Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced a purge on inactive accounts. Musk has cited the reasoning as “freeing [up] the name space” for users who might want a new handle. Musk then went on to assure Twitter that these “1.5 billion accounts” would be accounts which have not tweeted or logged-in for the last few years.

This is very much, an expected move. You might recall from our blogpost a while ago that Musk had expressed interest in purging accounts early in November. It should also be noted that Twitter’s previous management had failed a similar policy change in 2019, to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. That policy change failed due to outrage and protest across the platform.

Well then, should you be worried? Probably not for your own account. Some have expressed concern over the accounts of loved ones or deceased celebrities, which will more easily fit this criteria. If you have such concerns, we can recommend a useful utility from our friend JustAnotherArchivist, called snscrape. snscrape allows you to save public tweets from accounts on Twitter. It also works for a few other websites like Facebook and Reddit.

The code is available at https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape, but if you have Python 3 installed pip3 install snscrape is all you need to install it.

From your terminal or command prompt, the following command will save a local archive of Elon Musk’s tweets:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user elonmusk > muskytweets.json

And if you want another account, just substitute the username and a file to save to:

snscrape --jsonl twitter-user RetroTechDreams > RTD_tweets.json

I might write a more detailed tutorial on snscrape if people are interested.

But for the time being, spread the word! Save what endangered accounts are valuable to you and be sure to tell all of your friends about snscrape.

This new era of Twitter has been quite turbulent, to say the least. More than half of the workforce has been fired or has quit, and site functionality is becoming unstable, as reported by the Seattle Times. Mastodon has emerged as a serious Twitter alternative. In fact, some of those who have departed Twitter now have their own Mastodon instance over at macaw.social. Personally, I am excited about the rise of mastodon as an alternative as I have been posting Data Horde updates over at @[email protected] for about two years now.

So, why not leave Twitter behind and move on? Now, Twitter allows you to request a copy of your personal data: Tweets and all. But it’s probably hard to leave a site that you have been on for over a decade. Especially, when requesting your personal archive is not even working correctly. Many people have reported that archive requests are being ignored or processed with delay. On a test account, we at Data Horde found that it took over 3 days to receive a personal archive.

In 2022 this is a big deal, not only for archivists but also for legality. Article 13 of the GDPR mandates a responsibility to provide a copy of collected data to users (i.e. data subjects) upon request. Outside of Europe, California’s CCPA has a similar clause protecting the right to know.

There are repercussion for not respecting these rules. Recently another messaging app, Discord, was fined 800 000 Euros for failing to respect data retention periods and security of personal data by French Regulator CNIL. That was actually a reduced fine, given Discord’s conciliatory attitude. If Twitter does not up their game, they may meet a similar fate, if not a worser one.

Now that I have your attention, I would like to direct it to the help page on how to request a personal archive from Twitter: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive . Even if a bit unstable, this is what you need to follow to save a copy of your Tweets.

The Twitter archive is big and burly but not perfect. Johan van der Knijff recently wrote a blogpost on some shortcomings, such as the t.co URL-shortener and some workarounds: https://www.bitsgalore.org/2022/11/20/how-to-preserve-your-personal-twitter-archive

Oh, and by the way. It gets worse: Elon Musk has also stated interest in purging inactive accounts and their Tweet history.

This might not seem like a big deal, except to the one or two of our readers who periodically scrape politician accounts off of https://ballotpedia.org. Yet it is actually a serious turning point. Currently, Twitter does not purge inactive accounts, except in the event of death or incapacitation and by special request.

In 2019 there was an attempted Twitter policy change to expire accounts which had not been logged into for 6 months. This sparked outrage across the platform by those who saw this as unfair to the memory of inactive accounts. In particular, fans of deceased K-Pop artist Kim Jong-hyun, otherwise known as Jonghyun (김종현/종현) came to the defence of his legacy overturning the attempt altogether. Turning back on this decision would go against all of that heritage, people’s heritage, Twitter’s heritage, web heritage. Alas this the projected course of things, even if we cannot prevent it, it is perhaps our duty to protest why it is wrong.

