21 ms·

Historical programming-language groups disappearing from Google

737 points by beachwood23 6y ago

kazinator 6y ago
The vast majority of the spam content is injected into these newsgroups via Google Groups itself, and is not even seen on other NNTP servers. Blocking posting access to these newsgroups from GG is generally a good thing for those newsgroups. Not being able to search the archive is the unfortunate collateral damage though. Google is not obliged to provide a Usenet archive, I suppose. Formerly obtained deep links to the content also do not work! If you formely cited a comp.lang.lisp article by giving a direct link into Google Groups, people navigating it now get a permission error.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  What would be a good free NNTP server or NNTP archive?
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    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.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      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.*).
      - giancarlostoro 6y ago
        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.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        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.
        u801e 6y ago
        > 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.
        tptacek 6y ago
        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.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - kazinator 6y ago
      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.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      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: https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver and the generated pages: https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html When we were working on the history of the D programming language paper, this was an invaluable resource.
      - drey08 6y ago
        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.
        WalterBright 6y ago
        Good idea. Never thought of that!
        giancarlostoro 6y ago
        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.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    I've been using the NNTP server provided by https://www.aioe.org/ https://www.aioe.org/ for quite a few years. There is also https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ which I used. AOIE requires no authentication. The Eternal September server requires account registration via the web site; then you use an authenticated NNTP connection. There are other servers out there. These sites do not provide any archive.
aidenn0 6y ago
Anyone know if anyone not google has newsgroup archives publicly accessible (The Internet Archive maybe?)
- eej71 6y ago
  https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ I think you have to register. Not sure how much history is there.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    A lot of posts are missing from this one.
    - u801e 6y ago
      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.
- rikroots 6y ago
  I found this Usenet Historical Collection link - https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical - in a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796). 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 https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp
  - u801e 6y ago
    Maybe someone could set up a public inbox[1] instance that allows access to those groups either via HTTP or NNTP. [1] https://public-inbox.org/README.html https://public-inbox.org/README.html
  - bensw 6y ago
microtherion 6y ago
GOOGLE FORTH HATE IF HONK THEN
none10287 6y ago
Google has bought dejanews and has profited immensely from open source and open information. So I do think they have an obligation either a) to make the whole archive available for anyone or b) maintain it properly. Properly means restoring the fast UI from around 2004.
- nine_k 6y ago
  How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely curious.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    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.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Groups doesn't (and didn't ever?) Show ads as far as I know. So you're reaching for second or third order effects at best.
      - mtkd 6y ago
        You think that realtime ad impressions is all they get from you reading granular forum posts? Sadly, even in 2020, nothing has yet replaced what Deja was at the time it got acquired and destroyed.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        > So you're reaching for second or third order effects at best. I'm curious what second or third order effects you think a usenet archive had on GG.
        6y ago
_kp6z 6y ago
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.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  Controversial question: Why should we preserve code that no one uses anymore? Why should we not allow some information to be simply lost?
  - Zenst 6y ago
    Future digital tourism. That or risk future archaeologists thinking COBOL was some God of the time and the natives built large metal obelisks in dedicated worship temples.
  - sgillen 6y ago
    Well I think it’s ok in general for some information to be lost, but I think a lot of HN users value this specific information.
  - johnfn 6y ago
    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.
  - bordercases 6y ago
    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.
  - pfortuny 6y ago
    Do you know about cuneiform? Lots of what is known are just ledgers and exercise books... Never forget that we do not know the future.
totalforge 6y ago
SELF FOOT SHOOT DUP
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Or Factor style, [ SELF FOOT SHOOT ] 1000 REP
- astrobe_ 6y ago
  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.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  BEGIN ME FUCK AGAIN
gnabgib 6y ago
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) [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/ https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we've changed to that from https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en. Thanks!
bawana 6y ago
is google sinking? Between their mothballing/deletion of services and the obnoxious signup ads on youtube. I am wondering what is going on?
- gumby 6y ago
  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.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  No they've just secured their kingdom enough that they can do whatever they want.
- wegs 6y ago
  It's not doing so hot: 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?
synack 6y ago
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. https://archive.legitdata.co/ https://archive.legitdata.co/ https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/ https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/ https://public-inbox.org/README.html https://public-inbox.org/README.html
- sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
  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.
CrankyBear 6y ago
No, no, no. These groups and other Usenet groups archives must be preserved. They're our history.
Animats 6y ago
"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future" - Orwell, "1984"
jedberg 6y ago
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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Like we have whitewashing and greenwashing, I propose the term: Googlewashing - to proclaim “Google would never ...”
- coliveira 6y ago
  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.
  - methodin 6y ago
    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.
  - zrm 6y ago
    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.
icheishvili 6y ago
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?
- john-shaffer 6y ago
  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. [1] https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler
  - firebaze 6y ago
    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%.
    - john-shaffer 6y ago
      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.
LockAndLol 6y ago
