It's funny, when I took a tour of the US Geological Survey, the curator of the collection hated Google (which was just a few blocks away). He said Google is great now, with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better coverage than the USGS.
But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.
Well, that's the problem with the whole internet. Remember those pages created in the 90s/early 2000s? People thought they were sharing information to the whole world. It turns out that most pages created in the 90s are now inaccessible or have been siloed by big corporations. The fact that we allowed corporations to take over the internet made it an inhospitable place for everyone else without corporate backing.
I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random whenever they feel like it.
A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section.
It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile.
Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions
From Wikipedia:
Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group
I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? It would be trivial for celebrities to set up their own websites and share whatever stuff they are sharing. At minimum, they can do this in addition to whatever social media they are on.
It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except tiktok) which is another interesting angle.
This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too. There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently.
I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online especially, and probably offline too.
> If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have?
This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these people just don't need their own website. They may come to regret that decision later, but it's their decision to make.
If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes, it's more work, but it was always more work to do it yourself, and always will be.
A lot of ordinary people don't post in public, or if they do it's not under their real name, and there is a growing trend of deleting it after a few days. They don't want you to have any data about them at all.
The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook groups that never get indexed.
These celebrities will be forgotten as soon as their Instagram account is gone or followers appear to be dead accounts mostly. Some artistically influential will get to the mainstream thanks to their fans hoarding and sharing the data, like all these last century music/film stars who left tons of material in any medium, now digitized and shared/pirated. Although I get a bit worried about p2p sharing as multimedia rental walled gardens got too popular.
The venn diagram of "celebs who are influential" and "fans who are data hoarders" don't overlap as much as you think. The latter tend to be a much nerdier group than the general population.
Yeah, you may be right here. Also Instagram has low entry barrier, where super stars got enormous promotional budgets. Now it is full race to the bottom I would say, commoditization of popularity, massive celebritism :)
There are many projects to make network decentralized such as ipfs (InterPlanetary File System). When exposing these services to public, legality is a big issue.
Plenty of rights would involve in it (copyright, privacy, and so on). Also, all kind of crimes are another issue. It is hard for people to keep monitoring if contents are safe or not.
I think we need a network version of the War of Independence.
If the websites bother to export RSS/ATOM/ActivityPub feeds, they won't need to. They'll just "subscribe" to the stream in their preferred app/webservice, and get aggregated updates about everyone they care about.
Sure, but what about commenting on the post? No one likes creating accounts for different websites in order to post one comment.
It's obvious that things like Twitter and Instagram provide value to celebrities and people who follow them. It's just that there are some serious externalities not factored in.
ActivityPub lets you mark a comment as a "reply" to a post (or any web resource), then all you need is a trackback-like facility to link from the post to comments on it. It doesn't need to be centralized.
> like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications
Yes, please! More and faster.
Centralized services are easy to build, because they offer an obvious location to do some of the things that are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also, by the way, far easier to for small numbers of coordinating people to control, which makes them popular with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths.
Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But, unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace won't go away.
We have tons of decentralized platforms. The amount is not the problem. The problem is the user experience. For users who don’t care about anything behind the scenes and only cares about the experience, why would they go out of their way to figure out Mastodon when Facebook has a one-step signup process?
The reason central platforms win is because they have to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users. Decentralized platforms get their initial users because of how cool the technology is, but those people (people like me and you) aren’t UX experts and don’t prioritize UX.
It has to be easier than the central platform, and the central platform has the benefit of millions/billions of dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized platforms have to work even harder to overcome that. It’s not impossible, but it does require engineers to overcome their desire to build cool things and instead focusing on building a user experience that’s better than what Facebook/Twitter/etc can provide.
Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon instance has centralized control over their users; you always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using your own instance.
This is what I would have thought, but I've heard from more than one friend who was frustrated by having to choose an instance in the first place. What makes one better or worse than another? What if I choose wrong? What if I need to move?
This isn't difficult, per se, but it's not as easy as signing up for Twitter for the simple dumb reason that you don't need to make that choice. And the concerns about "wrong choices" aren't entirely unfounded; the first Mastodon instance I signed up for was effectively abandoned by its sysadmin. The decentralization still makes it hard to search for new users to follow compared to Twitter (checking right this moment, when I click on someone I follow to see who they follow, it only shows me people they follow on the same instance); depending on the Mastodon client I'm using, it can actually be a little hard to follow someone even when I find them if they're not on the same instance I am. Again, technically none of this is super difficult, but for a user who isn't philosophically committed to the fediverse, tiny little frustrations start to add up quickly.
Most public mastodon instances usually have an about page that describes what their intended audience is. You can also look through the public timeline to see what users are saying first before signing up. If you aren't sure, pick a larger general instance.
Despite all that, in my opinion you'll probably get more mileage out of joining an instance run by someone you know and trust.
Well, you can see how that's a bit of a bigger ask than "go to Twitter.com and click SIGN UP," right? :)
People really, really want to argue that decentralization of social networks doesn't make things harder, but eventually the defense always shifts to "well, you have to be willing to jump through a few hoops if you believe in the advantages of a decentralized/indie internet, which you totally should," because the truth is that the decentralized way does make things harder. Personally, I do believe in the advantages of the IndieWeb, and I do think it's worth jumping through those hoops. I just think we need to acknowledge those hoops exist, and always be thinking about ways we can reduce the friction for people who say "I like all those ideas in theory, but in practice it's too frustrating."
It’s the “signing up elsewhere or using your own instance” that’s the problem. You’re joining a Mastodon server and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort.
It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and think “if it works for email it’ll work here” and don’t understand that people deal with email because they have to, not because they want to. I don’t want to have to change my email address when I switch providers and I don’t want to have to move all my stuff if my favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down.
That’s not a solution that’s just another problem. It’s bad user experience.
> and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort.
Not sure how that's worse than something like Facebook, where you literally don't get that option. If you want your asserted identity to be reasonably secure and easy to assess for other users, you have to find a trusted host or do your own hosting; that's no different from any other service.
This is what I’m talking about with developers not understanding users. I even said “users don’t care what’s behind the scenes”. Any normal user who is looking to leave Facebook wants Facebook The Product but not Facebook The Company. They don’t care about hosting or asserting identity. They don’t want options, they want a product.
People use email because it’s the best communication system existing. If someone doesn’t want to change his address he creates his own self-hosted mail server. Or just use his own domain name when using email service with thord party email providers. Email system is amazing, the issues with ux are in fact minimal, almost non-existent.
Even if self-hosted email was easy, I don't find it to be a great idea.
I ran my own for a while using mail-in-a-box but ended up moving to fastmail because I didn't trust myself to maintain the setup. I need my email system to just work and that's likely the same for the majority of people.
(I validated that lack of trust in myself even with fastmail by not realizing for almost 3 days that I let my domain expire, thus causing emails to bounce with no way of me knowing that was happening)
Ok so make mastodon as easy as gmail. I can use Gmail.com or my own domain. Let me have same flexibility with my internet identity. I wish the USPS had gotten into the official Internet identity game. One place to receive legal emails, store my private keys, public keys etc. protected by law.
Too bad spammers and big corps broke that one as well. Maybe if it worked as a publush subscribe system (MQTT) instead where the sender was responsible for storing and distributing content, then the spam problem would be somewhat fixed?
A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.
Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one.
Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful.
Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
> A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational.
I like trains, and I started a website back in 2001 for people to share their photos. It was reasonably popular. One of my drivers was taxonomy and archiving of images for future enthusiasts.
Today, it's dead. People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure. The comments - from people who worked on the railways, knew people involved - useful to historians of the future, are fantastic. But if you can't find them, what point?
I get why Facebooks succeeded. For my site, I was a total geek: why would I dirty the site with anything social? Well, look who's laughing now.
>People post their photos on Facebook groups. They get attention, likes - all the stuff that matters to a human. A week later the photos are lost in the group, hard for anyone to find, no indexing, no exposure.
Not even a week if you consider the target audience for what's posted as opposed to the poster. Algorithmic sorting and infinity scrolling have pretty much eliminated the ability to go back and look at something you saw a few days ago (unless the algorithm decides to boost it back into your feed).
I haven’t seen your train site, but the kind of content I imagine you produce would be, in my mind, akin to a reference book.
By contrast, Facebook is at best like a magazine, at worst a radio phone-in about trains.
Reference works in the form of websites have amazing value in and of themselves. I don’t think they need to be measured by social eyeballs when they attain an outright high level of quality.
I happen to be particularly fond of a reference website that is a taxonomy and history of British traffic lights:
> Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Newsfeed is RSS/Atom.
Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss.
The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like.
Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat.
RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way?
Because these compete with the interests of browser vendors, interests which finance a degree of development that dominates and ultimately stifles independent efforts.
Remember that Google pitched Google+ as an "identity service". They're now accomplishing this through Android, Doubleclick, GA, Gmail, and ReCaptcha, far more effectively. And sell ads on it.
Facebook isn't going to pay for social integration development by Mozilla: Zuck wants that pie to himself.
Channel monopolies would prefer RSS died and browsers (or apps) served their specific feed directly and exclusively.
More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free.
Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is.
Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2]
I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.
Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening.
But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
Why do you feel that it was the job of "corporations" to preserve and archive of every page forever?
In my country, all physical books and magazines which are published must be submitted to the government in X copies. The government then keeps an archive.
With webpages, the problem of obtaining X copies never existed. Why couldn't the government have archived webpages like it always did with books?
It is not that it is their job. The problem is the mismatch between the broader public understanding of the lifetime of "a webpage" and reality, when said "webpage" is inside a walled silo (and maybe even when it isn't).
I guess I don't see why anyone would expect their webpage to keep being published indefinitely with no contract or ongoing payment. Not many other things in the world work like that.
Services provided by a company typically don't survive the end of the contract to provide that service. If the company itself goes bankrupt, all services cease to be provdided immediately.
Typically the only organisations which can credibly commit to providing a service for more than a few years/decades is the government of a country, a well-funded foundation with a clearly specified mission, or similar.
I believe you are misrepresenting the situation. No one expects corporations to archive and preserve all data, especially not data that they are not associated with.
However, if they create a monopoly on that data they have an obligation to preserve it, especially in the case of a corporation outright aquiring data instead of simply "out competing" for data. And as everyone mentions, of course they are in no way legally obligated to do so, but they are by any reasonable standard ethically obligated.
I do think that the government could and should archive data, but there is currently no system in place for doing so and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. Corporations would simply have to maintain the data that they already have.
I'd argue this is a feature not a bug. The internet is a protocol for communication, not archival or retention. Any notion of persistence is owned by nodes in the network. Retrieval from an "archive" over the internet comes in the form of communication. The web introduced hypertext, and a protocol for exchanging hypertext, on top of this communication protocol. But again any notion of persistence of hypertext, and the "links" between hypertext documents, is the responsibility of the nodes in the network.
They were sharing information with the whole world, but in an ephemeral medium.
The web, and internet, is not an inhospitable place for anyone without corporate backing. You can host a somewhat reliable service on a raspberry pi over your home internet connection.
The issue is is that a web page only lasts as long as its funding does: private sites are great, but someone still has to pay for the server and, when they die, it’s probably going to just vanish, unless the internet archive got it.
Seems like a fundamental truth of Capitalism: privatization and ultimate destruction of anything that can be monetized. Certain things are impossible without money and to make money to have to generate or consume something which leads to a never-ending cycle.
I seem to have a distrust of corps imprinted in my brain since birth and had never fell for their candies/propaganda. All my stuff is always on my own servers with shadowing of course.
> He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
Jeez, that's horrifying. Literally just giving public assets to private corporations.
I believe the original author meant that Google doesn't have to turn over aerial scans that Google commissioned (not the scans they took of the USGS files).
Furthermore, I'd be shocked if Google just kept the original copies that the USGS gave them.
If getting it takes connections or prestige, then yes.
If any entity with a plausible use case could and still can get that data at the cost of the copy, I don't see why not. The whole "copying does not deprive the original owner" meme applies particularly to such public assets.
At a fundamental level, my complaint isn't about money or access, it's about ownership.
Yes, money and access are important. Yes, ownership has money and access implications. But ownership in itself is fundamental, and the money and access problems usually don't immediately follow the ownership problems, because if they did, nobody would give up ownership in the first place.
I've said it before and I'll it say again: corporations don't have the right to "innocent until proven guilty". We don't have to wait for corporations to do something wrong to do something about it. A lot of people on Hacker News seem to have this idea that we should wait to regulate until businesses follow incentives to the point of doing great harm, and then once they're when they do great harm, we should just say, "Oh it's not their fault, they were just following incentives."
I don't accept this. It's obvious that taking publicly owned data and making it privately owned will lead to Google placing that data behind a paywall, an ad-wall, or a simple loss of access if Google feels they can't monetize access. Even if Google maintains a relationship with the USGS such that we always have access, there's no reason for the USGS to spend our tax dollars to pay rent to Google as a middleman. We don't have to wait for Google to follow incentives to that point--we can see where this is going and we don't have to pretend we don't.
I assume the USGS still holds the same data, no less accessible than before.
So, if Google has put their copy of the data behind a wall, or deleted it, it's no less accessible than if Google had never been allowed to make that copy.
> I don't like this but if a corporation is a person, they have the same right to it that the rest of the public has.
1. A corporation is not a person. Corporations don't have rights, except inasmuch as the people within the corporation have rights.
2. The problem isn't that Google has access to the data, it's that USGS and the rest of the world no longer have access to the data, except on Google's terms.
The supreme court also decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves were not included under the constitution and could never be citizens.
The supreme court was wrong on racism, and it's wrong on corporate personhood.
What's right and wrong is a purely human construct and changes over time. The point was that, currently, in the eyes of the law, corporations hold many of the same rights as individuals. This could change, but would require special circumstances not considered previously or a change to the law by congress.
Corporations aren't people. I can't get married to Google. If you can point to specific precedence of corporations being given access to certain data on grounds of their personhood then your argument makes sense but just because corporations are considered like people in the context of speech doesn't mean that applies literally everywhere else.
Corporations aren’t people, but from a legal perspective, they have some rights in common with persons, which is why you often hear statements saying they are.
> But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
That was poor negotiation by USGS Solicitor's Office. Libraries participating in google digitization programs negotiated to keep copies of their scanned materials in the Hathi Trust Digital Library https://www.hathitrust.org
You act like the Director of the USGS was acting in good faith. It's pretty likely that Eric Schmidt, or similar, already worked things out with high-level officials within the government and the USGS Director was not given any real decision making capabilities.
