Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “yahoo”

Another Yahoo Security Breach Affects a Billion Accounts

After announcing in September that 500 million accounts had been compromised in a 2014 security breach, the company announces today that an additional billion accounts have been hacked in a separate incident.

Yahoo logo

Breaking News

If you’re a Yahoo user, you should strongly consider closing your account. If you decide to keep your account open, you might as well post your username and password to Facebook and send them out in a tweet, for all the good Yahoo’s security precautions will do for you.

FU Yahoo!

It appears as if Yahoo has become the pet rodent of the U.S. spooks. To paraphrase: A rat by any other name…

Op-ed

If I were Verizon, I’d be going over my agreement to purchase Yahoo with a fine tooth comb, looking for a way to weasel out of the deal. If I couldn’t find one, after going through with the purchase I’d quietly shut the site down and take a loss on the whole thing. Yahoo has no value anymore, not as a portal nor as a brand.

Yahoo logoThe value it once had as the main intersection on the Internet is long gone, despite the fact that the site still commands enough traffic to make it the fifth most visited site on the web. The trouble is, that traffic isn’t arriving through the front door anymore, and visitors aren’t sticking around for more than a minute or two. People no longer visit the site to use all of the nifty features Yahoo once offered, because the majority of those features are long gone. Instead, these days Yahoo’s users come through the back door, either to use Yahoo Mail or to read a news article — usually a reprint from another site — after being directed to the URL by Google.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Krebs Goes Down, Opera Gets a VPN & More…

Also included: Yahoo’s big hack, Garrett on Lenovo, new Audacious and GNOME, and Ubuntu get’s ready for Yakkety Yak.

FOSS Week in Review

I spent time this week terminating a Yahoo account I’ve had since way back in the last century. For years, the My Yahoo page was my “home” page whenever I fired-up the old dial-up to go online, but over time the portal (remember portals?) became less and less relevant and I found my visits to Yahoo becoming less and less frequent. By the time I closed the account, prompted by news of a massive hack involving 500 million accounts going back to 2014, I hadn’t visited my Yahoo page in well over a year. RIP Yahoo. It was nice knowing you.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Firefox to Default to Yahoo’s Microsoft Search

There have been rumblings for some time now about Google’s search contract with Mozilla coming to an end this year. For ten years, the search giant has been the default go-to when it comes to search on Firefox, a deal which has supplied more than 80 percent of the browser’s funding. There’s been talk that Google or Mozilla wasn’t interested in renewing the deal, either because Firefox competes directly with Google’s Chrome browser or because the folks at Mozilla are unhappy with Google’s open web policies, depending on who’s doing the talking.

Firefox brings "click to play" to browser plugins.A week ago, in an attempt to make up for this projected loss of revenue, Mozilla began displaying advertising tiles in new tab pages on Firefox in newer versions of the browser. The first two sponsors, according to a Mozilla blog post, are CVS Health and Booking.com. Then yesterday, in another blog post, the organization announced that it’s signed a five year deal with Yahoo to make the once uber popular, still somewhat popular web portal the default for searches in Firefox.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

NSA/PRISM Mess–Yahoo Wins & Microsoft Loses

I’m beginning to rethink Yahoo, just as I reappraised my feelings on the old Novel after they went to bat against SCO for the benefit of IBM and Linux.

On Monday, the Sunnyvale, California company pulled a honest-to-goodness rabbit out of the hat when they managed to persuade a FISA court to order the Obama administration to declassify as much as possible of a 2008 court decision justifying Prism before releasing it to the public.

Yahoo’s victory came one day before Microsoft went into damage control mode by denying allegations revealed by the publication last Thursday of documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper and website.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Top 10 Career Choices for Yahoo’s Ex-CEO Carol Bartz

Oops… You forgot it was Thursday, didn’t you? Too late, you’re here now. Time to subject yourself to another of our inane top ten lists.

Of course we couldn’t let the firing of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz slide by without getting the top ten treatment. After all, they fired her on the telephone, then she went and showed us that she knows some words that are, er, not very polite. On top of that, she’s been willing to ignore a non-disparagement clause in her contract, possibly forfeiting over $14 million in money owed to her by Yahoo. Perhaps you can see how we might find this to be fodder for humor, no?

So, here it is, our list of the top 10 career choices for Yahoo’s ex-CEO Carol Bartz….

  1. Become CEO of MSN.com. Since they’ve never been very successful, they won’t be expecting much.
  2. Put her in charge of HP’s consumer PC division. They want to get rid of it anyway – maybe this will help.
  3. Become a professional drunken sailor. She’s got the vocabulary down.
  4. Do what every IT CEO does after being proved incompetent – run for public office.
  5. Two words: Roller derby.

Intel Still MeeGos, Apple Loses Again, Yahoo Presents ‘The Charlie Sheen Show’

Friday FOSS Week in Review

What a wacky week for tech news this has been! I couldn’t make much of this stuff up if I tried – and if I did, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s one of the nice things about the Internet, I can provide you with links so you can see for yourself that these stories really happened…

Apple Loses Another iPhone Prototype in Bar

Less than a year and a half after an Apple employee lost a top secret prototype of an iPhone 4 in a bar, it’s happened again. This time the prototype of an iPhone 5 was lost at Cava 22, a bar located in San Francisco’s mission district. Although every tech site on the planet is covering this story, I think it’s only fitting to turn to Gizmodo for a quote, given their connection with the first lost prototype:

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Breaking News: