Verizon Buys Yahoo In $4.8 Billion Attempt To Bore The Internet To Death

from the hip-to-be-square dept

Remember when Yahoo rejected a $44.6 billion offer by Microsoft? Good times. After months of redundant rumors about the bidding process, Verizon has confirmed that it has acquired Yahoo in a $4.8 billion all cash deal. According to Verizon's press announcement, the acquisition of Yahoo's stumbling empire will position Verizon as a superpower in the new media age, helping the formerly stodgy telco in its pivot toward slinging ads at Millennials. As you might expect, the press release trots out AOL boss Tim Armstrong to sell a dull deal he claims will finally let poor Yahoo shine:

"We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished: this transaction is about unleashing Yahoo’s full potential, building upon our collective synergies, and strengthening and accelerating that growth. Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers."

Verizon executives have acquired Yahoo and AOL in the belief they can pivot from a government-pampered telco mono/duopoly to a Facebook and Google-esque advertising juggernaut. And while there is little doubt that the advertising technology acquired from these deals will be useful in Verizon's quest to monetize the company's 140 million mobile subscribers, there's been little to no evidence that Verizon is actually competent enough to execute its own game plan.

Verizon's jumping into the media and advertising game because mobile and fixed broadband subscriber growth is slowing to a point where it's incredibly profitable, but just not profitable enough for Wall Street. And if you've followed the net neutrality fights, you're probably aware that most telcos believe they're absolutely entitled to a larger share of ad revenues -- simply because they built the networks these services run over. The problem (for these telecom companies) is that most of them have spent so long as government-pampered duopolies focusing on lobbying and turf protection, innovation and competition are alien concepts.

As a result, pivoting from stodgy telco to hip Millennial-focused ad empire has had an almost comical learning curve for Verizon execs. You might recall it began with Verizon launching its own tech blog dubbed Sugarstring, where its reporters weren't allowed to even mention subjects like net neutrality or surveillance. As that effort was busy imploding, Verizon's advertising arm was busted covertly modifying wireless user data packets to track consumer behavior around the Internet. This is of course all while Verizon was busy trying to deliver a killing blow to net neutrality; not exactly endearing itself to its target audience.

After several years of stumbling, Verizon launched a new, hip streaming video service Go90, which by most measurements has been a disappointment, despite Verizon's anti-competitive practice of zero rating the service. Now we're to believe that the combination of multiple, marginal 90s brands will somehow be the missing ingredient needed to transform Verizon into a media and advertising god, despite the fact Verizon has shown minimal competence and an aggressive, active disdain for the users it's trying to target. Good luck with that, Verizon.

Filed Under: advertising, mergers, search
Companies: aol, verizon, yahoo

Drug Dealer's Lawyers Want To Know How Yahoo Is Recovering Communications It Previously Said Were Unrecoverable

from the either-don't-understand-the-system-or-it-doesn't-work-the-way-Yahoo-clai dept

Yahoo's in the middle of another national security-related courtroom battle, albeit somewhat inadvertently. Its response to a discovery order in a drug dealer's trial has left the defense wondering exactly how the hell it complied with it. Joseph Cox of Motherboard has more details.

Defense lawyers in the case claim that six months of deleted emails were recovered—something which Yahoo's policies state is not possible. The defense therefore speculates that the emails may have instead been collected by real-time interception or an NSA surveillance program.

United States Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James, from a San Francisco court, granted the defense's motion for discovery in an order filed on Wednesday.

Russell Knaggs, the accused drug dealer, apparently utilized a Yahoo email account to hook up suppliers in Colombia with buyers in Europe. To add to the difficulty level, Knaggs did this while serving time for another drug bust. The method used was not all that uncommon. Everyone shared a single email account and composed draft messages. Each party would log into the account, read the draft message left for them, and compose a draft of their own in response. No emails were sent. All drafts were then deleted from both the "Draft" folder and the "Trash."

According to Yahoo, there was no way for Yahoo to retain these messages. Except that it did and turned them over to law enforcement, suggesting ongoing surveillance, rather than the recovery of communications from the account.

After receiving requests from UK police and the FBI in September 2009 and April 2010, Yahoo created several “snapshots” of the email account, preserving its contents at the time—and revealing the messages. But the defense alleges there should have been nothing for law enforcement to find.