There are laws for book publishers, requiring that they send copies to your local government's central library. In the US it's the library of congress. Some of the books they don't keep, but they do filter them by which books are important and which aren't. Maybe the same should be done for "viral" posts, such arial scans, and other data deemed important.
In Germany the national library is also required by law to take care of digital ("körperlose Werke") media.
They are still figuring out what a good way for archival of those is and are quite selective in choice what they archive, but they plan to expand on that
Electronic works in the U.S. fall within the mandatory deposit statute, but then are excused by Copyright Office administrative rules. However, it seems they've slightly narrowed the electronic works exception (first in 2010, and tentatively for 2020) since the last time I looked: https://www.copyright.gov/rulemaking/ebookdeposit/
I didn't know that LoC has any discretion regarding keeping items mandatorily deposited for copyright registration. Do you have more information on this?
The USGS is currently in the middle of an 8-year 1.1-billion-dollar program to develop a nationwide digital elevation model from aerial lidar. The data, which is freely accessible, is hosted on AWS. Cute story though. The hackernewses are going to eat it up.
USGS is in the process of collecting that data right now, it's not from the archives, and DEM is different from USGS aerials (which are photographs) and run out of a different USGS office. This is sort of irrelevant.
Making digital data publicly available is pretty new for USGS. Just a few years ago archived aerial imagery had to be ordered by mail and it was a pretty lengthy process. Topo maps (the earlier equivalent of the DEM data to which you refer) were generally ordered on paper as well up to five or so years ago, but they're in a lot more popular use so more third parties got into the business of distributing them. I've relied moderately heavily on both for some of my research and was a very painful process until just recently to get anything older than current. In the meantime, yes, Google had it all at some point, but mostly stopped using it or providing it because they obtained better quality imagery.
Fortunately USGS now has a slippy map for topo and an admittedly rather clunky ESRI query service for aerials.
USGS has been providing free public access to DEM data for ages. The SRTM has been available via FTP since at least 15 years ago when I first started using it to render hillshaded maps. There's not a secret handshake needed.
and the DEM has always been in a native digital format. The whole problem here is that the aerials and conventional maps are not, they're on paper and film and fiche. It takes a lot of time and money to get it digitized and available and USGS was not able to do that for a long time. You could argue that Google's generous offer to digitize the EROS archives contributed to the delays on this.
Keep in mind that when we talk about the EROS archives we're talking about data that goes back to the 1930s and earlier for some product types.
For a long time I got the topo maps from the website of a state government bureau that had conveniently run them through their own large-format scanner and posted the TIFFs - USGS didn't get around to it for years after. It's hard to blame them too much as they had a shoestring budget.
Actually, for amusement value, that state agency appears to have removed the TIFFs from their website and now says that you can order the topo maps by mail for $8 a piece, which is what I used to have to do. I wonder if USGS got mad at them, which is a bit ironic since they don't mention that USGS themselves only recently started offering them online for free. For additional amusement value EarthExplorer, the fairly new service that lets you retrieve aerials online, has a banner up that downloads are intermittently broken and indeed I can't get it to work at the moment.
Really I'm struggling with your statement about digital distribution being new for the USGS. We're talking about an agency that ran a finger service to inform people about recent earthquakes!
I had to order some maps over Antarctica by fax a year ago. The USGS had a functional webshop, but it only served the US, everybody else had to fill out this form including debit card data and send it over. It turned ou my uni actually still had one (1) functional fax machine.
The planet should be managed for the centuries, plural.
But we're just not smart enough to understand that, never mind make it happen.
Instead we prefer to cling to the bizarre delusion that billions of individuals with competing interests will somehow spontaneously self-organise into the best of all possible worlds.
That is indeed pretty much what it says on the tin.
However, to be fair, it has always been the most greedy and self-interested, with already the most disproportionate power to rig the game in their favor, that have been most vocally advocating this system. No surprise there, of course.
What fascinates me is how a majority of people, who certainly do not personally benefit from that system, have been made to believe that they do. Sure, political corruption, cultural indoctrination/propaganda, horrendous general education, and I can think of a few more .. but still I've always been amazed, how it appears to have canceled even basic logic reasoning among so many.
Who knows, maybe one day, it will turn out to not just "correlate" with an addiction to carbs/sugars, of which the country has plenty of problems with too. Junkies have always been easy to manipulate.
Until then, at least it still gives some hope that a growing number of people now realize that this system just doesn't work as it is advertised.
And it's not even true. At least here in Europe (I can't comment on the US as I've never visited), Google Maps is really poor.
It's fine when you travel by car, but when I'm hiking through the hills I'm just walking through an empty square on Google Maps. Volunteer-driven OpenStreetMap is MUCH better. And there the data is actually open and safeguarded.
Governments should support that kind of project instead of corporate privacy-invading playtoys like Google Maps.
In another life, I was a land surveyor and I did a lot of LiDAR work as well as heavy use of USGS data. Almost anybody except the most blinkered in that industry would have seen this coming, I think. It's just one more data point that convinces me that Google should be broken up or at least not allowed to silo previously public categories of data.
I had a similar almost to the letter conversation when I did some web work for a much smaller GIS firm back in the day, but wanted to add that in my experience this isn't just a google thing but an issue with governments and outsourcing in general.
Anecdotally, a close relative (and many others in her institute) designed entire curricula of learning modules for a government-owned nationwide technical college, back when online learning was newish, ~20 years ago (I think back when SCORM was fresh). These were tightly integrated into the traditional in-class offerings. A couple of years later a "trim the fat" government slashed internal capabilities and outsourced all "IT" hosting, management, etc.
All of the online learning modules (which would have cost millions in man-hours to develop) were literally handed over as "content" to a company who to this day offers them back to her institute under per-student licenses (that far exceed any "hosting" costs of these basically static resources) over a decade later. This company also profits off licensing to an array of pop-up online "institutes" that don't even approach the pedagogical context needed to ensure quality education outcomes from these resources.
Like a comedy of errors, from time to time some lecturer at her college will want to ask some question about the materials, their boss directs them to the company support (which is a paid service), after the issue escalates through the support tiers and they realise they need the expert knowledge of the author she'll get an email with the question, a process that can take days or weeks when the lecturer could have walked into the office next door and asked her directly, if the company hadn't stripped all author credits from the materials.
If the company decides to shift business models, or goes out of business, or is acquired and scuttled, these assets get blown to the winds.
There's a lot I could say about this situation, but essentially governments in general seem to devalue their assets at taxpayer expense, the IP of these assets could have been better handled rather than just giving it directly to the first company to win the contract all those years ago.
I think most of us are young enough to live up to the point where we would look into the mirror asking ourselves what did we do 20 years ago and nobody will really remember because you know,a few bits here,a few bits there,and all it disappeared...
It sounds awful that Google has the best mapping data in the US. In the UK Google's data is awful, worse than OpenStreetMap and much worse than Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency.
The underlying problem here might as well be considered a fundamental shortcoming of pure/fundamental capitalism. I make no claims about the value of alternatives, or even if there are any (better ones, that is).
Anything that is (no longer) of commercial value will be "phased out" and dismantled/destroyed. One might still stretch it a bit, by arguing that the commercial value of something can include its future potential value. But I personally know not a single commercial companies that ever choose that over short term cost reductions and "profit optimizations".
Luckily, there are governments who acknowledge this shortcoming and build structures to compensate for it. But when governments decide to leave (almost) everything to commercial markets, then the importance of anything and everything can and will only be measured by it's commercial (contemporary) value/profitability.
People have every right to vote for and support such a system. But then don't complain, when all that you will get is only what such system supports/provides.
He said Google is great now, with all their maps, which were far more accurate and had better coverage than the USGS...But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.
If you would've asked me back when Google was new, and we all believed in "Don't be Evil," I would never have thought that Big Tech would end up being the Ministry of Truth and The Memory Hole.
Just recently I collected all of the archives of comp.lang.ada I could find and imported them into a public-inbox repository. There's a gap around 1992 that I couldn't find a copy of, but it's otherwise complete. It took a few days to get everything into the right format and get SpamAssassin dialed in, but it would certainly be possible to do this for the other comp.* groups if one had the patience.
I would personally very much appreciate it if the ada recources could be placed or archived again on the internet. Lately I had the feeling even books where a better option for finding information about the language.
The D programming language forums work as a NNTP server as well as web forums. I have in the past downloaded all content from the forum allowing me to have fully offline archives of threads. This is so underrated. I think NNTP could make forums much more superior although it feels like there arent many clients springing up AFAICT.
Adding some new NNTP features to Thunderbird was my introduction to open-source software and ultimately led me to being one of the primary maintainers.
NNTP is a wonderful protocol, arguably the simplest of the 4 mailnews protocols (IMAP, POP, SMTP, and NNTP). While it seems to share the same basic format as RFC822 messages, it actually tends to avoid some of the more inane issues with the RFC822 formatting (generally prohibiting comments and whitespace folding).
Unfortunately, the internet by the early 2000s started turning more and more into an HTTP(S)-only zone. Usenet itself hemorrhaged its population base, especially as ISPs shut down their instances (e.g., because someone found one child porn instance somewhere in alt.binaries.*).
The only things I would ever modernize about the D forums if I were to ever bother is just CSS style or something, but honestly, they work, they're faster than most forums out there and aren't crashing all the time (I'm looking at you vBulletin!) so it's fantastic.
I'm a broken record on this, so you may have seen me point it out before, but NNTP started dying in the mid-late 1990s, when binaries took over. It was extraordinarily difficult to keep reliable full-feed binaries (NNTP is the dumbest conceivable way to share large binaries), and if you couldn't do that, customers would yell and ultimately abandon your service for a cheaper one, while opting for more centralized Internet NNTP services.
Ultimately I think the web would have eaten Usenet anyways, but it's a shame; we were Freenix-competitive (I think I independently invented the INN history cache), and that was some of the most fun I've had doing systems engineering work.
> I'm a broken record on this, so you may have seen me point it out before, but NNTP started dying in the mid-late 1990s,
I didn't start posting to usenet before 1999 and was a regular poster in a few groups from that time up till around 2014. Excluding spam, what was the activity level of groups before and after eternal september?
> It was extraordinarily difficult to keep reliable full-feed binaries
I don't understand why ISPs wouldn't just limit their newsfeed to the text only newsgroups? Did peering arrangments require one to also provide binary newsgroup access? IME, ISP and university news servers had mediocre binary completion rates at best. If someone wanted binaries, they could always subscribe to one of the paid newsfeeds that provided better completion. So I don't really see the incentive for providing binary access at all at an ISP/educational institution level.
That was exactly what Universities where doing here in the 90's. We didn't have physical disk space or bandwidth for a complete feed, but where able to provide all the non-binary groups in the main top levels (including alt.*).
The ISPs needed the binaries though, because that was all they were used for. People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.
> People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.
At dialup speeds, the only practical binaries one could download would be images. mp3 files were practically the upper limit of file size one could download. Beyond that, articles would expire off the server before they could be downloaded.
Without broadband and better completion rates, which commercial ISPs didn't really provide (especially the latter), customers probably wouldn't really try using their usenet feed for that purpose when they had other alternatives for binaries.
I just used my ISP's usenet access for text groups until they discontinued it.
If you disabled binaries, customers would get angrier than if you simply didn't provide Usenet at all. Nobody that cared about Usenet would sign up to a provider that didn't provide full feeds. I agree that it's irrational, but it also destroyed Usenet, a couple years earlier than I think it would have otherwise.
For what it's worth, I never called my ISP's customer support to complain about bad completion rates on Usenet. Logically, people would have found other ways to download what they wanted, either by finding an alternate source, or another usenet feed to replace or combine with their ISP's.
What really took down usenet was when Andrew Cuomo, back when he was the state attorney general of New York, made a deal with several major ISPs to restrict access to child porn via usenet.
This lead to many ISPs discontinuing their usenet service, which in turn lead decreased the number of people posting to text groups. Within a few years of that happening, practically all the regular posters in the groups I used to frequent just stopped posting. Those same groups now only have spam posted every several weeks based on what I've seen via google groups. Prior to that, these groups had plenty of active discussions going back to the mid '90s and earlier.
I was the tech lead at the most popular ISP in Chicago in the mid-late 1990s and I assure you that people complained, on Usenet, in email, and in phone calls. And we kept a full feed!
Ah I see, I'm not more curious that you say it's really simple, I haven't read the spec much personally. I loved the concept of the D forums so much I intended to attempt to setup my own NNTP daemon from scratch, but it's in a bucket list of projects I want to try out, the only resource I could think of reading are the RFCs not sure if anybody else has documented Usenet otherwise.
What you can do with NNTP is run a local NNTP caching server. Then connect to that server instead of the real one. Your caching server can retain articles as long as you want; much longer than the upstream server.
(Though mere long article retention is not necessarily the best archive interface, of course.)
Disclaimer: I'm not well-versed in the solutions in this space. Maybe there is some NNTP cacher out there that also has a web archive interface into it or whatever.
Yes, and I have 100% of the D newsgroups archived back to the very first post. Anyone can get them from the D NNTP server. I also wrote a program to create static web pages from them:
Back when I was first learning about D (over 10 years ago), I crawled those archives and sorted all the posts based on the comment count. It revealed many interesting topics and the history of how D progressed as a language.
I wish forum.dlang.org had a quick way of browsing just the top list of the most commented posts.
Well it is open sourced on GitHub you are welcome to make tickets. Maybe thats a small type of enhancement the D forums could benefit from. Filters that produce informative pages / results.
AOIE requires no authentication. The Eternal September server requires account registration via the web site; then you use an authenticated NNTP connection.
Google's handling of these critical archives they were given is pretty abhorrent. The usenet archives should really be made public since there is no business value to them and they don't care about usenet.
When Google started, there was maybe an overall altruistic, visionary, principled culture among many pre-Web Internet-y people, and it looked like Google was of that same school of thought.
(This was at the same time that there was a gold rush of IPO plays, hiring anyone who could spell "HTML", and plopping them down in slick office space, Aerons for everyone, and lavish launch parties, with tons of oblivious posturing and self-congratulating. But Google stood out as looking technically smart, at least I believed the "Don't Be Evil", since that was the OG culture, and it seemed a savvy reference to behaviors in industry and awareness of the power that it was clear they would probably have.)
That might be why it wasn't surprising to hear of things like someone entrusting a bunch of old university backup tapes to Google's stewardship.
This has played out with mixed results, and I think Google could be doing much better for humanity and for techie culture.
Google didn’t kill Usenet; it was already pretty much dead. Web forums had all but taken their place (and where are their archives now? So much is lost).
If you look at the history, Google basically rescued the data from a collapsing Deja News, and made it available again. A nice gesture, which didn’t serve to benefit Google much in the long term.
If we want to preserve history then we can’t rely on for-profit companies. We need to instead fund non-profits whose specific charter is archival and preservation, like the Internet Archive.
Various people sent their old tape reels and other backups to Deja News, which compiled everything. But Deja News never made freely available the individual archives or the collection, nor did Google. The oldest stuff is locked away by Google because the only hard copy was destroyed when sent to Deja News. As time wore on most of the remaining fragments that at one point could have been recompiled independently also disappeared.
What Google is doing by refusing to publish the archive or even share it with parties like the Internet Archive is completely unjustifiable and anathema to everything they once stood for.
> What Google is doing by refusing to publish the archive or even share it with parties like the Internet Archive is completely unjustifiable and anathema to everything they once stood for.
Couldn't a copyright claim (or something under the GDPR or UK's DPA) be used to regain access to those though?
Just because something is published to a public forum doesn't mean you relinquish your rights.
Copyright is a legal mechanism for restricting others from making copies, not for demanding they make copies for you. Off hand I'm unaware of any general legal mechanism to accomplish that outside of a contract or promise.
That’s why I suggested the DPA which does allow for rightsholders to request copies of data pertinent to themselves - I’d argue that usenet postings would fall under that scope.
Google acquired probably the biggest searchable archive, Deja News. What we needed was some kind of self-sustaining org with a strict charter to preserve the archive no matter what.
Because it's a cultural artifact, of its time. It's history. And some people would like to be able to read it, or do other things with it.
Personally I'd like to be able to link to my own posts from that time, for when people asked me what I used to do. But I can't find them any more.
These groups are mostly not code. They are conversations, design discussions, ideological discussions, jokes, that sort of thing.
Like what we have now in social media, except back then there was pretty much only Usenet, and it had a very different feel than the current social networks.
They are where things ideas like the smiley, and free and open source software, and utopian ideas of internet culture were developed. All the early internet memes. And of course all the knowledge people shared.
Conducted in public at the time and thought to be archived for the long term.
Wonder what people will think in a hundred years when they read that everyone believed the universe was made up almost entirely of invisible and intangible matter? It'll be some future generation's flat earth joke.
As someone else pointed out, losing information is bad because we can't know what value it might have in the future, only what value it has to us today. A lot of things from the past that we are certain had no value to people at the time (such as literal garbage heaps) are of immense value to historians today in understanding the past and the context within which those "worthless" things existed.
You're right though that a decision will probably have to be made at some point about what to keep and what to toss (how big is YouTube, exactly? Are we really going to keep every video, in its original resolution, forever?), but this is just plaintext, it takes up almost no space. The decision doesn't even have to be made, since it's easy to find the means to store this, so why bother making it? Kicking the can down the road is actually the best decision in this case, since the people of the future will (hopefully) have a clearer understanding about what was important in our own past than we do currently.
Why should we preserve old websites that no one uses? Why bother with historical documentation at all?
It's because, at the time, you don't know what information is going to be important and what is just garbage. Documents that are apparently useless today could become fascinating tomorrow.
No, it's a reasonable question. We're not going to preserve, certainly not in a findable way, every piece of digital flotsam that has ever been summoned into existence. In general, we probably should save what we can of Usenet for historical value as balanced against the fact that the archives are tiny in the scheme of things. They're probably also messy but that's probably OK.
Interestingly, when some people saved a great deal of the Usenet archives pre-Deja News, one of them said something to the effect of they wished they had prioritized saving social discussions and so forth because, by and large, saving discussions about a bug in a long ago version of SunOS probably wasn't very interesting.
saving discussions about a bug in a long ago version of SunOS probably wasn't very interesting.
Honestly even that sounds pretty fascinating:
It could help someone gather stats on the nature, frequency, and severity of bugs over time and across companies from another angle.
It could provide a fresh perspective on modern OSes by showing how historic OSes did things.
And it might be good material for a course on the history of software engineering practices, showing classes of bugs that have been eliminated, and styles of development and customer support that worked or didn't work.
I suspect the information would be too fragmentary to extract anything statistically useful in it. But, yes, there are possibly historically interesting nuggets in those sorts of topics.
Why not? Our capacity for storage has been increasing exponentially such that yesterday’s data is basically of negligible size compared to what we are producing today. There’s no reason to delete history.
Which is a very laudable response! With the caveat that pack-ratting everything is going to be an endless treadmill. I certainly favor preservation but at some point you do have to consider what you're saving and why.
You assumption "no one uses anymore" is glaringly wrong in this case.
Those archives are full of useful and informative information.
Not everthing changes fast. Common Lisp has been around for 30 years basically unchanged. The discussions back there can be truly informative for today.
It does take time to wade thought it, but people have been collecting (via the google archive, when it existed, sigh) curated lists.
Digital data is not exclusionary in physical space like condos. And even random myspace pages with hacked stylesheets show the common culture of an era.
why do mennonites and other such groups use low/deprecated technologies? partially due to religious creed, but also because when the electricity is gone, oil lamps still function, and horses dont need a petrol pump to keep running.
likewise many people are clinging to the local operating system rather than moving to the SAAS model.
so what happens if we lose the oldschool languages and platforms entirely, for whatever reason ?
if TBTF corporations are somehow hobbled or neutralized, we need old hand tools to build a tech newtopia from the rubble. if those tools are destroyed then we are beholden to a system that stands on very thin ice.
I would add to this that not all forward progress is necessarily good or well thought out. If there is value in an old thing that hasn't been unlocked yet, and it is lost to history, we become collectively worse for wear. Things like Lisp are old and pretty darn cool to have as an option.
I second the need to rebuild from the rubble is often overlooked, especially by corporations driven by profit centered goals.
The thought process and conversations that produced the code give insight into how to more generally produce code of that kind. Typically code currently in use is in continuity with code that was previously used, either as a system dependency or conceptual dependency. So it's still useful to have history around, like it would be to have comments in current code.
I’m sad to see that this was downvoted, it’s contains the key questions. I think they have good answers.
1) Eventually, everything will be lost anyway. The original print of King Kong is gone. A fire at Universal Studios wiped out the masters for a lot of music at once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_fire . Floods destroy family photos all the time. But those are examples of the forces of decay, of natural entropy, of error. The Library of Alexandria probably contained a lot of useless crap but also nuggets we’d want to know today. Information is memories, useful information is useful memories, and there’s no compelling REASON to lose it. Other sections of usenet history were wiped out when Google acquired it (a lot of comp.database.olap content I had a hand in) and groups of people just lost a knowledge base.
2) It’s not simply code that no one uses anymore. It’s a knowledge base on how and why, debates over constructs and usage that are useful beyond code-sharing snippets a la Stack Overflow.
3) There is an argument for letting some information get lost or at least super-obscure, but it’s hard to see this being a good example. Tide Pod Challenge videos come to mind. GDPR and right to be forgotten mandate something akin to information loss.
