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Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m8s 6y agoWhy?
- ve55 6y agoWho knows. There are so many algorithms and people at play in the decisions to ban things on large platforms that most people that work at the organization itself won't even be able to tell you who or what, specifically, was responsible. That's why this gets posted to HN with hope that enough relevant people will notice such that remediation has a real chance of occurring, because with a normal 'appeal' your chances are basically nil regardless of how incorrect the ban was.
- rbetts 6y agoUnsafe content.
- jacquesm 6y agoPredictable :)
- CydeWeys 6y agoIf I had to guess at a moment's notice, I'd say some kind of spam/malicious content tripped some kind of automated trigger. Hopefully it can be fixed soon. Usenet unfortunately harkens back to the era before there were bad actors at all and thus has the same vulnerability to spam and other issues as email does. I bet it's something along those lines.
- vvern 6y agoUndefined behavior ;)
- dionian 6y agoI can't figure this out either. Is the internet now dead?
- shiftoutbox 6y agoThe hackers !!!!
- chmod775 6y agoIf that group was relying on Google, that's on them at this point. If you use any Google product, you better have an alternative ready. There's no telling when Google will either shut the product down, or just ban you.
- jcranmer 6y agocomp.lang.c is a Usenet forum, that Google Groups provides access to. You can access it from any NNTP server that provides the core of Usenet without using Groups, and it's better not to use Google's horrible interface anyways.
- mnd999 6y agoI guess I’m getting old but I’m always amazed when people don’t know what Usenet is. Or at least aren’t able to spot a Usenet group by name.
- Silhouette 6y agoEvery ISP I used a decade or two ago had its own Usenet server. No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use. It's hard to blame them, with modern Web-based discussion forums able to do better in almost every way, but that's a lot of freely available information and insight about a lot of subjects that is being consigned to history. Maybe one of the official national libraries is at least keeping an archive of old Usenet content, though I'm not aware that any of them is (at least, not making the archive publicly available at present).
- marcus_holmes 6y agoLast time I used an actual usenet group must have been around 2000 or so. I have no idea how I'd set up NNTP and get to a group now. Not that it wouldn't take me long to work it out, but I'd have to start from first principles.
- dsr_ 6y agoOh, Google. You never quite figured out adulthood, and now senescence is setting in.
- threevox 6y agoQuite aptly put. It's entering the "ending with a whimper" phase
- a3n 6y agoWe'll know they're done when this happens: "google.com has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content."
- rtsil 6y agoWe're not that far. I've had emails sent by google classified as spam by gmail.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> I've had emails sent by google classified as spam by gmail. Was it wrong, though? (I'm... actually, I meant it as humor but depending on how much you've opted out of it's probably true)
- rtsil 6y agoThe emails asked me if I still want "less secure apps access" to be on for a couple of gmail accounts so I'm pretty sure they were wrong in that case.
- liquidise 6y agoGreat word. For those like me: senescence (noun) the condition or process of deterioration with age. • loss of a cell's power of division and growth.
- jacquesm 6y ago"comp.lang.c has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content." Hehe. Insert Rust joke here.
- benibela 6y ago70 percent of all security bugs are caused by comp.lang.c
- zucker42 6y agoThey should try rewriting their forum to be about rust.
- jacquesm 6y agoI think you win the prize.
- rdescartes 6y agounsafe { comp.lang.c }
- forgot-my-pw 6y agoFor some reason the first post there is "Is Covid19 pandemic a Hoax?". So it probably triggered something with the bot.
- jetrink 6y agoThe same thing happened last July to comp.lang.forth and comp.lang.lisp. https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913 https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913
- CydeWeys 6y agoGood thing the precedent here is that they were reinstated.
- KirillPanov 6y ago> https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913 https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913 "This question is locked and replying has been disabled." Gee, lovely.