Yahoo's explanation is that the recovered emails were copies created by the email service's “auto-save” feature, which saves data in case of a loss of connectivity, for example. The company has filed several declarations from a number of its staff, but the defense said some of those contradicted each other, and it wants more information.

Here's what the defendant's tech expert had to say in his testimony [PDF].

With regard to Yahoo‟s “snapshot” and its process of “retriev[ing emails] from the servers because their auto-save function systematically preserved edits made over time,” Abramson says the descriptions Yahoo gives of its auto-save feature are inconsistent, contradictory, and furthermore “do[] not align with [Abramson‟s] understanding of such programs.” Abramson contends Yahoo‟s statements “do not in fact agree with common technical principles. The timing of e-mail data saved between 2 minutes and several seconds is not consistent.” Abramson Rpt. at 8. He asserts that “[a] more plausible explanation for the e-mail information provided to law enforcement is that the e-mail account of Mr. Knagg‟s [sic] was under surveillance and through the immediate efforts of surveillance, Yahoo was able to capture the email information and provide it to law enforcement.”

The defense wants several things from Yahoo, including source code, in hopes of sussing out the methods used to capture and preserve these draft messages. Yahoo would rather not give this information up. The judge, while somewhat sympathetic to Yahoo's arguments, also notes it's the company's own inconsistent explanations that have led to this situation.

The Court agrees with Yahoo that Petitioner's requests are somewhat broad; however, the Court also agrees that Yahoo‟s seemingly conflicting responses up to this point create a situation where Petitioner cannot be certain he understands the process of information gathering he seeks to challenge. While Yahoo believes that Petitioner seeks information that is cumulative given its interrogatory responses, it would appear that the requested discovery would not necessarily be cumulative, but might instead provide clarity to Petitioner regarding Yahoo‟s data-gathering methods. Additionally, since the documents Petitioner requests are potentially the same ones that helped Chan “clarify” her previous statement and better understand the data-gathering process, it would appear that these documents could help Petitioner gain a better understanding of the system as well, and could help to prove or disprove one of the grounds of his appeal, as is the purpose of his discovery request. The Court also notes that Chan‟s responses up to this point do not provide the sort of personal knowledge or foundational information for the Court or Petitioner to be able to adequately assess her responses. Consequently, Petitioner's request for documents and a 30(b)(6) deposition is appropriate rather than ordering further interrogatory responses.

The list of items the defense wants has been scaled back by the judge, but what remains will still provide a glimpse into Yahoo email's inner workings, including any evidence of targeted or bulk surveillance methods put into place by the company. Whether or not we'll get to see it is another matter, as the judge will consider instituting a protective order if the information produced is deemed too sensitive.

What it sort of looks like is possibly illegal surveillance being covered up with parallel construction. The problem with this theory is that Yahoo has been more than a little resistant to broad surveillance requests. That doesn't completely rule out complicity, but it would definitely be a risky move for a private company to cover for government wrongdoing. When (and if) more details are provided, we'll know more. If nothing else, it may indicate draft messages are indiscernible from sent messages, at least when it comes to Yahoo's servers.

Filed Under: communications, deleted, drug dealer, emails, evidence, russell knaggs
Companies: yahoo

Yahoo First Company To Publicly Acknowledge It Has Received National Security Letters

from the doxing-the-feds dept

Given its history of battling gag orders from the government, there's some cosmic justice contained in the fact that Yahoo is the first company to publicly disclose the contents of National Security Letters it has received. Before the passage of the USA Freedom Act, NSLs came bundled with a presumptive lifetime ban on disclosure. This wasn't statutorily-required. It's just the way things worked out when the FBI was allowed to decide if and when it was going to allow NSL recipients to publicly discuss them.

The surveillance reform law requires the FBI to "periodically" assess its NSL nondisclosure demands, which appears to have led directly to the first publication of these letters by any company. Yahoo's accompanying statement notes it will continue to publicly disclose whatever it's allowed to in the future.

Yahoo has always maintained a strong commitment to protecting our users’ safety, security and privacy. The release of these documents and information regarding NSLs today is consistent with our commitment to sharing as much information as we legally can regarding government data requests. We believe there is value in making these documents available to the public to promote an informed discussion about the legal authorities available to law enforcement. They also demonstrate the importance of hard-fought reforms to surveillance law achieved with passage of the USA Freedom Act.

