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.

Maybe you could be the one to raise it on the Slack channel and (even better) get some eyeballs with authority clued in on the matter.

It was someone quite high up in the company who was the first to raise in Slack actually; though it's clear were similarly not highly clued in to this before yesterday, and no substantive replies or info yet (just other colleagues with similar concerns).

I'm guessing this will blow up later this morning when people start waking for the work week.

Thanks. We also noticed that BoingBoing picked it up. Their graphics are a bit crude - but that's BoingBoing. We're trying to be more polite here: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-swear-2.htm...

Crude but quite applicable.

If VzM wants to contact someone at the archive team securely they can DM any of the @s on irc.efnet.org/#archiveteam or twitter DM myself (@JRWR) or Jason Scott (@textfiles)

Seems risky at this point, since they’ve already posted here. Probably better to wait quietly and report.

Why would it be risky? Surfacing an issue that is important to the public, where future/planned actions by the company could become a PR debacle sounds important.

We're commenting on an article that describes Verizon giving 0 fucks about what is "important to the public".

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

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

Not OP but I assume it means verizon media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Media

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

That could really help. Thank you!

Pure speculation, but if you publish something created by another person without an explicit permission by them, it may open you up for a lawsuit. If some groups required explicit approval by a moderator in order to read the posts, I would take it as they didn't want the content to go public.

So technically, some legal troll could post some copyrighted information, wait for it to be published on Archive, and then sue Archive for copyright infringement and Verizon for assisting it. As a non-profit, Archive will likely get away with just taking it down, but a for-profit Verizon is a wholly different story.

Groups can be private or not. Require approval, or not. The archiving team isn't attempting to break into private groups and archive them. Only public groups are going to be collected.

Also, from one of the mails:

> The 128 people you banned were REQUESTED by the group owners to get their stuff.

Here I wrote a blog post to explain why products are shutdown, illustrating Yahoo and Verizon. https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

I think everyone understands that corporations don't want to spend money and effort maintaining servers that don't generate revenue. No one is really surprised that they won't help with archive efforts.

The question is why they're spending real effort on blocking archivists. All they had to do was keep doing nothing for a few days. The cost to them might have been a couple hundred dollars' worth of bandwidth, at most, which I think archivists would have been happy to pay--they've done more before. (That's estimating based on small-scale commercial hosting prices; it might not even register on whatever enterprise uplink Yahoo/Verizon uses.)

Instead they've got at least one professional taking time away from productive work to fuck with archivists at no benefit to anyone. It's possible that the wage-hours spent on this actually exceed what the bandwidth costs would have been. It's astonishingly petty.

Two reasons I can think of right away. There can have a policy (and people) to detect abuse and shut off bot accounts, this can even be a separate entity from Yahoo Groups. Second, there can be internal metrics tracking active users and viewed pages, to get down as low as possible before deletion. In both cases archive.org is ruining it for them.

<conspiracy tinfoil hat>

Is it possible that there may be some kind of political angle to all of this; that archiving this information for the future might allow someone to find out something that someone else doesn't want to come to light?

</conspiracy tinfoil hat>

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

Over 4 petabytes 8 years ago

I'd love to have this as a torrent

you have 4,000 terabytes of storage space and bandwidth to torrent? (I'll be honest, I had to look up how many terabytes a petabyte is.)

It's actually not totally insane anymore. If you could afford a Tesla Roadster you can build yourself a 4PB storage solution. With some high density top loading storage servers (4HE for 90 HDDs), 6TB HDDs and some SSDs thrown in for caching you can build that in 36HE for less than 300k$ (not counting time needed to assemble and configure). So if that's your hobby, go ahead :D If one takes more than 5 minutes to research this I'm pretty sure that it's possible to push that number below 250k$.

Yes, university should be able to make some room so researchers can work with it. It's a lot of data, but not impossible to do with a small investment.

Oh.