
Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14 - Diagon
https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-yahoo-bad-form/
======
Diagon
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.

~~~
tedunangst
> 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
“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...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/17/20919630/yahoo-groups-uk-ofcom-
simwood-numbers)

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

~~~
Alex3917
But as a mailing list, each subscriber has the entire archive, at least from
the date they joined. And any one of them can make it publicly accessible at
any point in the future. In practice it will undoubtedly result in the
destruction of enormous amounts of human knowledge, but at least in theory not
much is getting immediately lost.

~~~
philpem
The difficulty in a lot of cases is finding someone who has a complete copy of
the group. Yahoo Groups also had file, photo and database features, and
archives of those are likely to be incomplete. You'd have to go through the
member list (primarily early members) and find someone who still had a copy of
all the messages.

The other problem is making it available - I ran a Yahoo group for many years,
and have Mbox and Maildir format archives. I'm still looking for a decent web-
based browser for these. HyperKitty (Mailman's archive browser) came close,
but seems to require most of Mailman to be installed in order to work.

In my case, I managed to archive a bunch of groups related to amateur radio --
and I will be placing these on archive.org as soon as I have a spare moment to
zip them up. A difficult-to-access archive is better than no archive at all,
the important part is getting the data into a safe place.

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

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

~~~
Alex3917
> pretty trivial given a parser for the email format itself

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

------
betamaxthetape
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](https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner)

~~~
john_moscow
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.

~~~
betamaxthetape
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.

~~~
john_moscow
OK, thanks for explaining this. Just my 2 cents then: big companies make
decisions like this based on the potential PR win/loss. If ignoring you keeps
the PR delta at 0, while allowing to export the data exposes them to even a
minimal risk (I dunno, someone's private details buried in), they will ignore,
or even actively resist you.

Politically, you need to arrange it so that cooperating with you will give
Verizon a small PR boost, while ignoring you will be seen negatively by the
public. This thread had a good example of interesting data that is worth
preserving, so I would try reaching out to news companies (NY Times and
whatnot) to see if anyone wants to publish a piece. Phrasing this positively
and ensuring enough people see it, would greatly increase the chances of
cooperation from Verizon.

------
pmoriarty
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.

~~~
ygthrowaway
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.

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

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

------
Thorentis
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?

~~~
pariahHN
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.

~~~
cirno
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.

~~~
icebraining
The archives are not easily indexable by search engines, they're posted as
multi-GB gzip-compressed WARC files.

~~~
ignoranceprior
But someone could hypothetically convert the WARC files back to static HTML
and host them on the clear web.

~~~
Diagon
Hypothetically, yes; but right now all this stuff is available on the clearnet
and searchable. So obviously any potential harm of the present situation, is
decreased. And, unless your argument is that we should delete all fora on the
web because someone may have said something embarrassing on them, then I think
you'd probably want to come down on the side of preservation.

------
empath75
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
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_ban
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.

~~~
johannes1234321
For new code it is indeed "simple". Old code however likely contains third
party provided code, be it from libraries or code provided by contractors,
where no (clear) license permitting relicensing of the source is available.
This can be quite complex historic work as version history might not exist
(which code come from where?) and documentation is limited (paper contracts
lost in archives) and so on.

~~~
unethical_ban
First, to Hell with whoever downvoted me, probably lawyers (not you,
johannes). Second, I get there are occasionally complicating factors, BUT -
licensing can't be difficult at most times, since the company often owns what
the worker produces - for better or worse, it's simple that way. As for third
party work, are you talking about library imports, or copy and paste? The
logistics of solving those problems are either simple or really complex.

~~~
johannes1234321
Yes, they own what employed workers produce. But especially before there was
such a number of freely available open source licenses software vendors
licensed tons of stuff, often in source, often without permission to relicense
the source and over time developers refsctored the licensed code, which makes
it hard to trace code back. Especially since version control often was done by
having different sets of floppies, which are all gone.

------
jedberg
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.

~~~
piroux
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.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perniciously-
persistent-myths-of-hypatia-and-the-great-library)

\- [https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-
li...](https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-library-
alexandria/)

\- [https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-
knowled...](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-knowledge-
may-have-been-lost-at-the-library-of-alexandria)

But anyway, no one should delete human littérature, be it inadvertently or by
lack of effort.

~~~
glenstein
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.

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

~~~
glenstein
It has been used that way, but not here. Here, it's a disorienting non-
sequitur that makes it sound like the information was never really lost.

------
Diagon
Other collective projects to try to archive Yahoo groups:

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

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

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

I've got to guess that there are more.

------
frustyycomb
there are a few groups i was a member of like lifters
[https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Lifters/info](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.

------
lazzlazzlazz
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.

~~~
8bitsrule
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!

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

------
dessant
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?

~~~
tcd
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.

~~~
amluto
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.

~~~
saagarjha
I’d assume the law is smarter than this, because companies would otherwise
continually spin of new corporations to get rid of their liabilities with no
assets as a sort of lightning rod for lawsuits.

