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Yahoo today confirmed that "at least" 500 million Yahoo accounts were compromised in an attack in late 2014, leaking customer information like names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birthdates, hashed passwords, and both encrypted and unencrypted security questions and answers.
Does this surprise anyone at this point?
You know, I think if I had a huge cloud company with hundreds of millions of users, I'd consider having at least three sets of teams writing at least the fascade of the software -- the server-side controller methods -- so I could rotate from one to another every sprint or so to throw off would-be hackers. As soon as they made progress hacking one, it'd be replaced by Team 2. By the time we got back around to Team 1, they'd have iterated once or twice, and the hackers would have to, if not start over, pivot. Or maybe any user would have an X% chance of bringing up Team 1, Y% 2, Z% 3 each time they started a session.
I'd likely do the same for the users' data, splitting them into into several different databases, and maybe rotating users back and forth. Several different architectures using several different databases, all pitching to a consistent UI and user experience. If you interface well, it's no problem.
I realize there are obvious downsides. Maybe Team 2 has a horrible design, and it's easily cracked. That is, I'm in some sense three times as likely to get hacked as before, even if it's a much smaller set of users that's compromised.
But even more importantly would seem to be to sniff your network traffic like heck to see when 500 million sets of birthdays had left the network. Bizarre.
Ultimately, though, RMS (hrm, apparently not Stallman) is on point: If it's on a computer, in a network, given enough time, it'll eventually be free to anyone else on that network. Networked zeroes and ones want to be free.
Interesting results from Yahooโs deal to serve as the default web search for Firefox:
StatCounter has also run a special report on US search engine usage by Firefox users only. Yahoo-on-Firefox usage in the US increased from 9.9% in November 2014 to 28.3% in January. Over the same period Google-on-Firefox usage in the US fell from 81.9% to 63.9%.
There's no way that lasts. I wonder what percentage is permanent.
Firefox hijacked my search bar at some point in the recent past, and after trying a single search, I was setting Google as the default search engine, peeved at the audacity of the sinking Mozilla ship to change my setting without asking. Maybe on that box I'd never swapped from Google as my default, but I certainly have played around with Bing on other Firefox installs and quickly gone back to Google.
Other folks will probably go more than a single search before getting upset enough to learn how to swap their engine, but eventually they'll notice Yahoo ain't as good as what they had before, and ask their tech-savvy friends to swap them back.
I hope. Man, can you believe it if 19% of Firefox users, already probably a slightly above-the-mean group of techies, just don't care, and figure the default search engine is always good enough?
More telling is probably, if Firefox hijacked everyone like they did me, that over 70% of Firefox users immediately swapped back to Google.
And forget the products โ so far Yahoo has been unable to attract top quality talent to the company. Not one 20-something I have talked to in the past six months has wistfully talked about working for Yahoo. And even those who have joined Yahoo from Google are joining the company thanks to mega-million dollar contracts, not because they want to work there. When Yahoo becomes the desired job-spot for a fresh, new tech tinkerer โ that will be the time I will lighten up on Yahoo.
I think the folks at my current company would benefit from having similar goals as Malik's for Yahoo. Having not just lots of folks, but the right types of folks wanting to work with you is the best sort of flattery.
More posts based on links shared by Gruber. Glad I went off the "articles only" feed to the busier one.
Why is it that Hotmail continues to include ads for itself in emails sent by its service? We do understand that part of why Gmail's caught on is that it can be used exactly like our old, conventional ISP-based mail service? If I send Gmail, it doesn't have ads in the text of the email, only in the sidebar, menubar, etc if they too use Gmail. Gmail users throw privacy to the wind and accept ads because the Gmail interface is that good, but also because we get everything we used to get from an ISP, plus portability, if we want to use our old mail handlers. (Everything but the ability to email .exe's, that is.)
Why Microsoft/Hotmail continues to append "spam riders" to their users' email, I don't understand. Spam riders will keep many Gmail users from ever considering switching. Perhaps (and I suspect this is part of the case) they've given up on growing and would rather simply "monetize" what little they've already got, like when AOL's prices stayed insanely high for dial-up (and even AOL access once users were using someone else's high speed access) and priced themselves right out of business in the long term.
But rather than milking cash, why not make try to make a better interface than Gmail's? Maybe they could remove the insane MSN tie-ins, maybe even keep the spam riders, and take out the annoying ads inside of Hotmail? Right now there's no war for email, not attempt to out-innovate Google. There's only Hotmail and Yahoo trying their darnest to make more profit as their ships all but sink.
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