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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

#151

Post by advaita »

spsful wrote: post #149
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…

I hope this doesn't sound naive, but what does the M in VzM stand for?

Not OP but I assume it means verizon media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Media

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

#152

Post by Macha »

spsful wrote: post #149
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…

I hope this doesn't sound naive, but what does the M in VzM stand for?

Media. Verizon Media is the specific division of Verizon that contains Yahoo, AOL, and VDMS (formerly edgecast)

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

spsful wrote: post #149
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…

I hope this doesn't sound naive, but what does the M in VzM stand for?

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by jdsully »

glenstein wrote: post #104
piroux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Library of Alexandria never actuelly burnt ! That is a very good ol' myth ;) - https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perni... - https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-li... - https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-knowled... But anyway, no one should delete human littérature, be it inadvertently or by lack of effort.

Too often historical events turn out to be perfectly true, but claimed to be myths due to dizzying semantic distinctions. Just looking at the third link, the most upvoted answer agrees that humanity suffered a significant loss of important information. And the 'myth' is just an asinine distinction regarding whether loss was due literally due to fire, or whether the information was lost due to some other cause. I thin…

It's quite clear the library is no longer here. How exactly it was lost does matter as its destruction has been used to paint various groups as anti intellectual barbarians since ancient times. Eliminating the story as a weapon to attack others would do humanity some good.

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

#155

Post by cirno »

pariahHN wrote: post #86
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…

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 comes to removing embarrassing (but not illegal) content, sometimes the loss of information is a small blessing for some.

Yes, it's their fault, but I also don't think it's fair that something a child said at 14 should haunt them their entire professional careers, either.

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

#156

Post by Diagon »

mtmail wrote: post #143
tedunangst wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A phone company in the UK that assigns phone numbers using the groups and now will lose all those phone designations when it’s deleted. Wow, somebody invented a database that's even worse than an Excel file on a network share. (Also, how are they going to assign new numbers when archive.org takes over? Is archive.org going to give them write access?)

“My understanding is that [the group] will still function as a mailing list, which is for all practical purposes, what people use this as,” https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/17/20919630/yahoo-groups-uk...

That's right, but (our main concern) is that the archives are being deleted. With no further history being recorded, it's utility for some purposes is limited. I have also come across some complaints that even as a list-serve it can be problematic. Posts, for example, are no longer coming in order.

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

#157

Post by ajnin »

What was the original plan exactly ? Subscribe to as many groups as possible and then wait until the last moment to grab the data ? That would almost certainly have resulted in massive bandwidth problems and massive bans by Verizon in response at this point, failing the archival effort anyway.

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

#158

Post by Dignium »

IDK if this is any help, Verizon is holding their annual conference On Dec 10th (less 2 days away as of this writing), with C.E.O. Hans Vestberg presenting at 12:15 EST.

https://www.verizon.com/about/investors/ubs-global-tmt-confe...

Maybe someone can pipe up at the conference.

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

#159

Post by betamaxthetape »

misnome wrote: post #113
betamaxthetape wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sorry about that. The current (as of 2100 UTC) set of groups being sent out to be joined were ones submitted through our nomination form: https://tinyurl.com/savegroups I did specify that groups requiring approval to join shouldn't be submitted, but not everyone took notice. (And then there was the several dozen Google Groups URLs that were submitted!)

It seems a weird set of groups. Like, lots of three-to-five person groups roleplaying doctor who, spiderman and things like that. Is this the long tail of what hasn't been archived or is there not even a good way to tell post/member count without loading up through the extensions?

It's a set of groups that have been specifically requested by the fandom community. Of course, the groups handed out depend on what's been joined, so if / once all the fandom groups are joined, we'll move onto something else.

I appreciate this isn't made clear in the instructions, but if you have a desired set of groups in mind, you don't need to use the chrome extension. Just join the groups you want saved and (provided you've sent the account details through the form) they'll be added to the queue to be archived. I did a lot of Amateur Radio (Ham Radio in US) groups that way.

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

#160

Post by phendrenad2 »

piroux wrote: post #49
jedberg wrote: post #10

It's like the burning of the Library of Alexandria all over again. We don't know exactly what was in the library when it burned. We assume it was all great works of intellectualism, but it could very well have been the fanfics of their time.

Except that the Library of Alexandria never actuelly burnt ! That is a very good ol' myth ;) - https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perni... - https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-li... - https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-knowled... But anyway, no one should delete human littérature, be it inadvertently or by lack of effort.

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.
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