~~~
sdenton4
This is, iiuc, how the movie and construction industries work. Spin up a
minicorp for every big risky project to shield the mother ship.

~~~
derefr
When you create the SPV in advance, it's very clear what part of the work done
by the organization attaches to it (because the organization ensures that all
its processes explicitly specify the legal compartment they're running under.)

When you create an SPV after-the-fact, you have to go back and reverse-
engineer a separation of liabilities from documents that don't specify whether
they're work done for the organization or the SPV (because the SPV didn't
exist.)

It's like a divorce. (Or, for an even more on-the-nose analogy, it's like
trying to use a condom after-the-fact by extracting any bodily contamination
and putting it in the condom.)

------
Cougher
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiping#BBC)

------
userbinator
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".

~~~
PopeRigby
Who are the dark side of web scrapers?

~~~
55555
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.

~~~
abathur
This feels like an alt-take on That Scene in The Dark Knight. In a good way?
:)

------
Diagon
_Call For Action_

[https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/taking-
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/media-contacts/)

[https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-
verizon-...](https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-verizon-
directly/)

[https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-
verizon-...](https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/contacting-verizon-
yahoo-stockholders/)

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>

~~~
kevingadd
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.

~~~
Diagon
Point taken.

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

------
egfx
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

------
zfxfr
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

------
gatherhunterer
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

~~~
gatherhunterer
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.

~~~
arianestrasse
I'm wholeheartedly supporting the archival effort but was wondering exactly
the same thing about the person communicating with Verizone. Her argumentation
comes off as quite immature, and she's not making much sense with all that
rambling.

Saying stuff such as this sounds pretentious and will unfortunately only get
laughed at by anyone in the corporate world: "So the best thing Verizon could
do, since they are just going to throw us all into the trash anyway, as we
aren’t important to them, is let us get our archives any way we can.

The terms of service really should not apply to people who have been told,
we’re gonna delete you from existence. If it’s lawful for us to get them from
you, in broken buggy and virus ridden state, it’s just as lawful for us to get
them ourselves."

As it is right now, she's just not doing any favors to the archivist community
out there. Perhaps someone with proper communication skills and better nerves
should take up that role? This is not a time to play a martyr and throw a fit
while expecting Verizon to meet you half-way.

------
a3n
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
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
It might not be up for debate, but it's a good reminder.

Maybe Hacker News should be mirrored on Usenet...

------
rthomas6
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.

------
oieoeireoes
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...](https://www.verizonmedia.com/policies/us/en/verizonmedia/terms/otos/index.html)

~~~
arianestrasse
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".

~~~
Diagon
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.)

------
fl0under
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/](https://www.arweave.org/)

~~~
companyhen
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!

------
murxmaster
Such a pity we lost gmane.org.

Lots of knowledge gets lost these days.

------
iforgotpassword
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
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.

------
tcd
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Protocols, not Platforms !

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059)

~~~
Diagon
I totally agree. Google? FB? Twitter? How about the Friendiverse? :)

------
Diagon
BoingBoing has picked this up: [https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-
you-swear-2.htm...](https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-
swear-2.html)

------
macawfish
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.

------
Diagon
More media attention:

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nnek/verizon-is-
blockin...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59nnek/verizon-is-blocking-
efforts-to-preserve-internet-history)

[https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-
ending-...](https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-and-
verizon-is-making-it-hard-for-people-to-archive-its-content.html)

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/verizon-
reported...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/verizon-reportedly-
blocks-archivists-from-yahoo-groups-days-before-deletion/)

[https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/786469397/internet-
historians...](https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/786469397/internet-historians-
mourn-loss-of-cultural-record-as-yahoo-deletes-group-archive)

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

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

------
Diagon
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...

------
oneepic
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.

~~~
BlueTemplar
P2P software has solved this problem a while ago?

~~~
oneepic
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.

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

------
umeshunni
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.

~~~
betamaxthetape
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.

~~~
dependenttypes
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.

~~~
dependenttypes
Also, I am looking at
[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon)
and some jobs there (such as berries.space) give 404 when I try to download
the data. Do you have any idea why that could be?

------
Dolores12
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.

~~~
betamaxthetape
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-...](https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-
yahoo-bad-form/)

------
lnanek2
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.

~~~
Diagon
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).

------
caymanjim
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
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.

------
amatecha
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act)

------
drawkbox
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

------
dredmorbius
A suggestion I'd made during the G+ shutdown, and active interference (see:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_at...](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/b87hpi/googles_attention_is_not_required_everything_is/)),
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?

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

~~~
dredmorbius
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...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Privacy_and_Electronic_Rights_Organisations)

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.)

~~~
Diagon
I've passed on your idea. What did EFF have to say? Anything hopeful?

~~~
dredmorbius
Basically, to write up and explain the idea, and it'll get passed on to the
right people.

(At least one of whom is frequently seen on HN.)

------
raverbashing
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.

~~~
userbinator
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".

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

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

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

------
mleonhard
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.

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

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

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

------
droithomme
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.

~~~
betamaxthetape
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?

~~~
droithomme
_> '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.

------
AQ2
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

------
pepijndevos
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](https://groups.io/g/LTspice)

~~~
Diagon
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.

