ZDNet Zero Day: “Former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos to join Zoom as outside security consultant”

In a blog post published on Medium today, Stamos said he decided to join the company after a phone call last week with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan.

Yuan approached Stamos for the move after the former Facebook CSO defended Zoom on Twitter after the video conferencing software was being widely criticized in the media for a series of – what Stamos described as – “shallow bugs”.

Also, all of these shallow bugs demonstrate the value of the hundreds of enterprise vendor risk assessments Zoom has gone through in the last couple of years.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) April 1, 2020

Catalin Cimpanu

I didn't give this piece of news much thought at the time, other than cynically thinking that Zoom is doing good PR to counteract the rising number of security and privacy incidents on their videoconferencing software. Since then I listened to a podcast where Stamos was invited to talk, and found out that, prior to working at Facebook, he had been Chief Security Officer at Yahoo! around the time of their massive hack in 2014! Twice in a row he clashed with his superiors from a similar position, but ultimately failed to influence internal policies and left the company without positive results. Even if you cannot attribute Yahoo!’s and Facebook’s failures to him in particular, I would not consider him effective at his job… Which brings me back to my original point that contracting Stamos is more a way for Zoom to improve their public image than actually delivering more secure products.

USA Today: “Exclusive: Flickr bought by SmugMug, which vows to revitalize the photo service”

SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill told USA TODAY he’s committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy.

SmugMug, an independent, family-run company, will maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves, MacAskill said in an exclusive interview.

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MacAskill says he does not yet know what his plans are for Flickr’s business.

I don’t know what the future holds. This is a new model for me, he said. We certainly think we need to operate it with an eye to our cash flow and our profitability. We are going to have to take a detailed look at the business and make sure it’s growing and healthy.

Jessica Guynn

I’m relieved that Flickr has finally escaped from the languishing management of Yahoo, but I’m rather skeptical that this new owner will be able to turn things around. I know little about SmugMug, but it doesn’t feel like they have the resources to run and update two separate photo services, considering that they are competing with Facebook-owned Instagram and Google Photos. And from the comments quoted above, it sounds like the CEO doesn’t have any long-term strategy yet; it was probably an impulse acquisition, at a discounted price.

Reuters: “Americans less likely to trust Facebook than rivals on personal data”

Some 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared with 66 percent who said they trust Amazon, 62 percent who trust Google, 60 percent for Microsoft and 47 percent for Yahoo.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 2,237 people and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points.

Chris Kahn, David Ingram

Remarkable how Facebook manages to be the least trusted company when it comes to privacy and still retain so many recurring users. It’s even lower in the public perception than Yahoo!, whose security was constantly breached in recent years. Granted, Facebook’s track record on privacy is very shady and the company is struggling with two recent scandals involving data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica and the collection of personal calls and SMS on Android. Unfortunately, the public has a short memory on these issues and I suspect Facebook will land again on its feet.

Flickr Blog: “Happy 13th Birthday, Flickr!”

It’s official, Flickr is a teenager! Thirteen years young and just as full of wonder, snark, and creativity as we’ve ever been. Together with our phenomenal community of photographers from around the world, our Flickr Family, we’ve set the tone for what an online photographer’s space could be.

Zee Jenkins

With the trouble their parent company Yahoo is going through, I would be grateful if Flickr just manages to grow old by another year. There are encouraging signs, with Flickr recently integrated more deeply into other Yahoo products, such as mail, but the bigger problem is how Yahoo will survive – or will the company end up being sold for parts.

The New York Times: “Yahoo Says Hackers Stole Data on 500 Million Users in 2014”

Yahoo announced on Thursday that the account information of at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers two years ago, in the biggest known intrusion of one company’s computer network.

In a statement, Yahoo said user information — including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, security questions — was compromised in 2014 by what it believed was a “state-sponsored actor”.

While Yahoo did not name the country involved, how the company discovered the hack nearly two years after the fact offered a glimpse at the complicated and mysterious world of the underground web.

Nicole Perlroth

Ironic how companies regularly prompt users to add more data to secure their online accounts – especially phone numbers – thereby giving hackers more personal information to steal. Good thing I never gave Yahoo! my phone number despite their insistence.

