[HN Gopher] Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
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Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
Author : veltas
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-02-13 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| [deleted]
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| Some 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/wbzzoyS...
| (I believe it was crossposted to clc)
|
| Some discussion of the saga:
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie
|
| RIP dmr
| disposekinetics wrote:
| Is there a standard way to get Usenet access these days?
| zafiro17 wrote:
| On 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_ wrote:
| Google 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 wrote:
| > " _... 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.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Yeah, Dejanews was the harbinger of the archiving
| apocalypse. I added X-No-Archive: Yes to have dejanews
| throw away my posts the _instant_ I learned about it, and
| then later on when Google bought dejanews and gave us all a
| one-time "opt out or be archived forever" chance, I was
| able to purge all the rest.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is hilarious because Google is probably the largest user
| of C++ and has the most people on the C++ standards
| committees .
| dialamac wrote:
| This is about C, not C++. Though I haven't been there in
| years, I chuckle to think what would have happened if you
| made this mistake on that news group.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Funny and sad at the same time. It my sound trendy, but I think
| we'll eventually learn to use blockchain to avoid this kind of
| problems.
| john_moscow wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Monopolistic platforms don't own the copyright on user-
| generated content. The users do, and they license it to the
| platform.
| qwertay wrote:
| Thats 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.
| m8s wrote:
| Why?
| ve55 wrote:
| Who 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 wrote:
| Unsafe content.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Predictable :)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Undefined behavior ;)
| shiftoutbox wrote:
| The hackers !!!!
| chmod775 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| comp.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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Every 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 wrote:
| Last 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.
| u801e wrote:
| I was regularly posting to several groups as late as
| 2014.
|
| But setting up access is no different than configuring a
| mail client.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| That, and the fact that the bulk of Usenet traffic is
| encoded binaries of copyrighted media and porn of varying
| levels of legality. The amount of traffic in the "big 7"
| hierarchy (like comp.*) is tiny compared to that.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I never got how this works. All of those encrypted
| binaries can only be decrypted using keys posted to
| private invite-only forums/groups. What's the point in
| making that extra detour through "binary usenet
| providers" compared to just having a private tracker?
| u801e wrote:
| > No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all
| been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use.
|
| The event that lead to a lot of ISPs dropping their NNTP
| service was when Andrew Cuomo, when he was the attorney
| general of New York, made a deal with several ISPs to
| block access to child porn[1].
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/technology/10iht-
| net.1.13...
| asveikau wrote:
| It was probably hard for an ISP to justify when dejanews,
| later acquired and transformed into google groups, was
| providing adequate access.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's hard to justify when 99% of ISP's current customers
| will never understand what usenet is no matter what.
| u801e wrote:
| But if you want to find a particular post, it really depends
| on the retention policy of the server you use. Free ones may
| have a year of retention. Commercial one's have 12 years or
| so. The only one that I know of where one can find posts
| further back than that is Google groups.
| makomk wrote:
| You can access the current posts from any good NNTP server,
| but Usenet isn't used that much these days anyway. What's
| more interesting is the historic posts from its heyday and I
| think Google might own the only good archive of them by
| virtue of purchasing it.
| sgt wrote:
| At some point Google will ask themselves why they are
| spending money on running Google Groups in the first place.
| They may just decide to pull the plug.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's the default trajectory for most things that google
| acquires. It gets ingested with a lot of fanfare, then gets
| integrated in some half assed way, you get a lot of funny
| colors you never cared about in the first place and
| eventually it just withers. Dejanews used to be a fantastic
| resource, and beat the pants of the likes of stackoverflow.
| Tomte wrote:
| They don't. It's a Usenet group.
|
| Google bought Dejanews and was an acceptable Usenet archive,
| for a time.
|
| Then Google put the Usenet groups under the same umbrella as
| their proprietary groups.
|
| Then their index became spotty (and you could retrieve some
| posts under groups.google.com, but not groups.google.de, or
| vice versa).
|
| Today, Google Groups is near useless for Usenet.
| erlich wrote:
| Google is so bad at product.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Oh, Google. You never quite figured out adulthood, and now
| senescence is setting in.
| threevox wrote:
| Quite aptly put. It's entering the "ending with a whimper"
| phase
| a3n wrote:
| We'll know they're done when this happens:
|
| "google.com has been identified as containing spam, malware,
| or other malicious content."
| jacquesm wrote:
| "comp.lang.c has been identified as containing spam, malware, or
| other malicious content."
|
| Hehe. Insert Rust joke here.
| benibela wrote:
| 70 percent of all security bugs are caused by comp.lang.c
| zucker42 wrote:
| They should try rewriting their forum to be about rust.
| jetrink wrote:
| The same thing happened last July to comp.lang.forth and
| comp.lang.lisp.
|
| https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Good thing the precedent here is that they were reinstated.
| hu3 wrote:
| Probably some automated spam detector got it banned.
|
| Here's the ban message for posterity:
| https://i.imgur.com/0lFapQ1.png
| kaszanka wrote:
| "Back to safety". Gotta love corporate BS
| u801e wrote:
| Based on what I've seen in several groups, a lot of spam comes
| from posts made via Google groups.
| Animats wrote:
| Those were USENET groups. Then Google started acting like they
| owned them. Eventually, Google did own them.
| mnd999 wrote:
| It's pretty depressing, particularly in light the current
| clamour for decentralisation. Everything new is old I guess.
| themihai wrote:
| People should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good
| thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nah, using cloud VMs over Web browsers feels just the same as X
| Windows Terminals to DG/UX central server in 1994, just with a
| prettier interface.
| fatbird wrote:
| This 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.
| cambalache wrote:
| Careful , 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| To 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Outside 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| That'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].
| nottorp wrote:
| Another victory for Machine Learning!(tm).
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