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

https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-yahoo-bad-form/

by Diagon • 7 years ago

1393 392 7 years ago

modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Extensive history is about to be lost. Despite being broken, many organizations still use it. Examples from that post:

A police cooperative in Washington DC that was using them as a network to communicate with their respective neighborhoods with over 17,000 members.

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.

A Birding group in new Delhi with 2,000 members that has collected data and research on birds for TWO DECADES.

An Adoption group in France, that has been using it for years and years to communicate and share history and photos and more.

They also would have found: Numerous support groups for people who are suicidal or depressed.

Numerous medical groups for people to communicate more effectively with their doctors.

Numerous Vet groups with 24 hr care advice for sick pets.

Numerous support and help groups for the Elderly.

Numerous Historical groups for WW2 Veterans, Vietnam Veterans, and etc.

Numerous science groups that have used them for years and have all their research there.

Numerous fan fiction groups or arts groups that have shared their work for years.

tedunangst2• 7 years ago

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?)

mtmail• 7 years ago

“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...

ec109685• 7 years ago

Not to be flippant, but wouldn't one of the members of these groups have a copy of the group in their email? Given gmail and whatnot store things virtually indefinitely, couldn't the contents be recovered that way?

-EJ

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Some of these groups are decades old. For them, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who was there for the whole history of the group and kept them all. Also, yahoo was often a headache, dropping emails to individuals - you'd have to go to the website to read them. And furthermore, there is a lot more than emails stored on the platform: files/images/links/calendars/databases ...

To add to all this, it's not an individual project. Most people done' have technical competence. They need someone to help. That's what the Archive Team has been trying to offer (if not for Verizon).

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

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 to all of the 30,000 Fandom (fanfic / fanart / etc..) groups that were requested to be archived by members of the fandom community. We're back to square one now, and it is looking increasingly likely that we're only going to be able to re-join (and therefore archive) a small percentage of these groups before December 14.

(And now for the inevitable, shameless plug...) We could really use some help! If you've got an hour or so, we could really use people to come and complete CAPTCHAs for us. (A CAPTCHA is needed to join every group). Instructions at: https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner

mehhh• 7 years ago

Have you considered using NordVPN for CAPTCHA bypass? They are a shady company, but their network of residential VPNs is impressive.

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

I imagine you guys already know this but considering we’re up against the timeline, I’d use the captcha solving service (easy to google yourself) and Luminati to distribute the IP addresses while swallowing my ethical qualms.

stavros• 7 years ago

I would donate my IP/bandwidth to archive.org if I could run a scraper easily.

john_moscow3• 7 years ago

Forgive my naivety, but why would blocking of your accounts delete the data you have already backed up? This sounds like you are doing it the wrong WAY, IMO.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

They hadn't backed up yet. They had set up accounts with yahoo that they were then planning to use to back up those groups. Backups themselves were starting, but they had to go slowly enough not to bog down yahoo's servers.

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

Two reasons: (a) If we hit Yahoo with everything we've got, groups would have almost certainly crashed, or at least become unbearably slow. That's not a reasonable thing to do, and would be (IMHO) grounds for Verison banning us.

(b) We were still testing / writing the scripts to do the actual archiving. Most of the groups we did save before the banning were from test runs of the archiving script.

And sure, given hindsight, I'd do things differently. We've learned, now, and are archiving a groups soon after it is joined.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

While the above post is concerned with Fandom groups, my concern is with groups that started doing early community driven biohacking type research. There are medical tests results and discussions of medical interventions. While that's my focus, I'm sure there's additiona important material. We really need to save this data.

yots• 7 years ago

FYI: The extension offers many private groups that I can't join without approval and that seems to disrupt the flow of the extensions.

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

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!)

tootie• 7 years ago

Is there any cited reason for the groups they're blocking?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Verizon's response, and the response to the response, are in the article of the OP. They claim they offer a Group Downloads Manager, but it's very broken.

ar-jan2• 7 years ago

Just solved a bunch of captchas, but Chrome crashed a few times during. Due to the addon?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

I checked on IRC. One person says they've been using it for hours on chromium without a problem. "I've been using Edge (Chromium) for past few hours, no issues. Could be unrelated, could be related. May help to use a standalone chromium build for this."

withinrafael• 7 years ago

I've been using Edge (Chromium) for past few hours, no issues yet. Plugin could be unrelated to your crashing. May help to use a standalone Chromium build for this https://chromium.woolyss.com/

ar-jan2• 7 years ago

btw, maybe Mechanical Turk could help with the captcha part?

vermilingua• 7 years ago

I feel like there must be some protection in place against using mTurk with captcha, or it would have already been abused.

adventskalender2• 7 years ago

A couple of years ago I saw somebody giving a talk, where they demonstrated a CAPCHA-Solving API, with people from India solving the CAPCHAs for a few cents.

jstanley• 7 years ago

I tried to do this but upon clicking the purple "Join Group" button Yahoo is giving me an error saying my email address is not linked to a Yahoo account:

Your email address is not linked to a Yahoo ID. To join this group, you need to link your email address to a Yahoo account.

When I click "link your email address", it just takes me to a page called "Personal info" which doesn't have any obvious way to link my email address.

So I'm not sure how to proceed.

EDIT: Solved it. I had initially only "verified" the account with a phone number, but you have to add an email address as well. It's now working.

For anyone who, like me, signed up for this and filled in the Google form, but then couldn't find the leaderboard URL after closing the tab, it is https://df58.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/yahoogroups/leaderboar...

It seems to be working through a list in reverse alphabetical order. Watching the progress being made is quite satisfying. When I started it was on groups like "sciencefiction" and now it's moved on to "petzluverz".

hota_mazi• 7 years ago

How long did it take you between adding the email address and being able to join the group?

Seeing the same thing now, I added an email address and verified it, but I'm still not allowed to join the group.

wanderer23232• 7 years ago

It went pretty good for the first 10-20 or so groups but now I get the multiples of the really annoying captchas (click until none remain) per group... Damnit yahoo...

wanderer23232• 7 years ago

update: just enabling the vpn was enough to 'reset' captcha to the simple level, seems like yahoo does not take into account whether your IP is 'residential'.

rkagerer3• 7 years ago

Thanks for fighting the good fight!

I assumed I could help by going to a web page and solving a bunch of captchas for you, but when I read those instructions I found there's more involved (forging a Yahoo account, installing an extension) and it turned me off.

If captcha's are the bottleneck, maybe some generous soul here could figure out a way to automate the rest and just give me a page I can go solve captchas? Further reducing the friction might help get you some more uptick from the community - more monkeys like me banging at typewriters.

Sorry I wasn't more help, and best of luck with your efforts.

Angostura• 7 years ago

Have you posted this on Reddit anywhere? Possibly /technology?

You might even get the admins to make an announcement.

britmob• 7 years ago

It’s been all over r/datahoarder lately, also saw a post on r/YouShouldKnow

citruscomputing2• 7 years ago

Shoutout to https://github.com/dessant/buster by the way!

`Buster is a browser extension which helps you to solve difficult captchas by completing reCAPTCHA audio challenges using speech recognition. Challenges are solved by clicking on the extension button at the bottom of the reCAPTCHA widget.`

davidferguson3• 7 years ago

That's nice, but it doesn't scale. Google only let you solve a few (5 or so) audio captchas in quick succession before you're banned for a while, so it's no good for us.

dartdartdart2• 7 years ago

As an aside, is there anyway to recover emails if I didn't sign into Yahoo for a year? I and a lot of others had up to 15 years of sentimental mail exchanged during that period :(

Diagon66• 7 years ago

I don't see why not. Point Thunderbird at it or something and then just transfer the mails over to somewhere else if you want that - but this is not about mail. Rather it's about Yahoo Groups, whose archives are about to go away.

Aeolun• 7 years ago

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...

