Verizon is buying struggling giant Yahoo for $4.83 billion
After months of gesturing and negotiations, Yahoo has finally found a buyer: Verizon. The mobile operator, which is also the parent company of AOL and Engadget, confirmed today that it will pay $4.83 billion for Yahoo’s web business. All of the company’s advertising, content, search and mobile operations will be transferred to Verizon and merged with AOL.
As you may already know, Yahoo has a solid portfolio of services and websites. The Yahoo homepage is the default destination for over 43 million people and its Weather and Finance portals are also very popular. The company also owns blogging service Tumblr and photo-hosting site Flickr.
The deal will leave Yahoo with its existing cash, a 15 percent stake in Alibaba and investment in Yahoo Japan. Once everything has been given the green light, the company will then change its name and become a “registered, publicly traded investment company.” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has spent the last year looking to “unlock shareholder value” won’t lead the merged entity forward, that will be the job of Verizon EVP Marni Walden, who also oversees AOL’s role within Verizon.
In a statement, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says that the buyout “will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers.” Yahoo’s finance, news and sports brands are listed as particular draws, as is the company’s popular email service, which counts more than 225 million monthly users.
As with any major takeover, the acquisition will need to be given approval by regulators, but also Yahoo’s shareholders — the people who have been waiting for Marissa Mayer to “unlock” Yahoo’s inherent value. Verizon expects the deal to close in the first quarter of next year, with Yahoo continuing to “offering and improving its own products and services for users, advertisers, developers and partners” in the meantime.
Source: AOL
Yahoo must explain how it got a drug trafficker’s deleted email
Were you wondering how Yahoo managed to recover deleted email that was supposedly impossible to retrieve? You’re not the only one. A judge has partially granted a motion that orders Yahoo to explain how it recovered deleted email from UK drug trafficking convict Russell Knaggs. It won’t have to detail more than how it dealt with the email account in question, but that still means having to say just how it grabbed six months of message drafts when its own policies suggest this should have been impossible. The company has to provide both documents and a relevant witness by August 31st.
For its part, Yahoo has maintained that it scooped up auto-saved drafts using a “proprietary tool,” and denies the defense’s claims that it had to have had access to government surveillance to collect the information. At the same time, some of Yahoo’s own staffers allegedly contradicted each other with their earlier explanations of what happened. It may need a formal, thorough explanation if it doesn’t want to maintain doubt and raise Knaggs’ hopes for an appeal.
Source: Motherboard
Verizon is reportedly close to buying Yahoo for $5 billion
Remember when Verizon bought out AOL (Engadget’s parent brand) last year? Then get ready for deja vu: the communications giant is reportedly in closing talks to purchase Yahoo later this year. Sources familiar with the deal have told Bloomberg and ReCode that Verizon is offering almost $5 billion to take over Yahoo’s core business and real estate holdings. The deal still isn’t finalized, but sources say it’s close. That’s good news for Tim Armstrong, who’s been hoping to use the buyout to expand the AOL userbase from 700 million to almost two billion.
For Yahoo, the selling processes is the end of a long journey. When Marissa Mayer took over as CEO in 2012, the company’s core services were struggling to maintain relevancy. Mayer restructured the firm to focus on mobile development, cut fat and eventually performed a “reverse spin-off” to save on taxes, moving all of its business except Alibaba into a new company. Despite this, the company still wound up pitching a sale to bidders earlier this year. It looks like they may finally have a buyer.
Even so, don’t place any bets just yet: negotiations are still ongoing, and the presumptive sale could still fall apart. Even if it does, one thing is clear — Yahoo’s days as an independent company seem to be numbered.
Via: ReCode
Source: Bloomberg
Drug trafficker gets 20 years thanks to emails he never sent
A UK man has been convicted of 20 years for drug trafficking conspiracy thanks to Yahoo emails in draft he thought were deleted, according to Motherboard. While already in jail, Russell Knaggs devised a scheme to have an accomplice write a draft email and save, but not send it. Another partner located in Columbia would then read the draft, delete it, and write another in reply. The idea was to avoid sending emails that could be seen by cops, but the traffickers didn’t realize that Yahoo keeps the deleted drafts for a long period of time.
Yahoo forwarded the emails to law enforcement, which used them (along with other evidence) to convict Knaggs. The problem, his lawyer says, is that his collaborators deleted most of the emails from the drafts and trash, so they’re supposed to be impossible to recover. “If a user deletes a communication from his or her account, the communication becomes inaccessible to [our] proprietary tools,” says Yahoo’s Michele Lai.