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.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Those groups are running on decentralized system and open protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet The problem is that there is no other searchable archives.
haecceity 6y ago
So Google Groups archives usenet stuff? Where are the usenet stuff hosted originally? How do I connect to it without Google Groups?
- ghaff 6y ago
  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.
- icedchai 6y ago
  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.
DoctorNick 6y ago
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.
- Stubb 6y ago
  And each other.
- beagle3 6y ago
  Potentially far worse - but Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. They sucked the air out of advertising (in cooperation with Facebook) leaving none for others. But I consider that a small loss. Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6, and more. Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    > Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet. That is changing extremely fast.
  - walkingolof 6y ago
    > Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16 year:ish etc They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.
    - anchpop 6y ago
      I'm still upset with them for killing Inbox
      - harha 6y ago
        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.
WoodenChair 6y ago
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?
- DanBC 6y ago
  Here's what I get: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth > Banned Content Warning > 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. There's no content available for me.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    Is there means you access and archive it or is too late?
  - jjgreen 6y ago
    Forth is pretty grim, but I wouldn't go that far ...
lkirk 6y ago
Is this something that the internet archive would preserve?
fizixer 6y ago
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?
- rjsw 6y ago
  That isn't how it works, usenet is distributed, you can still access it using non-Google servers.
Ijumfs 6y ago
It was a terrible idea to entrust ANYTHING to Google. Time to de-Google the whole Web.
hosh 6y ago
Maybe it is something that a non-profit dedicated towards preserving knowledge and internet content (such as Internet Archive) should be handling anyways.
fmajid 6y ago
> Usenet predates Google's spam handling tools In fact Usenet predates spam itself, since the first spam (Canter & Siegel) was on Usenet itself in 1994 (I was there).
Havoc 6y ago
I'm hearing a fair bit of chatter in SEO circles about google de-indexing pages so this certainly rings true. I guess there was this unjustified assumption that google only adds & never subtracts.
jolmg 6y ago
> since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google's purchase of Dejanews around 20 years ago Was I naive in thinking that The Internet Archive would have long archived this type of thing?
- foresto 6y ago
  The Internet Archive is younger than Deja News. Someone would have had to provide the data. Did they? If you want to look, you might start here: https://archive.org/details/usenet https://archive.org/details/usenet
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
staycoolboy 6y ago
On the plus side, evidence of my awful usenet etiquette from the late 80's is disappearing with some of these groups.
jeffbee 6y ago
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.
- dabockster 6y ago
  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. Brb archiving my Twitter posts
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >The fact that nobody had enough fucks to give to archive these groups Well, you assume. Maybe it was just decentralized enough you haven't heard about it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ipunchghosts 6y ago
i would like to find the quickbasic archives. anyone know how i can get them?
- DanBC 6y ago
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.basic.dos https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.bas... Not safe for work!!!
mark_l_watson 6y ago
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.
NewEntryHN 6y ago
Either this archive exists elsewhere, either now is not the proper time for panic -- it was when Google became sole owner of this archive.
rurban 6y ago
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.
bawolff 6y ago
Maybe these types of historical archives can be turned over to internet archive. I trust them a lot more than google for this.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
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.
photon-torpedo 6y ago
Guess comp.lang.lisp has too many posts with (((code))) in them... ;)
DonHopkins 6y ago
Since when were Forth and Lisp historical programming languages??! People still use them. HARUMPH!
- velosol 6y ago
  If it makes you feel better, comp.lang.python is also blocked: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    No, because I like Python too, but it would make me feel much better if comp.lang.perl was blocked.
imhoguy 6y ago
Anyone looking for a hobby? It is time to become a data hoarder https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Thank god. I said some really dumb shit on those lists in my youth that I regret.
ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
alt.sex is still there and you don't get an adult content warning unless you choose the desktop version.
rdiddly 6y 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."
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Google has definitely failed. Finding anything that's not frecent is basically impossible.
userbinator 6y ago
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.
- SyneRyder 6y ago
  > do not care about the past... 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) https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s The segment starts at 16:00 in the video and is about 2 minutes long.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    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-segregation-story.html http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2020/06/repost-personal-s...
- jolmg 6y ago
  > almost all tech companies simply do not care about the past You may be surprised that it's not just companies. It's not hard to find people who think it's better for old stuff to just be deleted.
Igelau 6y ago
If an AI decided to shut off comp.lang.lisp, I'd say it's officially too late to solve the Alignment Problem.
smsm42 6y ago
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.
summerlight 6y ago
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=%22comp.lang.forth%22+%22comp.lang.lisp%22&sort_by= https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&... 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.
- __void 6y ago
  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 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...
- __void 6y ago
  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.
msie 6y ago
WTF Google? Are you now so full of young programmers who have no respect for programming history? You’ve lost all greek cred that’s for sure.
grappler 6y ago
This kind of thing makes it really easy to get interested, and stay interested, in decentralization tech. Once you see things in this light, the new flavor of the month online service just doesn't hold any allure.
avodonosov 6y ago
There is a comp.lang.lisp archive published in 2009. > In 2009, Ron Garret published a 700MB archive file of all of comp.lang.lisp https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html
jolmg 6y ago
> Perhaps Google can be convinced to restore the content The support ticket was deleted, so I guess not.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Arjuna144 6y ago
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! This is really bad marketing
sara889 6y ago
KBC LOTTERY https://www.sonyprize.com/winners https://www.sonyprize.com/winners
LucasWilliam 6y ago
So far....
cptnapalm 6y ago
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.
quantified 6y ago
(Repeating one of the comments from the post): > Has anyone (EFF?) considered the aspect of destroying evidence of prior art in the public domain? I think there’s a case to be made for stewardship of these groups for that reason.