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

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

That's possibly the maximum cap?

gumby• 7 years ago

What is Verizon’s motivation for taking steps to prevent it?

jedberg4• 7 years ago

Cost savings, plain and simple. Less bandwidth, fewer servers.

dbtx3• 7 years ago

That only explains a decision to take them down ITFP. What can be gained by shredding all that information? Maybe they aren't shredding it. Maybe they just want no publically available copies to exist.

jsjohnst• 7 years ago

GDPR, CCPA, <insert other regulation>, all are possible reasons to throw their hands in the air rather than do the work / endure the possible risk.

Very possibly the timing isn’t a coincidence, being CCPA is about to take effect.

AJ007• 7 years ago

I don’t know why your comment was downvoted. Very legitimate reason.

dessant• 7 years ago

What prevents Verizon from donating the Yahoo Groups database to the Internet Archive? What does Verizon have to gain from preventing the archival of Yahoo Groups?

tcd2• 7 years ago

I can imagine it's easier and safer (from a legal perspective) to just delete the data and therefore no longer be responsible for the content. Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR.

I mean, the GDPR makes things kind of difficult in this regard, and I suspect even archives are liable if somebody takes an issue with content they are hosting.

Alex39175• 7 years ago

That doesn’t sound correct, given they GDPR doesn’t generally apply to archival products.

amluto• 7 years ago

This seems relatively cheap to fix. Spin off Yahoo Groups as a new corporation, and have that corporation subsequently donate all its assets. If the corporation somehow manages to get sued, it doesn't really matter, since it has no assets.

Or spin it off and sell it.

derefr2• 7 years ago

Twitter wants to delete older Twitter accounts because they're required to by law under the GDPR.

So, by analogy, if Twitter did allow people to download an archive of any public Twitter account's history... what would the GDPR require them to do? Wrap those archives in some sort of auto-expiring DRM?

mindslight• 7 years ago

One of Verizon's spokespeople was literally Darth Vader. "Ma Bell has you by the calls".

Large corporations are not anthropomorphic entities, regardless of their disarming branding. Rather they are amoral bureaucracies, likely administered by people who have learned to ignore their empathy to get there. Verizon won't change course to accommodate the Internet Archive or general Internet community any more than a combine would pause for a field mouse.

user59944613• 7 years ago

It's simply way too much work. Dying projects generating no revenues don't get the luxury of having tens of people assigned to work on them.

CriticalCathed4• 7 years ago

How is it too much work to tar up that shit, put it on a big ass drive or two, and ship it to them? I can't imagine it's that hard.

blihp• 7 years ago

Companies don't typically operate that way. All else being equal (especially when there's no $$$ in it for them) when given the choice between doing something and doing nothing, they usually choose to do nothing. It's often not malicious, but an overabundance of caution. (i.e. lawyers raising red flags about liability, 'our IP' etc... it's a real pain even from the inside getting large companies to do anything different from the status quo)

My bet would be that Verizon's network monitoring system/team sees the archive team's attempts as some sort of anomaly to be stopped. It's possible, though I wouldn't bet on it given Verizon's history re: public relations, that making noise might alter the equation and get them to allow the archive team to continue.

BlueTemplar8• 7 years ago

It is kind of incredible that they are expecting to be protected by IP laws, and yet aren't willing to put the slightest effort to archive the content that they are taking down...

patcon5• 7 years ago

Maybe those who care (we?) could organize a campaign to get customers to commit to leaving Verizon if they let the messages be deleted without archive? That would convert it into the language they understand.

To raise the perceived threat level, many folks could support in building tooling or docs to help ppl migrate as easily and streamlined as possible, to minimize the tax on consumer time that they rely on. (E.g., help on comparable plans, cheat sheet for call centre keywords, etc.)

Maybe something team "Do Not Pay" could help run with...! [1]

[1] https://boingboing.net/2019/10/28/parking-tickets-plus-plus....

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

There is a campaign already. https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/

jedberg4• 7 years ago

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.

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

Yahoo Answers is an invaluable trove of insight into an intellectual class of people that I think a lot of us regularly forget exist.

therein• 7 years ago

It is an absolute trove of insight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

OnlineGladiator2• 7 years ago

We must never forget Ken M.

https://gizmodo.com/ken-m-is-the-most-epic-troll-on-the-inte...

narrator• 7 years ago

I think one of the unintended consequences of privacy legislation is it will support the burning the library of Alexandria over and over again.

The default corporate posture will be : Delete all the data! It's a liability and figuring out what we can keep is an enormous headache.

rkagerer3• 7 years ago

Well, to some degree it is a liability. It just took this long and some accidents for them to finally figure it out.

That attitude will create a problem - a.k.a. opportunity - for others to come in and solve. Google got rich by scraping the internet and solving the headache of how to find decent content. If there's value in some of this data headed to the dump, it gives a chance for someone to do the same. Who knows, they might even find a way to do in a privacy-respecting manner.

naniwaduni• 7 years ago

This particularly consequence was so clearly predictable that it's hard to call it unintentional. It's a hard-to-avoid trade-off.

Jury's out on whether it was the right one.

BlueTemplar8• 7 years ago

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

piroux2• 7 years ago

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.

OnlineGladiator2• 7 years ago

Whoa. I guess what they say is true - say a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.

jedberg4• 7 years ago

From Wikipedia: "Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather only a warehouse located near the docks being used by the Library to house scrolls"

If anything this would make the analogy even more apt, since only part of Yahoo is being destroyed. :)

Regardless, it's mostly used as a metaphor for the destruction of knowledge at this point.

aspaceman3• 7 years ago

These articles seem more concerned with detailing how important it is that it wasn't Christians. Makes sense for a organization centered around "religion and public life", I guess. Quite the angle.

glenstein2• 7 years ago

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 think declaring it a myth in a conversation like this misses the point (it certainly isn't a distinction relevant to the original comparison made here to Yahoo Groups) and just serves to confuse people.

phendrenad2• 7 years ago

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.

pmoriarty• 7 years ago

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 upper management and help them understand how important it is to archive this?

You Verizon/Yahoo employees have much more power to make a difference here than anyone of us from the outside can.

ygthrowaway2• 7 years ago

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, VzM is top of the HN frontpage, and not a single soul has mentioned it yet on internal Slack.

Will see if I can find out more.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

That could really help. Thank you!

spsful• 7 years ago

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

rkagerer3• 7 years ago

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.

davidferguson3• 7 years ago

Don't suppose you can find a way to unban our accounts...? ;)

john_moscow3• 7 years ago

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 Archive for copyright infringement and Verizon for assisting it. As a non-profit, Archive will likely get away with just taking it down, but a for-profit Verizon is a wholly different story.

CriticalCathed4• 7 years ago

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.

logicallee2• 7 years ago

how much storage do you think in total all of the Yahoo Groups content takes?

geggam• 7 years ago

Over 4 petabytes 8 years ago

user59944613• 7 years ago

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...

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

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.

userbinator4• 7 years ago

The "dark side" of web scrapers has always been one step ahead with things like IP bans and CAPTCHA solvers, maybe it's time to get their assistance... as the old saying goes, "an enemy of an enemy is a friend".

PopeRigby3• 7 years ago

Who are the dark side of web scrapers?

userbinator4• 7 years ago

The shady SEO people (including the social media account farmers) and the spammers, who seem to always find a way around everything that's put in place against them.

