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Verizon Kills Email Accounts of Archivists Trying To Save Yahoo Groups History (zdnet.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in a few weeks. As Verizon announced in October, the company intends to wipe all content from Yahoo Groups. As of December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The mass deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digests, and message histories that was uploaded to Yahoo servers since pre-Google 1990s. Verizon planned to allow users to download their own data from the site's privacy dashboard, but apparently it has a problem with the work of The Archive Team who wants to save content to upload it to the non-profit Internet Archive, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.

"Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."
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Verizon Kills Email Accounts of Archivists Trying To Save Yahoo Groups History More

Verizon Kills Email Accounts of Archivists Trying To Save Yahoo Groups History

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  • Mutability of the past (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Forty Two Tenfold ( 1134125 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:30AM (#59500914)

    The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

    George Orwell

  • That explains it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:31AM (#59500928) Homepage Journal

    I got a request to join an ancient group that had no posts for at least a decade. Looks like they were archiving it. Nice to know it will live on.

    • Re:That explains it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ToTheStars ( 4807725 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:25PM (#59501184)
      Thanks for doing your part in preserving Internet history, and shame on whoever modded you down as 'troll'.

      For those of you who haven't been banned by Yahoo yet, I signed up for a couple of niche groups I heard about just a week ago, and even though the groups hadn't been active in years and require moderator approval to fully join, Yahoo gave me all their files from the 'get my data' page even though I can't browse to the files through the online interface. So get joining! (Just not too many at once, I guess.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      How the hell is this trolling people? I'm at a loss to explain what kind of snowflake is upset by this.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jwhyche ( 6192 )

        See that button there that says report abuse? HIt it and report it as mod abuse. I doubt it will do anything. I suspect all those go right into /dev/null but at least its something.

        You where modded a troll because the mod was a fucking moron. That is all.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          See that button there that says report abuse? HIt it and report it as mod abuse. I doubt it will do anything. I suspect all those go right into /dev/null but at least its something.

          See here is a perfect example of mod abuse and I have flagged it as such. They are now modding my posts redundant since I started flagging the over rated mods. The over rated mods would be canceled. I have flagged the parent post for mod abuse.

      • You post a lot of bad opinions, so it's probably just someone that mods you based on your username rather than what you wrote. But this post isn't an example of a bad post.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          You think bad opinions are trolling people? They are so fragile that if the dislike your opinion they feel trolled by it and try to censor it?

          • Bad opinions can be trolling, but, it's kind of the fault of Slashdot for not having another category (it feels that Troll and Flamebait are pretty much the same thing). There's no "Bad Opinion" or similar option, so that's what people use Troll for nowadays.

            I know it gets hidden if it goes low enough, but it's not really censoring since you can still see those -1 posts, though it does make it hard to sift the more likely trolls from people who just have extremist/non-mainstream opinions.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Disagreeing is not trolling. You are the problem, the thing cancer eating Slashdot.

              There is no moderation option for "disagree" because the correct response is to post a reply or mod up someone you agree with. All you are doing is stifling the debate, which is not what the system is for.

      • How the hell is this trolling people? I'm at a loss to explain what kind of snowflake is upset by this.

        I'd guess - based on very occasionally seeing bland, inoffensive posts get modded as "troll" or "flamebait" - some arrested development type here just doesn't like you and happens to have mod points. You can report it, but I'd just ignore it - life's too short to waste much time thinking about them.

  • An "impossible" task. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:34AM (#59500940) Journal

    "Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."

    One word to never use in the presence of hackers is "impossible". Besides why would they have to redo work that's already been pulled off, unless they kept the result in those blocked accounts?

    • They joined the groups, and archived the efforts. It's the rejoining part that's the obstacle.

      • I believe he's asking where the "redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days" part comes from. If they have already archived some groups over the past four weeks, why would that need to be done again?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The take-away from this is to start archiving sites now, before they announce they are closing down. Do it slowly so they don't ban you.

