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Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by jedberg on Sunday December 08, 2019 @03:38PM (#21738129)
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.

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by piroux on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:18PM (#21738381)
Except that the Library of Alexandria never actuelly burnt ! That is a very good ol' myth ;)

- https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perni...

- https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/making-myth-li...

- https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/677/what-knowled...

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by jedberg on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:41PM (#21738548)
From Wikipedia: "Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather only a warehouse located near the docks being used by the Library to house scrolls"

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

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by glenstein on Sunday December 08, 2019 @05:46PM (#21738965)
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.

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by jdsully on Sunday December 08, 2019 @06:59PM (#21739379)
It's quite clear the library is no longer here. How exactly it was lost does matter as its destruction has been used to paint various groups as anti intellectual barbarians since ancient times. Eliminating the story as a weapon to attack others would do humanity some good.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by glenstein on Monday December 09, 2019 @06:52PM (#21748066)
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.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by aspaceman on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:44PM (#21738561)
These articles seem more concerned with detailing how important it is that it wasn't Christians. Makes sense for a organization centered around "religion and public life", I guess. Quite the angle.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by wyattpeak on Sunday December 08, 2019 @08:01PM (#21739661)
It's quite important that it wasn't Christians. A large part of the public understanding of history is based on a belief that progress through the early Middle Ages was held back primarily by Christian repression of free thought. There are people who very seriously believe that we'd be flying between stars by now if Christianity had never become predominant.

You don't have to be a Christian apologist to think that it's important for people understand history correctly.

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by perl4ever on Sunday December 08, 2019 @08:13PM (#21739702)
Do people generally think it was Christians? Without looking it up, I would have said "barbarians", which may not rule out Christians but doesn't specify them either.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by wyattpeak on Sunday December 08, 2019 @08:25PM (#21739753)
I think the majority of people have never thought about it one way or the other (and would probably think similarly to you), but there is a substantial group of people who do. While it's by no means predominant, you come across the idea with fair regularity on atheist discussion boards.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by OnlineGladiator on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:31PM (#21738472)
Whoa. I guess what they say is true - say a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by phendrenad2 on Sunday December 08, 2019 @07:16PM (#21739466)
Wait the library wasn't lost due to that fire, but the contents were slowly lost due to the passage of time and people not caring or having access to copy it's contents? That makes the analogy way better, but the "burning" part is sadly wrong.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by piroux on Sunday December 08, 2019 @08:16PM (#21739712)
Yes, that is exactly what I wanted to convey by "lack of efforts".

2000 years ago, as a civilization, even if we failed to care enough for the Works stored in the Library, their loss would not have happened if access was not limited, which would have helped in their dissemination and issuing of copies.

Today, as a civilization, if we fail to implement to right process to backup on time what matters to us, we will repeat the same errors as our ancestors.

I guess many historians today would prefer to see those non-existent backups of the Alexandria Library rather than those of Yahoo Groups, but who knows what is more important after all ;)

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by ajsnigrutin on Monday December 09, 2019 @04:45AM (#21741435)
The main difference is, that then, "backup" ment copying everything by hand, and now, it means one simple copy-paste. Considering the size and price of modern hard drives, and relatively small size of old archives, any one individual can backup a huge amount of data (and even offer/share it as a download link/torrent seed/etc).

Their whole Library would probably fit even on a smallest now-available sd card.

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by Waterluvian on Sunday December 08, 2019 @03:50PM (#21738206)
Yahoo Answers is an invaluable trove of insight into an intellectual class of people that I think a lot of us regularly forget exist.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by OnlineGladiator on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:05PM (#21738308)
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by cyberpunk on Sunday December 08, 2019 @06:15PM (#21739131)
https://i.redd.it/yv9k5nes87rz.jpg

Not sure why this one kills me so much...

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by therein on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:04PM (#21738300)
It is an absolute trove of insight:

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by userbinator on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:24PM (#21738417)
Before clicking that link I guessed at what it would be, and I was wrong but not far (I was expecting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY )
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by narrator on Sunday December 08, 2019 @04:15PM (#21738358)
I think one of the unintended consequences of privacy legislation is it will support the burning the library of Alexandria over and over again.

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by rkagerer on Sunday December 08, 2019 @09:42PM (#21740008)
Well, to some degree it is a liability. It just took this long and some accidents for them to finally figure it out.

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by naniwaduni on Sunday December 08, 2019 @11:01PM (#21740310)
This particularly consequence was so clearly predictable that it's hard to call it unintentional. It's a hard-to-avoid trade-off.

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

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by BlueTemplar on Sunday December 08, 2019 @11:30PM (#21740404)
Note that "deleting" is problematic in itself, especially for "cloud" data, considering how storage works, especially transistor one like SSD's !
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by anticensor on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:22AM (#21740565)
Mark it inaccessible and write the new data over it in the next write cycle.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by BlueTemplar on Monday December 09, 2019 @09:09AM (#21742725)
That doesn't work on SSDs, and the data might be even theoretically recoverable on HDDs : https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/12503/can-wiped... > Therefore, you should assume there is no reliable way to securely erase individual files on a SSD; you need to sanitize the whole drive, as an entire unit.

There's a reason why when security is deemed important, the storage is physically destroyed instead.

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by anticensor on Monday December 09, 2019 @01:09PM (#21744852)
I meant for the sake of data protection, not for forensics. You start with all ones and gradually deplete your ability to write ones over time in electron charge memories such as SSDs.
Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by BlueTemplar on Monday December 09, 2019 @02:37PM (#21745642)
This is not about companies following best practices but about what is going to happen when some of the supposedly deleted data pops up again, as it eventually will.

Will a judge that is clueless about how computers really work consider that as a GDPR violation or not ? As deliberate or not ?

Re:Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups –... by anticensor on Monday December 09, 2019 @03:39PM (#21746279)
If you disable wear levelling, you could force it to end in a final all-zeros state.