The letters [PDF] are redacted but some information had still managed to seep out between the black bars. For one, it appears the FBI asks for everything Yahoo could possibly have collected about targeted users, tracing all the way back to the creation of the accounts.

In preparing your response to this National Security Letter, you should determine whether your company maintains the following types of information which may be considered by you to be an electronic communications transactional record in accordance with Title 18 United States Code § 2709.

Subscriber name and related subscriber information

Account number(s)

Date the account opened or closed

Physical and or postal addresses associated with the account

Subscriber day/evening telephone numbers

Screen names or other on-line names associated with the account

All billing and method of payment related to the account including alternative billed numbers or calling cards

All e-mail addresses associated with the account to include any and all of the above information for any secondary or additional e-mail addresses and or user names identified by you as belonging to the targeted account in this letter

Internet Protocol (IP) addresses assigned to this account and related e-mail accounts

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) assigned to the account

Plain old telephone{s) (POTS), ISDN circuit(s), Voice over internet protocol (VOIP), Cable modem service, Internet cable service, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) asymmetrical/symmetrical relating to this account

The names of any and all upstream and providers facilitating this account's communications

The above-listed information from "inception of the targeted account to the present" if this request cannot be processed as presently written

And, while the FBI requests this information to be sent to it in electronic form, it demands any challenges to its gag orders be handled via fax machines or snail mail.

This disclosure allows Yahoo to update its previous transparency reports with real numbers, rather than the fake numbers demanded by the government.

Prior to this, Yahoo hadn't even been allowed to disclose the fact that it had received NSLs, even under the very broad disclosure range of 1-499. This is a small step towards government transparency -- one that will hopefully continue to undermine its secrecy-by-default stance.

Filed Under: doj, fbi, national security letters, nsls, transparency
Companies: yahoo

House Of Representatives Tech Team Blocks All Google Appspot Apps Because Of A Single Trojan

from the well-that's...-something dept

We started receiving reports of this last week, but I wanted to track down some details. You may have seen a few other reports, noting that the tech team at the House of Representatives recently started blocking YahooMail because of a big phishing attempt targeted at Congress. On April 30th, the House's "Technology Service Desk" sent around an email stating:

In the past 48 hours, the House Information Security Office has seen an increase of attacks on the House Network using third party, web-based mail applications such as YahooMail, Gmail, etc. The attacks are focused on putting “ransomware” on users’ computers. When a user clicks on the link in the attack e-mail, the malware encrypts all files on that computer, including shared files, making them unusable until a “ransom” is paid. The recent attacks have focused on using .js files attached as zip files to e-mail that appear to come from known senders. The primary focus appears to be through YahooMail at this time.

The House Information Security Office is taking a number of steps to address this specific attack. As part of that effort, we will be blocking access to YahooMail on the House Network until further notice. We are making every effort to put other mitigating protections in place so that we can restore full access as soon as possible.

Please do your part to help us address this recent attack and protect the House Network going forward by following proper cyber practices at all times. Phishing e-mails can look very legitimate and appear to come from known senders. Be very careful about clicking on attachments or links in e-mails, particularly when you are using non-House e-mail systems.

Obviously, it's worth being careful and concerned about this kind of thing. Those encrypted ransomware attacks have become quite popular lately, and you can imagine why some would think it would be fun to target Congress specifically. Still, blocking all of YahooMail seems... like overkill? Yes, obviously, warn everyone to be careful, and highlight the details and what to watch out for. Perhaps institute some other kinds of protections. But a blanket ban on YahooMail just seems odd.

But... that's not all. Because a few days after that happened, the same tech staff also started blocking all of appspot.com. That's where a ton of apps actually live for things like Google's App Engine. Once again, this seemed like total overkill, so I reached out to people at the House to find out what was going on, and was given the following statement:

We began blocking appspot.com on May 3 in response to indicators that appspot.com as potentially still hosting a remote access Trojan named BLT that has been there since June 2015.

