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Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

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Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#21

Post by ryandrake »

wila wrote: post #2

While I agree with the sentiment. Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account. Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to everyone. This means that if you have not unlinked everything it can be used by others to reset accounts on services you forgot that you linked to your yahoo account. Instead of deleting it, forward it all to another account and stop using it. Do not forget to log…

Isn't your E-mail address used as the username in most services' credentials? So you should know which services you registered using your Yahoo E-mail address because that's what you use to log in. Just go in and change them over to using your new address. For those few that don't use E-mail, take a Sunday afternoon and log in to each of them to check. Surely it couldn't be that difficult.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#22

Post by crystalmeph »

donretag wrote: post #8

Yahoo is simply the first company that we publicly know of that scans incoming emails. If the government can force Yahoo, they will force all of them. Yahoo has more disgruntled former employees to reveal secrets than Google, Microsoft, etc...

To be fair, according to this article, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have explicitly denied allowing government officials direct access to their servers.

However, due to the secrecy requirements of the law, we cannot know if they did allow the government some other form of access that was functionally equivalent to a rootkit on the server in terms of what the government could access.

Pure speculation on my part: Yahoo probably got the court order and made the decision that the government was going to get what they wanted anyway in the end, and resistance was going to be futile, and they probably figured that since no-one was going to be able to hear about them fighting against this order, it wouldn't even do their reputation any good to fight it. Of course, if I'm right, they miscalculated a little bit on that last part, since they obviously didn't count on a leak of the fact that they did roll over, which now has damaged their reputation.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#24

Post by Silhouette »

wila wrote: post #2

While I agree with the sentiment. Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account. Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to everyone. This means that if you have not unlinked everything it can be used by others to reset accounts on services you forgot that you linked to your yahoo account. Instead of deleting it, forward it all to another account and stop using it. Do not forget to log…

This is an excellent argument for setting up e-mail using your own domain name, though, and for using that for all new accounts and transitioning existing accounts to your new e-mail address as soon as possible.

The Internet works just fine when it's decentralised, but particularly with e-mail, relying on the big service providers (or an ISP-provided address, for that matter) immediately locks you into someone else's systems for no particularly good reason.

Registering your own domain and setting up mail forwarding can be done with any number of services and costs less for a year than many people pay for a week of their cell phone service, and crucially, the domain is registered by some specialist service but is your domain and can be transferred to another service any time you want.

Unfortunately it can be a scary-looking process for non-technical users, but for those with enough confidence to arrange it, I highly recommend it.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#25

Post by etjossem »

joesmo wrote: post #6

The Yahoo fiasco is horrible, but it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has heard of Snowden and his leaks. He talks about programs like this, though I don't remember the program's name. So, in other words, shouldn't we all have dumped Yahoo (and everyone else) in 2013? Also, it's rather irrelevant if you communicate mostly with other Yahoo, Gmail, etc. users because, unless you encrypt (good luck with gettin…

You are probably thinking of the PRISM program, which demands information from technology companies based on warrants from the secret FISA court [1], and the MUSCULAR program which sniffs internal Google/Yahoo cloud traffic from servers based in foreign countries. MUSCULAR is completely warrantless because the information is collected outside of the United States [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program...

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#26

Post by l3m0ndr0p »

Yahoo was very sloppy. But I believe all other companies that provide "free" email are continuing to allow The US Government Agencies to archive and search emails without explicit consent from the user.

If a company states it denied the access to email, then let the CEO of the company under oath, testify that they've rejected/denied all attempts to have emails archived and searched by any Government agency

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#27

Post by dpark »

ryandrake wrote: post #21
wila wrote: post #2

While I agree with the sentiment. Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account. Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to everyone. This means that if you have not unlinked everything it can be used by others to reset accounts on services you forgot that you linked to your yahoo account. Instead of deleting it, forward it all to another account and stop using it. Do not forget to log…

Isn't your E-mail address used as the username in most services' credentials? So you should know which services you registered using your Yahoo E-mail address because that's what you use to log in. Just go in and change them over to using your new address. For those few that don't use E-mail, take a Sunday afternoon and log in to each of them to check. Surely it couldn't be that difficult.

I have accounts at literally hundreds of sites, from credit cards and banks, public utilities, online stores, photo sites, discussion sites and forums, social networks, etc. I don't even have an exhaustive list of all the sites I've got accounts with. I certainly don't use them all frequently enough to know what my login account is set to and it would be a lot more than a Sunday morning for me to track them all down.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#28

Post by jwtadvice »

crystalmeph wrote: post #22
donretag wrote: post #8

Yahoo is simply the first company that we publicly know of that scans incoming emails. If the government can force Yahoo, they will force all of them. Yahoo has more disgruntled former employees to reveal secrets than Google, Microsoft, etc...

To be fair, according to this article, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have explicitly denied allowing government officials direct access to their servers. However, due to the secrecy requirements of the law, we cannot know if they did allow the government some other form of access that was functionally equivalent to a rootkit on the server in terms of what the government could access. Pure speculation on my par…

> To be fair, according to this article, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others have explicitly denied allowing government officials direct access to their servers.

Right, but the statements were very carefully crafted PR statements that only implied that there were no similar feeds while leaving open the possibility that there may be.

Having watching the industry for some time (Skype's PR denials come to mind as well as all the companies implicated in the Snowden disclosures) I have no confidence that those PR releases mean anything of significance besides a recognition from the companies that their users might not like certain activities by their customers.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#29

Post by michaelmrose »

awinter-py wrote: post #19

how is yahoo's action different from a court-ordered pen register? I respect the lavabit guy for his decision to implode, but you can't expect a large public company to behave that way.

Presumably in that traditionally an actual normal court that is accountable to the public would have to based on evidence approve a warrant naming particularly the individuals and why and for a finite duration of time.

This is fundamentally different from building a tool that would allow them to access any or all of your customers communications forever with no further oversight forever based on a secret courts request or in fact sometimes nothing more than administrative request or even breaking in.

Re: Why We Should All Dump Yahoo

#30

Post by jwtadvice »

awinter-py wrote: post #19

how is yahoo's action different from a court-ordered pen register? I respect the lavabit guy for his decision to implode, but you can't expect a large public company to behave that way.

It is significant in the sense of scope (they searched everyone's email), in the sense of legality (this wasn't court ordered, indeed it didn't come through corporate attorneys), in the sense of reasonable suspicion (there was none), and in the sense of scale (data at scale can be used to do things that individual bits of data can not).
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