ASCII by Jason Scott

This little purple piece of crap is the screenshot heard around the world.

You know, doing work with Archive Team, you can sometimes (well, often) feel you’re doing amazing work.  We got a nice run against Geocities, got a lot of attention with things, spread the word a bit… you know, heroes and all that. Raise a glass for fallen websites, pride ourselves. We’ve actually saved other stuff besides Geocities, but it’s not the kind of things that get much attention and frankly, some aren’t unique at all – many other people saved various .7z files or collections announced, we just all coordinated to spread the word among our members about grabbing it. So humility is the watchword, as well as quiet dedication to backing up what we can.

With the dropping of this screenshot, however, came a hundred calls for us to “do something” or to simply let us know, knowing we would “do something”.

If you haven’t seen the screenshot before, it was snagged off an internal status meeting amid a multi-hundred-layoff at Yahoo! and leaked to the world, and it revealed the “sunset” of a multitude of services, the “merge” of others, and “make feature” of some other ones.  Obviously “sunset” got the most attention, because that’s the kind of mealy-mouthed language one would expect out of assholes. It’s the same thinking that took “mass firings” to “downsizing” and then made it “rightsizing” because they thought “downsizing” was too negative. Those sort of assholes. The kind that run Yahoo!, in other words.

Before I go further, let me just say to anyone from Yahoo! all prepared to show up in my comment sections or somewhere else defending Yahoo!: Fuck off. If you are seriously working at Yahoo! and seriously think things are going great, and seriously think the criticisms I’ve had for them all this time are in some way not valid, then go back to your cubicle and your office wherever it is and play a few more rounds of solitaire while the cubicle walls are hoisted away, because you are on the goddamned Titanic and waiting for the third iceberg before declaring there’s trouble.

Paul Graham punched the buh-jeezuz out of Yahoo! quite nicely earlier this year, where the punches count: from the inside. I can’t beat that. What I can do is frame the current situation as to how other people reacted to Archive Team when this screenshot got out. Which was people were “sunsetting” in their pants in great numbers.

A lot of people expected us to go DING DING DING and swarm over Yahoo! like locusts. We don’t do that – we have been doing all sorts of work backing up various things, sharing stories and ideas, and when we could, improving the website.  We have no insider ability with companies like this, and we’re definitely not in any shape to foist anything onto a company when they announce they’re killing all their crap to shave a few pennies off the bottom line. So while we’ve geared up a few projects, we don’t exactly blow out press releases upon the shocking news that a company that kills its websites is killing its websites.

Let’s take Delicious. When Delicious showed up on the Sunset Skillet, a lot of people justifiably freaked out. Delicious is a bookmarking site, but also a wonderful interconnected network of slight commentary (not forums, just commentary) and tags, one of the sites that really “got” tags as a secondary layer of informational pointers for URLs.  It’s a good thing. It works well, it does what it’s supposed to, and it’s very efficient to pull data off and put it on. Now, granted, the exporting is access-restricted, but for most people that’s very good and it certainly falls under the Archive Team craziness of “Where Is Your Export”.  So, there was a pretty solid little website there – right about access to data, easy, and efficient. Of course it must be killed.

Yahoo! actually went on the offensive and claimed they weren’t going to kill Delicious but sell it, which makes me laugh, because no such thing could be true – the most glaring reason being that Yahoo’s authentication system infests every one of their properties, and a lot of people on Delicious are using Yahoo IDs. Another is that Yahoo are incompetent assholes.  Back in January of 2009, Archive Team announced that Yahoo! was not to be trusted.  Someone from Yahoo! showed up and said we were wrong. I’m having this image he was fired, as was the entire staff of Delicious. Tell me how you intend to transition a site when you fire everyone first. You don’t. A place buying it would be buying the name and maybe the right to use the software. Maybe. Who would want that?

Anyway, since the thing was announced, I got contacted by a half-dozen discrete entities all intending to pull out as much of Delicious as possible. Some are going their own way, some are interested in working within the Archive Team. Everyone agrees that sitting around hoping Delicious gets sold somewhere isn’t the way to go. So the extracting has begun.

