

Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it." - unalone
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617

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DenisM
summary: some blog/site hosting shut down on short notice (one month) and a
lot of users (especially not tech savvy) got hosed because they did't
understand or couldn't react in time. "Digital eviction" should have rules in
place to balance interests of "landlords" and "tenants".

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dfranke
Are you sure you want to stand by that? Do you think the government could get
involved in this issue and manage to do more good than harm? More than likely
we'd end up having to get permission from some bureaucracy before being
allowed to delete spam.

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DenisM
I am not advocating anything, I only relay the content of the article. That's
why I put "summary:" in front.

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dfranke
Oh, sorry. I parsed the precedence of "summary:" as binding only to the first
sentence :-)

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DenisM
Point taken. I'll try to quote the whole thing next time around to make it
clearer.

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cgranade
Though I agree with the main gist of the article, the tone leaves something to
be desired. For instance, the author seems to think that somehow free culture
supporters such as myself dupe people into using Creative Commons licenses.
Free software and free culture are about very specific sets of issues, so the
Hometown shutdown doesn't really fall into the same area of responsibility.

Sure, many of the same people would be supportive both of free culture and
data eviction measures, but that doesn't mean that the FSF should take up the
cause. One may as well blame Greenpeace for failing to take action with
respect to the Hometown evictions.

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extension
I like the idea of legally imposing some responsibility on data
storage/hosting services. Not just minimum eviction notice but mandatory
export functionality would not be unreasonable.

A site like Facebook should allow me to retrieve all of my data in a single
action, in some reasonably convenient format, and should be required to give
me notice if my data will become inaccessible to me.

The details of this legislation would need to be carefully thought out to
avoid imposing absurd requirements on well intentioned sites.

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noonespecial
That's what has worried me most about google docs. There's no easy way to just
"do a backup". Wish they'd get around to that.

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DenisM
<http://code.google.com/p/gdatacopier/>

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kogir
I don't see how AOL did anything wrong here. They offered a free service that
millions enjoyed, and when it came time to close it down, they notified users
using the email addresses the users had given them.

It's not AOL's fault if people didn't keep their contact information up to
date, and two weeks is ample notice.

What could they really have done differently, save not closing the service or
never offering it in the first place?

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DenisM
1\. Make it read-only and keep around for 3 months. It's not like hosting a
static site costs a lot of money these days.

2\. Take the site down for a month and bring it back online for one final
month. This should get everyone's attention.

Above and beyond all, they could actually start _caring_ about the impact they
make on people. When driving down the road I slow down to avoid splashing
pedestrians with water - they never paid aything to me and it slows me down,
yet I try to be conscious of the impact I could make.

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DenisM
I have once gone for 30 days without logging into my hotmail account (vacation
and all). When I came back it was erased, along with 10 years worth of emails
and contact information. Needless to say I will stay away from anything MSN -
they have proven that _they don't care_.

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Jem
Odd. I had a hotmail account several years ago and left it abandoned for about
8 months & when I finally checked it, it hadn't been deleted.

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DenisM
It happened in 2005 I think. they might have chnaged that policy since then.

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Jem
I had my account prior to 2005, so it's likely that there have been
significant changes since then, hehe.

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Raphael
They could have just emailed everyone their sites in zip files.

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nuclear_eclipse
"What do I do with a dot zee eye pea file?" ...

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noonespecial
Did "hometown" pages end up in the internet archive's "way back machine"?
Presumably everyones not completely out of luck if this is the case.

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seldo
I've been thinking a lot about this issue recently. Hometown is a relatively
small site, but what if for some reason Google decided to shut down Blogger
tomorrow? There's huge swathes of the useful internet on that domain, and no
legal recourse right now if Google lose all that data -- it's a free service,
with no guarantees.

It seems like maybe some very lightweight legislation guaranteeing some level
of access to data _would_ be a good idea, for services above a certain size --
maybe 1m+ users or something.

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Jem
I've lost data 3 times due to host cock-ups and I didn't have the correct
back-ups in place to fix it. It sucks, I learnt to back-up properly, and I
moved on. Certainly didn't require anyone to "take a stand" on my behalf, and
I fail to see the need for anyone to take a stand now.

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zitterbewegung
I had a news.yc that covered a similar topic. If the company actually knows
what it's doing they should allow for about 6 months where people can get
their social graph / other data from the website.

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swombat
He makes a good case, but will anyone actually take it up?

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ja2ke
How many people making web services and tools actually care about their
community or their contributions, long-term? I'd bet, in all honesty, very
few. For instance, if you're building to be bought, why would you give a shit?

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Tichy
Wouldn't the content of the blogs be availabe in the internet archive? Not
sure about the url, maybe archive.org?

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jgfoot
Apparently not. Last indexed by the Wayback Machine January 15, 2008, and then
only the first few pages; actual blogs seem to be missing.
<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hometown.aol.com>

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fuzzmeister
Google cache, perhaps?

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pmorici
Title should be, "A terrible thing happened recently, You might not care"