Now, this is kind of interesting for a variety of reasons. The Trojan.BLT has been "associated with a major APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] campaign." Furthermore, there has been some speculation connecting it to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack that was exposed last year, based on a timely warning from the FBI about "cyber actors" using a series of exploits -- including BLT -- to gain access to personally identifiable information from the government. As the FBI noted:

Trojan.BLT- a RAT that is executed from its export CreateInstance, the mutex HFRM_ is created and a process instance of cmd.exe is launched to execute the command “ipconfig/all” to collect the victim system’s MAC address. Trojan.BLT will test network connectivity by establishing a connection with a legitimate website. This malware is capable of bypassing dyndns categorization by using a proxy through Google AppProxy’s hosted on appspot domains.

Trojan.BLT will validate the connection by checking the HTTP header “Service:IIS”. Trojan.BLT will then conduct further C2 activity.

So, yes, as I was told, Trojan.BLT was first discovered making use of Google's appspot domains last June -- so it's a little unclear why there's suddenly a renewed focus on it, and why it's cause to shut down access to appspot entirely -- especially since it appears that there are tools that can detect this particular trojan.

So, on the one hand, you can understand why the House's IT staff has pulled out the nuclear option in both these cases, first banning YahooMail and then banning access to basically all of Google's hosted 3rd party apps. Ransomware or an OPM-level hack on Congress would be a massive black eye for the House's tech staff. So it must feel a lot safer to just block entirely. Of course, it's also not that likely to be effective. Ted Henderson, the creator of a social network solely for Congressional staffers called Cloakroom, and who first alerted me and many other reporters to this, was pretty clearly frustrated by this move, which obviously cut off the vast majority of his userbase from actually being able to use the app. But, he's already found a workaround (which I know because I once did an AMA on the platform and still receive notifications from the app). All users received a notification on their phones to turn off their WiFi and use their cellular connections if they wished to use Cloakroom while on Capitol Hill.

And, of course, this shows the futility of just blocking all access to an entire ecosystem like Appspot. It's not going to stop people. It's just going to frustrate people and send them looking for other paths to get that info, which may actually be more dangerous. Instead, it seems worth asking why the House IT staff isn't focused on providing better protection against the actual threat, rather than just trying to bury access to massive platforms, just because lurking somewhere on those platforms there may be something harmful.

Remember, too, that the people in the House are the same ones legislating technology issues today, and they're getting a very warped idea of how technology works thanks to the House's tech desk. A small potential problem that could be avoided with some basic precautions? Shut down the whole damn thing. This seems like exactly the wrong lesson that our elected officials and their staffers should be learning right now about technology. Protecting their computers and devices is obviously important, but it seems like the House is resorting to overkill, and hopefully this does not lead out of touch Representatives to assume that similar overkill solutions -- such as entire site blocking -- are sensible for American citizens. The House Of Representatives is blocking all apps using Google%u2019s appspot.com

Filed Under: appspot, congress, cybersecurity, google appengine, house of representatives, ransomware, trojans, yahoomail
Companies: google, yahoo

Unsealed Yahoo/FISA Documents Show NSA Expected Company, FISC Judge To Operate On Zero Information

from the shame-this-whole-system-of-checks-and-balances-can't-just-be-eradicated dept

Late last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a stack of documents from Yahoo's challenge of the NSA's internet dragnet. The new declassified and unsealed documents have been dumped into one, 309-page PDF along with everything the ODNI has already released -- one of the small things the office routinely does to slow the dissemination of previously-unseen information.

Marcy Wheeler, being the hero she is, has waded into the bloated PDF and recovered more damning statements from FISA judge Reggie Walton -- one of few presiding judges to seriously challenge the NSA's methods and techniques.

What she's uncovered is more evidence the agency considers itself accountable to no one. Not only was Yahoo expected to be litigating blindly -- what with the government's multiple ex parte submissions and its general refusal to discuss any specifics of its PRISM program -- but apparently the FISA court was expected to adjudicate blindly. The NSA's refusal to provide Reggie Walton with the information he needed to render decisions resulted in this irritated order.

The Court is issuing this ex parte order to the Government requiring it to provide clarification concerning the impact on this case of various government filings that have been made to the FISC under separate docket.

[snip]

lt is HEREBY ORDERED that the government shall file a brief no later than February 20. 2008, addressing the following questions:


1. Whether the classified appendix that was provided to the Court in December 2007 constitutes the complete and up-to-date set of certifications and supporting documents (to include affidavits, procedures concerning the location of targets, and minimization procedures) that are applicable to the directives at issue in this proceeding. If the answer to this question is .. yes,'” the government's brief may be filed ex parte. If the government chooses to serve Yahoo with a copy of the brief, it shall serve a copy of this Order upon Yahoo as well.

