In the immortal words of Amy Stinson (amys@amys-answers.com):
> Without a whole heck of a lot of fanfare, Y!groups deleted all the
> adult groups with the exception of the humor areas.
>
> I'm guessing that they checked with their attorneys and found that
> hosting adult groups without sufficient controls would leave them
> open for litigation.
Unlikely. They inherited most of those groups when they bought
egroups, which in turn got most of them from onelist. Theres a _lot_
of legal and technical due diligence involved in that kind of
acquisition; the lawyers would have vetted everything long before
then.
A much more likely scenario is that their board of directors,
currently rather punch-drunk from having their stock price hammered
after profit warnings, decided that the current round of bad publicity
over the adult groups/shops on yahoo was the last headache they
wanted, and made a quick decision to pull the plug. Unfortunate, but
I can't really say that I blame them.
Amusing side-note: once upon a time, I was the Postmaster and sr.
sysadmin for Mail.Com, formerly iName, one of the larger free email
providers. Back in the stone ages, before we got our quota system
re-implemented (long, ugly story), one of my tasks was to occasionally
sweep for Grotesquely Large Mailboxes.
One day, we found one that had cropped up out of nowhere; the account
was less than 3 days old. The mailbox had already hit 2 Gigabytes--
the maximum file size that Solaris 2.6 will handle.
After quickly deleting the user, I had a bit of fun analyzing the file
in question -- 90% of its contents had come from _one_ mailing list:
do_my_wife@onelist.com
I was pretty impressed that all that traffic had managed to come
through onelist's servers without any apparent trouble (especially as
a quick check revealed that the list had several thousand
subscribers). I actually tried to pitch mail.com's
mergers/acquisitions department on buying onelist based on the fact
that I wanted to be able to do the technical due diligence on the deal
and see what they were using. :)
-n
------------------------------------------------------------<memory@blank.org>
"There are certain phrases that inspire an instinctive dread in moviegoers:
`Tarantino-esque'; `big in France'; `starring Andy Garcia.'" (--M.E. Williams)
<http://blank.org/memory/>----------------------------------------------------
Follow-Ups:
References:
|
|
