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An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

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Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#331

Post by tajen »

gotofritz wrote: post #322
djsumdog wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder if there really was a Linkedin breach, or if it was just to force people to remember they had a Linkedin account.

A LOT of people use Linkedin regularly, perhaps not where you live.

Living in France as a good Java dev, LinkedIn sends me few spam, while it is very relevant to get contacted by recruiters whenever I update my resume. I've found my last 2 gigs in my last 3 years (yeah I'm a software editor who only contracts whenever my income gets low) through LinkedIn. Of course, this doesn't understate LinkedIn's other face which is made of dark patterns, probably-illegal data hunting, massive spamming problems and doubtful security.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#332

Post by tajen »

crististm wrote: post #179
supergirl wrote: post #77

"state sponsored actor". I wonder how they decided that. did the hackers plant a flag inside yahoo's data center? or is any attack originating from outside US now considered state sponsored? of course, we will never see any proof of this. also, did it take them 2 years to discover this breach? that's bad. or, do they just announce it now? that's worse.

"I mean, look at this: it was a STATE-sponsored-entity that did that to us! We were overwhelmed... Did not stand a chance... I need a hug..." - At least this is how I interpreted it. They put in all the right words: "threats, Industry, government, crosshairs, strategic". Edit: "...by what it believes is a state..."??? Who is IT?

In a communist country, isn't every corporation a state actor ;) ?

Also, although of course many states could do something with the data... I still wonder why they'd auction it on a marketplace.

We'll later learn that Archive.org bought the data... "to bootstrap their new museum on Internet archeology" /s.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#333

Post by [deleted] »

slicktux wrote: post #277

Interestingly my account is not part of the compromise and my friends are; I can confirm this because they received a message about the compromise and I did not. . .I asked them how long they've had their accounts and they said for about a year; where as I have had my account for about 5 years. Interesting no?

[deleted]

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#334

Post by ValentineC »

monix wrote: post #42
cylo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been entirely the opposite of yours. Fastmail has excellent (and personal) customer service whereas getting ahold of someone at Google is nearly impossible.

Truth be told, with Google Apps you get phone support and email support usually answers withing 24 hours in my experience. Problem is they couldn't help me much when I had problems. Google Apps has serious limits and contacting support won't help you get around those limits. Most of the time support just tells you what you can already find in their online docs. They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to…

> They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to change my primary domain, after 2-3 months of asking them repeatedly, they finally enrolled me into this beta programming and finally changed my primary domain.

Were you on the grandfathered free tier? It seems to be quite trivial to change the primary domain if you're on a paid tier.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#336

Post by 4ad »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #28
marco1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to a new email address (and taking all your existing mails with you to the new inbox) is actually far easier than changing phone numbers. Almost all (old) providers let you set up a mail forwarding (to the new provider). But even better, several services let you set up some fetchmail-like program where it imports all the messages from the old provider, e.g. via POP3 or IMAP, and even deletes them with the old…

FastMail has working tech but customer service leaves a lot to be desired. Google is leagues ahead of them there. It's better than Office365 support though.

Google has absolutely no customer support whatsoever. I don't know anything about FastMail customer support, but it's hard to argue it's worse than no customer support.

Unless customer service means something different than customer support. What does it mean?

Personally, I use Google Apps for Business and since a few months ago Hangouts doesn't work correctly any more. It's almost unusable at times.

What can I do? Who can I complain to? How can I escalate this? Absolutely nobody can help me.

Once I figure out a feasible transition plan from Hangouts, I'm done with doing business with Google.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#337

Post by 4ad »

newscracker wrote: post #5

Moving email addresses out from one provider and creating another one is more difficult than moving phone numbers (in the latter case, number portability could help, if available). What exactly can an average/common end user do for such incidents, even if it is to avoid them in the future? I use different passwords across accounts, with all of them being somewhat complex or very complex. I have looked at a few differ…

They appear expensive because the expectation in people's minds is that email, and most online services are free.

Personally I find email to be the most important online service. Everything depends on email. While I can live a non luddite life without Netflix and Dropbox and cloud VMs, and Facebooks, I quite literally can't live my normal life without email.

For me, it's more important than a phone. Because of this, I would expect to pay less for a mobile plan than for email, but even with "expensive" email service, the situation seem reversed.

If the idea of paying for online services were more entranced in people's mind, there would be more competition and there would be email providers offering services at any price point. Now we only have free email, and "expensive" email, for "those" people.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#338

Post by 4ad »

driverdan wrote: post #246
blawson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I did that and while generally it's been a positive experience, providing your email address over the phone has become huge pain! I definitely took for granted how easy it is to say to someone "first initial + last name at major email provider . com", instead of "really easy first part at custom domain, wait let me give you the phonetic alphabet equivalent, no just the letter b, not actually the wor…

Never use a domain for email or a business that you can't say clearly over the phone without spelling it.

This sounds good, but in my experience americans wants everything spelled out. Every time I need to communicate a common name, or common-word domain, or anything like that, they always ask me how to spell it.

"Hi, my name is Kate", "How do you spell that?". WTF!

And they get it wrong anyway. My partner's name is "Andreea", with a double 'e', and she always makes this fact very explicit, but in 95% of cases they will input it in their systems with a single 'e'.

My name is unusual, but it's one letter off from a usual name in my country. The bank has my correct name in their record, of course. But each time they email me, they use the wrong name. They sometimes even emit me new cards in the wrong name! When I complain, they ask very surprised and say that they are aware that the name in the system is what it is, but they thought it was a mistake, so they decided to emit the card in a different name! Unbelievable! This has happened with multiple banks.

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#339

Post by newscracker »

KMag wrote: post #50
newscracker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it still needs an email service provider to point to (and I wouldn't want to run it myself for various reasons). And the providers I've seen are expensive (for me).

Did Google stop offering a free tier for Apps For Your Domain? I guess I missed the part about being grandfathered in.

Luckily, I do have a grandfathered plan where I can use Google Apps for my domain for free. But as I mentioned in another comment, I'm trying to reduce my linkages with Google, Facebook and others for privacy reasons. That's one of the reasons why I don't use that much (the other issue is dealing with changing my email addresses with everyone else I've shared those with - ad based free email providers like Yahoo do not offer mail forwarding out of their platforms for free).

Re: An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

#340

Post by bruceboughton »

killbrad wrote: post #320
whoopdedo wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo hosts the email for many ISPs, including AT&T.

Wait, Yahoo hosts all of AT&T subscribers' email, or there is some cross-account link? Important difference.

Yahoo hosts all mail for BT Internet in the UK (the former national telecom, now one of top 3 ISPs)
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