- astrange 6y agoLisp still might be popular if the Usenet group got banned back in the day. Lisp developers were famously incredibly rude for some reason and if you asked a question a guy named Erik Naggum would write essays screaming at you and tell you to kill yourself, then everyone else would call him "a character". I sort of think this is why people stopped using the language. Eventually they calmed down and now everyone seem to be genuinely nice. I personally just had to live through a later period, where they didn't scream at you, but instead just constantly implied they were smarter than you in every way because you wrote in "Blub" or "Javascript".
- etc-hosts 6y agoI still remember when he compared Scheme to The Bell Curve "well, enough marketing for Scheme. once you try it, you'll understand. be warned that lots of people approach Scheme the same way they approach controversial books (The Bell Curve comes to mind): they don't read it, they don't know any of the things it actually says, but they have a hell of a lot of opinions about it."
- hu3 6y agoProbably some automated spam detector got it banned. Here's the ban message for posterity: https://i.imgur.com/0lFapQ1.png https://i.imgur.com/0lFapQ1.png
- themihai 6y agoPeople should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.
- fatbird 6y agoThis is an interesting point: that a commitment to practical free speech for everyone, everywhere, will tend towards consolidation of platforms and natural monopolies. Cancellation, deplatforming, etc. might actually drive platform diversity and innovation which will, in turn, further freedom of expression far more effectively than public pressure to tolerate everything.
- papa_reton 6y agoThe Paradox of Tolerance comes to mind, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
- cambalache 6y agoCareful , it will also drive to isolationism, echo-chambers and the quashing of controversial dissenting opinions. If you dont think right now we have opinions as controversial as "Gay people should be able to marry each other if they want" was 100 years ago,an opinion which right now we consider almost self-evident, I would urge you to think harder.
- pm24601 6y ago> it will also drive to isolationism, This separation would be good. It would mean that LGBTI humans would be able to find their own communities without cispeople getting weirded out. Right now everything about my gender is verboten because it is sexualized. Overreliance on youtube means that medical information around gender issues has to be "coded" so as to not trigger banning. Facebook outs people with their stupid names rules that puts real people in real danger. If everyone was being deplatformed then there would be the platform diversity needed.
- MattGaiser 6y agoOutside of Hacker News, Google's moderation gets a lot less attention, whether it be regarding spam or politics or the complexities of managing communities. I waver between Google's aggressive algo moderation being just because they don't see it as a priority to fix or because overzealous moderation might actually be a better strategy when dealing with a relatively casual userbase. Overmoderate and get a few wrong, but make sure that those errors have a path to resolution if they are popular enough (basically Hacker News). Otherwise when in doubt, ban.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoIf they get it wrong with under moderation then they get people complaining they're allowing nazis, spam, baby eaters, etc. This affects ads. If they get it wrong with over moderation people just think they're stupid. This does not affect ads.
- MattGaiser 6y agoIt also never blows up into a major story. Most news stories about Twitter, Facebook, and even the few about YouTube have been about them failing to ban X. Overmoderate and the criticism comes in bit by bit.
- bachmeier 6y agoThat's natural, because the cost of mistakes in the two directions is not remotely close to symmetric. A few delayed messages to comp.lang.c is not the equivalent of [really bad thing].
- Animats 6y agoThose were USENET groups. Then Google started acting like they owned them. Eventually, Google did own them.
- mnd999 6y agoIt’s pretty depressing, particularly in light the current clamour for decentralisation. Everything new is old I guess.
- nottorp 6y agoAnother victory for Machine Learning!(tm).
- visarga 6y agoNah, if we're going to blame the tools then I blame the C language without which ML would not be possible.
- zafiro17 6y agoOn behalf of Usenet users everywhere, this is excellent news, and I wouldn't be surprised if Usenetters begin stuffing other useful newsgroups with crap in order to removed from Google as well. Google's assimilation of Usenet content had promise at first but quickly turned into a dystopia and the general consensus on Usenet is that Google has been a disaster for Usenet.