For my own part, I have, as of this writing, pulled out 900,000 usernames out of Delicious. You know… because I could. I’ve been passing them to the other teams. They’re having a wonderful time.

I’m sure there’ll be stories aplenty for the other Yahoo! properties with extractable content.  Maybe I’ll post some thoughts about it, if it warrants it. Archive Team is doing a lot of good stuff, quietly, a lot of it with no intervention from me personally at all. When things are ready, I’m sure they’ll be made available. It is, after all, what we do.

But let’s keep two things in mind.

First, Flickr.

I am, frankly, a mixture of disappointed and sad that after Yahoo! shut down Geocities, Briefcase, Content Match, Mash, RSS Advertising, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo Publisher, Yahoo! Podcasts, Yahoo! Music Store, Yahoo Photos, Yahoo! Design, Yahoo Auctions, Farechase, Yahoo Kickstart, MyWeb, WebJay, Yahoo! Directory France, Yahoo! Directory Spain, Yahoo! Directory Germany, Yahoo! Directory Italy, the enterprise business division, Inktomi, SpotM, Maven Networks, Direct Media Exchange, The All Seeing Eye, Yahoo! Tech, Paid Inclusion, Brickhouse, PayDirect, SearchMonkey, and Yahoo! Go!… there are still people out there going “Well, Yahoo certainly will never shut down Flickr, because _______________” where ______ is the sound of donkeys.

What, because they take your money? Because they’re so big? Because so many people use it and like it? Because it works well? Because it would make Yahoo! look bad? Go ahead, give me some more reasons. Flickr allows you great ability to export all your data. Get used to using it regularly.

Second, Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Video next year. March 2011. March 15, 2011, to be exact. They will delete all user-generated content on that day.

Yahoo! Video was the second-most used video hosting site behind YouTube. Number 2! And all of it, all video, is going to be deleted. Thousands and thousands of videos, many of which are likely hosted nowhere else, completely gone. This is awful. I am almost positive it’ll be beyond the abilities of Archive Team to get even a tiny fraction of all that video. And why are they doing this? Some idiot middle manager’s ideas to cut costs, I’m sure – some “refocusing” of priorities or whatnot, is sitting stuck in the gullet of this decision, never to make any sense.

All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say:

Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.

Great work, guys.

33 Comments

I am going through a massive pile of CD-ROMs I bought on auction. For $40, including shipping, I got something like 200-300 CD-ROMs of shareware, trials, cover disks and random what-have-you.  I had another package from a contributor who sent in his collection, so the number’s probably closer to 300. That’s a lot of historical data!

This marks the big move into cover discs for me, those attached-to-the-front CD-ROMs (later DVD-ROMs) that were able to give you endless demos and promises of great games that may or may not have ultimately materialized. I didn’t go after these much initially, trying just to get all this other data up, but it’s time; many of these cover discs are over a decade old and it’d be good to get them while they’re still gettable.

The number of doubles hasn’t been so bad, and a couple weirdo random ones have shown up, stuff from mars I’ve never heard of that probably sold less than a thousand copies at best and which disappeared into attics and basements soon afterwards. That’s often where the rare stuff shows up, deep in a directory, mis-named, waiting for a robot or a really bored person to find it.

So, there I am, transferring untold buckets of data from PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, and the occasional “best of shareware we yanked from who knows where” when I found a CD-ROM, entitled PowerPak Gold ’92.

Now, what makes it is not the simplistic clip art title or the evocative name (a lot of these CD-ROMs have titles with phrases like “gold”, “power”, “amazing”). It’s certainly not the fact that it has 600 megabytes of shareware on it or that it comes out  pre-designed to be used by BBSes.

No, what makes it is that the price for this single CD-ROM is $90 dollars.

And not just in the form of a price tag stuck to the outside of the case; I mean on the top right of the cover art, the price is printed right into the packaging: $89.95. That is a lot of fucking money for a CD-ROM, of any stripe, much less one that basically has shareware on it and is composed of data taken from public sources. The phrase “highway robbery” is usually used when you have no choice but to buy and are being gouged, and that’s obviously not the case here, but still, the phrase “galactically overpriced” still applies.