2. If the answer to question number one is “no,” the Government shall state what additional documents it believes are currently in effect and applicable to the directives to Yahoo that are at issue in this proceeding. The government shall file copies of any such documents with the Court concurrent with filing its brief. The government shall serve copies of this Order, its brief, and any additional documents upon Yahoo, unless the government moves this Court for leave to file its submission ex parte, either in whole or in part. If the government files such a motion with the Court, it shall serve a copy of its motion upon Yahoo. The government shall also serve a copy of this Order upon Yahoo, unless the government establishes good cause for not doing so within the submission it seeks to file ex parte.

The government's testy response was to point out it has never been obligated to provide anyone but the court with documents pertaining to its surveillance efforts..

Under the Protect America Act, then, the government has an unqualified right to have the Court review a classified submission ex parte and in camera which, of course, includes the unqualified right to keep that submission from being disclosed to any party in an adversarial proceeding before this Court.

As Wheeler points out, the documents Judge Walton ordered the government to turn over to the court did not arrive in full until after Walton had made it clear he wouldn't force the government to hand these over to Yahoo as well.

The holdout document -- the one that didn't appear until the government was sure it wouldn't have to provide Yahoo with this info -- is key. It shows the government's procedures for handling metadata had been misleadingly portrayed, not just to Yahoo, but possibly to the court as well.

Now, to be fair, in the original release, it was not clear that the government offered this much explanation for SPCMA [Special Procedures Concerning Metadata Analysis], making it clear that the procedural change involved making American metadata visible. But the government very clearly suggested — falsely — that SPCMA had no Fourth Amendment implications because they didn’t make Americans overseas more likely to be targeted (which the government already knew was the key thrust of Yahoo’s challenge).

The opposite is true: by making US person metadata visible, it ensured the government would be more likely to focus on communications of those with whom Americans were communicating. These procedures — which were approved more than two months, one document dump, and one court order agreeing to keep everything secret from Yahoo earlier — were and remain the key to the Fourth Amendment exposure for Americans, as was argued just last year. And they weren’t given to even the judge in this case until he asked nicely a few times.

The NSA has very little in the way of effective oversight. It has even less opposition in terms of checks and balances even when facing a judge clearly exhausted by the agency's obfuscation and abuse. An effective challenge of NSA surveillance in court -- even a regular one -- is an uphill battle. In the FISA court, where it's allowed an "unqualified right" to present all its assertions and evidence without facing anything more adversarial than a FISC judge, it's completely impossible. Yahoo fought with pretty much every appendage tied behind its back. An unsuccessful challenge was a foregone conclusion. But, if nothing else, its long tangle with the NSA dragged some of its so-called secrets out of the shadows. That's not a win but it's far better than the alternative -- where the government's foremost intelligence agency is allowed to rewrite the rules as it goes along with the administration's implicit support -- and keep the public from ever finding out just how much domestic surveillance slack it's managed to cut for itself.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, doj, fisa court, fisc, mass surveillance, nsa, odni, oversight, reggie walton, surveillance
Companies: yahoo

DailyDirt: Does It Take A Village To Teach Artificial Intelligence?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The accomplishments of artificial intelligence are making it a popular topic in the news again, both for its wins and its (apparent) failures. General artificial intelligence hasn't quite lived up to its full potential yet, but more open source AI projects could help speed up development. Here are just a few reminders that open source AI projects are making progress -- hopefully towards a more 'John Henry' type of AI and less of a scary Skynet program.

