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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