4) I posted this elsewhere but I’ll share here too: there was a comment made on the original article about preserving prior art for IP (patent) purposes. That alone is in the public interest. Irrelevant to your questions in general, but pertinent to each of them in this case.
The fact that nobody had enough fucks to give to archive these groups tells you everything you need to know about decentralized peer-to-peer proof-of-work blockchain nerd hobbies. This content exists on a completely open peer-to-peer content distribution network and here you are whining that one company -- the company that already rescued this archive in a midnight U-Haul run 20 years ago -- failed to archive it.
Seriously! I have the same issue with a lot of modern online communities/projects too. They all assume whatever platform they're currently publishing on will be there forever.
There are quite a few humans at Google, both in HN and at twitter. Sadly all of them that I talked with seemed like people that I would not want to interact with again.
Warning: contains snark. Not all googlers are bad but I am grumpy. There's now one you despise so much as the one you loved that betrayed you and all that.
-------------
Busily making sure it
feels even more lame to try to give them feedback? Or wondering what thriving ecosystem they can destroy next after
- destroying rss,
- participating in destroying federated messaging,
- trying to kill all independent browser engines and replace it with a nerfed on that "sadly" can't block ads
Some ideas:
Maybe they can come up with a more opaque way to shut down peoples accounts?
Or maybe a more sneaky way to befriend the Chinese government?
> It is also annoying how all google employees on HN suddenly disappear on threads that talk about the new cool unethical thing that google decided to do.
We're here and do pay attention. Plenty of Googlers write comments criticizing the company here.
Like it or not, Google is a part of the Open Internet.
Example: AMP was created to protect the free flow of information which was being silo'd into apps. Consumers of news were abandoning the open (mobile) web due to the godawful performance and advertising issues. Google saw the existential threat of everything being locked down within Facebook and Reddit. Is this preferable?
How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely curious.
Dejanews was the seed material for Google Groups, any profit derived from that (ads) was from content posted to Usenet by people who never intended for it to be used for that.
From G side they gained users interacting with 50K+ topics and occasionally posting views, sentiment etc. (and likely all Deja News historic interactions)
In addition to the search history, email content, geo location etc. G have for many people
This type of behavior is why I can never consider GCP. How many people have been burned at this point by Google randomly shutting down something they rely on?
I've had two Google accounts shut down in the last six months with no explanation. There is no appeal. The consumer services I've used (Feed Reader, Play Music) have been shut down, and the cloud service I was most interested in was luckily shut down before I was able to use it. (They used to have a service to resize & manipulate images in Blob Storage. I found a good AWS alternative[1] instead). I cannot rely on Google for anything at all, and definitely not for something as important as cloud services.
Are there any indications to you why your accounts got shut down? Any pattern you noticed?
I - as most of us - have a personal google account, and our company uses a google business account. While I'm following news regarding google cancelling accounts at will, I fail to notice a reliable pattern: (alleged) fraud and other illegal stuff seems to comprise a good part of it, but at most 30-50%.
No, there is no pattern. The last one happened when I got a new Android phone. I logged in on my work account and my personal account, and the work account got suspended. It said "suspicious app", but the only app I used it with was Google Meet. The personal account was used for much more, but didn't get suspended. I half suspect that they deliberately have false alarms so they can act like they're more secure, but it's more likely just a horrible, unaccountable AI.
I treat all Google accounts as throwaways now and don't use the work email at all because I want to know that I can actually receive emails that are sent to me. That's a huge problem even without randomly losing access, because their spam filter has a ton of false positives and those emails don't get forwarded to my real address.
>Their spam filter has a ton of false positives and those emails don't get forwarded to my real address.
This is very interesting to me. I've used Gmail for 10 years now and I've found the spam filter to be nearly impeccable. I can't recall a single false positive. I can't even recall a single false negative, though I am moderately careful about who I provide my email to.
Now I'm left wondering if most people think about Gmail more like me or more like you...
Anyone like me who sends maybe 10 emails a month to gmail.
I'm in their spam sin bin since a spammer managed to find an old test account on my SMTP server with a weak password and spammed the world for a day or so a few years ago. The problem is that I don't send enough emails to get out of the bin.
This isn't a problem google cares about, small senders with no reputation are basically screwed. I can deliver to gmail hosted accounts I've got a relationship with (personal & my own work address) but I can't reliably send to other email addresses at work.
How do you sign up for new accounts given the mobile number requirement? Do you just reuse the same number?
I tried to make a Google account for work use the other day, and got stuck at that point. Given Google's history it seems silly to use my personal account for work, or to connect the two accounts in any way.
I had two personal accounts that I registered before GMail had a phone requirement. I don't remember setting up the work account, but I probably just used my normal phone number.
Play Music has not been shut down (yet), and you can transfer everything to Youtube Music, which is available at the same price (and in my opinon a superior product).
Some randomly selected people can transfer everything to YouTube Music. I can't, and it may be months before Google would allow me to. It's exactly that kind of treatment that makes me feel like Google has zero respect for its customers.
Spotify is generally better than Play Music though, so it was for the best in the end.
a) Spy on people and sell the data to advertisers.
b) Use that data to directly push ads
That's basically incompatible with b2b services. Or consumer services. As a customer you're judged by how valuable the data they are collecting on you is. Which is less than a support call costs. That bleeds into every facet of their business. As such even if you pay them money you get the same treatment because they can't think any different.
Advertisers can choose to advertise to customers that fall into various buckets.
Income, gender, location, recent history of viewing specific types of pages, etc.
This is what I mean by limited form of access. Advertisers do not receive user information, but are granted the ability to use it when setting up ad campaigns.
They don't sell peoples personal data at least publicly. But that makes them care even less about end users, even paying end users. Which means a business is foolish to rely on them.
One thing that's become extremely clear to me over the last decade or so is that almost all tech companies simply do not care about the past, and I suspect at least part of that is so their narrative of progress can be subjected to fewer challenges from those who look back and compare.
Also, and this may be a bit of a tangential point, but the "deny the past because it has something bad" that Google has effectively done here is uncomfortably close to the set of recent and far more political events.
You just reminded me of a quote from an electronic music documentary 25 years ago. One of the Detroit techno artists insisted on taking the filmmakers to a historic theatre that had been left to crumble & turned into a car park:
"In America especially, nobody tends to care about these kinds of things. People in America tend to let this shit just die, let it go. No respect for the history. I, being a techno, electronic, high-tech futurist musician, I totally believe in the future! But as well, I believe in a historic and well kept past. I believe there are some things that are important. Now, maybe this is more important like this, because in this atmosphere, you can realize how much people don't care, how much they don't respect. And it can make you realize how much you should respect."
- Derrick May, DJ/Composer, Universal Techno (1996)
I don't think it's quite as simple as "Americans don't care about the past" when discussing cities like Detroit. The actual reason those places were left to rot is a lot worse imo, and it's the same reason that led to San Francisco becoming such a (cheap) haven for LGBT people / artists / etc in the 1970s and '80s: http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2020/06/repost-personal-s...
I have no idea how useful the collection may prove to be. I found 'comp' but it doesn't offer a webpage view, just a link to download a file. https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp
Most free and ISP based usenet feeds had a lot of missing posts, especially since they allowed older posts to expire. Even the commercial usenet providers only started their archives about 12 years ago.
Either those Usenet groups are not part of the world, or they don't consist of information, or Google just failed at "organizing the world's information."
