Flickr’s survival is a minor miracle of the Internet age: it’s one of the few sites that Yahoo acquired in the last decade that it didn’t kill off or change beyond all recognition. That’s because of its core base of very loyal and very talented users. Unfortunately, that kind of base means a popular uprising whenever anything about the site changes, a minor revolt happens. [More]
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Google, Bing To Block Search Result Ads For Unlicensed Payday Lenders In California
By 4.8.15
Government officials in California found a few unlikely allies when it comes to ensuring online payday lenders aren’t illegally advertising their services to residents online: The nation’s top search engine providers. [More]
Whatever Happened To GeoCities, Lycos, Netscape & Other Giants Of Web 1.0?
By 3.20.15
Long before Facebook and Twitter, well before even Friendster and MySpace, before the first dotcom bubble burst, in the eons before Google was a glint in anyone’s eye, there was the first web. In comparison to everything that’s come after it, you could call it Web 1.0 or perhaps even just “the dark ages.” But for anyone born before, say, 1990, this was the dawn of our now-ubiquitous digital world. But as the digital giants of yesteryear have been replaced by the now-ubiquitous Facebook and Google, how many are still in play now? [More]
Flickr Stops Selling Prints Of Photos Licensed For Free Use
By 12.19.14
Creative Commons licenses let people without expansive legal teams license their creative work for use in other creative projects: a piece of Creative Commons-licensed music could appear in a podcast or a video, for example, or a photo could be used to illustrate a blog post. The idea is to let people share their work and build on others’ creative work. Users of photo-sharing site Flickr were upset about the company’s sale of prints of their CC-licensed photos without giving them a cut of the proceeds. [More]
Firefox Breaks Up With Google, Makes Yahoo The Browser’s Default Search Engine
By 11.20.14
Right now, Google is probably on the couch wrapped in blankets with The Notebook on repeat, eyeballs deep in a trough of chocolate ice cream. Mozilla dumped Google this week after three years together, as Firefox’s default search engine, and has decided to go steady with Yahoo instead. [More]
Secure Messaging Scorecard Shows Just How Unprotected Your Online Chats Are
By 11.5.14
The Internet is a place where hundreds of millions of people go to write things they wouldn’t — or can’t — say in public, and many of the most private and secretive communications occur via the many instant messaging services available to consumers. But what you may not realize when sharing your personal thoughts (and images) with someone online is that the level of privacy and security on these services varies wildly from one to the next. [More]
IRS Turning Its Baleful Gaze At Company Cafeterias That Churn Out Free Food
By 9.2.14
Do you hear that noise? It’s thousands of forks clattering in the hands of Silicon Valley employees currently enjoying a free lunch. The Internal Revenue Service is taking a closer look at the trend of company cafeterias shoveling free food onto employees’ plates, saying that smorgasbord is a taxable fringe benefit. [More]
Yahoo Ditching Google, Facebook Logins For Flickr Accounts By End Of The Month
By 6.6.14
After announcing in March that it would phase out third-party logins for photo-sharing site Flickr, Yahoo says it’ll be killing off Google and Facebook logins on June 30. That means you’ll need a Yahoo account to sign in and access your photos. [More]
Amazon, Google, Reddit, Netflix, 4Chan, Dozens Others, Plead With FCC To Protect Net Neutrality
By 5.7.14
In perhaps the most motley crew (as opposed to Mötley Crüe) of tech and Internet companies ever assembled for a single cause, around 150 businesses representing everything from content and infrastructure to gaming, crowdfunding and 3-D printing have written the FCC to ask that it not completely screw up net neutrality. [More]
What Is This Scary Heartbleed Bug, And Why Is Everyone Freaking Out About It?
By 4.9.14
One second everything on the Internet appears normal, and the next thing you know, everyone is talking about some security bug called “Heartbleed” that’s out to get us all. So what is it, and is it as scary of a problem as it seems to be? [More]
Yahoo Announces New Security Measures To Keep Snoopers From Snooping
By 4.3.14
If security is a blanket, Yahoo is trying to roll itself up in more layers of that blanket to make a nice little cocoon for its users, designed to keep the government and others from snooping. Following Google’s recent new security measures, Yahoo says it’s also completed a new system that encrypts all info going from one Yahoo data center to another. [More]
Comcast, Abercrombie, Chase Victorious In First Day Of Worst Company Competition!
March 19, 2014
The 2014 Worst Company In America competition got off to a big start today with readers turning out in droves to vote on the tournament’s first three match-ups that saw a former Golden Poo champ flexing its muscle, a tournament mainstay making its case for the WCIA title, and the year’s first upset. [More]
Have Fun Breaking Down This Year’s Worst Company In America Bracket
March 18, 2014
The above bracket will be updated at the end of each day of WCIA competition to reflect that day’s results.
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After going through all of your nominations, then having y’all rank the contenders and eliminate the chaff from the wheat, we’re proud to present the first round match-ups for this year’s Worst Company in America tournament! [More]
Here Are Your Worst Company Contenders For 2014 — Help Us Seed The Brackets!
March 17, 2014
After sorting through a mountain of nomination e-mails, we’ve whittled down the field of competitors for this year’s Worst Company In America tournament to 40 bad businesses. Here’s your chance to have your say on how these players will square off in the bracket, and which bubble teams will get left out in the cold. [More]
UK Spy Agency Snooped On Yahoo Cam Chats, Including The Nude Ones
By 2.27.14
With help from their pals at the National Security Agency the British intelligence agents at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spent two years swiping still frames from millions of Yahoo webcam chats between people who weren’t suspects in any crimes or terrorist activities, according to leaked government documents. [More]
Is Yahoo Triple-Billing You For Your Old Flickr Pro Account?
By 2.19.14
While Yahoo’s photo sharing site Flickr now offers free users a reasonably hefty 1TB of storage, it didn’t use to be so generous, and the only way around those old limits was to upgrade to a Pro account for $25/year. When Flickr stopped offering the Pro tier last spring, Yahoo grandfathered in existing Pro accounts at the same rate. But if you’re still paying for Flickr Pro, you may want to keep an eye on your bank statement when it comes time to renew your account. [More]
Great, Now Yahoo E-mail Addresses & Passwords Have Been Stolen
By 1.30.14
In news that makes you long for the days of handwritten correspondence, Yahoo has announced that usernames and passwords for an unspecified number of users have been compromised. [More]
Feds To Allow Tech Companies To Provide More Transparent Info On Data Requests
By 1.27.14
While a number of the largest websites and telecom companies have recently published transparency data detailing the number of data requests made about consumers, these companies have been very limited with regard to what they could say about federal requests that fall under the header of national security. In response to a call for more transparency from several major Internet businesses, the government is changing its restrictions. [More]