Vanity Fair: “Marissa Mayer vs. “Kim Kardashian’s Ass”: What Sunk Yahoo’s Media Ambitions?”

Finally, it seemed Mayer had an answer to the question of whether Yahoo was a tech company or a media company. It was both. We may not be the biggest technology company, but we’re the biggest technology company that understands media, she said at a Bloomberg conference last summer. No one argues with the first part of her statement; it’s the second half that is the subject of debate.

Only months later, however, it is all being reined in. While Yahoo is keeping individual publications dedicated to beauty, style, politics, movies, celebrity, and TV, among others, it is ending its “experiment” in creating smaller individual publications. As Yahoo approaches a potential sale, many fear the pattern of cost-cutting could continue. Yahoo is reverting to its natural form, a former staffer told me, a crap home page for the Midwest. Nelson, who has overseen the downsizing, is trying to maintain her good humor. She recently joked to colleagues that she thought she was being invited to the party, and then she showed up and they handed her a broom. (Nelson declined to address that comment, but told me that 2016 is a year of focus and that Yahoo is doubling down on the core content verticals where the company has always shown strength: news sports, finance and lifestyle.)

Sarah Ellison

Could possibly explain why Yahoo is still so popular in Romania (emphasis mine).

The New York Times: “What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs”

Illustration by Matt Dorfman. Photographs by Getty Images

Mayer saw her plan as a return, in a sense, to Yahoo’s original mission. Yahoo grew in popularity and value during the late 1990s, when it was the most user-friendly way to peruse the World Wide Web. Now, Mayer believed, it could ride the shift from P.C.s to smartphones and make the mobile web-browsing experience more user-friendly too. Yahoo, in other words, would need to become a really great apps company. Mayer wanted to narrow its product portfolio down to approximately a dozen from more than 100. She and her C.M.O., Kathy Savitt, did some market research and found a list of common user activities on mobile devices. She called this list the “Daily Habits”, and they included news-reading, checking weather, reading email and photo-sharing. Mayer was determined to ensure that Yahoo had the best mobile app for each.

Nicholas Carlson

A story of good intentions, and the not so good places where they lead. My favorite part: when Marissa Mayer started to read from a children’s book in front of her employees…

In retrospect, focusing on apps was not such a smart idea. As numerous developers can testify, it’s difficult to build a business on someone else’s platform. The successful apps either come from massive social platforms (Twitter, Facebook and co.), create unique experiences (like Paper for iPad) or access already established services (productivity apps like Evernote or Office). Unfortunately for Yahoo, they offer neither. It’s even harder if you target ‘daily habits’, because the competition is especially diverse, differentiation is low, and people can readily switch whenever a new app comes along. The result: looking at the recent Homescreen study, no Yahoo apps made it in that top…

Search Engine Land: “Yahoo Replaces Google as Default Search Provider in Firefox”

Yahoo and Mozilla just announced a strategic five-year partnership that makes Yahoo the default search experience for Firefox in the United States on mobile and desktop. The companies said they will explore other potential future product integrations and distribution opportunities to other markets.

Greg Sterling

A classic case of the blind leading the blind: Yahoo struggling for relevance by buying (and usually shutting down) every other semi-successful startup, Mozilla trying to catch up to other desktop browsers and chasing impossible dreams of becoming the next mobile OS – neither could see a good strategic decision if it hit them in the face. Maybe someone should explain to them that people prefer Google’s search engine and browser because they are better products than Yahoo and Firefox, either separate or combined.

Carlos Bueno: “Inside the Mirrortocracy”

I want to stress the importance of being young and technical.
Young people are just smarter. Mark Zuckerberg

I was in the audience when a 22-year-old Zuck led with that drop of wisdom during his first Startup School talk. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue, it was the thesis of his entire 30 minutes on stage. It would have been forgettable startup blah-blah except that his talk followed Mitch Kapor’s. The contrast could not have been more raw.

Ironically, Zuck had arrived late and didn’t hear Kapor speak. He’s since evolved his views, thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s influence and (ahem) getting older himself.