If you draft up an email about something but never send it, can it really be used against you?
Because of that, Knaggs lawyer suspects that the records were found via “bulk-data gathering, live monitoring, [or] interception,” possibly by the US government (the investigation started in 2009, well before the Snowden revelations). To prove its theory, it filed a petition to force Yahoo to disclose its exact retrieval method. However, the company dismissed the “fanciful” idea, saying they were recovered from auto-saved drafts. “The evidence produced was not the product of US government surveillance, but rather was captured … using a Yahoo proprietary tool in response to ordinary legal process, even though [Knaggs] and his co-conspirators thought they had deleted the evidence.”
It does bring up another interesting point — if you draft up an email about something but never send it, can it really be used against you? It kind of reminds us of a certain film where people are busted for just thinking about “pre-crimes.” Check out more on the story at Motherboard.
Source: US District Court, Motherboard
Yahoo’s latest mobile app is a conversational travel planner
Yahoo’s latest mobile app wants to help you browse more than just the internet. Radar, which launched today for iOS, acts as your “virtual travel guide” by using machine learning and artificial intelligence (not to mention the travel confirmations in your email) to offer additional recommendations, reviews and activities around your next destination.
In its first version, Radar scans your Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail or AOL account to find your travel plans. From there, the app is a little less like a search engine and a little more like a chat bot. Once it finds your next trip to a major US city, it will make some basic suggestions, which you can refine based on some conversational, pre-populated answers like “Adventurous” or “Family friendly.” Even without travel plans, you can peruse options in any city in the country. Radar currently draws from sources like TripAdvisor and Yelp to recommend destinations, restaurants and even must-order dishes, but as Yahoo VP of product management Conrad Wai explained to VentureBeat Radar will also surface additional sources from its search engine. Radar will also learn your preferences over time, so it will recommend more of what you like on next year’s big vacation as well.
While Radar doesn’t yet offer in-app booking for flights or hotels, Wai believes the simple interface will still cut out a lot of the headache of travel planning. “If I can combine some of the 50 tabs I have [when researching trip planning] on-the-go, it would be great,” Wai told VentureBeat. “We’re trying to aggregate, distill, and combine information for the user across the web.”
Radar’s iOS version is currently available in the App Store, but no word yet on if or when an Android version will come along.
Tumblr officially joins the live video party
It’s official: today, Tumblr joins Facebook, Twitter and Amazon as the latest platform to add live video streaming. In a post on Live Video dot Tumblr dot com, Yahoo’s quirky social network laid out the crucial details.
Although the Tumblr app itself doesn’t include a livestreaming feature, users can post live videos from a number of different third-party streaming apps like YouNow, Kanvas, Upclose, and YouTube, with even more expected in the future. (There’s a tiny bit of setup involved.) Live video posts can also be reblogged like any other post, meaning your beautiful, livestreaming face can spread virally across Tumblr, complete with hierarchical quotations below. If someone you follow is streaming live, that post will be pinned at the top of your dashboard so users can immediately see who is live when they log in. Finally, any videos you shoot are archived on your Tumblr with the platform’s native player, so followers can return to play them back later.
As Engadget noted yesterday, Tumblr is celebrating the launch of Live Video with a suitably zany hour and a half of live programming today, starting with “Opening remarks live from the surface of Mars” at 4 PM ET, followed by notable Tumblr blog Things Organized Neatly spending at least 10 minutes “organizing things neatly” for your in-the-moment enjoyment. There’s also a two-hour countdown to launch starting at 2 PM ET, and users who follow livevideo.tumblr.com will get a notification when the new streams go live.
Finally, TechCrunch notes a number of media partners like MTV, the Huffington Post and about a dozen others are already signed on to stream live events and content.
Say goodbye to the old Yahoo Messenger on August 5th
After more than 18 years of service, faithfully shuttling your messages, emojis and A/S/L requests back and forth across the internet, Yahoo has announced they will be signing off and closing its old Messenger app for good on August 5th. The app launched in 1998 under the incredibly dated name “Yahoo Pager,” but is heading off into the software sunset after the company introduced a more modern version last year.