• Google is sharing some of its artificial intelligence capabilities -- like image recognition, speech translation, etc. Maybe people will find cool new uses for AI, and hopefully, some of the machine learning bugs will be caught faster. [url]
• Yahoo hasn't been getting too much positive press lately (for the health of its business), but it also released its own open source AI tools (aka CaffeOnSpark AI engine) recently. Yahoo still has a lot of Flickr image data to help train its deep learning software, but selling off Yahoo's "core business" could have an effect on Yahoo's AI projects. [url]
• OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that has just set up new offices in San Francisco. It has $1 billion in funding from several sources, aiming for a long-term benefit to humanity from artificial intelligence projects. [url]
• China's main search company, Baidu, has released its own open source AI software -- used to build systems like Deep Speech 2 which recognizes human speech better than some humans (at least for short phrases or messages). Baidu's code is called Warp-CTC, and you can play around with it all you like -- but you'll probably need access to some heavy-duty hardware to make your own HAL9000. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, cloud, deep learning, deep speech 2, image recognition, john henry, machine learning, open source, speech recognition
Companies: baidu, flickr, google, microsoft, openai, yahoo

Patent Troll Sues Everyone For Infringing On Encryption-Related Patent By Encrypting Their Websites

from the um,-we-actually-offer-no-encryption-services-of-our-own.-sorry. dept

Underdog Texas company takes on corporate giants!

Scores of big brands – from AT&T and Yahoo! to Netflix, GoPro and Macy's – are being sued because their HTTPS websites allegedly infringe an encryption patent.

It appears in May this year CryptoPeak Solutions, based in Longview, Texas, got its hands on US Patent 6,202,150, which describes "auto-escrowable and auto-certifiable cryptosystems."

CryptoPeak reckons TLS-secured websites that use elliptic curve cryptography are infringing the patent – so it's suing owners of HTTPS websites that use ECC. Top tip: loads of websites use ECC these days to securely encrypt their traffic.

CryptoPeak, of course, offers no cryptography products. It does, however, manage a portfolio of 66 lawsuits, all filed in the Texas Eastern District Court, beginning roughly 60 days after it acquired the patent. Among the illustrious names listed as defendants are PNC Financial Services, VUDU, Netflix, State Farm, Allstate, Petco, GoPro, Mary Kay, Target, Groupon, Williams-Sonoma, Etsy, Priceline… well, the list goes on and on and on.

All of these companies produce goods and services. CryptoPeak does not. The only thing it produces are lawsuits. The patent it's using in its litigation doesn't appear to actually cover the allegedly infringing activity it's suing over.

Perhaps crucially, [the patent] describes a means for "generating public keys" and "publishing public keys", and it's certainly true that ECC does involve generating public keys and using them.

But the patent is focused on "a key recovery agent to recover the user's private key or information encrypted under said user's corresponding public key" – which is really not the point of ECC.

Netflix, which has already moved to dismiss the suit against it, doesn't concern itself too much with the patent's supposed function. Instead, it argues the patent (along with the numerous lawsuits) should be invalidated/tossed because of other wording used in the patent paperwork itself.

The invalidity of the claims asserted here is cut and dry. The Asserted Claims recite “a method and apparatus.” Thus, a practitioner cannot know the scope of the Asserted Claims from reading them because they explicitly claim “separate statutory classes of invention,” an act expressly forbidden by the law. For this reason alone, these claims are invalid on their face, and the Court should declare so at this stage.

Netflix then points out the "method and apparatus" wording appears in multiple claims.


All of which should serve to kill the lawsuit and, possibly the patent, no matter how much the troll protests.

The defect in these claims is so glaring that CryptoPeak’s only choice is to request that the Court overlook the express words of the claims, construe the claims to read out certain language, or even correct the claims. CryptoPeak has done just that in its Amended Complaint, alleging that “[n]othwithstanding that [the claims] generically recite the existence of ‘apparatus’ in their preambles, each of the . . . Asserted Claims is a method claim . . . .” (Dkt. No. 21 at 4 (emphasis added).)

This request is improper and should be rejected. The Court must read the claims as written, “not as the patentees wish they [ ] were written.”

Seems like a solid argument, but CryptoPeak didn't file in this particular court just because it coincidentally happened to have rented a mailbox and an empty office in Longview, Texas shortly before filing the lawsuits. It filed in this court because magical things often happen for patent trolls -- wholly unrelated to the validity of their claims and their affected Texan accents. If this wasn't the case, then this particular district wouldn't be the IP shitmagnet that it is. If CryptoPeak can nail down a few settlements and licensing agreements, it makes the hassle and expense of serial filing worthwhile. And isn't that why our patent system was implemented in the first place?