Kapor is the legendary founder of Lotus, which more or less kicked off the personal computer revolution by making desktop computers relevant to business. He spoke about the dangers of what he called the “mirror-tocracy”: confirmation bias, insularity, and cliquish modes of thinking. He described the work of his institute to combat bias, countering the anecdotes and fantasies that pass for truth with actual research about diversity in the workplace.

Carlos Bueno

Fascinating article about the hiring process in Silicon Valley corporations and the numerous unwritten rules that can dismiss a candidate before he even had a chance to speak. If it sounds hard to believe, look at the recent disclosures about workforce diversity – or lack thereof – from Google, Facebook and Yahoo: their personnel structures are remarkably similar, even though the companies are quite different in age and development. It’s too bad they didn’t release any data about the age distribution of their employees, that would make for another interesting comparison.

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Update: more data about workforce diversity from Twitter and Pinterest.

Yahoo Mail updates to catch-up with Gmail and Outlook

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this major update to Yahoo! Mail, after all the changes to Flickr in the recent months, but somehow I am – I think I’m actually surprised by how well it looks, after the previous versions left me unimpressed. There are strong new features (Gmail-like conversations and themes powered by gorgeous Flickr photos, probably the major reason why the new inbox looks so appealing), as well as old Mail Plus features made free for all users (POP3 access, automatic email forwarding, disposable email addresses and extra filters). This move is actually very similar to the recent changes to Flickr Pro accounts, with more features available for free for the general public and higher prices for the ad-free experience – and let’s not forget the 1TB free storage, enough for a lifetime! It’s astonishing how ‘free’ online storage skyrocketed, from 1GB in 2004 to 1TB in 2013, a thousand-fold increase in less than 10 years.

Hide the Yahoo! Universal Header on Flickr

The complaints over the recent Flickr redesign have barely had time to quiet down when Yahoo! made another change, adding a navigation bar to all its sites, Flickr included. It’s not unlike Google’s top bar in functionality, with links to various Yahoo! services, but instead of blending into the background, the purple color makes it stick out, especially on the new design, supposedly dedicated to photos. Needless to say, users were once again upset, especially since it looks like the bar is here to stay. In this case, the only solution is to manually remove the bar using an extension, script or custom CSS style. A couple of days ago I became sufficiently annoyed by the header to do something about it; it didn’t take very long to find the CSS code that removes it from the final page:

#eyebrow { display: none; } 
body.with-eyebrow #global-nav { top: 0px !important; }

Flickr Blog: “A better, brighter Flickr”

Biggr. A free terabyte of space

At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

Markus Spiering

This feels like back in 2004 when webmail providers offered merely a couple of megabytes and Gmail launched with 1GB of free storage space.

Weather apps for iPhone: Forecast vs. Yahoo!

It seems like every other week a new weather app for the iPhone launches. It’s one of the easier ways to test new design ideas or user interface concepts, because the back-end data is relatively easy to obtain from one of several providers and that leaves more time to refine the interface. I have tried several of them as well, though most haven’t stuck around on my phone for more than a couple of days. Accuweather is horribly slow and bloated, while Sun and Solar are just to sparse with the information they provide. For a long while I have been using Celsius, which has a neat bonus in showing the current temperature as a badge icon so you can see it every time you unlock the phone. Lately there have been some good additions to the list that I both like:

Forecast is a full web app accessible from the desktop as well as from any smartphone – unlike Sun, which claims to be a web app but can only be installed on iOS devices. The design is very clean, with pastel colors and a couple of simple gestures: tap on the current weather icon to see details; swipe up to see the 7-day forecast; tap any day to see a short description and detailed, hour-by-hour forecast with temperature, rain potential, sunrise and sunset times; tilt the phone in landscape mode for a Easter-Egg. What’s remarkable about Forecast is that – for most of the time – it feels just like a native app, very responsive and with barely any lag while looking up data online. The best evidence for this is the ‘Map’ mode showing the cloud cover for a couple of days before and after today. Design and speed aside, the best of all is that the forecast is very accurate and reliable.

