How Yahoo Fought PRISM — and Lost
Yahoo, one of the companies named as part of the NSA's PRISM data collection program, didn't go quietly, according to a New York Times scoop posted late Thursday
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Of the nine companies supposedly working with the government on PRISM, four and a half — Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft (which may or may not include Skype), Apple, and Google (sort of) — have disclosed the number of government requests they get including the secret FISA court ones, giving us an idea of which tech company the government loves most.
Yahoo, one of the companies named as part of the NSA's PRISM data collection program, didn't go quietly, according to a New York Times scoop posted late Thursday
The premium video streaming service Hulu is up for sale but no one wants to pay what it's worth. The only bids announced so far have come in much lower than the company's $2 billion valuation. So, what gives?
Marissa Mayer is coming for online video — and the ads that accompany it. Days after announcing its $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr, Yaho has submitted a bid for Hulu. Now starts the bidding war, all $2 billion of it.
Every single one of Tumblr's 178 employees will get money from the $1.1 billion Yahoo deal, which means that if the site hadn't let go of its three editorial team members last month, they too would have received $371,000 — each.
All this crying over how much this Yahoo acquisition will ruin Tumblr is a predictable part of the cycle of tech company acquisitions these days — no matter how smart or dumb the buy — and says nothing about how the impending marriage will do.
Now that Tumblr is a Yahoo! property, just like the beleaguered Flickr, some are predicting the service's death already and the deal hasn't even been officially announced yet. Those people are dramatic teens who use Tumblr but that's still a pretty big deal.
That rumored $1 billion offer from Yahoo! to buy Tumblr? It's looking like a forgone conclusion at this point. But things are messy and speculative and there are already doomsayers predicting this is a bad idea for everyone involved. But mostly they're predicting it's bad for Yahoo!
There's another $1 billion acquisition rumor floating around. Yahoo, reportedly, is interested in coming to some sort of deal to acquire Tumblr.
In the high-stakes race to commoditize the new couch potato, other online networks-in-the-making are working overtime. Can Netflix keep you binging across both ends of the entertainment spectrum? Or is there a funny sleeper hit in the works from the Internet, where two-minute clips are true kings, and 22-minute series are usually, well, really bad?
Fred Amoroso resigned his position as chairman of Yahoo Inc., a position he'd held for only 14 months, on Thursday. Obviously, everybody immediately wondered what CEO Marissa Mayer did wrong.
Yahoo already helps power the Apple weather app that comes built in to every iPhone, but the newly mobile first company has just launched its own proprietary meteorological wonder — indeed, this photo-first new app is so wondrous that you should go download Yahoo! Weather right now.
Tech companies are always buying up smaller tech companies for what sounds like a lot of money, but it's hard to know how much money is really a lot of money without some everyday context. That's why we built the handy new Atlantic Wire Startup Acquisition Calculator.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
After a pile of backlash over her work-from-home ban, Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who can do no right, is now getting flack for trying to get the best people to work at her fledgling company, which might not be as ridiculous as it sounds. Just ask Sheryl Sandberg.
After about five months on the job, on top of her $1 million annual salary, the Yahoo CEO received a ton of money for such a short period of time. But she made the company way more than that.
Amid all the theoretical talk about how Marissa Mayer's work-from-home ban is a terrible policy for America, those actually affected don't sound too upset about anything, really. In fact, it's working rather well as part of a broader cultural shift.
So Best Buy announced this week that it, too, will start making its workers come in and — well, well — nobody is calling new white-male CEO Hubert Joly a bad feminist yet. What gives?
With Marissa Mayer's new decree on telecommuting and Sheryl Sandberg's "feminist manifesto," everyone has an opinion about the feminine boss, but on what they're actually doing. Here's how we talk about women in power now.
Despite inheriting the title of Woman Who Has It All in Chief, the Yahoo CEO doesn't want to lead the feminist tribe, according to comments she said over a year ago that have resurfaced in light of her recent scandalous order to end work-at-home setups.
Least compelling of all the arguments against Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's new tyrannical order — outlawing permanent work-from-home arrangements for her employees — come from people who feel like their particular work-life patters are about to be upset .
After months of leaks, Yahoo finally unveiled its new homepage today and though it may not look that different, its new personalized news feed is the most important, and potentially most lucrative, part of the new look.
The winners of yesterday's third annual Streamy Awards, which "honor excellence in original online video programming and those who create it," show that the best of made-for-Web television is still pretty webby.