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

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

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

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

------
lonelappde
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

------
Diagon
We've got another article.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90440817/bill-gates-solves-
your-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90440817/bill-gates-solves-your-gift-
problems-here-are-his-top-5-books-for-the-holidays)

------
Diagon
Yet another article at TheInquirer:
[https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084557/verizon-
bl...](https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084557/verizon-blocks-
archivists-yahoo-group-content)

------
Diagon
More media attention at zdnet: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/verizon-kills-
email-accounts-o...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/verizon-kills-email-
accounts-of-archivists-trying-to-save-yahoo-groups-history/)

------
chb
>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?

~~~
Diagon
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.)

------
rapht
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 ?

------
Diagon
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](https://queerdigital.com/ygpresproject)

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

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

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

[5] Exchanges with Yahoo:
[https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-...](https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-
yahoo-bad-form/)

------
giancarlostoro
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.

------
ComodoHacker
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?

~~~
Diagon
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.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
teovall
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.

------
frustyycomb
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
Nope, they are deleting everything

~~~
D-Coder
Any recommendations for a good replacement site?

~~~
Diagon
A lot of people are going to groups.io, but I certainly wouldn't want to
suggest anyone move to another centralized system. The best thing to do is
probably just to get a VPS and install phpBB or something. For group owners,
importing our Yahoo archives there is going to be the next task.

~~~
breakingcups
Yeah, a PHPBB forum on a random VPS run by a random user has a much higher
chance of surviving..

~~~
Diagon
The point is they then own their data. If they want to move it to archive.org
or anyplace else, they can. Unlike the situation we find ourselves in now.

------
crazypython
Can we bypass their firewall protection?

------
jijji
what a PR mess for verizon

~~~
fortran77
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."

~~~
Diagon
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.

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

[https://www.verizon.com/about/investors/ubs-global-tmt-
confe...](https://www.verizon.com/about/investors/ubs-global-tmt-
conference-2019)

Maybe someone can pipe up at the conference.

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

~~~
Diagon
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...](https://www.ubs.com/global/en/investment-
bank/conferences/americas.html)

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

------
Dignium
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](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)

------
shrubble
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?

~~~
Diagon
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.

~~~
shrubble
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.

~~~
mulmen
Is that enough? What about groups with only a few members? Or members that
have passed away in the last 20 years? Will those WWII vet groups have 1000
responsive members with the technical skill to run an archive script in the
next week?

------
ddmma
NSA might have a copy just for your concern

------
qxnqd
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)

~~~
dbtx
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
Do it.

------
fred_is_fred
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.

~~~
perl4ever
‘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.’

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

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

~~~
jefftk
Yahoo sent out email notifications to every group owner and member. I got mine
on November 1st.

Yahoo is definitely handling this badly: they should have offered an export
tool, given a longer window, and been clearer in their messaging. But the
claim that they didn't notify people (and just put the information up in a
place no one would see) is wrong.

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

~~~
Diagon
And how complete was it? Have you checked? You may be disappointed. You might
want to check out one of these while you have the chance:

[https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group-
archiver](https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group-archiver)

[https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/yahoo-group-
archiver](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/yahoo-group-archiver)

------
paggle
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.

~~~
Diagon
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.

~~~
paggle
Forgot the password to the account.

~~~
Diagon
I see, yes. They have been negligent in many ways. Can you contact the owner
of the group or a moderator and make the request?

(We even have groups whose owners have been locked out. Who do you contact at
yahoo?)

~~~
paggle
I don’t want to draw any attention to the post. It’s made it ~15 years in
silence so I don’t want to make a change of strategy.

~~~
Diagon
Well, I will say that if these are backed up, they will be less accessible
than they would with Yahoo. Someone will have to download a large archive
(gigabytes, depending on teh group) and then search through it for themselves.

~~~
paggle
Yeah it’s not that the post is immediately bad. It’s that I had an alt account
for a completely different side of myself and made one errant post with that
alt account to a forum linkable to my real identity. So it’s not a serious
concern but I’ll be glad when it’s gone.

~~~
Diagon
It's been eating at you, I can tell.

Well, all I can say is, don't add that to the list of groups that this team is
trying to archive ([https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--
10nDq...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--
10nDq3b_lowT88aB447-E/viewform?edit_requested=true)) and if it does end up on
archive.org, you will find another post on this thread saying that they are
very responsive to takedown requests. (info@archive.org)

------
paulcole
Verizon isn’t a charity. Why would they offer _any_ assistance?

~~~
danShumway
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
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

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

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

~~~
aspaceman
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 -_-

~~~
wolfgang42
Speculating wildly is OK. Speculating wildly using definitive-sounding
statements, particularly in a thread directed specifically towards employees
of a company, is extremely misleading.

If you had started with “Not related to Verizon in any way, but IMO...” that
would have been perfectly fine, but given where and how you made the
statements it looks remarkably like you were claiming inside knowledge of the
situation, and then feigning innocence when called out.

~~~
blotter_paper
FWIW, I read aspaceman's orginal post as speculation rather than an implicit
claim of insider knowledge. I do see how it could be taken the other way.