What about the extreme scenario of a total collapse of Twitter? What does that mean for web history? Well, the good new is that people have been thinking on this for much longer than before this year.

Already in 2010 the Library of Congress announced that they would be copying the entire internal archive of Twitter, starting from March 2006.

There are also many smaller grabs on the Internet Archive and archive.today, some of which you have seen linked above. Special mention goes to Archive Team‘s periodical Twitter Stream archive.

Last but not least, you can help! The Internet Archive is collecting Tweet dumps from people as we speak: https://archive.org/services/wayback-gsheets/archive-your-tweets Whether you just want extra insurance for your back-up, or to contribute to the wealth of the web you can help by using the above tool to upload your Tweets to the Internet Archive for generations to come.

One thing sadly lost in the transition from desktop to mobile was user-customizability. Winamp, in particular, had a community dedicated to designing and sharing custom skins. Though Winamp has been obsoleted, to some extent, the aesthetic in these skins are certainly a lot more timeless. Preserving that artistic value is the Winamp Skin Collection, with over 72 thousand community made Winamp skins, waiting for your viewing pleasure on the Internet Archive.

The best part? You can run it from your browser, even on your smartphone! The skins in this collection are set up to load Webamp, an open-source HTML5 rewrite of Winamp 2.

From stereo-themed skins, to futuristic devices; and from game fan-art to original designs you’re certain to find the perfect skin for all of your llama-whipping needs! Also be sure to check out the Winamp Skin Museum and the Butterchurn Visualizer!

• Introduction
• Why Are People Leaving WhatsApp
• How To Export Chat Logs
• How To Export Contacts
• How To Migrate Group Chats
• Chat Log Utilities

Introduction

A few months ago WhatsApp’s controversial Terms of Service update led to panic on a global scale. Users who did not accept the new ToS, which would mandate them to allow WhatsApp to share user/usage data with Facebook, faced losing access to their account and contacts. In the heat of the moment, many people who felt their privacy was being invaded switched to newer messaging apps.

Following backlash, WhatsApp has softened its terms. But if you are still looking for some change, or just need help following your friend group, this page has tips to help you emigrate from WhatsApp.

Disclaimer: This page and Data Horde itself were not sponsored or financially endorsed by WhatsApp, Facebook Inc. or any of their competitors at the time of writing. What is presented here is given for informative purposes and not to smear WhatsApp against any particular competitor.

Originally published as https://datahorde.org/the-whatsapp-emigrants-guide/, May 13, 2021.

Why Are People Leaving WhatsApp

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world, so why are people leaving when everyone is still here?

• Privacy Concerns: WhatsApp prides itself with its end-to-end chat encryption which protect users’ chat messages. Yet the app still exposes other kinds of personal data. As mentioned above, the new Terms of Service will allow for data sharing, such as contacts, with Facebook. This has drawn ire from privy folks and privacy regulators.
• The rise of global competitors such as Telegram and Signal which offer more transparency and privacy; as well as regional competitors such as WeChat in China and LINE in Japan.
• Security vulnerabilities and frequent scams circulating.

Click here for the latest Data Horde updates on WhatsApp

If any of the above is concerning to you, or your contact groups, you might want to use a new app to message your contacts, friends and family! Read on to find out how you can export your WhatsApp data.

How To Export Chat Logs

You can export the history for a single chat, contact or group, from the chat options. Fortunately WhatsApp already has a guide on their website. When exporting like this, remember to choose “attach media” to also include photos and other media shared within chat.

Warning!

Google Drive and iCloud backups are not readable outside of WhatsApp. These are only worth your while if you:

A) Plan to switch phones and to continue using WhatsApp.
B) Need a backup in case your phone is damaged, but will continue to use WhatsApp.

Migrating to Telegram

Telegram, one of WhatsApp’s most ambitious competitors, can import WhatsApp chat logs directly. Starting with Telegram 7.4, you can directly migrate your contact/group chats from WhatsApp to Telegram. After exporting, you will be able to see who sent what message when on Telegram, and can continue the conversation as if you had always been using this app in the first place.

How To Export Contacts

Most apps nowadays can read your contacts from your smartphone so you shouldn’t have to add them in manually. As long as your contacts switch to the same messaging apps, you should be able to reconnect soon enough.