I read the article and I read the threads here, and maybe I missed it—but why did these groups disappear? Were they banned due to bad words or a mistaken spam filter?
> The group that you are attempting to view (comp.lang.forth) has been identified as containing spam, malware or other malicious content. Content in this group is now limited to view-only mode for those with access.
> Group owners can request an appeal after they have taken steps to clean up potentially offensive content in the forum. For more information about content policies on Google Groups, please see our Help Centre article on abuse and our Terms of Service.
Looks like there has been (likely automated, nearly all of them are the same Italian phrase) mechanical legal complaints and it probably caused this instance of automated blocking going wild.
As an engineer I can understand the desire to automate everything, but please at least have some heuristics to detect this kind of easy-to-detect mechanical behavior before giving the model a full authority to block anyone it doesn't like.
Okay, I did some research, and I think I figured out what caused these usenet group banning.
A Genoese lawyer has been a victim of harassing and heavy doxing for some time, you can find many twitter accounts accusing him of paedophilia in cahoots with epstein, berlusconi, the pope and so on (no, I'm not kidding; clearly the stalker has obvious mental sanity problems).
The stalker is very prolific and is wallpapering the internet with his copy-paste-accouse in every corner, from newspaper comments to ancient forums to usenet. The lawyer report and ask for removation where he can but also he does not seem very worried because it seems that this issue goes on from two years ...
I don't think I can say the name of the subjects in question but in any case I'm archiving the harassment accounts before proceeding with the report, then I'll try to get in touch with the lawyer and see if he can request a new, less "coarse" censorship.
I am Italian and this is very interesting: all the requests were made with the topic "Stalking Diffamation Illegal processing of personal data" but this (https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/21395773) is simply fantastic. It seem that a fool with persecution mania has reported half usenet and the bots was auto-triggered...
Too many people and companies don’t appreciate culture enough. Maintaining a cultural record should apparently not be left to just one company.
Thanks for posting this, it reminded me to donate again to archive.org, which I just did.
I use ‘culture’ to include anything creative, anything that we experience as humans. Everything should be preserved, schools should be well funded, as should the arts.
Ridiculous. They are blaming missing moderators, but only Google would be able to solve the spam problem. They open now these old forums, and Gmail is mostly spam free. Now you cannot even browse the archives. Where is the internet police when you need them.
For a long time I've wanted to revisit some the old Usenet stuff. I knew someone in the who ran a commercial usenet feed service in the early 90s and their whole setup depended heavily on low level backplane configuration, number of spindles, disk rotation speed, etc. - a lot of details that AWS hides from most of us. Using everything I've learned about distributed systems in the last thirty years I bet I could build a really awesome news feed today.
Of course the downside of Usenet was most people expected conversations to disappear after a couple weeks or a month but there was always some jerk that kept everything and refused to delete anything.
It's becoming clear to me that Google has become a far, far worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was. Microsoft just controlled our computers; Google controls our access to history.
Google is becoming worse monopoly trough natural evolution of it's core business. It seems more offhand way. Network effects and economies of scale. Microsoft monopoly grew by planning and plotting. Bill Gates had genuinely sinister motivations and used deception and dirty play.
To fix problems caused by Google, you need to change the principles of competition law. Microsoft was knowingly doing lots of stuff that violated laws. It was just very hard to prove it.
It's kind of weird to get this question when you lived it and there seems to be relatively little to Google.
I mean, it was all in the news, trade magazines, business journals. Blackmailing OEM's, intentionally breaking things and making them incompatible. At least the legal battles are documented somewhere and Wikipedia has something about them, but they were just the tip of the iceberg.
Dan Gilmour's articles in San Jose Mercury news from 90's should be somewhere.
Basically small software startups had to have Microsoft Strategy. They had to find way to stay out of Microsoft radar or MS would steal their work, their developers or block them. You sue them like Stack did and MS just stalls few years and pays few millions in damages. It was worth of losing in court to protect monopoly.
Big OEM's like Dell had to do what MS said or MS would up their price. It was straight blackmail from monopoly position.
Disagree in that they’ve already done plenty of damage.
Easiest example is with RSS - entered the RSS Reader market for free and at a loss and effectively killed competition because you cannot compete with that. Then subsequently killed Google Reader. This chain of moves essentially drove RSS to being obsolete which in turn made everyone far more reliant on Google and social media.
Now extend this to other products that they’ve started for free and subsequently killed. It’s not the same as embrace, extend, extinguish, but the result is the same. You kill off competition and stunt progress.
I don’t think RSS is a good example. Everyone I know who used google reader switched to a different RSS reader;
It’s mostly that RSS isn’t monetizable as easily as web pages. I think FB and Twitter dropping their feeds had a more significant effect; regardless, RSS was always niche.
If we’re going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at that time that ticked all the boxes.
For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off competing products during its existence. Then when they killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was starting from the ground up. All the time that could have been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on catchup.
FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
Now occurs to me that one could clone any given Google service (product), ensure maximum compatibility, wait for Google to biff, and then welcome all the orphans.
Yeah, they all realized how much tracking and advert impressions you lose with RSS. It seems like that's happened with a lot of web technologies that aren't conducive to that since Google's taken the reins.
But Gmail is interoperable with other mail systems and they didn't create incompatible extensions to email (AFAIAA); that's quite different to how IE6 was.
If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read. That would be analogous to what IE6 was up to.
> If Gmail required emails themselves to be in a special format that broke other MUA and IE6 wouldn't render standards compliant emails in a way you could read.
Gmail is as notorious as IE6 was for its rather poor support of HTML and CSS in email.
I used that as an opportunity to leave most Google services all together, the product decisions just can't be trusted from a user perspective.
For most services there's a better alternative (e.g. DuckDuckGo with bangs for search, native apps whenever possible, markdown for notes and texts) - in general this was a learning process for me to distrust systems that control me more than the other way around by creating a lock-in to an ecosystem.
I feel it's worth taking the time to understand systems a bit more. Once the learning is there, much of the convenience that Google offers can be replicated through good processes and automation.
I dunno, I look out at the world and think that maybe making journalism unprofitable may have had some negative effects that are a bit bigger than web standards not advancing that fast?
Personally I would pay a decent subscription to a journal or newspaper if they offered incredibly high quality content ad-free. Instead what we have are cheap ad-saturated papers competing with each other to the lowest common denominator.
To get to be a 'journal or newspaper that offers incredibly high quality content ad-free' you need funding. Arguably you also need to go up against the richest and most powerful people in the World, and you need to protect against someone buying it and shutting it down.
You need a lot of principles and some money, getting those things together in the same place seems hard.
Was news in the past better ( more comprehensive? more verified?), or just better presented?
News in the distant past was more sensationalist and overtly political.
News in the more recent past tried to be a little more hands off of politics. The market dynamics were usually such that you wanted to sell both to the left and the right. Some newsmen idealized this and sold the product with the idea of an allegiance to fact, and the idea that the facts would speak for themselves. Opinions were indulged on the editorial page (where advertisers fear to tread) and they could be safely ignored. Opinions were avoided elsewhere. Sensationalism was for tabloids; major papers achieved respect and a reputation and premium prices with their restraint.
