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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

#401

Post by davidferguson »

estranhosidade wrote: post #399
Nition wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: We only need to archive the genuinely good content. Step 2: It will take a long time to look through all this content and determine which parts deserve keeping. Step 3: We will inevitably leave out something that someone else thinks is worth keeping anyway. Step 4: Let's just archive everything.

It's basically that. Yes, when saving everything we'll save a lot of trash and utterly garbage, spam and all that shit... But the things we would be risking to lose if we didn't save everything, they are and will be so much important. To save what is really important, you have to save everything.

And actually, spam is quite interesting to some people. It certainly gives a flavour of what early-2000s internet was like, and what happens when spam filters aren't good.

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

#402

Post by ojosilva »

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…

Certain group contents are actually unique and valuable (see threads below), in which there could be a certain similarities to the LoA.

But most importantly, Groups is a corpus representing many segments of society during a period (starting 2001, with a peak of over 100 million users in 2008). It's a snapshot that embodies concerns, beliefs, morals, language... at several realms. This is more than LoA even. It can be used profusely by researchers and historians to study society for years to come. Or by AI to learn how and who we are/were...

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

#403

Post by myth_drannon »

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 more details here https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-up...

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

#404

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Hah, this is fun! I've so far stumbled on a fantastic group with Sims 1 houses (pictures, and the actual lots), and a Dream Street fan-club, which of course prompted me to see who the hell they were.

I confess I'm doing this mostly to see what people posted on the internet at some point in time :)

Edit: All groups have around 1600 members... what causes this...

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

#405

Post by giancarlostoro »

Aeolun wrote: post #404
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…

Hah, this is fun! I've so far stumbled on a fantastic group with Sims 1 houses (pictures, and the actual lots), and a Dream Street fan-club, which of course prompted me to see who the hell they were. I confess I'm doing this mostly to see what people posted on the internet at some point in time :) Edit: All groups have around 1600 members... what causes this...

> Edit: All groups have around 1600 members... what causes this...

That's possibly the maximum cap?

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

#407

Post by user5994461 »

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…

Here I wrote a blog post to explain why products are shutdown, illustrating Yahoo and Verizon. https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

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

#408

Post by PhasmaFelis »

user5994461 wrote: post #407
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…

Here I wrote a blog post to explain why products are shutdown, illustrating Yahoo and Verizon. https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

I think everyone understands that corporations don't want to spend money and effort maintaining servers that don't generate revenue. No one is really surprised that they won't help with archive efforts.

The question is why they're spending real effort on blocking archivists. All they had to do was keep doing nothing for a few days. The cost to them might have been a couple hundred dollars' worth of bandwidth, at most, which I think archivists would have been happy to pay--they've done more before. (That's estimating based on small-scale commercial hosting prices; it might not even register on whatever enterprise uplink Yahoo/Verizon uses.)

Instead they've got at least one professional taking time away from productive work to fuck with archivists at no benefit to anyone. It's possible that the wage-hours spent on this actually exceed what the bandwidth costs would have been. It's astonishingly petty.

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

#409

Post by jhallenworld »

I'm an occasional yahoo groups user. I'm pleased to find that the owners of the groups I'm interested in have moved their content to groups.io.

These include mostly support groups for obsolete hardware and software. I would say that something like github would be a better place, except for copyright problems. Yahoo groups were better for quasi-legal archiving.

I'm wishing that Groups.io was hosted outside of the US for this reason..

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

#410

Post by cr0sh »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #408
user5994461 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I wrote a blog post to explain why products are shutdown, illustrating Yahoo and Verizon. https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

I think everyone understands that corporations don't want to spend money and effort maintaining servers that don't generate revenue. No one is really surprised that they won't help with archive efforts. The question is why they're spending real effort on blocking archivists. All they had to do was keep doing nothing for a few days. The cost to them might have been a couple hundred dollars' worth of bandwidth, at most…

Is it possible that there may be some kind of political angle to all of this; that archiving this information for the future might allow someone to find out something that someone else doesn't want to come to light?

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