That being said, if you would like to make a list of your WhatsApp contacts you can do so from WhatsApp Web, or by using a couple of tools. See iMyFone‘s contact export guide for more details.

How To Migrate Group Chats

It’s one thing for one person to move to a new app, but how do you get your group chat to migrate together? So here are some tips to make the process as easy as possible:

• As mentioned above, Telegram in particular makes it easy to migrate group chats and continue the conversation.
• Talk to your group members to see what messaging apps they already have installed. It’s a lot easier for someone to use an installed app than to try a new one.
• Ask your group admin to change the group description to link the invite for your new group.
• Consider muting, or if you’re feeling naughty kicking, all members from the group to make sure people notice that the old group has closed down.

Chat Log Utilities

Here are some tools you can use to tinker with your chat data liberated from WhatsApp:

• WhatsApp Analyzer: A WhatsApp chat visualizer built in Python. (Source Code)
• PetengDedet/WhatsApp-Analyzer: Analyze WhatsApp chat (Message Count, Domain Mentions, Emoji Rank etc.)

Want us to add a resource to this page? Just send it to [email protected].

Unfortunately, MediaFire doesn’t have a search/discovery feature, relying entirely on search engine traffic and external linking. There’s a lot of undiscovered things on MediaFire, and Pyxia’s mf-dl tool is one of the first tools that we have for exploring it. Read on to learn how to install and use mf-dl to easily download MediaFire files and crawl undiscovered corners of the internet!

Installation

mf-dl follows the usual steps for setting up a python tool:

1. Install Python 3 if you don’t already have it on your device.
2. Clone the mf-dl repository from https://gitgud.io/Pyxia/mf-dl.git using a git client. Alternatively download the repo and unzip it.
3. Using a terminal, cd into the mf-dldirectory and run python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt.

Downloading Files with mfdl.py

mfdl.py is a bulk-downloader for MediaFire links. You may have found these links yourself, copied them from your bookmarks or possibly scraped them beforehand. At any rate, mfdl.py will download the contents and metadata for a list of links that have already been collected.

The input is a sequence of links and can be any file separated by spaces, new-lines or commas. Ideally, you might want to use a spreadsheet-friendly CSV file. For this tutorial, copy the table below into Excel, or another spreadsheet editor, and save it aslinks.csv.

Next we will need an output directory to save mf-dl’s grabs. mf-dl does not have permission to create new directories, so you will have to create a new folder if the destination doesn’t already exist. For demonstration’s sake we will create/output directory under mf-dl.

To run mfdl.py, execute the following command from inside your terminal and mfdl.py will begin downloading the contents of the input links into the output directory.

> python3 mfdl.py output links.csv

Protip #1: Increasing Download Throughput
mfdl.py can download several files concurrently. By default, mfdl.py runs 6 threads; so that means that it will initiate 6 synchronous downloads at a time. If you have a high network bandwidth, you might want to increase the number of threads to maximize your downloading speed. Or if MediaFire is upset with your frequent downloads and is throwing CAPTCHAs your way, you can decrease your thread count. Use this modified version of the mfdl.py call to change your thread-count.

> python3 mfdl.py --threads NEWTHREADCOUNT output links.csv

Protip #2: Multiple Input Files
All arguments after the output are treated as input files. If you have links split across several files, you can simply concatenate them to the end of the command.

> python3 mfdl.py output links.csv links2.csv links3.csv

Scraping MediaFire links with web_crawler.py

web_crawler.py is a utility for discovering new MediaFire links. That’s right, links not files.web_crawler.py does not download the corresponding files and we will need to later feed the outputted links into mfdl.py.

Setting up web_crawler.py is a bit more straightforward. Then we need a seed URL to initiate the crawl. Any site with downloadables will make for a nice link farm. In this case we’ll be using the Minecraft Pocked Edition Downloads site https://mcpedl.com/ as our seed.

To run web_crawler.py, execute the following. Note that web_crawler.py will run indefinitely as new links are discovered, until its execution is interrupted.