  • Yahoo/Oath's "recover my content" fails (Score:4, Interesting)

    by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:35AM (#59500950)

    I participated in several (model railroad) related groups, so I tried to get access to the stuff I posted there using the links they provided. They came back with "no such content."

    Assholes! (fortunately, I'm a digital packrat, and have all that stuff on my hard drive, it's just not clear which images I posted where.)

    • Re:Yahoo/Oath's "recover my content" fails (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:22PM (#59501168)

      I'm archiving a bunch of machining groups independently of what the Archive team is doing using a piece of trialware called PG offline. It can download the files, photos, and messages, then dump them out to directories and a sqlite db for messages. If you can see the content on the web at groups.yahoo.com it should be able to get it.

      If you want me to try to grab your RR groups, email me at Elizabeth.a.Greene@gmail.com and I'll see what I can do.

      • I think when we moved the primary group over to Groups.IO, that process got all of the important stuff. (Thanks for the offer!)

  • Put not thy trust in corporations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:36AM (#59500954)

    Nothing truly valuable or important can ever be safely entrusted to any corporation.

    That's because corporations are abstract, psychopathic entities whose prime directive is to survive and to maximize profit. They are intrinsically incapable of caring about people, morality, religion or even law.

  • It's too bad it's not called (Score:3)

    by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:47AM (#59501010) Journal

    Yahoo Cloud Groups and Yahoo Cloud Email. The result is the same, the headline might get some pointy hair attention.

  • makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by noobiedoobiedo ( 6194604 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:47AM (#59501012)
    Verizon does not care about their customers or users My @yahoo.com email just had 20 yrs of mail deleted even though I logged in just a few months ago. Inbox only had some random spam from the last few months or so.

  • About anyone living in a metropolitan area these days can get high speed internet and a static IP and with a RaspberryPI can host a simple web-server. Or with an off the shelf computer can host a more substantial system.

    The internet was designed to be distributed and the hyperlink made that possible and yet people continue to congregate to centralized systems.

    There is probably so much legal liability contained in those groups that the only possible action is to nuke it from space.

    There are simply too many

  • Immaturity or determined effort (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:49AM (#59501024) Journal

    It seems as of late and this is just a subjective feeling there has been a concerted effort to erase what remains of the internet from 1992-2001.

    None of that stuff can really take that much storage or database resource compared to everyone's ginormous blobs of 720p 30fps and higher quality video all over the place today.

    Keep some of that old code running might be a moderate challenge and fixing security issues or not wanting to deal with them might be a good reason to take the old sites down but but but there is little if any good reason to resist efforts like this unless you don't want the world to remember what the web looked like back then.

    It seems like Geocities shutdown went the same way, not only was there no effort to help preserve the content it seems like their was hostility to doing so.

    More subjectively it seems like lots of older properties that are still active are making it increasingly hard to find old content if they are not out right removing it. Try finding any of the old flash games or post on StarTrek.com from that era. Slashdot is probably the exception that proves the rule but of course that has alot to do with this site having not been meaningfully updated since that era :-)

    • Re:Immaturity or determined effort (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:15PM (#59501140)

      The one I mourn the most is the IMDB forums.

      I did the math, and it would have been trivial to have preserved the forum content. I don't know why they couldn't have kept it going or sold off the forums to someone else, or at least provided the entire content database to someone willing to re-code it and import the complete database.

      The guy behind MovieChat.org tried to scape as much content as possible, but it's very incomplete -- many films/talent forums that would have had some content are now blank.

      I never bought the Amazon/IMDB argument that the forum moderation was too much relative to spam/abuse. Most of that seemed to be happening on a tiny subset of popular recent shows or movies. The forums were a godsend for old/niche movies and talent, since they had low posting rates they had really long retentions. I would sometimes get followup posts to original posts I made years ago.

      I think Amazon just wanted a site to shill its Prime original content and get a cut of movie ticket sales, and the forums were just inconvenient to that goal.