737 points by beachwood23 6y ago

The vast majority of the spam content is injected into these newsgroups via Google Groups itself, and is not even seen on other NNTP servers. Blocking posting access to these newsgroups from GG is generally a good thing for those newsgroups. Not being able to search the archive is the unfortunate collateral damage though. Google is not obliged to provide a Usenet archive, I suppose. Formerly obtained deep links to the content also do not work! If you formely cited a comp.lang.lisp article by giving a direct link into Google Groups, people navigating it now get a permission error.

dependenttypes 6y ago
What would be a good free NNTP server or NNTP archive?
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  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.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    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.*).
    - giancarlostoro 6y ago
      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.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      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.
      - u801e 6y ago
        > 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.
        tptacek 6y ago
        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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kazinator 6y ago
    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.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    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: https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver and the generated pages: https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html When we were working on the history of the D programming language paper, this was an invaluable resource.
    - drey08 6y ago
      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.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Good idea. Never thought of that!
      - giancarlostoro 6y ago
        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.
- kazinator 6y ago
  I've been using the NNTP server provided by https://www.aioe.org/ https://www.aioe.org/ for quite a few years. There is also https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ which I used. AOIE requires no authentication. The Eternal September server requires account registration via the web site; then you use an authenticated NNTP connection. There are other servers out there. These sites do not provide any archive.

aidenn0 6y ago

Anyone know if anyone not google has newsgroup archives publicly accessible (The Internet Archive maybe?)

eej71 6y ago
https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ I think you have to register. Not sure how much history is there.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  A lot of posts are missing from this one.
  - u801e 6y ago
    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.
rikroots 6y ago
I found this Usenet Historical Collection link - https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical - in a previous HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16667796). 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 https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp
- u801e 6y ago
  Maybe someone could set up a public inbox[1] instance that allows access to those groups either via HTTP or NNTP. [1] https://public-inbox.org/README.html https://public-inbox.org/README.html
- bensw 6y ago

microtherion 6y ago

GOOGLE FORTH HATE IF HONK THEN

none10287 6y ago

Google has bought dejanews and has profited immensely from open source and open information. So I do think they have an obligation either a) to make the whole archive available for anyone or b) maintain it properly. Properly means restoring the fast UI from around 2004.