Filed Under: encryption, https, patent troll, patents
Companies: at&t, cryptopeak solutions, etsy, gopro, groupon, macy's, netflix, petco, priceline, target, yahoo

Clinging To Relevance, Yahoo Prevents Ad Block Users From Checking Yahoo Mail

from the ingenious-strategy dept

Yahoo's been struggling for some time under the leadership of Marissa Mayer to become as relevant in the advertising and content space as contemporaries like Google and Facebook. By and large these efforts have not been going particularly well, with the mood inside the company supposedly "grim and contentious," employees frustrated with a lack of direction, heavy often-senseless micromanagement, and a "lack of a coherent strategy." A growing movement from both inside and outside of Yahoo to replace Mayer has gained momentum.

So as the company struggles for relevance this week in the face of users, employees and investors, somebody at the company apparently thought it would be a great idea to annoy a huge swath of the company's userbase. According to a growing number of Ad Block users, Yahooers this week were met with a message scolding them for using ad blocking technology and preventing them from accessing their mail through the website:When I asked the company to confirm that this was indeed a new, ingenious business strategy, I was told it was part of a "test" for the company:

"At Yahoo, we are continually developing and testing new product experiences. This is a test we're running for a small number of Yahoo Mail users in the U.S."

Really? You're barely clinging to relevance and you think it's a great idea to begin alienating the remaining customers that haven't fled to gmail? As we've noted many, many times, there are numerous answers to dealing with ad blocking, from designing less annoying ads, to developing new business models, to giving users more control. Instead, some websites have tried to dictate to consumers what they should do with their own browsers, and in some instances punished site visitors for even talking about ad blocking whatsoever. In Yahoo's case, the decision had the expected result. It started to drive users away:

"please disable ad blocker to continue using yahoo mail" how about no. do you want me to stop using yahoo mail?? cause this is a good start

— Timmay (@RunLikeDeer) November 19, 2015

So @YahooMail has blocked my inbox for using an ad blocker. It was a good run, I guess. Goodbye! Hello Apple Mail, as much as I hate it.

— Andrei Herasimchuk (@Trenti) November 19, 2015

Perhaps we're all missing some subtle nuance of the plan, and Mayer somehow hopes to make Yahoo more relevant -- via the power of annoyance?

Filed Under: ad block, ad blocking, email, yahoo mail
Companies: yahoo

Yahoo Pumps Up Viewership Numbers For NFL Game By Autoplaying It On Your Yahoo Home Page

from the your-not-helping dept

Over the summer, when the NFL and Yahoo inked a deal for a one-game test run of an NFL game exclusively streamed by a service provider, I tried to temper everyone's excitement. Baby steps, is what I called the deal, which it absolutely was. In many ways, the NFL either set this all up to minimize risk to its reputation and revenue, or set it up to fail, depending on who you believe. The game featured two teams expected to be bad, with followings and markets on the smaller side of the league, and the game was played overseas in the UK absurdly early in the morning in all the time zones state-side. That meant that the game would never have the viewership that a prime-time matchup between two good teams might have, but that probably worked for the NFL's test run, in that any failure would be minimized for all the reasons listed above.

Well, the streamed game happened this past weekend. The results? Pretty good, actually.

Sunday's live stream marked the first time that a single company had distributed an NFL telecast all around the world via the Internet. It was widely seen as a test for future NFL streaming efforts. The NFL said Monday that it was "thrilled with the results." Technical reviews were mixed, with many fans reporting a seamless live stream, while others ran into connectivity trouble. Average viewership per minute was high by web live-streaming standards, but low by NFL TV standards.

The average viewership per minute reported by Yahoo was about 2.5 million, which is quite large by streaming standards. By comparison, though, that viewership is something like a third or a quarter of the viewership for most NFL television broadcasts. Still, considering the game started in the wee hours of the morning (4:30am Central Time, for instance), nobody was scoffing at the numbers. In fact, the NFL announced it was "thrilled" with the results.

And that really should have been enough. Unfortunately, Yahoo also stated that 15 million viewers had watched at least part of the live stream as well, which was quickly shown to be largely bullshit the company concocted by counting, oh, anyone who visited Yahoo's home page.

All morning long, if you visited Yahoo.com on a PC, you were greeted with an autoplay stream of the broadcast, including commercials, but without sound. Yahoo says 43 million people a day visit its homepage. That number is presumably lower on a Sunday morning. But if it can get a big chunk of those visitors to see a couple minutes each, it will be in good shape — at least by the low bar it laid out for itself.

