Twitpic Data Will Stay Alive “For Now” Thanks to an Agreement with Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Twitpic Data Will Stay Alive “For Now” Thanks to an Agreement with Twitter

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31 pointscalvin_c8 comments

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Can someone explain to me why no one has scraped all the Twitpic photos and stored them?

Who says no one has done that?

Twitpic blocked access to those trying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472047

Twitpic was brazenly (but not openly) limiting that, ostensibly to preserve whatever remaining value is there.

The will-they-won't-they nature of this shutdown is only being dragged out in an attempt to get an infusion of cash or a small acquisition (that would still be relatively large for the remaining stakeholders).

In other words, there was probably an expectation of acquisition before, it didn't happen, money got scarce and now there's a short sale. I don't know if it will work, but if not it will be a long time before the data is opened up for posterity.

I'm not sure if this is logical or reasonable for me to think this way, but this whole fiasco is evocative of a terrorist threat.

I know that Twitpic "owns" the data and isn't beholden to users or Twitter, but their attitude really reminds me of a hostage situation.

If you upload your data to a server then that data ceases to be under your control. This is the major downside of any cloud based service and you're going to have to decide before you upload/invest if that's what you want to do.

Terrorist threats hit random bystanders in violent ways, this has 0 to do with any of that, everybody involved should have known what they were getting into.

ArchiveTeam has been, first we were grabbing full pages and images and storing them, but wound up with IP bans (Not unexpected), so a couple of people went through and grabbed the first 500 million images directly from CloudFront, they're still sitting on that 55tb of data.

Following that TwitPic then removed all images from showing on their site and required signed requests to load images from CloudFront so the remaining 300m images can't be fetched yet.

Today TwitPic restored the images and such to their site so AT is stepping back, rewriting their scripts to properly grab pages/images/metadata and will start from the most recent image working backwards and properly store them/removing the earlier grabs as we replicate them.

In the end the data will probably reside in offline storage at the Internet Archive until something happens to the TwitPic site.

Props to the #quitpic team for working on this.

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