As VentureBeat points out, the old Messenger was popular with users in the Asia-Pacific region, and according to Bloomberg, the old Yahoo Messenger actually still had a weirdly strong following among oil traders who used the app to bid and gossip on commodities prices. Apparently those two groups aren’t enough to keep supporting such a dinosaur of an app. In a blog post, Yahoo explained the shut down:
While today we provide basic interoperation between the legacy product and the new Messenger, we encourage all of our users to complete their transition to the new Yahoo Messenger as we will no longer support the legacy platform as of August 5, 2016. We intend to continue our focused efforts on the new Messenger, with a goal of delivering the best experience to our users.
After August 5th, anyone still using the legacy Messenger will no longer be able to log in or send messages. Same goes for messages sent through third-party apps built on top of Yahoo’s API. The new Messenger, however, is still available on the App Store and Google Play.
Yahoo releases content of three FBI data requests to public
Today, Yahoo made minor history by becoming the first company to publicly confirm that it has been issued National Security Letters (NSLs) from the FBI. It sounds like a simple story, but it’s actually a huge win for transparency: until recently, gag orders kept companies like Yahoo from acknowledging NSLs in all but the vaguest of terms. Now, thanks to the USA Freedom Act, the company is able to divulge the contents of three FBI data requests made since 2013.
The contents of the NSLs themselves don’t actually tell us much (though it does specify exactly what Yahoo was to provide: service dates, names, addresses and header information, but absolutely no email content), but the announcement shows us how difficult it still is for companies to tell us how many requests they get per year. Yahoo is allowed to disclose the content of these three NSLs, for instance, but still has to report NSLs in intentionally vague lots of 500 in transparency reports. Bringing that number up to three, however allows Yahoo to list this statistic as between one and 500, rather than between zero and 500. Still pretty vague, but marginally better.
It takes some doing to get permission to acknowledge the receipt of a letter, too — Yahoo says that the FBI needs to review if the nondisclosure provision is still necessary for each specific NSL before allowing a company to publish it, and even then certain information needs to be redacted before being made available to the public. Still, when companies do get these gag orders lifted, it allows them to notify the investigated parties that the FBI was looking into their data, and it’s a big win for transparency overall. Want to see Yahoo’s NSL data for yourself? Check it out at the source link below.
Source: Yahoo
Yahoo Mail mobile apps get extra sharing and sync features
Yahoo continues to improve its Mail app for mobile devices. After adding support for Google Drive files and GIFs last month, the company is bringing more sharing and sync features to iOS and Android users. If you’re on Apple’s platform, Yahoo Mail now lets you show links in emails as previews, with a quick snapshot of information from any site. Additionally, you can start sharing pictures directly to Yahoo Mail, thanks to a new iOS share button for the app.
Android owners are getting a couple things to help them keep better track of contacts. The People Smart View tab, for example, allows you to see a list of folks you’ve been in touch with recently through Yahoo Mail. With this update, the Android apps also syncs your Yahoo and Android contacts, something that probably should’ve been there from the beginning.
And for those of you interested in testing features like these before the public, Yahoo Mail has opened up a beta program for Android — opt-in for that starts today.
Source: Yahoo
Russian provider casts doubt on email hacking claims
Yesterday, Reuters reported that tens of millions of email addresses and account passwords were stolen in an apparent data breach — but as is often the case, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. According to Motherboard, which spoke with both Hold Security (the company that received the data in question) and security expert Troy Hunt, it’s not at all clear that the email providers were hacked. It’s even possible this data isn’t legitimate.
For starters, Motherboard received a statement from Russian email provider Mail.ru, which accounted for 57 million accounts in the data release. The provider claims that after doing a sample check of the data, none of the email and password combinations work. This casts plenty of doubt on the legitimacy of the entire data set.
Furthermore, Alex Holden (CEO and founder of Hold Security) admitted that the data appeared to come from “a collection of different breaches.” Between this and the doubt that Mail.ru has cast on the legitimacy of the data, it’s entirely possible that the data in this “hack” is either quite old or didn’t come from the email providers directly — or both. Troy Hunt of “Have I Been Pwned” (a site that maintains a repository of data breeches) said to Motherboard: “You know how much effort we go to in trying to figure out if breaches are legit or not, it feels like that hasn’t happened here.”
As always, it’s good to practice good password hygiene and change them up frequently (and seriously, two-factor authentication!), but it’s also worth maintaining some perspective — if a company has large as Microsoft, Google or Yahoo was hit with a data breach affecting tens of millions of its customers, it would likely have made that knowledge publicly available. Absent any firm confirmation from those companies — as well as Mail.ru’s statement — it seems most users should be safe at the moment.
Source: Motherboard
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