I’d have probably never looked at this specific CD twice if I hadn’t seen that price up in the corner, but here I was, interested, so I started doing some research. Things got really fascinating really quickly, so here are some things for you to browse, assuming case law and pornography fall under your Interest Umbrella.

The CD is made by a company called “Florida Lion’s Den”, which I’d never heard of. But in the years since I first started textfiles.com, an awful lot of information has come online and once you get the right “trigger phrases”, searching around can yield all sorts of hits. And more every day. So “Florida Lion’s Den” came right up.

In a court case. A very interesting court case, as it turns out.

Here’s the Google Scholar version.  Either you really like reading case law or you really don’t; as someone who’s gone through the occasional lawsuit, I know enough of the language to not get floored by it and see where stuff went, so I’ll go ahead and summarize for you.

PowerPak ’92 3.0 comes out, as far as I can tell, around May of 1993. (I assume there were previous versions.) A month later, related to said previous versions, the creator of a viewer program named VPIC on there, Robert Montgomery, sends a lawyer letter to them in June of 1993. Lion’s Den ignores this letter, and Montgomery sues them in October of 1993. In November of ’93 he gets an injunction to prevent his program (VPIC) to be used on their products.

The case does not go to court until March 1995, at which point it goes before a jury. The Jury finds Florida Lion’s Den guilty of infringement of VPIC’s copyright, and Montgomery is awarded $30 for trademark violation, and $80,000 for copyright violation. Oh, and $142,000 for lawyers fees, and $6,500 for miscellaneous costs. That’s a lot of money – $228,833.34, to be exact. Naturally, Florida Lion’s Den appeals.

The appeal is finally ruled on in 1999. 1999, six years after the legal proceedings started – apparently this sort of glacial movement occurs in the courts of law, but think of how much computers and communication change between 1993 and 1999. The appeal, by the way, is denied, meaning that Florida Lion’s Den, Blaine Richard (who worked for Lion’s Den) and Rebecca Noga (Propietor of Lion’s Den) owe Robert Montgomery a hell of a lot of cash.

MONTGOMERY v. NOGA (as this case was called) is still cited in a hell of a lot of cases: check out all these hits on Google Scholar.  The killer aspect of the court case was whether Montgomery had truly transformed his shareware program into a commercial program by doing a few additional changes and declaring it copyrighted; the court said he had, even though the amount of changed code was less than 30 percent.

OK, so that’s a lot of money behind this ninety dollar shareware CD, but then the question comes of if Rebecca Noga is starving in a trailer somewhere, eyeing specials on dog food at the local shopper’s mart. Well, that’s probably unlikely.

Looking up her name shows that Florida Lion’s den is behind the Busty Babes CD-ROM series, which was a collection of photos of girls with huge racks which you could put on your BBS and make available for sale. From this, she made a lot of cash. I found an Orlando Sentinel article about her from November of 1994, a year after the lawsuit began from Montgomery, and years before she lost the appeal.

The article’s tone is interesting, because the implication is that she’s a rough-ridin’ lady who is finding herself put down by the suits: “The suits nearly put her out of business, but Noga, a motorcycle-riding, tattooed former firefighter, refused to give up.”

Now, why are the suits putting her down? Well, because her CD-ROMs had images from Disney, Time-Warner, and Playboy, among others. In other words, she was taking photos she didn’t own and selling them for money. A lot. Even though the article mentions she had to lay off half her four person staff, she mentions being on track for making a million and a half dollars for 1995. It also mentions her other CD-ROMs, including one called Ecstacy Hot Pics.

And another court case.

Now, this second court case comes squarely into my interest, because it caused me to lose an interview for the BBS Documentary. Specifically, it caused me to lose any chance of an interview for the BBS Documentary. And just talking about it makes my blood boil.

A sysop who had sold a number of adult CD-ROM was found guilty of obscenity in Oklahoma, including selling CD-ROMs made by Florida Lion’s Den. Here’s the appeal of his sentence that was denied in 1996. The sentence was for 25 years. 25 fucking years. Plus $32,000 in fines. The trial court later got it knocked down to ten years, a $2000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Not surprisingly, when I tracked down this sysop (who ended up spending actual jail time of years from this case), he wasn’t all that hot to speak to me and my documentary. Bulletin Board Systems hadn’t really done well by him, all told. Oh, and as I found out from others, did I mention he had previously won the congressional medal of honor? Yeah, real bad character, there.

