Items tagged with (NASDAQ: YHOO)
"Yahoo" is a positive word, but in relation to the internet giant, it's starting to feel like it could describe some of the company's key management. Yahoo has been dealing with some troubling issues, but most of those issues were self-created, such as failing to disclose a security breach which took place years ago, and building a custom tool for the U.S. government - and the NSA in particular - to scan user emails. Now, it's being reported that Yahoo's tool is in effect a sophisticated "hacking tool", although it's supposedly not that much different from Yahoo's preexisting tools used to seek out malware, child pornography, and spam. "Tool" might be the wrong word, though, as some experts...
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Yahoo is the latest major US corporation dealing with the fallout of a data breach that happened two years ago. Some might say that Yahoo's heartburn is well-deserved, though, as the company could have handled things better back in the day, which would have led to a better outcome right now. As we covered on Thursday, Yahoo suffered a major breach back in 2014 that resulted in some 500 million user accounts having their information compromised. However, it's only just recently that users have learned of this, so that's the first major criticism of Yahoo but it goes deeper. Yahoo has said that the attack was caused by a "state-sponsored actor", which means the company could have exercised...
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With agencies like the NSA and FBI wanting to peer into our personal communications at will, we have to be proactive about keeping ourselves safe. But what if there's a fault we can't work around and simply have to live with? Unless you're a skilled developer, you have to rely on other to come up with an improved solution. All of us want to stay a step ahead of those who want to intrude on our digital lives, and thankfully, many major companies do too. The latest example is with an improvement of SMTP, an extremely popular email protocol that lets you interact with your email in real-time, unlike POP3 which will download emails before they're displayed. SMTP has a number of benefits, but also...
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The digital landscape has evolved quite substantially over the past decade, primarily due to smart devices taking over our lives. Beyond that, "machine-learning" has also become a major force with many top-flight companies, with many of them seeing a lot of value (ultimately, revenue-wise) in churning through big data sets. It's even helping some companies collaborate with users at large. To give a couple of examples of what machine-learning can do, Microsoft released a neat project a couple of months ago that made use of machine-learning to detect your emotion; whether it be happiness, disgust, or anger. Microsoft even helped give computers a sense of humor, which is about as freaky as...
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Poor Microsoft - 2015 hasn't been too kind to it so far. We reported just yesterday that Google exposed a rather big Windows bug to the world simply because Microsoft didn't patch it in time, and now, we learn that a bad code update conducted yesterday knocked out the company's Bing search. That in turn took out Yahoo's search, as it's based on Bing.Another service that was temporarily affected by the outage included Apple's Siri personal assistant. A bad code update can result in various levels of problems, but for Microsoft, the biggest problem was merely rolling the update back. For a company like Microsoft, that's unusual, as setups are (and should be) designed to allow staff to revert...
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Considered a bigger threat than Heartbleed, Shellshock is a bug to be concerned about. It hasn’t been in the consumer’s consciousness for very long, but Yahoo appears to be the first business to fall victim to it. Yahoo recently announced that three of its servers had been breached by hackers via Shellshock. “A security flaw, called Shellshock, that could expose vulnerabilities in many web servers was identified on September 24. As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began patching our systems and have been closely monitoring our network,” said a spokesman for Yahoo. “We isolated a handful of our impacted servers and at this time we have no evidence of a compromise...
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Google just lost another one of its Android rock stars, while Yahoo gains a beloved figure in the open source space. We're talking about Jean-Baptiste Quéru, former Technical Lead of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), who's relationship with Google soured beyond the point of reconciliation last month when he announced he was stepping down out of frustration. "There's no point being the maintainer of an operating system that can't boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support, especially when I'm getting the blame for something that I don't have authority to fix myself and that I had anticipated and escalated more than 6 months ahead," Quéru stated in...
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Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer has proven to be a spark plug for the site and brand. Before she accepted the position as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Yahoo, the site was struggling to stay relevant and trying to figure out how best to market to its brand. Now two years later, Yahoo monthly active users are up 20 percent to 800 million around the world, and the company is processing 12,000 resumes a week. That includes 350 million monthly active users on mobile, which is a testament to Mayer's ability to see the need to focus on mobile at a time when not all technology CEOs could see the writing on the wall. You could even argue that tech giants like Intel, AMD, and Microsoft all struggled to look...