nine_k 6y ago
How did it profit from the Usenet archives? Genuinely curious.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  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.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Groups doesn't (and didn't ever?) Show ads as far as I know. So you're reaching for second or third order effects at best.
    - mtkd 6y ago
      You think that realtime ad impressions is all they get from you reading granular forum posts? Sadly, even in 2020, nothing has yet replaced what Deja was at the time it got acquired and destroyed.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        > So you're reaching for second or third order effects at best. I'm curious what second or third order effects you think a usenet archive had on GG.
        6y ago

_kp6z 6y ago

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.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
Controversial question: Why should we preserve code that no one uses anymore? Why should we not allow some information to be simply lost?
- Zenst 6y ago
  Future digital tourism. That or risk future archaeologists thinking COBOL was some God of the time and the natives built large metal obelisks in dedicated worship temples.
- sgillen 6y ago
  Well I think it’s ok in general for some information to be lost, but I think a lot of HN users value this specific information.
- johnfn 6y ago
  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.
- bordercases 6y ago
  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.
- pfortuny 6y ago
  Do you know about cuneiform? Lots of what is known are just ledgers and exercise books... Never forget that we do not know the future.

totalforge 6y ago

SELF FOOT SHOOT DUP

zentiggr 6y ago
Or Factor style, [ SELF FOOT SHOOT ] 1000 REP
astrobe_ 6y ago
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.
DonHopkins 6y ago
BEGIN ME FUCK AGAIN

gnabgib 6y ago

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) [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/ https://lwn.net/Articles/827233/

dang 6y ago
Ok, we've changed to that from https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/61391913?hl=en. Thanks!

bawana 6y ago

is google sinking? Between their mothballing/deletion of services and the obnoxious signup ads on youtube. I am wondering what is going on?

gumby 6y ago
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.
tmpz22 6y ago
No they've just secured their kingdom enough that they can do whatever they want.
wegs 6y ago
It's not doing so hot: 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?

synack 6y ago

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. https://archive.legitdata.co/ https://archive.legitdata.co/ https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/ https://archive.legitdata.co/comp.lang.ada/ https://public-inbox.org/README.html https://public-inbox.org/README.html

sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
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.

CrankyBear 6y ago

No, no, no. These groups and other Usenet groups archives must be preserved. They're our history.

Animats 6y ago

"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future" - Orwell, "1984"

jedberg 6y ago

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.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Like we have whitewashing and greenwashing, I propose the term: Googlewashing - to proclaim “Google would never ...”
coliveira 6y ago
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.
- methodin 6y ago
  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.
- zrm 6y ago
  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.

icheishvili 6y ago

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?

john-shaffer 6y ago
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. [1] https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler
- firebaze 6y ago
  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%.
  - john-shaffer 6y ago
    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.

LockAndLol 6y ago

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.

nabla9 6y ago
Those groups are running on decentralized system and open protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet The problem is that there is no other searchable archives.

haecceity 6y ago

So Google Groups archives usenet stuff? Where are the usenet stuff hosted originally? How do I connect to it without Google Groups?

ghaff 6y ago
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.
icedchai 6y ago
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.

DoctorNick 6y ago

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.

Stubb 6y ago
And each other.
beagle3 6y ago
Potentially far worse - but Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. They sucked the air out of advertising (in cooperation with Facebook) leaving none for others. But I consider that a small loss. Microsoft did that for operating systems, productivity software, stalled the web with IE6, and more. Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > Google is capable of much more damage, for sure. But they haven’t done that damage just yet. That is changing extremely fast.
- walkingolof 6y ago
  > Google did not yet stop progress for 10 years in multiple fields the way MS did. I beg the difference, Gmail have not changed much since I signed up 16 year:ish etc They are all the same, as soon as competition goes away, this happens.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    I'm still upset with them for killing Inbox
    - harha 6y ago
      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.

WoodenChair 6y ago

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?

DanBC 6y ago
Here's what I get: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.forth > Banned Content Warning > 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. There's no content available for me.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Is there means you access and archive it or is too late?
- jjgreen 6y ago
  Forth is pretty grim, but I wouldn't go that far ...

lkirk 6y ago

Is this something that the internet archive would preserve?

fizixer 6y ago

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?

rjsw 6y ago
That isn't how it works, usenet is distributed, you can still access it using non-Google servers.

Ijumfs 6y ago

It was a terrible idea to entrust ANYTHING to Google. Time to de-Google the whole Web.

hosh 6y ago

Maybe it is something that a non-profit dedicated towards preserving knowledge and internet content (such as Internet Archive) should be handling anyways.

fmajid 6y ago

> Usenet predates Google's spam handling tools In fact Usenet predates spam itself, since the first spam (Canter & Siegel) was on Usenet itself in 1994 (I was there).