You're not helping, Yahoo. Look, wider streaming of professional sports is going to happen. And advertisers and leagues are going to end up coming along for the ride because, no matter what your local cable company tells you, cord-cutting is a thing and it isn't slowing down. But trying these little gimmicks to fudge the numbers will only set back the willingness of leagues and advertisers to jump into this. It creates a trust problem, similar to that experienced by other internet advertising gimmicks, where ads are reported to have been seen after being autoplayed, whether they were truly watched or not. This was a big moment for those of us that believe streaming sports is the future. Whatever you think about the viewership results, they weren't disappointing the principal players involved in this entertainment game. For Yahoo to sully the waters in a transparent and obvious way was silly, as it could only hurt its own effort to secure future streaming deals.

Still, the rest of the news about the streamed NFL game was positive.

Filed Under: football, metrics, streaming, video, viewership
Companies: nfl, yahoo

Court Says Search Engines Not Making Things Disappear The Moment They're Deleted From Third-Party Sites Not 'Defamation'

from the the-definition-of-'tort'-is-NOT-'something-I-don't-personally-li dept

Eric Goldman brings the news of another misguided defamation lawsuit brought against search engines (plaintiff sued Google and Yahoo separately). The problem isn't that Google or Yahoo failed to comply with takedown requests. (There weren't any involved.) It was that the plaintiff -- Keyonna Ferrell -- deleted stuff she had posted to Pinterest and it kept showing up in search results for a few months after she vanished away the… well, I will now quote the complaint directly because anything otherwise wouldn't do it justice.

The facts of this case are:

I have a pininterest page. I changed it around Feb 5th of 2015. Before I put all the celebrity stuff up. I changed my screen name from Keyonna Ferrell to K Ferrell and the picture I had up for a week was also removed from pininterest. I have an email of the exact I did this But its vague. I have another emil from pininterest with proof it was removed but its in March. I will copy the emails below. The pictures were removed about 6 weeks after I complained but it was way too long. I have three threads all sent to legal legal@google.com they are not one message sent in one day they are messages sometimes once a day sometimes two and three times to legal a day over the course of three months google. Changed it settings, this is my email these are the threads. I usally send a copy to myself of each emails sent to google but all these emails were sent to LEGAL you cant tell unless you click inside. That's google for you. They changed their settings when I started taking pictures. I have pasted emails below. I am STILL having problems with them due to the page people are retaliating I ve been to four different hotels ive dealt wit stolen property, defemation of character, privacy being taken (picture wa deleted before celebrity went up pininterest and google resurfaced the images A month after I deleted it off my page) Defamation of character.

So, the crux of the case is that Google and Yahoo took "too long" to "forget" photos Keyonna Ferrell posted publicly on a third party's website. But nothing she alleges adds up to the injury she's claiming.

Ferrell alleges that she put information on the internet that remained accessible through the Yahoo search engine and thus available for viewing by the public after she had removed the images from Pinterest. She also alleges that a video not associated with her appears among search results based on her name. Nothing about this allegation suggests that the information made available was false. Ferrell therefore fails to state a claim for defamation.

Goldman notes that this is an interesting claim (albeit "interesting" in a way that pro se filings often are).

The court doesn’t say how many days elapsed between the alleged Pinterest removals and Google/Yahoo’s alleged failure to update their search database, nor do we know if Google and Yahoo had good reasons for delaying their deletions. I do know we’d see many dubious lawsuits if plaintiffs can sue search engines for taking too long to delete removed items from their databases.

This would be a ridiculous outcome, but all it takes is one significant case. This isn't it. As Goldman notes, US law differs significantly from the European legal interpretations of search engines' obligations in light of the "right to be forgotten" decision. Were that applicable here, Ferrell may have been successful in claiming damages for "delays" by third parties unrelated to the service where the content was originally posted.

If you're interested in reading some more of Keyonna Ferrell's legal excursions, she has also sued Quality Inn for... something. All I know is it revolves around a misplaced phone charger, some guy named TBOY, a missing roll of toilet paper, an unrecovered stash of personal documents and many, many incidents in which people failed to take Ferrell seriously.

Filed Under: defamation, keyonna ferrell, pro se, right to be forgotten, search engines
Companies: google, pinterest, yahoo