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While Yahoo's logo didn't draw too much (any?) applause, the company's refined mobile apps have been nearly universally praised. Now, it's branching out into yet another sector: the second screen. Yahoo Screen is a new iOS app, which Yahoo says is designed to bring a "simple, intuitive experience that turns your finger into a remote control. Just swipe through channels of content from Yahoo and our great partners then lean back and watch…no matter where you are." You'll be able to browse through trending clips, search for shows, or jump right in and start watching. Swiping left and right skips between episodes and swiping up and down flips through channels. Yahoo has also landed a deal...
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At this rate, Yahoo is apt to acquire a company a week -- or so it seems. Since Marissa Mayer came to town as CEO, she has been on an acquisition rampage. Company after company has been swooped up by Yahoo, reportedly due to Mayer's desire to procure talented developer and engineering resources at an accelerated rate. This week, IQ Engines came out of the woodwork in order to announce that it too has been acquired by Yahoo. The company's primary objective was to "transform the way people search and browse their photos by helping to process them intelligently." So, obviously, this particular move will see this team and this technology integrated into Yahoo's resurging Flickr platform. Earlier...
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Yahoo President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Marissa Mayer is obviously doing something right, lest anyone can come up with another explanation as to why her company would rank No. 1 on comScore's list of top 50 online properties in the U.S. According to comScore, Yahoo and its websites recorded 196.5 million unique visitors in July, trumping Google, who's combined properties attracted 192.2 million unique visitors for second place. Perhaps the back-to-school shopping season played a role in why more visitors directed their browser over to Yahoo and its properties than at Google. "Back-to-school shopping was top of mind for many Americans in July, seen by a spike in traffic to Fashion and...
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From the "Why wasn't it done sooner?" file comes word that the Web's major advertising platforms will soon be blocking ads from being seen on sites designed to distributed pirated materials. The consortium of sorts that's responsible for the movement involves the Interactive Advertising Bureau and seven participants: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, 24/7 Media, Adtegrity, Condé Nast and SpotXchange. If I were to burn you a copy of Adobe's or Microsoft's latest and greatest piece of software, that'd be frowned-upon. If I were to charge you for it, it'd become a criminal offense. With that perspective, it's little wonder why so many torrent site owners have wound up in jail; by displaying ads...
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Yahoo, apparently in the mood for a Qwiki, went and acquired the startup for an undisclosed sum, the company announced today. Currently exclusive to Apple users, the Qwiki app turns pictures and videos from the iPhone's camera roll into brief movies to share. Users can rearrange, add, or remove pictures and videos, and then add transitions, a soundtrack, filters, and captions. "We’re excited to announce that Yahoo! acquired Qwiki - a company that uses awesome technology to bring together pictures, music and video to capture the art of storytelling," Yahoo said in a statement. Yahoo said it will continue to support the Qwiki app, though didn't mention if it has plans of porting it over to...
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With a show of hands, who here knew that the old-school search engine AltaVista still existed? Well, that looks like none of you - and I admit, I'm right there with you. Prior to the year 2000, our choice in Web services - heck, even software - was seriously limited. If you didn't use Internet Explorer, you probably used Netscape, and if you didn't use ICQ, you probably called MSN Messenger your home. But what about search? Choice back then was even more lackluster, with AltaVista being the go-to solution for nearly everyone. Admittedly, it's been so long since I've last used AltaVista that I can't even remember how it excelled - but back then, with the lack of overall competition, you wouldn't...
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Now that the NSA has apparently assented to allow companies from which it culled personal user data to post some numbers about how many requests were made, more companies are disclosing that information. Facebook and Microsoft posted some numbers this weekend, and now Yahoo! has some as well. According to a post written by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer and Yahoo! General Counsel Ron Bell, law enforcement agencies made between 12,000 and 13,000 requests for data from Yahoo!, (including FISA requests) between December 1st, 2012 and May 31st, 2013. Yahoo! HQ Yahoo! says that “The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations.” The...