55555• 7 years ago

People who personally have 100,000 Yahoo accounts because they made them back when you could just pretend to be blind and request the captcha in spoken form, and then fed it into Google's speech to text engine, fed it back in to Yahoo, made the accounts, and who also have a botnet of a million residential IPs and can spin up a bunch of servers to run some scrapers.

ddmma• 7 years ago

NSA might have a copy just for your concern

empath752• 7 years ago

When I was at aol I tried to get them to open source the q link server code from the 1980s. Someone actually got it on DVD for me and everything but after the Verizon merger they fired the entire legal team that was responsible for authorizing open source release and it just stalled.

tempestn• 7 years ago

Open sourcing code can be tricky—there's quite a bit of review that needs to go into doing it right, as well as more work if you want the release to actually be reasonably useful. Blocking this archiving effort is on a whole other level. We're talking about saving information that was already public. All they have to do to allow this to happen is... nothing. I can't comprehend why Verizon/Yahoo would go out of their way to block these efforts.

unethical_ban2• 7 years ago

It depends on the size of the codebase and how shitty your programmers are, but if you aren't greedy or scared of over-litigation, it isn't hard at all.

I have written great contributions to a python API library that could be of benefit to the community around it. The code has nothing to do with my company's core competency, and the code is used for internal orchestration, so "exposing insecure code" is an unlikely concern.

It is easier for a lawyer, especially a luddite, to say "no" than to help their employees give back to the world.

h2odragon• 7 years ago

open source the q link server code

what a lovely thought. Thanks for the effort, even tho it didnt pan out. if you've got the dvd torrent it out :)

now im wondering if there's a stratus emulator anywhere and/or the os code. Them things were nasty... individually battery backed hard drives was just the beginning. The slot cards looked like someone had dumped yellow patchwire spaghetti all over them.

empath752• 7 years ago

Nah I don’t have the dvd and gave up trying to get it released because it wasn’t my job.

tcd2• 7 years ago

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 and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform).

I mean, Google+, MySpace, Bebo, IMDB comments is now dead and gone, how useful was the data really? I'm sure some people might go to archives but I would imagine 95% of the data is just "rot" that has no value or substance.

History is lost all the time, we barely know what we've been up to the last few thousand years only now can we so extensively document our world with the precision and quality afforded to us.

But in the end, time moves on and some of that history is lost, it hurts, but whose to say any archived history will be preserved anyhow? We're still relying on our storage technology being readable years/decades/centuries from now, which is not a given.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

While I agree with your first point, and tried to get groups I was associated with to move for years, nevertheless there are groups there that engaged in community driven research and have important data uploaded there. (This is my main concern, though other groups were focused on different issues - uploaded art, for example.) So I think while we need to educate people about not using centralized providers like Yahoo and Google, right now we need to focus on getting someone at Verizon/Yahoo to respond to this urgent situation.

BlueTemplar8• 7 years ago

Protocols, not Platforms !

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform).

Things shouldn't be like this. The price per unit of storage and bandwidth falls fast (and, except for the sites dealing with user-generated videos, faster than the amount and size of content grows). Laws shouldn't apply retroactively.

The problem really is that our means of accessing information are services. When you have a physical letter, or an e-mail saved locally, or a text message from 15 years ago, you can just read them. Nobody will know or care. Nobody will come after you trying to apply GDPR or DMCA retroactively. And since storage is near-free, you won't ever lose it until you forget about it (or at least about doing regular backups). Whereas with modern webmail, forums, link aggregators, IMs - you don't have even your own messages, and viewing a conversation that happened 15 years ago is really being provided a service today. Services are ephemeral, they're also subject to ever-changing regulations and whims of the service providers.

Bottom line, while services are necessary for transferring conversations, we really shouldn't be relying on them for access to conversations that already happened.

donaltroddyn• 7 years ago

If you are a company, GDPR does apply to data on physical letters and local emails. A large part of the preparation for the introduction of GDPR enforcement was companies getting a handle on what they had stored in various media.

myth_drannon2• 7 years ago

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

philpem2• 7 years ago

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.

ajsnigrutin2• 7 years ago

We cannot excpect a private company to continue paying for resources they don't want to.

But giving a "export all the data in xml/json/whatever" button, and maybe even opensourcing the now-abandoned component serving this data, would be nice move. The first part could even become a regulative requirement some day.

dredmorbius12• 7 years ago

A very substantial portion (~98% of all public posts) of Google+ was successfully archived, at the Internet Archive, thanks to the Archive Team. As a longtime G+ user, and one of the organisers behind the G+ "Plexodus", the existence, assistance, and capabilities of the Archive Team were hugely appreciated.

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.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Thanks for that history. I wasn't aware of it.

I got into this tangentially because of a community and ecosystem of Y-groups that I've been involved in. When I found the Archive Team's efforts, I hitched my wagon - though I'm not at all central to that group.

dredmorbius12• 7 years ago

Maintaining a static archive is remarkably inexpensive. The total amount of textual data included in even Google+ was likely only a few hundred GB. Images and multimedia, of course, would have been far more, though sampling-based estimates suggest that these were a few hundred KB each, on average, on about 30% of all posts.

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.

shrubble2• 7 years ago

I wonder if a small scraper script that an existing member of the group could download and run under their existing, valid account, would work?

Like a TCL language 'starpack' , a single binary Go program or something else?

Can you script a browser to do some crawling for you?

y4mi• 7 years ago

Like.... Selenium or puppeteer?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

There's way too much data. Many group owners did not know of the shutdown (Yahoo was negligent regarding informing owners), and even if they did many group owners have little or no technical capability. That's why so many requested of the Archive Team that their groups be archived.

shrubble2• 7 years ago

1000 members of a group each downloading 20 messages every 4 hours (a dribble that wouldn't be noticed) can pull down ... 20k messages in 4 hours.

lucb1e• 7 years ago

That's exactly what they're doing, and then they get CAPTCHAs and accounts banned.

umeshunni• 7 years ago

I'm confused why Archive.org is attempting to archive and expose to the public what is essentially private communications?

My usage of Yahoo groups in the early 2000s was mostly to communicate with my high school / college / dorm groups and the last thing I want is for embarrassing messages from 20 years ago sent to a private group to be archived.

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Yahoo Groups can be configured to allow public access.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Many groups are public. Many have owners that requested the group be archived.

rahuldottech• 7 years ago

They are only archiving data on publicly accessible groups - many of which contain lots of discussions worth archiving.

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

Clarification - we're not archive.org. Archive Team and Internet Archive are completely separate.

And we're only archiving things that "any guy on the internet" can see. If someone can access the messages simply by joining a group (with no moderator approval), I'd argue it's fair game.

We're not going to be unreasonable, though. If something private slips through and we receive a takedown request from the author, we typically remove it.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

But the data will be going to Archive.org, correct?

dependenttypes5• 7 years ago

Just wondering, if the author of a post or the administrator of a group makes a takedown request regarding non-private* info, would you delete it?

* and by that I mean something that is not a telephone number, an address, a real life name, and other similar things.

dependenttypes5• 7 years ago

what is essentially private communications

If they have access to it, it is not private.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

I find it curious that at the same time we discuss the 'right to be forgotten' laws there's also the opposite problem of preventing the internet from forgetting something.

userbinator4• 7 years ago

That's why I'm not a fan of those laws --- in addition to the fact that in practice they turn into something more like "right to rewrite history".

coldpie• 7 years ago

Yes! They're both really interesting problems and there's no right answer! You're right to be curious, it's a fascinating set of issues.

dependenttypes5• 7 years ago

'right to be forgotten' laws are the result of the whole "numbers have owners" insanity, combined with the fact that the average person will mindlessly use random services to store private data.

qxnqd• 7 years ago

Why does everything need to be archived? Why can't the stupid things I said 20 years ago in a forum just vanish someday?

(I never posted there but you get my point)

Diagon66• 7 years ago

It's not stupid. There were serious groups using that platform. While I never thought it was a good idea, they nevertheless did. My personal concern is community driven medical/biohacking research groups that go back to at least the late 1990's.

dependenttypes5• 7 years ago

Why can't the stupid things I said 20 years ago in a forum just vanish someday?

Because some might want to read them or use them in some form.

dbtx3• 7 years ago

The one group I ever joined held plenty of useful/unique SysEx dumps containing custom patches for a popular 80's music synthesizer, among related things. I wonder who has already backed it up, and if I should.

edit: Oops, I'm also a member of LTspice. D'oh!