Havoc 6y ago

I'm hearing a fair bit of chatter in SEO circles about google de-indexing pages so this certainly rings true. I guess there was this unjustified assumption that google only adds & never subtracts.

jolmg 6y ago

> since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google's purchase of Dejanews around 20 years ago Was I naive in thinking that The Internet Archive would have long archived this type of thing?

foresto 6y ago
The Internet Archive is younger than Deja News. Someone would have had to provide the data. Did they? If you want to look, you might start here: https://archive.org/details/usenet https://archive.org/details/usenet
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

staycoolboy 6y ago

On the plus side, evidence of my awful usenet etiquette from the late 80's is disappearing with some of these groups.

jeffbee 6y ago

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.

dabockster 6y ago
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. Brb archiving my Twitter posts
perl4ever 6y ago
>The fact that nobody had enough fucks to give to archive these groups Well, you assume. Maybe it was just decentralized enough you haven't heard about it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ipunchghosts 6y ago

i would like to find the quickbasic archives. anyone know how i can get them?

DanBC 6y ago
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.basic.dos https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/microsoft.public.bas... Not safe for work!!!

mark_l_watson 6y ago

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.

NewEntryHN 6y ago

Either this archive exists elsewhere, either now is not the proper time for panic -- it was when Google became sole owner of this archive.

rurban 6y ago

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.

bawolff 6y ago

Maybe these types of historical archives can be turned over to internet archive. I trust them a lot more than google for this.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

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.

photon-torpedo 6y ago

Guess comp.lang.lisp has too many posts with (((code))) in them... ;)

DonHopkins 6y ago

Since when were Forth and Lisp historical programming languages??! People still use them. HARUMPH!

velosol 6y ago
If it makes you feel better, comp.lang.python is also blocked: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.python/
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  No, because I like Python too, but it would make me feel much better if comp.lang.perl was blocked.

imhoguy 6y ago

Anyone looking for a hobby? It is time to become a data hoarder https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Thank god. I said some really dumb shit on those lists in my youth that I regret.

ZinniaZirconium 6y ago

alt.sex is still there and you don't get an adult content warning unless you choose the desktop version.

rdiddly 6y 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."

StavrosK 6y ago
Google has definitely failed. Finding anything that's not frecent is basically impossible.

userbinator 6y ago

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.

SyneRyder 6y ago
> do not care about the past... 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) https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdox6H7FJBU&t=955s The segment starts at 16:00 in the video and is about 2 minutes long.
- Lammy 6y ago
  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-segregation-story.html http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2020/06/repost-personal-s...
jolmg 6y ago
> almost all tech companies simply do not care about the past You may be surprised that it's not just companies. It's not hard to find people who think it's better for old stuff to just be deleted.

Igelau 6y ago

If an AI decided to shut off comp.lang.lisp, I'd say it's officially too late to solve the Alignment Problem.

smsm42 6y ago

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.

summerlight 6y ago

https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=%22comp.lang.forth%22+%22comp.lang.lisp%22&sort_by= https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&... 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.

__void 6y ago
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 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...
__void 6y ago
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.

msie 6y ago

WTF Google? Are you now so full of young programmers who have no respect for programming history? You’ve lost all greek cred that’s for sure.

grappler 6y ago

This kind of thing makes it really easy to get interested, and stay interested, in decentralization tech. Once you see things in this light, the new flavor of the month online service just doesn't hold any allure.

avodonosov 6y ago

There is a comp.lang.lisp archive published in 2009. > In 2009, Ron Garret published a 700MB archive file of all of comp.lang.lisp https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/notes.html

jolmg 6y ago

> Perhaps Google can be convinced to restore the content The support ticket was deleted, so I guess not.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Arjuna144 6y ago

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! This is really bad marketing

sara889 6y ago

KBC LOTTERY https://www.sonyprize.com/winners https://www.sonyprize.com/winners

LucasWilliam 6y ago

So far....

cptnapalm 6y ago

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.

quantified 6y ago

(Repeating one of the comments from the post): > Has anyone (EFF?) considered the aspect of destroying evidence of prior art in the public domain? I think there’s a case to be made for stewardship of these groups for that reason.