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…