The best way to stop being ashamed of stupid things that you said forever ago is not to cast those things into the Memory Hole, but to stop saying those things, and most importantly, stop being the person who would. Then you know it's in the past, and it doesn't matter who else remembers.

I'll let you know how that goes, someday ;)

no_identd• 7 years ago

Do it.

paggle4• 7 years ago

I am a self interested party, but I’m personally glad since there’s a post in a Yahoo Group that’s findable through Google, that would absolutely ruin my reputation and life if discovered.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Individuals have always been able to delete their own posts. If you log in there, you can still do it (before the 14th).

Also, see betamaxthetape, above. If anything is archived, they will respond to takedown requests.

paggle4• 7 years ago

Forgot the password to the account.

aspaceman3• 7 years ago

They want to wipe their hands clean of it. They don't want a record of it.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Is this something you know from the inside, or your (probably good) guess?

aspaceman3• 7 years ago

Just a guess to be clear. Not an employee myself.

I would imagine there's a lot of porn, sex work, stuff Verizon is trying to wash its hands of lately with Tumblr.

EDIT: Ah yes HN - where admitting that you're just speculating wildly like everyone else gets you the downvotes -_-

murxmaster• 7 years ago

Such a pity we lost gmane.org.

Lots of knowledge gets lost these days.

Thorentis• 7 years ago

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 is not that. The Internet is an open platform where anybody can say anything like that. Most comment sections are filled with all sorts of material ranging from factual to entirely fictional.

I realise it is hard to decide what is worth keeping (and therefore erring on the side of saving it all), but I'd wager that the vast majority of archived content is not useful at all. The Wayback machine is a perfect example. Lots of great stuff, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the vast amounts of useless, or even redundant information stored.

It is a lot of resources thrown at saving, not the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, but the public toilet block graffiti wall.

Anybody want to share what drives them to do this?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

See below. My main concern is early medical/biohacking groups that shared data, like medical tests, and engaged in extensive discussion/community driven research. Such groups go back to at least the late 1990's.

A main concern of the Archive Group (again, below) is art that was uploaded there.

I'm sure those are not the only two classes of examples. See for example the bird watching group in Delhi that has been collecting data for decades. (In the link of the OP.)

Nition• 7 years ago

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.

estranhosidade• 7 years ago

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.

pariahHN• 7 years ago

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 time period that contains even a fraction of the amount of content today's archive efforts are storing.

It's also not horrendously expensive - we are getting better and better at storage as well data analysis techniques, so stuff that seems useless today may be useful 50 years from now and cost less to store than it does now. The key thing again being that we can't benefit from hindsight.

Even graffiti can give insight into a time period, even if that insight is that that time period had an unusually high number of graffiti artists.

patcon5• 7 years ago

YES! It's like preserving ecological diversity. It's a store for later learning. Verizon is working in cold hard capitalism, and you can bet your lunch that they did NOT use Google Groups to hold their shared wisdom/history, and they would never let it be lost.

But many don't have the pockets for better systems, and so their earned knowledge lived on Google Groups. And when you think of all the people and groups that might have had needs to store their history, and what tools they might have used, what do you expect the skew of Yahoo Groups was. Certainly no Fortune 500 companies, but rather nonprofit and grassroots and all sorts of domains that are already getting the short end of the stick in our world :)

ArtDev• 7 years ago

For example: World War two groups where many of the the members have passed away by now. There could be first hand accounts of history that has already been lost to time.

cirno• 7 years ago

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.

godelski• 7 years ago

Not to mention that historians of the future will be able to sort and characterize massive amounts of data and draw conclusions that couldn't be made without that data.

For a time period where data is more valuable that oil, that the wealthiest companies are trying to grab every piece of data they can, and on a site where this is frequently discussed and many work for said companies, I find the question "why do archivists want to archive data?" a little silly. Date might not be useful to us now, but might be to future historians (though this is a similar argument made by that companies that do mass surveillance).

patcon5• 7 years ago

Great question! I'll take an amateur swing at a decent answer:

People doing important work (esp important work that is underfunded) don't have time to write/record their own histories. But that history can be instructive, to learn what worked and what didn't, and help future travellers do it better :)

And perhaps especially important: ppl engaging in these under-resourced efforts are often working in domains that capitalism is... less curious about, we'll just say. Otherwise, it would likely be able to be more highly documented, as incentive is there to preserve it.

Our ability to improve our present from better understanding our past is a supposed benefit of a digital world that accrues data -- we have records of things that in prior ages just flew by in conversation (for better or for worse). But efforts like this rob us all of that wisdom <3

And again, there is an asymmetry in who gets robbed. It is often the folks working in the commons, those doing invisible maintenance labour (nonprofits, grassroots, community), and generally just people doing work within the cracks of capitalism.

gdulli• 7 years ago

We don't think it's necessary to preserve everything that's ever spoken verbally. We don't lament that everyday conversation is ephemeral.

People are conflating internet discussion content with written content because it's stored as text. Whereas the more legitimate comparison is to verbal communication.

JadeNB• 7 years ago

We don't lament that everyday conversation is ephemeral.

I imagine you're not a historian. Neither am I, but I cannot imagine that there is a historian out there who hasn't lamented the ephemerality of everyday conversation (and even of apparently more durable forms of communication).

sincerely• 7 years ago

We don't lament that everyday conversation is ephemeral.

Linguists definitely do.

jonathanstrange• 7 years ago

Historians would love to preserve spoken communication and there are many projects recording everyday conversations. There are even projects of recording the typical sounds of the environment in certain areas at a certain time. However, many forms of spoken everyday conversation fall under restrictive privacy laws, which poses strict limits to such preservation efforts.

The texts on the internet at a given time, on the other hand, are public and reflect the opinions and ways of living of a large number of people at that time. There is no doubt that these could be analysed in the future to give us historical insights in ways we cannot even conceive yet. (Think e.g. about getting them data mined and analysed by advanced A.I. to give new insights into the time period.)

The worth of the data is so obvious that it's really hard for me to understand why you and some other people don't think these are interesting data points for research on how we lived in, say, 200, 500, or even 10000 years from now. The data is not only interesting to historians, but also to economists, political scientists, and linguistics, btw.

CamperBob22• 7 years ago

It is a lot of resources thrown at saving, not the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, but the public toilet block graffiti wall.

Ask an antiquarian about the value of graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii and other archaeological sites sometime. The great historians of the day wrote about their contemporary culture, while the vandals and miscreants and lowlifes and commoners contributed to that culture. Having access to both sources gives us a much more complete picture.

You don't know what's worth saving at the time you save it.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Ha, ha! Well, there's some high quality material there too, but I take your point. In the right context, like "history from below," all kinds of material can be high quality!

WalterBright• 7 years ago

I'm genuinely curious from an ideological perspective, why archivists think all this material is worth saving?

It's easier to just save it all and let gawd sort it out.

You never know what some future person might find interesting. For example, my father took lots and lots of pictures, but they're all set in the living room and kitchen. No pictures of the rest of the house. I'm sure the thought of photographing other rooms simply never occurred to him as being interesting.

For another example, many people are interested in where/when/why certain words first appeared, like the origin of "OK". Massive archives of text that are searchable would help with this.

shortformblog• 7 years ago

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 judgment. It’s to protect the data as they see fit.

p_l• 7 years ago

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.

ddingus• 7 years ago

One never knows what may have value.

The graffiti on the toilet wall may well speak to the start of a trend, term, movement, or other event, for example.

Think longer timelines, broader scope than you personally may feel is relevant.

En mass, those questions have answers we individually are unlikely to fathom.

marapuru• 7 years ago

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.

ojosilva• 7 years ago

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...

xp84• 7 years ago

The LoA held knowledge collated and collected by the best thinkers of the time. The Internet is not that.

