Snoop! stooge! Yahoo! handed! all! your! email! to! Uncle! Sam! – and! any! passing! hacker! Internet has-been Yahoo! has stressed it broke no US laws when it apparently insecurely backdoored its email systems for the NSA or FBI. In 2015, the California-based biz hastily set up mechanisms that allowed American intelligence workers to scan all incoming Yahoo! Mail for particular strings of keywords, it is reported. It …
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Marissa Mayer is nothing but a used car salesman peddling mostly lemons. Have fun with your new white elephant Verizon. Looking forward to your massive goodwill write down in the next 12 months. Plus it will be the gift that keeps on taking quarter after quarter. I wonder how many other bodies are to be found in the Yahoo crawl space. Some HP style due diligence right there (seriously are they doing it for tax reasons?). Couldn't happen to a nicer megacorp.
"Looking forward to your massive goodwill write down in the next 12 months."
That raises the interesting possibility that Verizon are buying Yahoo with the intention of declaring them a tax loss and taking the deductions over the next few years. Verizon could make a nice profit on a well planned loss.
Not sure why I remember this but for some reason it triggered this memory. A few years ago I was asleep in a hotel room and I got a phone call.. some guy was trying to get in touch with my former employer, after some discussion he revealed he was with the FBI and wanted to see if this company had some data they were tracking down someone(s). He asked whether or not the company had web access logs. I assume they were looking for something child porn related this company had a lot of user generated content and no controls whatsoever (said company has been out of business for some time now). I joked to my friends at the company at the time since they were hosted in amazon cloud hell just give them a splunk account, there is nothing useful in those logs anyway!
But I did find it funny that even the FBI investigator could not figure out how to get in touch with someone at the company, so they resorted to the WHOIS information on the domain, which more than a year after I left for some reason still pointed to me. There was no phone number or general email address(or physical address) to contact on the website etc, the whole time I worked there it sort of felt like they could decide to close up shop on a friday afternoon and have the place be emptied in a matter of hours and it would look like they were never there.
I could say the CEO of said company went over to Yahoo at one point but that's purely coincidence !
Anyways I got this guy in touch with people at the company and they took it over from there. Only such request I've ever dealt with.
>But I did find it funny that even the FBI investigator could not figure out how to get in touch with someone at the company,
It is pretty amazing how much better the press has been with the Panama papers than all the law enforcement that look the other way when they are dealing with rich folks.
They contacted me once also! I was working at a book depository back in 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Some new books had just come out for programming an IBM 1620, which were pretty damn heavy and I told my boss " hey, you gotta get me some help in here to move these crates of books!" They hired some guy, lee or Harvey something.....can't remember.... Anyway, he was bragging about how great of a shot the Marine Corp was to everyone else and I told him " I'll bet you tickets to the local Texas theatre that you can't shoot out this window and hit that manhole cover down by that grassy knoll"
He cracked off three shots, damned if the president of the united states didn't happen to be riding by at that exact time.....
We felt bad about that.....
It is pretty amazing how much better the press has been with the Panama papers than all the law enforcement that look the other way when they are dealing with rich folks.
Are you really sure? I'm not, because at the time I remarked how astonishingly few Americans were named in those papers. The excuse "we have our own "offshore" places INSIDE the US, like Delaware" didn't ring true, for the exact same reason that Yahoo can legitimately claim it broke no laws: anyone can be ordered to collaborate with law enforcement and IRS.
The inevitable conclusion was that the Panama papers were yet another US attack on any competition with Wall Street and its economy, and that makes more sense than the alleged repatriation of tax funds because there are FAR bigger fish to fry in that respect (companies, but also the rather wide span of billionaires - after all, the bulk of the global supply live in the US). The heroically recovered funds so far wouldn't repay more than 10 minutes Shock and Awe on Bagdad, so from that angle it's not worth the effort.
The pattern is fairly easy to spot once you've seen it once: as soon as the US administration gets itself into any kind of bother, things happen "abroad" that are "bad" and the US "has to sort it all out" - yeah, right. It'll get a lot worse when they elect Trump, I reckon (no, I don't consider that an "if" - his position in the polls despite making more policy and position U-turns than a UK politician involved in a scandal makes it pretty clear that facts no longer matter).
The excuse "we have our own "offshore" places INSIDE the US, like Delaware" didn't ring true, for the exact same reason that Yahoo can legitimately claim it broke no laws: anyone can be ordered to collaborate with law enforcement and IRS.
I am not a lawyer or tax accountant, but Private Eye -- which has been doing superb investigative journalism on offshore tax avoidance for 15 years or more -- accepted this explanation, with detail about specific states that are in a race to the bottom with Delaware. What you've missed is that there's no reason for law enforcement or the IRS to take any interest in such matters because basing your company in a low-tax / low transparency jurisdiction is entirely legal .
I scanned through the article's links, and none to past articles in the Reg about Alex Stamos at time of leaving. What was said? What was known? Were the usual 'family' reasons satisfying enough that no one cared to check into it more? Anybody know of previous hints to this mischief?
Is there actually anyone using Yahoo! for anything other than a throwaway account anymore? I'm assuming there must be a few who are, but I'm thinking the bulk of them are either dead or throwaways.
I do find this troubling, not just because they implemented a back door without informing IT Security but also for poorly implementing it and then ignoring the problem. I think this does border on the criminal and should impact the sale. No ethics, no principles... just bottom line oriented.
Disclaimer.. I'm still using an AOL account that goes back to the dark ages as all friends and family have it and it's a PITA to get them to use a new addy. But... I do have a stash of throwaways just for safety.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer
Buy that man a large beer. The dusky shadow of CEO incompetence, if not malfeasance, and Hillary-style "La Reine, C'est Moi" behaviour should be avoided even there is personal cost involved.
(not sure if formal punctuation demands a period after the ! in that sentence)
Interesting point (sorry :) ). Was there ever a rule developed for marketing idiots including punctuation in a name? As the exclamation mark is part of the company name it should formally not be considered punctuation, which would normally demand an extra full stop.
However, as that would be playing along with something that I've always found rather stupid! (as does El Reg, hence the constant heckling! in! any! Yahoo! headline!), I personally am of the opinion that formal rules can go stuff themselves and I'll (a) call it Yahoo and (b) add any punctuation to suit, which is unlikely to include an exclamation mark, under the banner of not wanting to perpetuate another marketing crime against the English language, even if it's American. Puns and play on words, fine, punctuation, no.
Period.
That is one case where the company should be forced to disclose to ALL it's email accounts holders that they done so and provide a link to delete their data and account in one click. Their mail service is to be avoided and as far as i am concerned , was deleted the moment Reuters broke the news.
I highly encourage those who haven't done so yet to do it.
Shame on America. They don't deserve neither our friendship ( what was left of it ) nor our business.
They probably have it slurped, monitored anyway because BT are a government agency who work hand in hand with GCHQ.
This monitoring was searching for a string of certain words not reading e-mails so I don't see this as such a big deal. How Yahoo went about it is another story.
They probably have it slurped, monitored anyway because BT are a government agency who work hand in hand with GCHQ.
That may still not make it legal. Punting that one over the fence to the Information Commissioner should at least be fun to watch as they'd probably have to change some more laws to legalise that retrospectively. Bit of a shame that entertainment will stop post Brexit..
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