[HN Gopher] Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned ___________________________________________________________________ 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). ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-13 23:00 UTC)