I am in awe of your flair for understatement.

eru• 7 years ago

It is a lot of resources thrown at saving, not the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, but the public toilet block graffiti wall.

We have that kind of graffiti from Pompeji. It's enormously more fascinating and insightful into regular people's lives than all the stuff about kings and battles people wrote about in the more official works.

When looking through all newspapers and magazines, the advertisements are often the most interesting bit. Especially since you can probably already read about the big events they wrote about on Wikipedia or history books.

jijji• 7 years ago

what a PR mess for verizon

fortran77• 7 years ago

Not really. Few people today care about Yahoo Groups, and I suspect many people wish old posts they made to the Internet would just "disappear."

Diagon66• 7 years ago

If you read here you will see that there are many active groups. Even of those that aren't active, some have important history, even scientific value.

As for old posts disappearing, individuals have always been able to go to Yahoo Groups and delete posts that they later thought the better of. Group owners can also delete posts.

lazzlazzlazz• 7 years ago

This is a wake-up call to the entire world: we cannot take internet history for granted. We need affordable, decentralized means with long-term economic incentives to archive the digital world.

In a way, the digital world is far more fragile than the physical world. And the time to solve this is now.

8bitsrule2• 7 years ago

Tragedy of The Cloud.

IIRC, Archive.org is still running its fundraiser today.

We need LOTS of publicly-sponsored and paid-for digital archival centers that, like libraries, are maintained for the common welfare. Or we could, you know, add that duty (and funding) to existing libraries! With -paid- archivists!

BlueTemplar8• 7 years ago

Yeah, aren't there archiving obligations like that for at least books and movies?

Dolores12• 7 years ago

Recently Verizon have blocked all of my yahoo accounts. I've spent some time trying to find any kind of support form to get them restored with no luck. To get support you need pay money now. Perhaps, Archive.org accounts fell under the same ban.

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

Verizon has stated in support emails that they were aware of Archive Team's efforts and specifically will not be un-banning our accounts.[0] I therefore think it likely that the banning was targeted.

[0] https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-...

Diagon66• 7 years ago

We have groups that the owners can't even access any more. They demand a yahoo email even when there's a non-Yahoo email associated with it. Y-Groups has been badly broken for some time.

frustyycomb2• 7 years ago

yahoo is going to keep the messages but just delete the art and other uploads or attachments to the messages correct? although apparently they will make some groups private as well essentially closing access.

lsiebert• 7 years ago

Nope, they are deleting everything

D-Coder2• 7 years ago

Any recommendations for a good replacement site?

frustyycomb2• 7 years ago

there are a few groups i was a member of like lifters https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Lifters/info which was an intensive technical development group in the field on propellerless, rocketless, jetless flight using only electronic high voltage.

also some of the politics groups were a great time capuslue for around the clinton/bush election era

a lo to f eartthquake researchers gathered on several earthquake groups as well including caltech seismologistics and advanced amatuers many of whom arent around anymore.

also some of the info in these groups can be used to defeat patent applications as they show evidence of public prior concepts and art.

yahoogroups consisted of somewhat more technically advanced users than modern website users like reddit etc because they were earlier and somewhat harder to use.

its a lot of good quality content.

also in the early days on these groups spam and massive controlled astroturfing account groups was pretty rare.

this is like losing 15 years of ancient Sumerian writings in a very interesting early time for the Internet.

gatherhunterer2• 7 years ago

The current administration put Verizon’s chief counsel into the position of FCC Chairman. I would not expect Verizon to answer to anyone.

Also, it is shame that the person in direct contact with Yahoo over this is sending angry emails in all caps. The Internet Archive deserves better.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

I agree on the first point. The second is perhaps understandable if you read the whole exchange. You know they initially gave us 13 days before they cut off storing any more of the group emails (that is, new emails)? With an outcry, they increased that to 20. Many thousands of people were scrambling to find a new home. We are now reaching the end of the line (the last week) before the archives themselves are gone, and they have blocked the main concerted attempt to save some of that history. So, some level of frustration is in order.

gatherhunterer2• 7 years ago

A lack of emotional control is usually understandable. But it suggests a lack of care and focus that does not befit an important effort. I learned years ago to never send and email or text or to make a call when angry. I always thank myself the next day when I am able to choose my words more tactfully. That email makes them look like a group of angry trolls.

ajnin• 7 years ago

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.

CriticalCathed4• 7 years ago

Plan was to organize it, then carefully and thoughtfully balance out the load so that it didn't put undue burden on their servers. The entire plan was orchestrated in this way so that it wouldn't cause problems.

teovall• 7 years ago

The archiving scripts have been under development and testing since Yahoo first made their announcement. The plan was to get as much manual labor (volunteers solving CAPTCHAs to join groups) done while waiting for the scripts to be stable, reliable, and automatable.

Dignium2• 7 years ago

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.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Dignium - is that an online conference? Do you need to own a share to get access? I'm having trouble making it out.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Ok, so it's a webcast and it LL we can join it through here: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/investment-bank/conferences/am...

I'm not clear if we'll be able to give feedback, but I can try.

lonelappde• 7 years ago

The lesson here isn't to run a hail Mary effort at the last day to save Yahoo Groups. The lesson here is to backup things you care about before they start to disappear.

Is this stuff so important if not one of millions of users thought it was worth putting effort into saving?

Yahoo's takeover/shutdown was announced years ago.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Inertia. I'm connected with a series of groups and I tried to get people to move for years. It just doesn't seem anything happens except under pressure.

Also, the scripts really have been developing during this last 2 months, which is all the time they gave us when they said they'd be deleting all content. Until then, I didn't see anything that would get me all content including files/links/calendars/databases.

fred_is_fred• 7 years ago

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.

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

‘There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.’

jefftk2• 7 years ago

This was on the front page here in October when it was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269614

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Actually, it's not. We were given 13 days for the shutoff of archives, with another 7 when there was an outcry. Most owners of groups are non-technical and have no idea how to get their data; this is why the archive team put up a request page for owners who wanted their groups archived (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--10nDq...). Their more crowd sourced approach, which has been hard at work for these months, has been actively interfered with by Verizon (see the link of the OP). Verizon should be supporting this attempt to preserve this material.

dredmorbius12• 7 years ago

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.

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.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

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.

caymanjim• 7 years ago

I don't see this as a big loss, and if I were someone who'd posted on Yahoo Groups, I'd be happy if it all disappeared. I don't consider this kind of content something that should be durable and everlasting. It's ephemeral conversation. If anything worth saving comes of conversation, it should be converted to another form and saved.

I'm glad I'm old enough that most of what I wrote on message boards as a teenager and young adult disappeared long before archive.org and similar sites existed. Conversations shouldn't last forever.

btashton• 7 years ago

I'm part of an opensource project that has been around for a long time, the mailing lists (for good or bad) lived there for quite some time. There is a lot of design and troubleshooting history I would rather not be lost forever.

okasaki• 7 years ago

I wonder if they're actually deleting it, or just making it inaccessible to the public?

PopeRigby3• 7 years ago

They're most likely deleting it. There's not much point in them hosting all that data when it costs money to do so.

paulcole• 7 years ago

Verizon isn’t a charity. Why would they offer any assistance?

johannes12343214• 7 years ago

This would fall under "marketing" from a accountant's perspective.

notduncansmith3• 7 years ago

Then again, maybe they figure they’ll get more press coverage by being dicks about it than they would by being decent.

danShumway• 7 years ago

They're also not monetizing the content or doing anything with it. They're just going to throw it away. Why would they go out of their way to block archival attempts?