Flickr’s new iPhone app is a huge improvement

A couple of weeks ago I saw an unusual surge of updates for my iPhone apps and among them one update that was long overdue: a new Flickr app! While I couldn’t care less about filters – if you shoot a photo with bad framing or out of focus you won’t be able to ‘fix’ it with a filter – the app has some great improvements. I won’t go through all of them – there are other, in-depth reviews for that – but simply highlight some of the things I enjoy about the app and some minor problems:

New message views in Yahoo! Mail

After the initial testing and launch of the newest version of Yahoo! mail a couple of weeks ago, some of the promised new functionality is starting to appear. The example I spotted: the integration of different views for the messages, controlled from a new button on the main toolbar:

• ‘Page by Page’: the classic layout – the list of emails is paginated and you can choose the number of messages per page from the ‘Options’ menu.
• ‘In Scrolling List’ (with Preview): the odd name basically means a single page with infinite scrolling and a preview pane in the bottom half, replicating the experience you get in a desktop client. And if I remember correctly, it’s also equivalent to the default view from the second version of Y!-mail, so this update effectively merges the two previous versions into one interface. Unlike Hotmail, you cannot expand the message to fill the entire reading area, Yahoo! sticks with opening it in a tab instead. Another benefit of this view is the ‘Reply bar’, a small area at the bottom, where you can reply inline to the message, somewhat reminiscent of Gmail’s text box under conversations. Unfortunately the huge header, list of emails and message preview leave little room for the reply field, so it’s probably best suited for short, IM-like replies.
• ‘In Scrolling List’ (no Preview): like the previous option, but without the preview pane. You can quickly toggle the pane on and off with the keyboard shortcut ‘v’.

I’m guessing the move is based on the feedback of numerous users, not happy with the new version. The only annoyance with the new menu is that switching between the first and second view will always trigger a warning message. I’m sure we could have a check-box somewhere saying “I understand the risks, just make the switch already!”

In order to switch view, Yahoo! Mail must refresh. Any mail messages you're currently writing will be saved as drafts.

The third version of Yahoo! Mail

Even though it’s is one of the biggest free email providers, Yahoo! is rarely featured in the tech news – well, except when it’s down. This recent outage seems to be related to the roll-out of a new version for the online service, a “new beta”. I received a service announcement last month asking me to opt-in to the upgrade; the new version will be made available gradually for all users, in the coming months.

Dear George,
Thank you for being a Yahoo! Mail user for the past 10 year(s). We look forward to bringing you an even faster, safer, easier-to-use Yahoo! Mail very soon.
In the coming months, we will ask you to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo! Mail for your account. All Yahoo! Mail customers will be asked to upgrade. But in the meantime, you don't have to wait, you can have the newest Yahoo! Mail today.

In terms of new features, this update doesn’t bring many innovations. The official announcement bolsters more speed, better spam protection and “never-ending storage”; in my experience the responsiveness has indeed improved – it even works faster that the simple “classic” version –,  but the spam protection not so much – as you can see in the screenshot below. The “infinite” storage is of course nothing new and not dependent of the interface you choose. The integration with Facebook is now even tighter: whereas with the current version you could follow the news feed inside Yahoo! Mail, the beta brings Facebook chat to the inbox, alongside the already available Yahoo! Messenger.

First integration between FeedBurner and Google Analytics

Yesterday, Friday the 13th, was not an unlucky day at all for fans of Google services, as two of them made the first steps towards a long-awaited integration. Like the official announcement states: It's about time these two neighbors got to talking to each other. – in this case FeedBurner and Google Analytics. More specifically, after enabling the feature, FeedBurner tags your links with parameters like “Source” and “Medium” so that any click is more clearly presented in Google Analytics, along with the application it originated from (e.g. Google Reader). The article also shows how to enable it and customize the available variables. Of course, the real benefit from such an integration would be to share information about feed views, not merely clicks, so that this can be compared and tracked through the powerful filters and goals from Analytics. We can still hope this will see the light of day, since Google promises this is only the first of a series of updates scheduled in the coming weeks.

Interface updates in Yahoo! mail and Twitter

I don’t use Yahoo! mail very often, despite the fact it offers unlimited storage. I have moved all my relevant conversations to Gmail ever since it launched. Now I use the Yahoo! mailbox as an online storage for all the large files I might need sometime in the future.

When I logged in today, I was greeted with a message announcing changes to the interface. The part about filtering messages from connections and contacts was already available for some time. What really caught my eye was the interface redesign.