> python3 web_crawler.py https://mcpedl.com/ links_found.txt

Protip #1: Feeding Back Links
You can feed links found using web_crawler.py intomfdl.py with

> python3 mfdl.py output links_found.txt

In fact, if you’re familiar with Crontab, you can schedule periodicmfdl.py jobs to download new links as they are added to links_found.txt. This away, you can continue to download new links, without ever stopping web_crawler.py.

Protip #2: Depth Control
You can limitweb_crawler.py‘s search by specifying a filter. If you want to keep your search to mcpedl.com, ignoring out-links to facebook etc. you can --filter https://mcpedl.com.

> python3 web_crawler.py --filter https://mcpedl.com https://mcpedl.com/ links_found.txt

Alternatively, you can specify --regex option if would rather filter with regular expressions instead.

Protip #3: Thread Control
web_crawler.py can also run on multiple threads, 6 by default. You can choose the number of maximum threads you want to use by, again, specifying the --threads option.

> python3 web_crawler.py --threads NEWTHREADCOUNT https://mcpedl.com/ links_found.txt

Have any more questions? To learn more about MediaFire archiving, check out the MediaFlare project!

Thankfully, owing to the efforts of the Save Yahoo Groups Project and Archive Team the data of many groups has been preserved. If you missed out on the GYD tool, you might still be able to retrieve your groups’ data by following the steps below.

To begin, can you remember your group’s name? If yes, the following steps will go by a lot faster; but if not, you might want to make a list of potential names to go by. Was the name of your group Fireflylovers, or Firefliers, or LoversofFF? Write down all likely candidates.

For demonstration’s sake let’s search for data on NFforKids, a non-fiction writing group.

Let’s perform a metadata search, to see when NFforKids was started. Head over to the Yahoo Groups Metadata Collection page on the Internet Archive. Ignoring the no preview warning, either click on Show all files or scroll down until you see DOWNLOAD OPTIONS on the right side of the page.

Click on COMMA-SEPARATED VALUES, to reveal a list of files. Since NFforKids starts with an N, if it does exist, it will be indexed under master_N.csv. Download this CSV file to your device.

You can now open this CSV file using Excel or another spreadsheet program. Search for NFforKids to find the corresponding information row. What do you know? NFforKids was started on 11 June 2000. You can scroll accross this row to find the group’s primary language, the category of the group, if the group was public or not, and more!

If you weren’t able to find metadata on your group, it’s time to pull up that list I told you to make above. Fall back to the other candidates and try another name. If the first letter (or two) of this second name is different, you will need to download the corresponding CSV file before resuming your search.

Please note that while the Yahoo! Groups collections on the Internet Archive are thorough, they are NOT exhaustive. It is entirely possible that data on your group might have been missed. That being said the metadata collection sports a whopping 1.1 million groups. Even if you weren’t able to find your group in the first round, it is very likely that you may have misremembered the name, so keep on trying!

Once you have confirmed the name of your group, and that it has been catalogued in the Metadata Collection, you can then download the corresponding TAR file, which contains even more details. Again, if we’re looking for a group called NFforKids we’ll be looking for the first two letters from the list. That’s NF.tar for NFforKids.

If you’re on Mac or Linux, you should be able to open this .tar file to reveal a folder titled media. If you’re on Windows, you can use 7-zip to open it. This TAR file contains the same information as the CSV, plus additional details. Did the group have spam filtering, was media sharing allowed or was the group text-only? You might even find the URL for group images, although unfortunately most of those links are now dead.

Stats are fine and dandy, but what about messages or activity? If your group was restricted, tough luck, you’ll need to find a member who made a GYD copy before the shutdown. This is where our luck with NFforKids has run out, seeing as chats of the group were not public. For the final step, let’s switch to a public group whose history is visible. We’ll go with nfwritersontheirwayup. Messages in this group were visible to all subscribers, so archivists were able to grab its contents.

Raw data collections are stored in assorted, non-alphabetic, batches. To see if a group has its raw data available on the Internet Archive, simply query subject:"yahoo groups" nfwritersontheirwayup. If you get any results, your group’s raw data is most likely located here. You can double check the item description to be sure that nfwritersontheirwayup is indeed included in the batch.