This is the corporate equivalent of throwing your old computer into an empty ditch on the side of the road, and getting mad when someone responsible comes by to recycle it for you.

nikanj• 7 years ago

Corporate DNA in the US seems to be build around two basic principles:

1) Use whatever means to get yourself forward

2) Do whatever you can to hold everyone else back

The Groups thing is a wonderful example of #2 in action. It’s not about preventing access to Groups in particular, just the general principle of preventing and hindering all and always

mbreese• 7 years ago

There are probably really costs here. From their initial message in the post, it sounded like it would cost them “something” to allow all of the data to be archived. I could imagine that the data for these groups was expected to fall into a 80:20 distribution between cold data and hot data (Or 90:9:1 between archived data, read only, and read/write). If you start pulling data from the archive or cold tier, then you could disrupt that storage pattern. Moving the data around could end up causing some kind of monetary cost.

But it seems strange to me that they would actively try to thwart these efforts and remove the possibility for a great deal of good will.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

That is one hell of an analogy. I'm going to try to use it.

(There is one guy I came across trying trying to monetize what he could download of some archives. He used the Windows software PGDownload to do it. It's a lot of alt-med stuff: https://groups.rifeforum.com)

blondin• 7 years ago

…equivalent of throwing your old computer into an empty ditch on the side of the road, and getting mad when someone responsible comes by to recycle it for you.

a better equivalent is realizing that that computer might have important stuff and taking steps to wipe out hard drives. or retrieving those bags full of documents and letters so you can secure trashing them.

i mean, most of us do it. not saying it is right but it is the sensible thing to do. for the legal aspect and also for security.

curious, isn't archive.org affected by GDPR at all?

8bitsrule2• 7 years ago

Oh, I dunno. Maybe in the interests of joining the human race?

drawkbox• 7 years ago

This is why the change in ownership to private equity of .ORG TLD is problematic.

What if the owners, or owners after it is sold further down the line, of the .ORG TLD prevent archiving? Or charge more for that? That would greatly affect web archive.org and Wikipedia.org.

This move on preventing archival actions is probably setup to allow them to block it later after the sale goes through and say that it was a policy before they started it. A bit like how they lifted .ORG pricing limits just before .ORG TLD was sold to Ethos Capital.

.ORG TLD looks to be targeted right now.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Wait. You're saying that the owners of the .org TLD could put restrictions on the use of those domain names? And something like "can't be used for archiving" is a legal possibility?

I admit to legal ignorance, but this does seem over the top.

fl0under• 7 years ago

I had just recently been reading about Arweave [0], a sort of distributed file storage that claims to permanently store files/webpages using various incentives.

Seems like something like this would be a good way to archive this sort of information or build sites like Yahoo groups on top of this file storage in the first place.

[0] https://www.arweave.org/

kevingadd3• 7 years ago

Storage isn't really the problem in this case, collecting the data is the problem because yahoo/verizon are actively hostile.

companyhen• 7 years ago

Arweave is doing great stuff but I think it'd still run into a similar situation as archive.org -- Check out the arweave discord dev community if you haven't though!

oieoeireoes• 7 years ago

Verizon claimed that the archivists violated the "terms of service" [1], but I couldn't find any reference to automation, downloading, crawling, or denial of service attacks that might apply.

Does anyone have an idea of exactly what term or terms were violated by the archivists?

[1] https://www.verizonmedia.com/policies/us/en/verizonmedia/ter...

kevingadd3• 7 years ago

AFAIK they hadn't started doing mass-archiving either. They were still setting up.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Correct. They had done some testing, but that's all. They were just getting yahoo id's, while iterating on software improvements, so they could then download the groups.

arianestrasse2• 7 years ago

Just playing a devil's advocate here. The way archivists are downloading the data can be said to disrupt the services, which is mentioned in the terms of service:

2. d. viii: "interfere with or disrupt the Services or servers, systems or networks connected to the Services in any way."

I'd also like to point out that the apparent spokesperson Brenda Fowler said in her open letter to Verizon, that "If the problem is that all our attempts to rescue our archives in the time we have left is causing an overload or strain on your servers, then stop making us HAVE to work around the clock, and GIVE US MORE TIME. ..." Probably not the wisest thing to say right now.

Also, archiving the groups with automated tools is against the Use of Services rule, that states the following:

2. e: "Use of Services. You must follow any guidelines or policies associated with the Services. You must not misuse or interfere with the Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide. ..."

As I mentioned in another comment, I really support the cause and am a big fan of archiving myself but it's unfortunately quite clear that Verizon is right at calling out the violations of "terms of service".

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Using the interface wouldn't block scrapers, yes? They do use the interface. But, this is academic I think. They offer a broken way to get our stuff, and say that we can't do anything else. Should we acquiesce to this?

As for bogging down the servers, my understanding was different from what the author said. They hadn't started to archive, but were in script testing mode and were accumulating yahoo accounts. What I saw of their activities, they were very careful about not overloading the servers. (I know that because I was backing up my own groups independently at the time, and I was able to do it. Luckily.)

egfx• 7 years ago

In the early 2000’s there existed two main ecosystems in mobile software J2ME and BREW (not counting Symbian) the latter BREW, operated by Verizon. I had cofounded a QA consulting company that heavily based itself off BREW’s highly extensive developer portal. Then one day without warning, the developer portal disappeared. Luckily I had the foresight to download all the documentation a week before. My cofounder, a Microsoft developer was dumbfounded.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Yes, this was incredibly sudden, and with not support for getting out. They gave 13 days notice of intention to shut down new additions to message archives (extended to 20 days after some commotion). That was October 21, I believe. They have offered a broken group downloader that produces incomplete results. Desperate group owners have been using a Windows piece of software called PGDownload, but Verizon has blocked that. Now the only organized effort is being actively interfered with. Dumbfounding is indeed the word.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Other collective projects to try to archive Yahoo groups:

Queer Digital History Project: https://queerdigital.com/ygpresproject

Project to Archive Trans Yahoo Groups: https://archivetransyahoo.noblogs.org/list-of-known-trans-gr...

Project to Archive South Asian American yahoo groups: https://yahoogroups.southasianamerican.org/

I've got to guess that there are more.

blurbleblurble• 7 years ago

This is really unfortunate. There's an amateur microscopy community on Yahoo groups with tons of information about old research microscopes. Corporations can really suck.

oneepic2• 7 years ago

I wonder if this would be a workable idea:

Create a service for long-term storage with an easy integration API; the idea would be that if you integrate your data with our service, and you eventually (maybe you're going out of business, or something) make a call to delete data, that data is first transferred to our service before deleting it on your end.

Integrating with us is basically like making a reservation in advance, so when you do perform the big delete like what's happening to these groups, it's offloaded to this service first.

I have no good idea about how to store/structure the data, or how it would make money. But I also have no idea if there's an easier solution to problems like this, where you force users to scramble to save all their stuff somewhere. People would also begin judging services by whether their data will be saved once it's terminated (ie whether you integrate with us or not), so I feel like that would ultimately bring in a lot of customers.

BlueTemplar8• 7 years ago

P2P software has solved this problem a while ago?

oneepic2• 7 years 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.

a3n• 7 years ago

Don't use free corporate services for shit you care about. Or think you may care about later.

Don't use any service that suffers from a single point of control.

How much anguish when Facebook inevitably either goes away or pivots entirely?

Or HN, for that matter?

slenk• 7 years ago

I don't believe that point is necessarily up for debate. At this point we are just trying to save the data that we know will be lost.

Teckla• 7 years ago

It might not be up for debate, but it's a good reminder.

Maybe Hacker News should be mirrored on Usenet...

Diagon66• 7 years ago

BoingBoing has picked this up: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-swear-2.htm...

zfxfr• 7 years ago

There must be something I am missing somewhere.

1) I have been a member of a group for many years (Gann study group) . Last Friday I received a notification from the owner who was explaining the group was closing so he set up a new one somewhere else. I thought it would be nice if I made a backup. So I found a python script on github (there are dozen of scripts in various languages which can be used to backup a yahoo group there). It took me a couple of minute to get it working and then a while later. Voila ! I had it nicely packed on my hard drive. So why is it so hard to back up a group? I don't understand the problem.

