Yahoo’s announcement last week that data from 500 million user accounts had been stolen in 2014 by what it called a “state-sponsored actor” certainly alarmed Yahoo’s users and its new bosses at Verizon. But now it seems that eyebrows were raised in the Senate as well. Senator Mark Warner, a …
Read More »Yahoo open sources its porn-detecting neural network
Ever wonder how things get marked NSFW on the internet? It’s Yahoo. Yahoo does it — with their special-made, smut-trained, porn-detecting neural network. And now you can, too, because the team behind the system has made it open source. I guess you could say they’re down to fork. I jest, …
Read More »Yahoo rebrands its main app as Yahoo Newsroom, lets you post your own news links
Yahoo’s homepage used to be the place where web users started their day, reading the top headlines, sports scores, stock updates, and other news. On mobile, that’s no longer always the case. In an effort to get back into the game, Yahoo this morning is launching a rebranded version of its flagship …
Read More »Report: Yahoo scanned users’ email for U.S. intelligence agencies
Yahoo’s trust with users is damaged today by a Reuters report that claims the company developed a custom program to search all users’ incoming email for specific queries given by U.S. intelligence officials. “We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve …
Read More »Twitter, Microsoft, Google and others say they haven’t scanned messages like Yahoo
Yahoo is under scrutiny today after former employees claimed the company designed custom software to enable U.S. intelligence agencies to scan incoming emails to all of Yahoo’s millions of users. The allegations, first published by Reuters, raise questions about the constitutionality of such dragnet surveillance and about the legal means used …
Read More »Yahoo says report on email scanning for intel agencies is “misleading”
Yahoo issued a statement this morning on Tuesday’s report that the company built a custom software tool to allow U.S. intelligence agencies to scan incoming email for all Yahoo users for certain selectors, calling the report “misleading” but not outright false. “The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government …
Read More »Report: Verizon wants $1 billion discount after Yahoo privacy concerns
It’s bad news for Yahoo. The company is in the midst of finalizing its sale to Verizon, but recent revelations about hacking and spying may be costing them a pretty penny. A story from the New York Post alleges that Verizon is now asking Yahoo for a hefty $1 billion discount …
Read More »Yahoo makes it difficult to leave its service by disabling automatic email forwarding
Following Yahoo’s September announcement of a data breach affecting 500 million user accounts, the company has made it more difficult for Yahoo Mail users to transition to another email service. At the beginning of October, Yahoo disabled an email forwarding feature, which would allow users to automatically redirect incoming emails sent …
Read More »Yahoo adds security event tracking to its Account Info page, but still no “delete” button
Following news of its large-scale data breach affecting 500 million account holders, Yahoo today rolled out a change to its Yahoo Account settings screen that will better alert users to unauthorized activity on their accounts. The feature is similar to Google’s in that it tracks the account activity and devices …
Read More »Verizon says Yahoo privacy breach had “material” impact
It looks like those 500 million hacked Yahoo accounts may affect its sale to Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent). At a company public policy round table in DC this afternoon, Verizon general counsel Craig Silliman said: “I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material …
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