Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-swear-2.html
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I realize I’m probably just dim, but…why is Verizon doing this?
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we can only speculate but perhaps two things:
- worried about liability for crappy content so would rather burn evidence than let it continue to exist.
- Capitalists often think that they have the right to prevent others from competing even in markets they are no longer in. an example would be the private electric industry being against bringing electricity to rural population while they were not doing it themselves way back in the day. there’s a billion examples of that behavior.
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Another example: private cable companies lobbying to stop towns from starting their own municipal cable networks, even though the private companies don’t serve these towns.
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My guess is that they have some mediocre IT security systems (whether automated or human) that are reacting to the bulk signups and bulk downloads as potential cyberattacks rather than legitimate archival activity. And there is nobody with sufficient authority at Verizon/Yahoo who is paying enough attention to do anything about it.
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Because assholes. Remember this is where Ajit Pai came from.
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it would be interesting to decipher just how much is algorithmic and how much is human intervention.
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Fuck you Yahoo, fuck you.
Can someone explain briefly- how Verizon is involved?
I have Verizon phone and internet. I will drop them in a heartbeat if they are causing this, I already hate them, and left ATT because I hated them the most (Binney and the NSA)
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I used to receive emails from a few local Yahoo! groups with daily digests, and I added content to some of them. They either no longer exist or migrated to Facebook. Fortunately, even if the new owners disconnect the groups from the internet, I can still go back and search and peruse my old emails, reading all the great advice and encouragement I thought I gave, and all the great advice I certainly received. The messages are still relevant. If they were archived, anyone could find them.
Incidentally, Yahoo! was my first internet email address. I remember my frustration during the sign-up after typing in combinations of my name and initials, and finding that someone had already claimed those. I ended up with k233210 (@ sign) yahoo.com–the easiest of my email addresses to share over the phone. So, if anyone cares to send me a personal email to that address, I would welcome it among all of my other commercial spam emails, on-line store ads, random ad emails, and utility bill notifications.
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We had a discussion some time back on BB about whether or not to archive a long semi-private thread that was going to be eliminated by the moderators. The consensus was to not preserve it, for a variety of reasons but I think the main one was that posts on it were made under a presumption of anonymity and limited access, which wouldn’t necessarily persist with the archives.
Based on the article, in the Yahoo case many of the archiving attempts are being made on behalf of group owners, but I’ve never been consulted by the one yahoo group in which I’m enrolled. While in reality I don’t care at all what they do with that group, I could imagine being peeved.
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Verizon own Yahoo.
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That doesn’t explain why they waited several months to ban them.
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Yoon Ha Lee wrote a brief post on his Dreamwidth about this very issue:
why I am against archiving fannish material without consent
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Yeah somehow I missed that.
Looks like I am fucked though. I can still go to T-Mobile which will soon be the only option left for phone, but I only have Verizon and Comcast for internet.
Choosing between Verizon and Comcast is like choosing between late-stage Rabies and Ebola.
The problem is I can’t vote with my wallet entirely because there is no one left to vote for.
I am starting to see even more concretely how apathy helped get Trump elected. When you’re out of choices what the hell do you do other than pick the least crazy one?
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As odd as it sounds and as lothe as I am to admit it… in some ways, it is best to let the past die. Let the groups rot and decay. People grow and evolve and change, and what boneheaded stupidity fell out of my mouth as a teenager is mostly lost to time and I am thankful for it. I am way not the person who I was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago; and some of the things I said then would deeply offend me now.
I mean, I think Verizon is wrong; they are doing it for all the wrong reasons, they are a crap company, it’s just in this case they happen to be wrong in a good way. Broken clock and all that.
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I wonder if upper management even knows about this?
What if the archiving makes more work for the handful of people still maintaining the groups? Say each post has a lastRead field that gets updated when touched by the archiving, and then all the updated records have to be backed-up? (Why are they still making backups? Above their paygrade to change that policy, and they know that they’ll be redundant employees soon.)
Yep. My Comet Owners group send digests, and every topic of use to me and my '62 was filed into an email folder. Fuck Yahorizon
Capitalists don’t believe in sharing. If the data has value then they expect (and demand) others to pay the price they want to sell it at. So archiving is antithetical to them even if it’s just a group full of amateur RF projects and people’s recipes. To them, they demand property rights compliance above all other concerns (and a return on ‘their investment’ accordingly).