      • I never bought the Amazon/IMDB argument that the forum moderation was too much relative to spam/abuse. Most of that seemed to be happening on a tiny subset of popular recent shows or movies. The forums were a godsend for old/niche movies and talent, since they had low posting rates they had really long retentions. I would sometimes get followup posts to original posts I made years ago.

        Many sites have moved away from comment moderated forums. I have noticed it most with news and current event sites. A newspaper that I visit regularly use to have an active article comment section. Then one day they replaced it with a new login system, but didn't let anyone create an account. A note said "We're working on enhancements to the comment section. Check back shortly." That first happened 7 years ago.

        Between all the nonsense, flame wars, profanity, and everything else that forum users do, I

        • AFAICT, IMDB moderation wasn't seriously baked into the system until late in its life, primarily to deal with forums for titles like Game of Thrones or other similarly popular ones.

          Once you got outside that realm, IMDB was essentially free of moderation. It wasn't unusual to see posts like "GREAT CANS ON THIS ONE" posted to forgotten actress pages, something which I'd assume would be moderated out on forums where there was actual moderation. Maybe those kinds of posts were let stand because unlike a "hot"

  • Schrodinger's Internet Memory. (Score:3)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:49AM (#59501026)

    Everything on the internet is forever, until it isn't.

    • Remember folks if you want to keep it then keep it yourself, and not on someone elses cloud. It really is not hard or expensive these days with the cost of external backup drives at less than $17 a TB. See r/Datahorder for full instructions.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        I think this would also highlight to any company that relies on cloud services that they are in the hands of the cloud company - by the balls.

  • Corporate Marshmallows (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Many years ago, I had to frequently use Verizon's (Flash based?) website for my work. It was poorly formatted and crashed often. So, at some point, I changed my password to something like 'yourwebsitesucksass'. Months later, I got an email from a unknown-to-me, female, Verizon employee saying something along the lines that my password needed to be changed, or else. I didn't; so they froze my website account. (Henceforth, I called them every time I need to make a change.)

    First of all, what non-Verizo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      More to the point why are these clueless idiots even storing passwords in plain text instead of hashing them somehow?

  • Verizon is run by jackasses (Score:3)

    by Malays Boweman ( 5369355 ) on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:02PM (#59501092)
    I would not trust Vericunt with anything at this point. Fuck them. I would switch away from everything Verizon and spread the bad press about them far and wide. Because if not, other companies will think their behavior is acceptable and play monkey see, monkey do. We have become far too complacent in how companies abuse us, and it's time to dust off the old torches and pitchforks.
  • Distribute the groups to a list of volunteers and have each volunteer join a small subset of groups and gather the content. Aggregate it all into a central repository. If enough people feel strongly about it then it should be possible. Or put the word out to existing groups and have one of their current members upload to a central repository.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is literally what the archive team is and does. :)

  • Yahoo/Verizon saw it as an attack from a script bot and acted accordingly. Maybe if the archive team explained what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it before doing it, this wouldn't have happened.

  • Once upon a time, people setup websites to host their views. Now, they farm out the hosting to some Megalocorp, and what do you know, Megalocorp doesn’t give a shit. The easy way is usually easy for a reason, and it’s rarely for your benefit.

    If you’re going to give your content to someone else to profit from, you can’t really be surprised when they delete it all once it’s no longer profitable.

    Ditto for all of the free marketing everyone does on the various ‘review

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • An Arstechnica comment on the story suggests they are doing this out of spite. Now tell me why are these companies "Trusted" but we're not? Oh yes, move all of your data into Teh Clowd(R). Of course, they now have control over it and may decide to delete your data out of 'spite'. And they already have some undecipherable legal mumbo-jumbo at the ready to cover their asses with.
  • And yet, I received an email from Yahoo saying that Groups is not going away. However, when you read through the rest of the message, nothing of Yahoo Groups is left except the name.

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