- _kst_ 6y agoGoogle had the most complete archive of comp.lang.c (and the rest of Usenet). That archive is now inaccessible. Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped. If Google made its archive of all Usenet newsgroups available, I'd be fine with them dropping the posting interface. (And some users actually managed to post to comp.lang.c through Google Groups without breaking things.)
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago> "... complete archive of ... Usenet" <sotto voce> Usenet postings were never meant to be permanent. I was there in its heyday and nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.
- hvocode 6y agoYup. I've met a number of old farts like me who were not thrilled when what we assumed was transient had been archived. I'm not a big fan of the opt-out model of archiving where archivers just assume that they have implied consent to grab anything and everyone from everyone who hasn't explicitly said no.
- andybak 6y agoDunno. History matters and historians would probably strongly disagree. Some things are more important than you think. Too much gets lost too easily.
- john_moscow 6y agoI am wondering if we could solve the current madness with arbitrary content policing by waiving copyright protection for monopolistic platforms and enforcing interoperability. Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content, and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some content, the fork could easily show it from a backup, leading the users to quickly flee the over-restrictive platform to the fork with the most reasonable moderation. As a nice side effect, this would kill the rotten ad-based revenue model where everything is free, but your data is sold to the highest bidder. Ad-blocking forks would quickly take over the originals, so in order to be profitable, the original platforms would have to charge the costs to the users directly (or to the forks that would pass them to the users with a possible markup for their added value). That said, it would be completely against the interests of the VC crowd that wields considerable political influence, so I cannot imagine this happening in the U.S. Europe is another story though.
- jorams 6y agoMonopolistic platforms don't own the copyright on user-generated content. The users do, and they license it to the platform.
- qwertay 6y agoThats true but the license users agree to usually says they grant the platform full rights. Users still retain their rights but you would have to contact every reddit user for their permission individually.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- notahacker 6y agoSo I pay my monthly subscription to FAANG which obliges me to allow every spammer in the world to syndicate my content, and the result is that conversations I start have replies spread across an unlimited number of platforms, each with their own EULA. Jeez, and I thought the status quo of social media verged on dystopic...
- zabzonk 6y agoTo be honest, the unmoderated (those not ending in .moderated) usenet groups were always a bit a home for flame fests - nothing particularly to do with Google. Speaking as a contributor (not to flames, or at least I hope not much) way back when.
- ridiculous_fish 6y agoSome fun comp.lang.c history: Dennis Ritchie posted, sharing an extremely early version of a C compiler. Richard Heathfield (well known C book author) jokingly chided Ritchie for posting something off-topic, as it was not part of ANSI C. In typical Usenet fashion, this triggered a huge thread, arguing over the appropriateness of the joke. Even Linus Torvalds got involved. Apparently Heathfield emailed Ritchie privately to apologize, and Ritchie's response is well known to anyone in clc: "Usenet is a strange place." Original thread: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wbzzoySmeMk https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wbzzoyS... (I believe it was crossposted to clc) Some discussion of the saga: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie RIP dmr
- blt 6y agoThis is hilarious. I could see something similar happening on HN today.
- ineedasername 6y agoIt shouldn't matter whether or not it's hilarious. Attempts at humor often fall flat on the internet and are somewhat frowned on per HN guidelines. You're objectively wrong and anyone who agrees should chime in to say so. Disagree? Fine, but come to this thread to tell us why. #s
- vlovich123 6y agoHumor is an integral part of the human experience and connecting with someone else. Saying “ban humor” leaves the community very sterile.
- Minor49er 6y agoYou missed the "#s" at the end of the parent post
- 6y ago
- disposekinetics 6y agoIs there a standard way to get Usenet access these days?
- mnd999 6y agoNNTP is a standard. I use eternal-september.
- rleigh 6y agoI joined a couple of years back, but came away disappointed. All the groups I followed 20 years back are pale shadows of their former selves, filled with spam. And most of those were big in the day and included the comp.lang.c|c++ and a few of the comp.os groups. There's still a need for usenet, and I'd love to participate if there was anyone worth talking to. But it needs fixing first.
