you have any samples? Does the viewer need any special features? (threading?)

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