4 ms·

In order to have plausible deniability, the guy at Yahoo has to have direct, personal access to ban this domain. This makes him an ops person. Pretty much anyon

In order to have plausible deniability, the guy at Yahoo has to have direct, personal access to ban this domain. This makes him an ops person. Pretty much anyone else needs to go through a chain to get anything like this into production, denying them deniability. If there's a conspiracy, it's an ops guy showing off to an oligarch friend. I don't see how any member of a thigh-knit oligarchy could get this done without leaving a trail that could get him fired for cause and publicly humiliated.

forensic 15y ago
VP of whatever at Yahoo shoots an email to his pet nerd in ops and asks him to add a few domains to the spam filter. A list of 20 who personally spammed an angry customer. VP of whatever says, "Nerdbro please add these domains to the filter before noon. An angry advertiser wants immediate action on this before closing a big deal. By the way I've recommended you to the division head for that position. Thanks for helping me out on this." In the corporate world almost everything that happens has it's genesis in an exchange like this. If you need a citation: Robert B. Cialdini Awhile later there is some PR consequence to this decision. Some PR guy in yahoo goes to ops and asks what happened. Immediate answer: "they were mistakenly added to the spam filter." "how did thus mistake happen?" "its technical; and anyway I'm not authorized to reveal the workings of the filter because hackers/spammers want to know how it works. " PR guy: "say no more. I understand. I'll make sure to let the public know it was an accident"