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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

#341

Post by p_l »

shortformblog wrote: post #174
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…

One man’s public toilet block graffiti wall is another’s Library of Alexandria. Let the historians and journalists decide what’s important and the archivists take their best crack at saving it. I write a lot of historical content and often the most useful stuff I find—for example, old flyers or ads from the 1950s or 1960s—would have been considered trash by someone at the time. So an archivist’s job isn’t to make a j…

Toilet wall graffiti and such, preserved in Pompeii, is an important archaeological resource for the understanding actual daily life of Romans.

So yes, there are real, hardcore scientific papers about ancients "shitposting" each other down to "your mom" jokes. Because it shows us how people really lived.

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

#342

Post by Alex3917 »

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'm actually applying for an SBIR grant right now to work on the NLP algorithms that power fwdeveryone.com, if you have any interest in writing a letter of support. Basically it would eventually enable someone to mass export something like an MBOX archive onto the web in a cleaned up format with accessible typography. You can play around with prettyfwd.com to get an idea of the current state of the tech, it works well for 95% of (non-commercial) email threads but still needs some more work to support the rest.

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

#343

Post by Alex3917 »

nicoburns wrote: post #340
philpem wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

> pretty trivial given a parser for the email format itself

The problem is that there isn't any standard that defines what can and can't go inside the body of an email message. So if you want to post each email message exactly in a thread exactly as is, i.e. each with completely different typography and with all the replies attached and not sanitized in any way, then that's relatively easy. But it's also completely unreadable for more than about 30 seconds, and doesn't allow for good search functionality. These problems aren't a deal breaker if you're only trying to make sense of your own inbox, but when you're looking for specific information across millions of people's inboxes then they're a complete nonstarter.

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

#344

Post by jrwr »

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.

If VzM wants to contact someone at the archive team securely they can DM any of the @s on irc.efnet.org/#archiveteam or twitter DM myself (@JRWR) or Jason Scott (@textfiles)

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

#345

Post by jacquesm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #320
fred_is_fred wrote: post #171

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.

For groups, especially, this simply isn't realistic to expect. 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…

If Google ever wonders why their newer ideas failed to gain traction they should read your comment.

For every early adopter pissed off there will be a hundred or more people that never make it to your new and shiny project. So piss off enough early adopters and whatever you launch will be a dud.

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

#346

Post by jacquesm »

Diagon wrote: post #310
ygthrowaway wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Crude but quite applicable.

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

#347

Post by friedegg »

philpem wrote: post #300
myth_drannon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can still read Fidonet messages decades after BBSs died. The power of decentralized networks.

I'm curious where you'd find these -- do you have any links to Fidonet archives? It's been a while since I looked, but I didn't find anything significant last time I did.

Some were gated over to Usenet, and you can see traces in Google Groups, but I'm not aware of any mass archive of them.

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

#348

Post by kevingadd »

Diagon wrote: post #293

Call For Action https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/taking-action/ Don't miss the sidebar with these links: https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/media-contacts/ https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-verizon-... https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-verizon-... Also, you can add these emails to the media contacts: "Reporter Katyanna Quach" , "Managing editor Gavin Clarke" , "Corey…

Please be aware that historically spamming media representatives has the opposite of the intended effect. A few emails to make it clear that it's coming from a group instead of just one individual can help, but at the point where it becomes saturating inbox noise it tends to get ignored.

It's not like interacting with political representatives or corporate PR/executive types where you're conveying the size of the interested party, in this case newsworthiness doesn't necessarily depend on how many people are sending the email.

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

#349

Post by big_chungus »

dredmorbius wrote: post #332
big_chungus wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Social cost would be at best very difficult to quantify, though, making it quite hard to handle. "Increased partisan tensions" due to social media, for instance, is not the sort of thing the cost of which one can quantify and mitigate.

Your point that the things which can be done with information collected are constantly in flux, and I agree the ability to retroactively change terms of service to cover previously-collected data is ridiculous and implies an illusory contract which is not legally valid. No one should be able to run through a neural net data collected in the nineties. However, it's also not reasonable to demand that old data be removed, as it's produced at least as much by the server as by the client (e.g. access logs are typically produced by server-side monitoring of server-side software). The most sensible option is for companies to require explicit agreement to TOS changes to continue using the service, and use new data only under that policy while using the old data under the old policy. It's additional compliance overhead, certainly, but it's no different from how a client contract would be treated.

> professional malfeasance and malice aforethought

You are not the arbiter of such things, but thank you for your opinion. There's also a site guideline about assuming good faith, so you're in violation of that.

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

#350

Post by jolmg »

CriticalCathed wrote: post #290
john_moscow wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, from one of the mails:

> The 128 people you banned were REQUESTED by the group owners to get their stuff.

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