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Do you have a fair bit of "sway" among your group of colleagues? Do you have hundreds or even thousands of "followers" on various social networks? Are you the CEO, founder or Senior Editor of your organization? If so, Yahoo! has devised a way to target you with higher-priced advertising. Don't you feel special? Filed in late 2011 but finally published just this week, Yahoo!'s patent could scan social networks and other locations to give you an "authority" score - the higher it is, the higher the price advertisers will have to potentially pay to target you. A CEO of a company may be targeted with Adobe Creative Cloud ads, for example, while a little ole regular user like me might see one for Adobe...
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It's out with the old and in with the new over at Yahoo, which is forcing users to either upgrade from its Yahoo Mail Classic email service or jump ship. Yahoo made the announcement on its site today and also sent emails to affected users letting them know that beginning this week, older versions of Yahoo Mail (including Yahoo Mail Classic) will no longer be available. Users are free to upgrade, of course, but there's a small caveat. "When you upgrade, you will be accepting our Communications Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This includes the acceptance of automated content scanning and analyzing of your communications content, which Yahoo! uses to deliver product features, relevant advertising,...
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Don't accuse Yahoo of being afraid to spend, and spend big, on acquisitions it thinks will give it an edge against the competition. Enter into evidence exhibit A, Yahoo's recent $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging service Tumblr that has a few industry analysts scratching their heads. Now less than a week later Yahoo is reportedly setting its sights on Hulu (exhibit B). According to a Reuters report, Yahoo submitted a formal proposal to acquire Hulu, an online streaming provider of movies and TV shows that's jointly owned by News Corp and Walt Disney Co. It's not clear how much Yahoo is offering, though for this to happen, it will have to beat out other bidders that include Time Warner Cable,...
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Yahoo! is scrambling to solve a major service outage for Flickr, the photo-sharing site that received a major revamp just a few days ago. The stumble comes at a particularly bad time, given the high marks Yahoo! was receiving from pundits and customers for opening a full terabyte of free storage to shutterbugs. The company announced the outage on Twitter this morning and promised to resolve the issue “as quickly as possible.” Not all users are experiencing problems. Some straight shootin' and a little humor. Not bad for a mea culpa. The new Flickr is part of the turnaround plan CEO Marissa Mayer launched to save Yahoo!, which has suffered for years from an inability to leverage its...
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If we're being honest, we can all admit to at one time or another suffering from foot-in-mouth disease. Unintentionally saying the wrong thing can happen whether you have the gift of gab or not, and those in the public eye are especially prone to such incidents when every word is scrutinized. Hence Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is asking for forgiveness from professional photographers after she made a statement that appeared to disparage their profession. Yahoo held a press event in New York City to celebrate the opening of a new office and to unveil a revamped Flickr service that now offers users 1TB of storage space for free. With so much space up for grabs, Yahoo no longer offers a Flickr Pro subscription,...
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When Marissa Mayer left Google last year to head-up Yahoo! is its CEO, it seemed likely that one of her main orders of business would be acquisitions. After all, acquisitions are the heart and soul of companies that yearn for noticeable growth, and it's why a day doesn't seem to go by where we don't learn of Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google or other major players snapping up a young company. So far, Yahoo!'s acquisitions have been rather modest, but that changes now if a rumor proves true. According to some Wall Street Journal sources, a deal could come as soon as tomorrow, with Yahoo! acquiring the ultra-popular blogging platform Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. WSJ's sources claim that Yahoo!'s board...
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Yahoo! is hard at work on its turnaround under CEO Marissa Mayer’s direction. Lately, Yahoo! news has focused on housekeeping decisions, like her call to bring remote workers back to the office, but today we’re seeing some new products – namely, Yahoo! Mail apps for tablets and the Yahoo! Weather App for iOS phones. The Yahoo! Mail app for Android tablets and iPad makes it easier to swipe and tap your way through your email. Image credit: Yahoo! Yahoo! Mail is now available as an app for both Android and iOS devices. Until now, you probably accessed your Yahoo! Mail via a browser on your tablet. Once you download the new app, you’ll be looking at a new, more touch-friendly...
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