Articles about Yahoo

The 1990s were great -- multiplayer shooters like Doom and Quake were revolutionizing gaming, Friends and ER were on the TV, and we were all enjoying a new, fledgling technology called the World Wide Web.

Before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter came along, there was GeoCities, a web hosting service eventually acquired by Yahoo, that allowed users to place their websites in virtual 'cities'. But if there was one thing that most people remember about GeoCities, it was the animated GIFs.

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San Diego, Calif. As a general rule I never connect to public WiFi networks, which is fine except when attending an event at a hotel ballroom where T-Mobile cellular is like an apparition dancing around a Halloween grave. So as Wendell Brooks, CEO of Intel Capital, begins his speech, I sit typing narrative offline rather than tweeting live. There’s irony, I suppose, reporting old style, about investments in new innovations.

Welcome to the trials and travails of the Intel Capital Global Summit, which kicks off today and goes through October 26. Looking at the lineup, I expect to hear about newfangled tech that would make news reporting so much easier if available—although 4G cellular data would be good enough for today.

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Yahoo users have started to lose faith in the company following the theft of millions of account details and the revelation of collusion with the NSA and FBI. But it is not just users who are becoming disillusioned and looking to move elsewhere -- Yahoo's partners are also concerned.

One such company is StartPage, described as "the world's most private search engine". Concerned by privacy violations, it is ditching Yahoo search results from its metasearch tool Ixquick.eu. The parting of ways will take place by the end of the month, and StartPage CEO Robert Beens believes more companies will follow suit.

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Yahoo has had a dramatic fall from grace in the last couple of weeks. While far from the most popular email service out there, it maintains a relatively healthy user base -- but all of this changed with news of a security breach resulting in the theft of 500 million account details, and the revelation that the company secretly scanned emails for the NSA.

While there has not exactly been a mass exodus away from Yahoo, many users have started to question their loyalty to the company and investigate the alternatives. If you are thinking about abandoning Yahoo, the company has put something of an obstacle in the way -- it has disabled email forwarding, saying the feature is now 'under development'.

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Yahoo has been having something of a rough time of late, and things are not getting any easier. It has emerged that the company created a custom tool to search customers' emails for specific terms as directed by the NSA and FBI.

Reuters shares the story of two former Yahoo employees who say the company complied with a government directive to search through all incoming emails. In response to the revelations, Apple, Google and Microsoft have all denied engaging in similar activity.

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You know that Yahoo breach that just happened recently? The one where 500 million credentials were stolen? Well, a highly respected security researcher claims the hack was done by the same group that breached MySpace, LinkedIn, Badoo, VK.com, and a few others.

The researcher in question is Andrew Komarov, and he told The Register that not only did the same group do all these things, but the number of breached Yahoo accounts is probably a billion. Double what was reported. Komarov says the group, referred to as "Group E", is a "small Eastern European hacking outfit" that makes money by hacking big companies and selling their data to whoever is willing to pay.

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The first thing you should do after getting your home or apartment robbed is, obviously, change the lock. Yahoo doesn’t seem to think so, as the same practices that were in place when it got breached are still being used according to a new report by Venafi.

What’s more, its practices have for years been known as unsecure. Venafi puts it simply: if you’re a Yahoo user, you should be worried about this. Here’s what it did (or, didn’t do): most importantly, 27 percent of certificates on external Yahoo sites haven’t been changed since January 2015.

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Yahoo users who have not changed their passwords for a while are being advised to do so. The company has confirmed that it suffered a major security breach back in 2014 and information relating to 500 million accounts was stolen.

Yahoo says that the attack was carried out by a "state-sponsored actor" but does not elaborate on who it might be. The data accessed includes "names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers".

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Until now the Latin America region has been slow to adopt mobile apps, partly because of limited availability of high-speed data connections.

But as the Rio Olympics kick off and the world focuses on the region, Yahoo's analytics arm Flurry is releasing its first-ever report analyzing mobile activity across Latin America.

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So Verizon is buying the heart of old Yahoo! I include the exclamation point because it was always there in the Yahoo! we knew back when the Internet was young. $4.83 billion in cash is a lot of cash, but for Verizon it’s a way of buying into the future while buying what to many of us seems to be the past.

So let’s get the business part out of the way: Verizon can see Yahoo! as a bargain because Yahoo! has nearly always been more profitable on a gross margin basis than Verizon, a phone company. Even Yahoo! in decline will pull Verizon up. But that’s not why I’m writing about Yahoo! I’m writing because a reader yesterday more or less suggested I do so. At the risk of my sounding like Donald Trump, the reader suggested I had been right all along about Yahoo!

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You may be surprised to read this, but, yes, Yahoo Messenger is still up and running. In fact, the longstanding service seems to be here to stay as it just received new desktop apps that should make Windows and Mac users happy.

Yahoo has launched the new clients to replace the "legacy" programs, which will no longer work after August 5. What you now get is a fresh design and a number of really nice features that add up to a user experience closer to Android, iOS, and the web.

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After speculation and rumors, the deal has been done. Verizon has stumped up $4.83 billion in cash for Yahoo's operating business, including search, advertising and content.

The acquisition adds an extra one billion monthly active users to Verizon's customer base, and the deal comes just over a year after the company acquired AOL. Verizon's CEO says the company is in a 'highly competitive position' and the deal will 'help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising'.

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Helping out with a drug trafficking case, Yahoo was able to recover emails that had previously been deleted. Now a judge wants to know how this was possible.

Yahoo's only policies state that email cannot be recovered once they have been deleted, and defense lawyers for Russell Knaggs -- who planned to move cocaine from South America -- want to know how the company was able to produce deleted email in this case.

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Facebook introduced support for bots in Messenger a few months back, and it did not take long to see big companies embracing this new opportunity to connect with their customers. Now Yahoo is joining this list with Finance, News, MonkeyPet, and Weather.

Finance, News, and Weather are self-explanatory, but for those wondering why MonkeyPet is also on the list Yahoo says that it is the answer to those of you who have been "longing for a pet monkey". Let's take a look at all four and see what they can do.

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My oldest Internet ID, three letters, is vintage 1996. Yahoo's impending demise, which could be to Verizon, almost certainly will mark the end of our long relationship. We mutually will abandon one another. I'm sorry that it comes to this.

Yahoo sealed its fate when cutting the deal to outsource search to Microsoft during summer 2009. The disaster I predicted then will soon end the iconic brand, what little remains of it. Many people will blame CEO Marissa Mayer, but she was but steward of the sinking ship. Doom was a certainty after Yahoo surrendered crown jewel search. That the company limped along for another 7 years is testimony to the brand and to the services infrastructure built around it.

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