2) "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."

What? Well OK why not.. But? They are a phone company. There must be someone able to scrape all this data? I don't get it? There are so many ways to extract data from yahoo group.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Most people running these groups are not technical. Even if they got the word in time, the only option many of them could find was PGOnline, a Win pay software, which by this point Yahoo has blocked. Furthermore, even if they got it, what do they do with it? For many groups, the archives are a resource to be referred to. They need to be hosted somewhere, preferably with some kind of front-end search engine. Even better if the search engine integrates with any new posts on the forum they move to.

The Archive Team has been taking requests for backups of groups for people who don't have the technical facility to run the python scripts. They then intend to make them available on the internet archive. The next project is making some kind of front end, in case group owners want to host that somewhere. Some of us, for example, will be doing that behind some kind of a forum login, so it won't be search engine indexed.

As for your point 2, that was cut/pasted from the link in the OP, where it's describing that many groups are still using the platform. More relevant to this project, is that many groups are losing their archives, and those archives contain anything from scientific data, to hobbyist & howto information, to art and literature, etc.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Press Release:

[Will be sent out to media. Thanks to those who are commenting here for useful bits of information that has been included.]

Verizon Media/Yahoo closing down Yahoo Groups, with imminent loss of important history.

Yahoo, now owned by Verizon, is in the process of partially closing down a two-decades long service, Yahoo Groups. This email list-serve/bulletin board is both a discussion platform and a repository of history for a large array of communities. Verizon intends to make all such history unavailable after December 14th of this year, having provided less than 2 and a half months of warning and, due to a broken system, having failed to alert numerous group owners and members.

Some of the histories on this platform are important, not just to the early Internet, but even to academic research and scientific investigations. Examples are discussion groups that included WW-II veterans, many of whom are now deceased; queer and trans groups, some of whom have organized to try to preserve this history [1,2]; and minority/immigrant groups [3]. Those with scientific data include earthquake researchers, medical/biohacking groups, bird watchers with decades of data, and even material relevant to patent claims. Popular culture groups devoted to art have uploaded their works there, and fan-fiction groups exchanged stories and feedback [4]. Sadly, Verizon has not made arrangements to help people to preserve this material. This has resulted in individual Yahoo Group owners/moderators, most of whom do not have technical backgrounds, scrambling to find ways to download their archives. Yahoo claims they have provided a data exporter, but it is very incomplete. Groups include not only messages, but files, databases, calendars and other materials. Some more technical users have organized to take requests, crowd-sourcing the work to download these Groups. One such [4] has been in contact with the Internet Archive, with the objective of uploading whatever they can get to Archive.org. Unfortunately, for reasons we can't guess, Verizon has been actively obstructing these efforts [5]. We urgently request that if Verizon will not support efforts to preserve this material, then they at least allow some means that Group owners can download complete archives of their groups, and independent groups can download public Groups. For this, we also need more time.

Support can be offered by spreading the word on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, and other social media.

Verizon can be contacted at:

    "Hans Vestberg, Chariman & CEO" <Hans.Vestberg@verizon.com>

    "Guru Gowrappan, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Media" <Guru.Gowrappan@verizon.com>

    "Ronan Dunne, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Consumer" <Ronan.Dunne@verizon.com>

    "Tami Erwin, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Business" <Tami.Erwin@verizon.com>

Ways to support the projects listed in the links below may be found on their websites.

Please contact the following people for further information:

[For people here, just go to IRC as described in the link of the OP.]

[1] Queer Digital History Project: https://queerdigital.com/ygpresproject

[2] Project to Archive Trans Yahoo Groups: https://archivetransyahoo.noblogs.org/list-of-known-trans-gr...

[3] Project to Archive South Asian American yahoo groups: https://yahoogroups.southasianamerican.org/

[4] Archive Team archiving Fandom but also taking requests from group owners: https://archiveteam.org/

[5] Exchanges with Yahoo: https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-...

Diagon66• 7 years ago

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-...

Also, you can add these emails to the media contacts:

  "Reporter Katyanna Quach" <kquach@theregister.co.uk>,
   "Managing editor Gavin Clarke" <gavin.clarke@theregister.co.uk>,
   "Corey Wilson & Rachel Janc; Senior Director, Communications" <press@Wired.Com>,
   "Pitches" <submit@wired.com>,
   "Rich Woods" <rich.woods@neowin.net>,
   "Paul Thurrott" <paul@thurrott.com>,
   "Brad Sams" <brad@petri.com>,
    "Kate Rayford, Media Inquiries" <katie.rayford@slate.com>,
    "Bryan Lowder (LGBTQ issues/culture)" < bryan.lowder@slate.com>,
    "Torie Bosch (emerging technology effects on public policy and society)" <torie.bosch@slate.com>,
    "Jonathan Fischer (big tech, cities, media/internet culture)" <jonathan.fischer@slate.com>,
    "Susan Matthews, Health & Science" <susan.matthews@slate.com>,
    "Erika Allen, Executive Managing Editor" <erika.allen@vice.com>,
    "Katie Drummond, SVP, Global Content" <katie.drummond@vice.com>,
    "Press, US" <press@vice.com>,
    "Press, Canada" <presscanada@vice.com>,
    "Press, UK" <ukpressoffice@vice.com>,
    "Pitches, Culture" <culture.pitches@vice.com>,
    "Pitches, Tech" <tech.pitches@vice.com>,
    "Issues" <issues.pitches@vice.com>

kevingadd3• 7 years ago

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.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Point taken.

There's also stuff there about contacting Verizon and contacting the shareholders of Verizon. For them, I think we need volume.

rapht• 7 years ago

I have trouble understanding how Yahoo's moves are GDPR-compliant : if just one European citizen was part of the group to be archived, at least some if not all data in the group can be considered part of their personal data (as they were either sender or recipient of messages) and therefore there should be a mechanism allowing them to download that data. Am I getting it wrong ?

chb• 7 years ago

We are receiving comments and messages from the frustrated and angry groups archivists, and some of those are posted below. You can send in your own if you e-mail it to owlsy@yahoo.com.

You're still using a yahoo.com email address to organize?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

I've only just heard from this woman. She seems to be writing on the issue but not an archivist. (Though I'm not 100% clear.)

dredmorbius12• 7 years ago

A suggestion I'd made during the G+ shutdown, and active interference (see: https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_at...), was that legal methods be employed.

An injunction filed on behalf of Yahoo Groups users to maintain access, delay deletion, and facilitate archival, specifically.

Is anyone working on this?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Not that I know of. Lawyers (hopefully not guns) and money would be needed. Suggestions?

dredmorbius12• 7 years ago

I've had some preliminary discussions with EFF.

There's a listing of online privacy and rights foundations I've compiled here:

https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Privacy_and_Elect...

Many are mostly dead. Which may mean partly alive.

(That Wiki in general might best be merged with AT's efforts. I'm the principle editor.)

droithomme2• 7 years ago

Yahoo has sent emails to everyone allowing them to click a button and get a zip file prepared with everything they have posted or stored on every Yahoo Group they have ever participated in.

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.

betamaxthetape8• 7 years ago

There have been lots of reports that this 'Get My Data' function doesn't work. One of the demands made by the blog author is for Yahoo to fix this so it actually does work.

Additionally, the 'Get My Data' only gives you access to all the files / photos that you uploaded to the group. These archives should not be considered complete archives of the group - is it really reasonable to suggest that in order to completely back up a group, every member must complete their own data request?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Yes, when a group owner wants to migrate to another platform - a bulletin board or the like - they need to be able to get all the group associated data so they can reconstitute their community.

droithomme2• 7 years ago

'Get My Data' only gives you access to all the files / photos that you uploaded to the group

Your comment is quite interesting! I did not receive only my own contributions, but got fairly large files that seem to me to be exhaustive archives of all posts and other materials uploaded by any and all group members during the entire time I was a member of each group.