Instead of the usual song and dance about how privacy is important to companies in the business of selling our data, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave a refreshingly honest take today at the World Economic Forum on how privacy actually works .
After six months on the job, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer hasn't made Yahoo any more popular, according to private ComScore data obtained by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. And that's not the only problem facing the ailing company.
Now that Instagram has suddenly angered so many of its millions of loyal users with a sneaky terms of service change, Yahoo's Flickr app for iPhone actually has a chance to win over legions of new photo sharers. Herein, a comparison test.
A day after debuting its new mail apps, the company has just released a Flickr app for iPhone, that — surprise, surprise — has Instagram-type filters. This comes just days after Twitter released its own filters and Instagram unveiled a new one.
In her first big product overhaul, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has announced a redesign of Yahoo Mail — and it focuses a lot on the mobile experience, as promised.
One of Marissa Mayer's big moves to bring Yahoo back includes a sorely needed homepage redesign, which might launch as early as this week, reports AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.
In her first public interview since taking over as Yahoo's CEO, Marissa Mayer gave a little insight into the company's plans going forward, and her strategy sounds like that of a lot of other tech companies these days: mobile first.
One would think that sources ROFLOLzing in the face of a possible joint Yahoo-Facebook search venture would quiet the rumors that the two companies are thinking about working together, but it has only led to further rumoring.
Marissa Mayer started her reign as Yahoo CEO with nice things like free lunches and company-issued iPhones, but the Internet giant is still stumbling and now it's time for her to cut the fat, which means using Google-like efficiency to cut the pay and lay off the 20 percent worst performing employees, sources tell AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.
During her first quarter as CEO Marissa Mayer didn't sink the company further into the depths of despair, reporting $1.089 billion in revenue which just beat the $1.08 billion forecast by analysts.
Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has some advice for current CEO Marissa Mayer: Change is harder than you think.
Take a look at the cover of Fortune's new "50 Most Powerful Women" list, and you'll see Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer looking powerful and professional and nothing close to pregnant, which she was up until Sunday—a decision the magazine says they made because Mayer declined their request.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had a baby boy last night, according to a tweet by her hubby Zachary Bogue. Because, yes, that's how we find out about things now.
When Yahoo appointed former Google loyalist Marissa Mayer as CEO, some suspected that it was part of a Google plot to bring down the competition. While never a very likely scenario, it looks even less likely today.
If it feels like there have been a lot of password hacks this year, it's because there have been more than usual, and Ars Technica's Dan Goodin explains why that is.
Newly appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is giving her entire staff new iPhones, which has to burn her former Google colleagues a little.
With Marissa Mayer comfortably installed as Yahoo's new CEO, the search has now begun for a new COO to act as Mayer's right hand.
As expected, Yahoo acting CEO Ross Levinsohn has left the company after the former Googler Marissa Mayer took the job he was supposed to inherit, reports AllThingsD's Kara Swisher.
During her first couple of weeks as CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer's first visible move comes in the form of employee perks, a tactic she learned from her Google days that worked for the company for awhile, but has since waned in importance.
When companies are asked to define themselves as either media or tech companies, it seems it's usually because they don't have a definitive answer.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
For a normal person, a $1 million base salary plus potential to make $100 million over the next five years would be a lot of money, but for Marissa Mayer, who already made her fortune as one of the first 20 employees of Google, it's just some more money.
And yes, a stop-motion Lego version of The Wire might just be more proof Yahoo is stil capable of doing something fun. Stop what you're doing and watch this.
The question of having it all cropped up yet again in the comments on today's post about newly appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. She just announced that she's pregnant, which has some people wondering how she'll balance work and family.
As if Marissa Mayer didn't already have enough scrutiny coming her way after landing her toughest gig yet, the new CEO of Yahoo announced another major personnel move: She's having a baby.
When it looked like the Yahoo CEO search had come down to the obvious, easy choice, Yahoo goes ahead and picks long-time Googler Marissa Mayer, reports The New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn Rusli.
If we've learned one thing from this Yahoo hack, it's that even after countless blogger and security expert pleas for smarter choices, people continue to create amazingly obvious passwords, leading us to wonder if they might be doing it on purpose. And if so, bravo!
After this morning's news that Yahoo had narrowed down its CEO search to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar, a Hulu spokesperson says Kilar is out, leaving Yahoo's choice for CEO pretty clear.
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