News of the present finds the market dynamics have reverted; overt partisanship and sensationalism drive reader engagement again — but we’ve got a ways to go before we have overtly political journalism everywhere and widespread cases of yellow journalism like in the past.
I'm of two minds on this and they aren't totally squared together, but I think they are both fair.
1. I'm somewhat nostalgic to physical newspapers for a couple of reasons, I think because they were physical and required a little bit more effort. They felt more authoritative and verifiable, that's the nostalgia. However I think there was another benefit to the journalists, because they were crafting a physical body of work, I probably naively believe it instilled a sense of duty in that work. Personally I feel like if my product (not code) was a fleeting piece of information, easily changeable and forgotten among a deluge of other work. I would not feel as obligated to honor the craft. So in short, less comprehensive and better verified and presented.
2. News was concentrated, I don't think this was necessarily a good thing. This is somewhat contradictory to 1. But I think this concentration was an easier to accept narrative and speaking to my above point, that presented a level of even-headedness to the whole affair of understanding the world and our place in it. The firehose that was unleashed with Google was good, but it then signaled the death of lots of rational measured thought and brought us to where we are today.
Those formats exists. For example, I am subscribed to Krautreporter [1] from Germany. They started with a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and are now organized as a "Genossenschaft" and are entirely supported by memberships and subscriptions.
Google are smart enough to maintain a duopoly (iOS, Office/365, Safari) Whereas Microsoft tried to kill all competitors (and all too often succeeded). That’s a huge difference.
Though Android's marketshare today is extremely similar to Windows compared to macOS early in the period for which Microsoft is criticized. Similarly, Safari and Firefox combined have low enough marketshare (currently estimated around 21%) versus Chrome estimated 65% (and growing) to make real, very concerned comparisons to the early parts of the IE6 era, if not its peak (yet).
The difference is that it is still early and Google hasn't killed their competitors yet. I can't tell you whether or not they are "trying" to, just that I agree with the above poster that Google has the potential to be worse, and possibly history repeating itself on some of the exact same product lines.
Why are people even relying on Google to keep any product alive? It's a business, not a charity. They don't do a single thing out of good will. It always has the goal of getting money in the short or long term. Knowing their quarterly obligations to shareholders, that's probably short term.
These groups should be putting more effort into federalisation and decentralisation. Make it possible to store all of this data in a distributed fashion and stop relying on a central authority for archiving purposes.
I was learning C, once upon a time, and had a bug that I couldn't figure out. It worked fine on Linux/x86, but was wrong on Solaris/sparc64. Deep Google diving found a newsgroup post from 1992 or so with a very similar problem; it was an endian problem. My search-fu may have been weak, but an old newsgroup post that helped me solve my problem, not stackoverflow or any other site.
The Internet is a distributed system. Usenet was never centrally hosted anywhere AFAIK. It was scattered around lots of individual systems. You'd have to look up the detailed history but Deja News brought together what it could at one point. It was subsequently purchased by Google and it was folded into Google Groups.
Back in the old days (mid 90's and earlier), most universities and large corporations had their own Usenet servers. These peered with other servers, either over the Internet with NNTP, or through older protocols like UUCP using modems.
I had a UUCP news feed from a local internet provider when I was in high school, back in 1993 or so.
I think everybody should have learned the lesson now - do not trust Google - or any other major megacorp, but especially Google - to preserve any data for longer that they are contractually obliged to. If there needs to be historic preservation, it should be done by independent organization specifically created for that purpose.
Can anyone tell me how Google got hold of the whole usenet (I know it was like 15-20 years ago) which looks to me like a community service kinda thing.
Like when Google decided it's going to host comp.lang.c, can there be only one comp.lang.c on the internet, or can someone else start hosting comp.lang.c as well?
Actually, what I saw on comp.lang.forth the last few times I checked it (coincidentally, I tried yesterday) makes the news not really surprising.
Aside from the spam, it gradually switched from passionate but respectful debates to name calling and plain insults from newbies to what remained of the veterans.
One could read very long arguments between Elizabeth D. Rather, CEO at that time of Forth, Inc. which she founded with C. Moore somewhere in the 70ies, and Jeff Fox (RIP), who was working at that time with Moore; Moore left his first company to pursue its adventures in hardware, making different "Forth processors", which eventually led to the RTX2000 which powered, notably, the Rosetta probe.
They are really shooting their own feet which such moves.
They confirm, validate and strengthen the already existing trend to avoid vendor lock in at all cost and move to open, possibly self-hosted and export friendly platforms!
Maybe it is something that a non-profit dedicated towards preserving knowledge and internet content (such as Internet Archive) should be handling anyways.
1) Hiring standards have drifted downwards over the past 15 years. Google used to be super-elite, compact, do-no-evil, massive-profit-per-employee. It's now a 140,000 person organization, and at that scale, standards just aren't high. You have a team of dozens of incompetent people doing what one person used to do.
2) With COVID19, ad revenues have crashed. It's not clear the impact on Google.
3) The smart, ethical folks on top (folks like Larry, Sergei, and Eric) are gone, and replaced with professional managers. They were smart to pick an internal CEO, but most of their executive team comes from places like Microsoft, Oracle, or Morgan. Having known a number of professional executives, the key skill is climbing executive ladders and moving into positions of power, not running successful companies.
4) Their products are increasingly starting to crash-and-burn, especially in B2B. Their culture relies on automated systems over people, and their automated systems have taken down tons of mission-critical businesses. Automated works well at 1000 people supporting 7 billion in B2C (small elite team model), and not so well for a massive, 100k person company.
5) I've switched mostly to non-Google products because they're better for what I need. AOL was massive too at one point. Losing the tech edge is not good. I still use gmail.
On the other hand, their revenues have continued to rise exponentially since they started. So perhaps they're doing fine?
The cases of IBM and more arguably Microsoft and Oracle tell us that if you reach a certain scale, you can continue to coast for a very, very long time after you lose relevance. Microsoft might be an example of having the glide time to regain it depending on how Windows 10 and Azure go over years, but it's far easier for a large corporation to spend billions defending their shrinking turf than to make the big changes usually required to regain it. The problem is that defending your shrinking turf can show positive revenue numbers for quite some time, so it all looks great while it happens...
Basically neglect and boredom (I say this not an an accusatory way). They have a huge gusher of cash that comes in pretty much regardless of what they do, so there is no penalty if their focus slips. You see this in other companies with this “problem” like Valve. This also happens with monopolies— note that standard oil made more money after being broken up than before that happened.
In google’s case you can see this boredom on Android, on the number of products announced and casually killed (they might be excellent standalone products but can’t move the needle on earnings for the benefit of Wall Street so why bother?).
Contrast this to early Intel in the Grove era: they were on top of the world with the memory business so they pivoted to something else. Google has had the same two products for almost 20 years. The later Intel has been more like that.
Another contrast: they don’t know what to do about the advertising downturn, so are cutting back on hiring and such, while FB is trying to double down.
This is editorialized (actual title: "Some Usenet groups suspended in Goggle Groups"), or on LWN[1] "Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google" (basically the same content)
But what happens when they get bored with map data and get rid of it?
He had been ordered to turn over all of their historical arial archives for scanning by Google, and then told the USGS would no longer do arial scanning since Google was doing it. But there was no agreement for Google to turn over their arial scans back to the USGS.
At the time we all told him not to worry, Google would never remove data it had collected. Looks like he was a lot smarter than us.