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It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer: > According to the two former employees
by jonknee 10y ago
It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer:
> According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
- mtgx 10y agoSounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.
- duaneb 10y ago> But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good. Realistically, this is every American company. Why trust anyone?
- rodgerd 10y agoMicrosoft and Apple have both been in court during the last 12 months to block US government over-reach. Yahoo joins Amazon in ethusiastically facilitating it. Your assertion isn't realistic, it's nonsense.
- openasocket 10y agoI'm curious, when has Amazon facilitated US government over-reach? I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head, and googling only provided a bunch of documentation for AWS's cloud offerings to government agencies.
- rodgerd 10y agoAmazon chose to boot WikiLeaks immediately after a US senator expressed displeasure with WL's original high-profile tranche of leaks.
- openasocket 10y agoI'll be honest, that doesn't really bother me, assuming AWS wasn't forced or coerced into dropping WikiLeaks. I happen to disagree with a lot of WL's actions, and understand why AWS may not want to host stolen classified documents. I understand that you don't share that opinion, and that my opinion may not be the most popular one on HN. Any other examples?
- spdustin 10y agoI must have missed something, can someone elaborate on how Amazon has enthusiastically facilitated government overreach into citizens' privacy?
- duaneb 10y agoI would have assumed it's referring to this: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/ I don't really see the point, though, I wouldn't want to host wikileaks either.
- WallowC_33 10y agoSure, as far as we know, MS and Apple have been in the public eye as being against government overreach. I suspect it's less about protecting customers from the government and more about protecting themselves, though. But one needs their hands and toes to count the other areas in which Microsoft and Apple have conducted themselves... poorly? Apple in the poaching employees lawsuit. Spurious lawsuits over "design" (ie rounded corners on rectangles) trademarks. Colluding with music execs to push customers to their streaming music service (instead of ad supported "free" streaming on labels sites). Since this is about a CEO hate, Steve Jobs was a complete asshole by a number of accounts. Horribly abusive. Microsoft... well their track record should be well established. The absolute worst of which was releasing a mass market OS that was egregiously insecure by default (yet, around here, the conversation often is "I wish MS tested like they did back in the day." when webcams break, but I digress). Again, the CEO thing, Ballmer was borderline incompetent, Gates was involved in a number of shady market capture schemes. But you know, because in this one context of government over-reach, they did a bit better than Yahoo!, the parents position that they're all untrustable is complete nonsense. The only thing "wrong" Marissa did was not make a shit ton of money for Yahoo! No one would give this story another thought if Yahoo!'s stock was worth $100 more than it was when she started. That's about all MS and Apple have done "right". That end justified the means.
- duaneb 10y agoCourt isn't likely to solve this. Only a wholesale rejection of terrorism as a realistic threat to, well, anything but our political process is going to do it. I assume the FBI is reading my email. You should, too, or you will be unhappy when you find out they are.
- dimino 10y agoBecause people don't honestly care, they just like to pretend to care. Convenience trumps privacy, every time.
- chc 10y agoIt is impossible to live functionally in society without trusting someone on some level.
- mirimir 10y agoFor sure. But it's prudent to understand and mitigate risk.
- duaneb 10y agoYea--I'm just saying this is a product of being a business, not Meyer. One can fight it and still give information over. You can't take the sign of struggle as a sign your data is safe.
- chc 10y agoIt's not a sign that your data is safe, but I think the point here is the opposite: You can take easy capitulation as a sure sign that your data is compromised. Similarly, the lock on my door doesn't make me safe against everyone who might want to commit any crime against me, but all else being equal, a locked door is still preferable from a security standpoint, and it's very preferable to keeping your valuables in an unlocked room with a known thief.
- M2Ys4U 10y agoYes, but they said every _American_ company, not every company in general.
- piaste 10y agoYou can trust Google/MS/Yahoo!/etc. with your pizza orders and mortgage payments, while switching to self-hosted, GPG email from a RYF-certified machine for organising your secret mattress-tag-removing guerrilla.
- mtgx 10y agoLet's take this one proof of company cooperation with NSA at a time.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThis is an instance of a specific executive, specific betrayal of user interests, and a specific mode of betrayal. Meyer is toast. I'll agree that the general level of trust evinced by corporate America is low, but there is considerable variance within that domain.
- greenyoda 10y agoI'm not a fan of Mayer's, but sounds like she didn't want to fight the order since that hadn't worked in the past: "Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful." Her real mistake was going directly to the e-mail team to implement the backdoor without telling the security chief about it: "They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources. The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in. When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails."
- draw_down 10y agoSure, but it's not like they had a non-terrible CEO in... ever? I'm not sure actually.
- ryandrake 10y ago> I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. Surprisingly, stacks of $100 bills make great mattresses. She won't lose a night of sleep.
- meowface 10y agoI'm not remotely rich, but I feel like after a certain amount of wealth, personal and professional reputation (and the success of things you control) matters much more to your overall happiness and well-being than your net worth. I suspect she's not had a good year, from her perspective and for the people around her.