Pop open the WEB ARCHIVE GZ download option from the left side of the page. Scroll down until you see nfwritersontheirwayup.bcqkJvN.warc.gz and proceed to download. To unpack this gzip you can use thegzip -d nfwritersontheirwayup.bcqkJvN.warc.gz command on Unix systems or good old 7-zip on Windows.

Last but not least, you’ll need a WARC viewer. If this is your first time with WARCs replayweb.page is very straightforward and runs right out of your browser. Simply upload the WARC contents of the group and voila, you can now navigate through the group’s chat logs.

Recovering your Yahoo! Groups from yesteryear is as simple as that. Got any questions? Or perhaps you have made some worthwhile discoveries while group hunting. Comment below!

Many members of the Flash community have come up with workarounds to continue to run .swf files in the post-EOL era. Read on to find a workaround that best suits you!

Do you still use Flash Player? Data Horde is conducting a survey to see how frequently people continue to use Flash Player even at the very end of its lifespan. It would mean a lot to us if you could spare 5-10 minutes to complete a very short survey.

Emulation:

It’s still possible to run Flash Media (.swf files) without actually using Flash Player. Two mature Flash Player emulators are Ruffle (ActionScript 1&2) and Lightspark (ActionScript 3). Ruffle even has an online demo if you’d like to see it in action before installing.

You can find a more thorough list of emulators in the Flash Player Emergency Kit.

Chrome Flags:

If you’re using any version of Google Chrome, up to and including Google Chrome 87, you might not have to install anything at all! You should be able to continue to use an older version of Flash Player which was immune to the effects of the EOL Killswitch.

Simply run Chrome with the --allow-outdated-plugins flag:

# On Windows:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --allow-outdated-plugins

# On Mac:
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --allow-outdated-plugins

# On Linux
google-chrome --allow-outdated-plugins

# For instructions on how to specify flags on other systems see http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/run-chromium-with-flags

Downgraded Firefox:

In addition to the EOL killswitch, Adobe have gone out of their way to remove downloads for previous versions of Flash Player from their website. That being said, there are ways to acquire a past versions of Flash Player, immune to the EOL killswitch.

An out-of-the-box solution is to install Waterfox, a modern fork of Firefox which also supports a lot of legacy features including Flash Player. Another option is Basilisk, up to version 2020.11.25 anyway.

If you would rather stick to a more traditional approach, u/Cifra85 made a Reddit post on how to install a portable Firefox Browser which comes bundled with an older version of Flash Player:

If you’re concerned about incompatibility, another option is Firefox 78 ESR (Extended Support Release) which will continue receiving updates until September of this year.

Modify Configuration File:

Edit:

Adobe has made it no secret that they intend to offer a killswitch workaround for enterprise customers, via their partner HARMAN, starting February. Leave it to the online Flash community to discover it in January!

Edit 5 May 2021: Consider installing FlashPatch, a tool which greatly simplifies the steps described below.

Spider, an Adventure Quest fanatic, was one of the first people to discover that all it took was a couple of modifications to a configuration file!

If you’re not on Windows, mms.cfg goes in /Library/Application Support/Macromedia on Mac and /etc/adobe/ on Linux. For more details on mms.cfg see Flash Player 32’s manual (page 41).

Flash Player Projector:

Using the Flash Player projectors, it’s possible to run .swf’s outside of a browser, with some minor limitations. Strangely projectors for Windows, Mac and Linux have not been removed from from Adobe’s website and are still available.

Flash Player projectors can be downloaded from Adobe’s Flashplayer Debug Downloads Section, and mirrors can be found on the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive.

Alternative Ways of Running Old Versions of Flash:

Another unique solution is to use the Cloud Browser Puffin, which can render Flash content remotely. Do note that Puffin is not free on every platform.

As a final workaround, you can try running an old version of Flash Player outside of a browser. Although there are a number of third-party archives out there, setting these up can be non-trivial.

Instead we would highly recommend Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint, a Flash game/animation Browser of sorts which comes with a built-in older version of Flash Player.

We hope you were able to find a solution that works for you. If you have any comments or suggestions let us know at [email protected].