- cratermoon 6y ago> filled with spam I was there for Canter & Siegel https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/ https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/ My first usenet post, sometime in the late 80s, was in a discussion about a possible future "digital newspaper"
- pferde 6y agocomp.misc is still going strong. It has been "taken over" by people running away from Slashdot when it got "corporatized" some years back, and has some interesting discussions from time to time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _wldu 6y agoC is a dangerous language, but I would not ban discussions about it.
- zoomablemind 6y agoNot that the comparison is equal, but imagine if one day the stackoverflow et al. went dark for good... (horror!) How many important projects would suddenly need to extend their deadlines, how many hopeful interviews would go bust. How many coding approaches would have to be re-discovered or written anew based on present best-practices. Where all that collective need for "tribal-knowledge" would channel to?
- manicdee 6y agoDonald Knuth, “The Art of Computer Programming” would grow more volumes by guest writers, perhaps.
- jozefjarosciak 6y agoHi Folks, I have archives of comp.lang.c group going back 35 years (1986-2021) and when I saw this news I decided to prioritize this one and just started synchronizing it into my archive. In a couple of hours, you should be able to see all of the posts ever made to: comp.lang.c group over at my Usenet Archives: Here it is, enjoy: https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.c&y=0&r=0&p=1 https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.c&y=0&r=... BTW. I just reworked entire architecture of the site, which unfortunately also means I have to re-synchronize over 1 billion posts back into the archive. That will take some time, but anyways, just wanted to tell you that I prioritized this group. Enjoy!
- nvr219 6y agoNowadays if the answer to my problem isn't in the first stack exchange answer in the first google result I just give up! Imagine having to post on usenet!
- vzaliva 6y agoFirst of all, thank you for making this available. However without Search functionality the utility of this archive is very limited.
- zikzak 6y agoIs Google indexing the content? Maybe you can search it that way.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago"site:usenetarchives.com" has a bunch of results, so it seems so.
- jozefjarosciak 6y agoHello, and thanks for your words, much appreciated. As far as search capabilities, it's a bit tricky to create a fast search, when you have over billion posts full of text to search through. But I am working on putting together a text search within a specific group, which seems to be working pretty fast. I should have it completed in a week or two.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 6y agoI dunno, you can write malware easily with C if you're not careful with pointers, memcpy, etc. The code samples have to be full of it.
- bovermyer 6y agoWell I mean you can also write "malware" easily with styrofoam and gasoline in the right ratios. You can also make some sweet wargaming terrain with styrofoam and fuel a car with gasoline.
- mdani 6y agoAnother case of ML based moderation. This ML based judging with no appeal must end. I was only mildly disturbed so far, but when it started affecting me personally, it really hit home. I wrote a book on third battle of Panipat and when I tried to advertise it on Facebook, the ML banned me because it thought that I am violating their guidelines and promoting violence. Alas, it can't differentiate between a 260 year old battle and today! And there is no way to talk to a human. If this is the way we continue, then no history books can be advertised since invariably our past has been filled with violence.
- pts_ 6y agoNeeds a blockchain and AI based classification cluster.
- guerrilla 6y agoExcuse my ignorance but was comp.lang.c active? Is any of Usenet still active? I haven't used it in like 20 years and wouldn't even know which NNTP host to connect to.
- welterde 6y agoIt still looks fairly active - not completely drowned out by spam coming from google.. As for NNTP access: eternal-september.org might be an option, but there are still quite a few NNTP servers ticking with open registration.
- technick 6y agoGoogle should be made to review and justify every ban since they have have the majority of world power at this point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pwdisswordfish6 6y agoWhat a time to be alive when a Usenet newsgroup is now referred to as a ‘Google Group’.
- pantalaimon 6y agoThis time the proponents of 'safe' languages have gone too far.
- teddyh 6y agoUnrestricted goto considered harmful.