It's pretty interesting if different people are being sent totally different things though as you indicate. Maybe I am just lucky.

I'm pretty happy myself that they have this method to get everything from the time I was a member of any group. I can't think of any other service that provides for that. Yahoo seems to be the most open and data accessible service I can recall. Other boards facing imminent shutdown I had to go to a lot of trouble to scrape old posts using bot scripts, which was inconvenient.

ComodoHacker• 7 years ago

Is this the future of Facebook when personal data use become heavily regulated, the data will become harder to monetize and the next big thing rize on the horizon?

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Probably. Now that the groups I am concerned with are migrating to our own hosted BB, we are also planning to migrate the associated FB groups away. For that, we expect to lose data in the process.

gerbilly• 7 years ago

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).

tossAfterUsing• 7 years ago

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.

thomasjudge• 7 years ago

Hypothetically could some one or group file a lawsuit or request an injunction to get a stay of the deletion date?

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

Just thinking out loud: This makes me wonder if we can learn from this and prepare to backup other (similar) platforms that hold such an amount of data and might go away some day. Building the backup tools today and ideally starting to backup now, making the process incremental so you can run it every now and then and only scrape the new stuff.

FrozenVoid• 7 years ago

Modern Web3.0 portals that built on async JS will be impossible to archive without hitting API limits or resource quotas.

New Reddit(without the old.reddit.com interface) for example. Many niche subreddits contain lots of information that would be lost if reddit dies(or just deletes these subreddits).

Youtube is unarchivable in principle due high amount of storage required(even thinking of 640x480) and yet it still contains tons of unique content found nowhere else from rare AMVs(that survived prior deletions) to instructions to repair telescopes - or basically anything in video form that doesn't have backups(i.e.not uploaded to other videos sites).

4chan and similar sites are archived by several sites in haphazard manner(only boards they like) and yet it a huge chunk of internet culture that is going to be lost if these sites die(and its more probable than Reddit due less funding). Usenet is slowly fading into obscurity and dependence on Google Groups. Many forums that today exist, will not exist forever: yet very few are archived anywhere else. Other forum-like sites like Stackoverflow and Quora might disappear in the future with nothing replacing them. Github is subject to Microsoft whims and positions on open-source. Wikipedia and various wiki farm sites don't have much revenue streams. Practically every major website we take for granted is vulnerable - people thought Yahoo Groups was going to last forever.

pepijndevos• 7 years ago

This is very sad to hear. One particular piece of Yahoo groups that I particularly care about is the LTSpice group, which contained a lot of simulation models I've not been able to find anywhere else. Luckily, this particular one seems to have been migrated to https://groups.io/g/LTspice

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Someone else mentioned that group on this thread. A group member. Scroll to the second page. He mentioned it along with a number of other groups worth archiving.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

More media attention at zdnet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/verizon-kills-email-accounts-o...

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Yet another article at TheInquirer: https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084557/verizon-bl...

rthomas6• 7 years ago

Things like this are a good answer to when people question why internet centralization and walled gardens matter. If these things were hosted across thousands of servers, federated, or under a license that made them able to be copied, there would be no issue. This is only an issue in the first place because people posted content in a place and manner that made them give up ownership to it. One day, perhaps decades from now, Facebook is going to face the same problem. Twitter would, too, if it wasn't being archived by the Library of Congress.

AQ2• 7 years ago

I have a disability group that actively discourages email messages and recommends - or, that is, recommended - that members use the Files section for answers to frequent questions. Email is for questions not answered in Files. This group would be intolerable without a website, with the same questions asked over and over and over again. Yahoo is totally wrong that email is all groups need.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Yes, exactly. Other groups have medical tests uploaded to the files section, to be shared with other members and discussed on-list. And yet others had artistic works or literature.

mleonhard• 7 years ago

If you have Verizon mobile service, call them!

In the US, dial 611, say "representative" at the prompt, then dial 3 for "something else."

I have Verizon prepaid, so switching is easy. I called and politely explained the situation to the customer service representative. I informed them that I will definitely switch away from Verizon if they delete the Yahoo Groups data without allowing archival. They promised to inform their manager and email me back.

lnanek2• 7 years ago

This is pretty standard. Google Groups bans me whenever I open too many tabs at once. It's annoying, but these big corps don't have any inclination to support user behavior other than standard, especially when closing down a product. I think the blocking bit is sensationalizing it a bit more than is the reality. The site policies and design intentionally prevent joining a group just to download everything, it's not an intentional blocking of a group or action beyond the default behavior of enforcing the TOS.

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Well, it was actually intentional. While a lot of us were backing up our groups as individuals (whether as owners or just members), and having no trouble there, the Archive Team was taking requests. So there was volume involved, and they have been in touch with Yahoo who refused to be supportive of the archive effort. So their target really was these guys specifically. Not just the ToS, but these guys in the context of an archive effort at a point of "ToS" (Termination of Service).

dartdartdart2• 7 years ago

Lost 15 years worth of email with yahoo since I didn't sign in for 1 year. No extensive warning either. Yahoo sucks

crazypython• 7 years ago

Can we bypass their firewall protection?

Cougher• 7 years ago

We have examples of content that was destroyed because it was deemed trivial at the time, one example being the BBC's policy of erasing its television shows so the tape could be used for new shows. The policy began with the idea that a television broadcast was a temporary communication like radio, and really, what possible reason could there be for people in the future to want to watch things like comedy shows. Dr Who, or news programs from the 60s, or the BBC's coverage of the Apollo moon landing? Surely the value of these cultural artifacts was not as great as the cost of video tape? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiping#BBC

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

This reminds me of my MSN Groups groups I had as a kid. I wish I could go back and see them, but I wasn't "big" enough, even though I had like 80 members.

jhallenworld• 7 years ago

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..

Diagon66• 7 years ago

More media attention:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nnek/verizon-is-blockin...

https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/verizon-reported...

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/786469397/internet-historians...

Diagon66• 7 years ago

Reports that there is an extension of the deadline to download groups until Jan. 31 are a smokescreen put up by Verizon. The Dec. 14 deadline still holds, but they will take requests of users for their data until Jan 31. This is a fail because:

From Yahoo's reply to the modsandmembers group: "The Groups Download Manager will download any content an individual posted to Yahoo Groups. However, it will not download attachments and photos uploaded to the Group by other members. For those that are having difficulty with the files delivered, this help article explains the types of files within the .zip file sent ... "

The point made on IRC:

The important point is they won't give you the vast majority of photos and attachments. They also don't export databases at all, which are important for certain groups. It's completely arbitrary too, because they give you files other people posted...

Dignium2• 7 years ago

Anybody who has FU money: start filing papers for a lawsuit against Yahoo and notify them of your intention to do so. Pay for expedited filing. This is the worst kind of PR for a company and they'll do almost anything to avoid being sued in the first place. A settlement offer is Not An Option.

Anybody living in the SF Bay Area, Especially if you live in the Silicon Valley: Pay a visit to Yahoo Global HQ. Find out the borders of their property, park and picket right outside them.

Anybody with the resources: Make / Print a banner that says something like:

yahoo! #WENEEDMORETIME! #YahooGroups

To drape over this pedestrian bridge located at [37.397547, -122.022673] https://goo.gl/maps/XknYg9H3BYWZPESF9 South Entrance Address: 101 E Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 (Intersection of W. Ahwanee Ave. & Borregas Ave.) P.S.: A good alternate location is the US-101 Mathilda Avenue Overpass, on the sidewalk southbound / northbound (37.398832, -122.027722)

Diagon66• 7 years ago

We've got another article.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90440817/bill-gates-solves-your-...

amatecha• 7 years ago

Anyone know why the service is being shut down? Is it perhaps because of the California Consumer Privacy Act[0] that comes into effect in Jan 2020 and they know they can't possibly comply with these new regulations? That's my personal guess...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...

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

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