Why am I going into all this? Mostly, as I watch various issues get knocked around in the twitterverse, or the blogosphere or the whatever, there’s this sort of light banter quality, a feeling like people are just playing the part of miffed or miffing, acting like it’s all very important and lives are at stake, and yet, at the end, it’s all in good fun.

It’s not in good fun. These little pieces of plastic, these round little nuggets of history I put up on CD.TEXTFILES.COM and related materials I make available – these have some true pain behind them, actual and real pain. There are things you can do in one state or online that will get you in the fucking klink for years in another state. That Jury wanted 25 years of a man’s life because he sold CD-ROMs they didn’t like. They wanted tens of thousands of dollars from him after he got out. Meanwhile a woman stole images from Playboy, Disney and who knows else, sold those same CD-ROMs by the truckload, and made millions.

There’s some fantastic and hilarious stuff in my archives from years gone past. But not all of it is fantastic and hilarious.

Not at all.

8 Comments

I got this back in February from a guy named David, and David was entirely right.

I was just discussing with my co-worker that most of the good old mom and pop computer stores are now gone (having presumably been killed off by the Internet and online shopping).  Granted I’m in Albuquerque, NM and we didn’t have many to begin with but I’m sure it’s happened everywhere.  Anyhow, I definitely think it’s a worthy topic to examine.

At this point in the US, the computer store is the electronics chain big box store, with little exception. Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, even Wal-Mart, Staples, Sears. If you want a washing machine at the same time as you get your laptop, or the idea of picking up a few ties and a Hawaiian shirt along with your hard drive excites you, boy are you in luck.

But obviously this wasn’t always the case – at one point computer stories dotted the landscape and had no other little clone friends dotting other parts of the landscape. I’m sure they hung out and chatted about the ups and downs of computer store ownership, but each one had its own place and its own unique character.

Most people agree that one of the first biggie computer stores was The Computer Mart, run by one Stan Veit.  Stan died earlier this year. (That obituary/rememberance is worth the read, by the way.) From that mid-1970s start, computer stories started appearing in greater numbers, selling off these awesome new machines to eager and money-waving hands. They were stumbly, strange, unique, fun, and individualistic. They hand-lettered signs, proudly put up baggies with software in them, and waited for the customers to come.

I wish they’d taken more photos of them.

There’ll always be a few of these stores around – either a community will be unwanted by the chains or the store will do things at a certain price for older equipment that enough customers will want to go there first for repairs. But the days of a vibrant, center-of-everything show of the latest and greatest coming down the way are over for them.

So thanks, David. I’ll get on it.

9 Comments

In October, Facebook made the announcement that you could finally export your information. Woo hoo!

What’s interests me is less how Facebook implemented the exporting (spoiler alert: so-so) than the fact that they felt they need to do this. Why did they spontaneously decide to add exporting of any fashion?

(If you want the clunky way to download the file, Dave Taylor wrote a walkthrough for it.)

My hope is that this signifies that user data exporting has started the long, arduous journey towards being Just Another Checkmark in the world of marketing and system development. A thing that you are as surprised it’s not there as you might be surprised that the HTML doesn’t work in most browsers. Disappointed, really. Tut-tutting.

I might be a bit too hopeful, of course.

Facebook itself changes interface and features utterly randomly, with no real rollout schedule beyond, well, rolling that crap out. So while it works a certain way today, it might not be there the day after. Who knows.

Export is the process of taking out the data from one entity and preparing it for import elsewhere. It’s meant, ultimately, to allow things to share.

As for how the exporting was implemented in Facebook’s little world, I said so-so and I’ll keep to that. It basically blows out all your photos and creates a bunch of HTML versions of your wall and a couple other items. You don’t get your contacts list, you don’t get any indication of how far back it goes (I found it arbitrary what got saved and what didn’t), and you certainly don’t get it in a format that could easily be imported anywhere else.

But at least it gets out of the walled garden in one form or another. And that’s a good first stumbling step, by Facebook standards.

Huzzah.

5 Comments