I for one believe in duplication, and not relying on a single source. 

All the artifacts survive today because they were scattered to the winds and found again. 

Plus when building a database having 10gb of human entered data is invaluable. 

I should add that the first public listing of hack on Google is missing the last part.  But it's in the utzoo archive. 

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack_1.0

So the google stuff is incomplete. 

Besides it's fun to re-read the world when the rumours of Spocks iniment death in the next movie circulated, and fans petitioned to save him, or even the fallout of Tienemen square, and how it parallels in reddit.  

I should also add now that Intel is purging all their old drivers and documents online, even a company with a vested interest in their own past doesn't care. 

Google is sunsetting their cloud printing after being up for a decade. It's only a matter of time before they find past free speech inconvenient and problematic and terminate groups. 

TLDR is that data needs to be shared, not made inaccessible by one company, and the Google usenet thing is incomplete. 



On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 5:33 AM +0800, "Larry McVoy" <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 01:06:45PM -0800, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 03:49:58PM -0500, Henry Bent wrote:
> > 
> > Has anyone definitely proven that any of the contents of these files are
> > not in the searchable Google Groups interface?  I don't really see any need
> > to duplicate their efforts. 
> 
> That data is essentially unavailable to people without Google accounts.
> Even back when it was, the search had degraded to the point where you
> could paste explicit quotes from messages and those messages would not
> be in the results page.
> 
> I wholeheartedly see a need to duplicate (and surpass) their efforts. The 
> Deja News service was wonderful; Google's implementation is not.  Even if
> someon were to convince them to improve it, they've demonstrated they're
> not a good company to rely on for long-term availability of services
> that are not active surveillance vehicles.

Amen.