Now go on and spread the word! Tell all your friends and family how they can continue to use Flash Player even in 2021!

That being said, it is likely that you have some CDs lying at home. And if you haven’t thrown it away yet, you might have a CD player, possibly even a portable one. So if you are in the mood for an old movie which somehow hasn’t been grabbed by any streaming service yet, you might as well plop your DVD in and grab some popcorn. Assuming that your CD still works, but of course.

As depicted in the thumbnail, CDs have a notorious tendency to get scratched. While a single scratch won’t render the CD entirely unusable, as little scratches accumulate over time it can become impossible for a player to read the disk. Scratches were most often caused by exposure to elements or handling disks improperly (ex. accidentally scratching a disk with one’s nails).

A decade or two ago, there was a debate on whether or not it was safe to leave a disk inside of the CD player. Seeing as there are a lot of moving parts within a CD player, who’s to say these wouldn’t harm a naked disk when the player was turned off? General consensus was that it was perfectly ok, except for cases where a faulty disk tray might lead to complications. But now, seeing as the years have gone by, leaving a CD in the player might not mean leaving it there for only a week, but potentially for months if not years.

At home, we recently found this particular disk you see here, a copy of Barbie as Rapunzel to be precise, left inside of our portable DVD-player, which we rarely ever use. That being said, we do take it with us on car trips once or twice a year and frequently move it around the house every spring cleaning.

And it seems that the years had taken their toll on the disk. What might have been negligible jostling and bumping around have added up to the point where entire chunks of the DVD are no longer readable. We also happened to discover an unreadable (likely misaligned) cassette tape, which we had left in our family Camcorder the last time we were watching it, which was probably a few years ago.

It might seem like common sense to keep CDs in the most secure container possible, as far as preservation enthusiasts are concerned anyway, but sometimes we just leave them inside of the player and forget to take them out, for years. So it’s perhaps a good habit to also check inside of your old media players (not just CD-players for that matter) to see if you have left inside, you might even find something you thought you had lost ages ago.

While the idea of leaving a CD inside of a vintage CD-player to hide in a time capsule for your unsuspecting offspring might seem tempting, don’t. Keep your CDs in a case, plastic sleeve or something meant for containing it, which doesn’t have any other parts inside. And leave it next to the player. Who knows? Maybe your message might reach them after all…

The simplest of Flash games is composed of one file ending with the .swf extension (Small Web Format, previously called ShockWaveFlash). That file contains all of the code and assets (such as artwork, audio, fonts, etc.) and it’s playable using a plugin called Macromedia Flash Player, which was later renamed Adobe Flash Player after it got purchased by Adobe. The coding language that is used is ActionScript, and graphics are usually vector, which is different from your usual image.

Instead of having an image made out of pixels, vector graphics will instead have information on the lines that form the image. That means you can scale a vector and never have to worry about the image becoming blurry because instead of scaling an image made out of pixels, you are scaling an image made out of lines. This will also in some cases reduce the file size.

Speaking of SWF, there are many other uses for Flash content. You have Flash movies, which are animated cartoons, and applets, which are small applications that are integrated in a webpage. Even online video players once used Flash!

Discontinuation of Adobe Flash Player

Flash Player was once the most used and the most needed plugin for your web browser. You couldn’t browse the web properly without Flash Player because tons of things needed it. In recent years though, Flash has declined in usage and Adobe is planning on killing the plugin at the end of 2020.

The trick is simple, just add a ,CC to the end of the search bar:

“your quote here”, CC

This trick allows you to search through YouTube’s closed captions, i.e. video transcripts on videos where they are available.

An alternative method to access this search is to use the FILTER tab, which provides you with even more options for fine-tuning your search. Just choose Subtitles/CC under Features.

The feature has been around for a few years, but it’s a bit of a hit-or-miss. Sometimes YouTube prioritizes tags or descriptions, instead of checking through the transcript. You might still get what you’re looking for, but all this will ensure is the video having closed captions, even if your quote doesn’t appear in the actual video.

Of course not all quotes come from talks. If you’re still unable to find the origin of a quote you’re looking for you might want to check out Quote Investigator.