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Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

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Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#161

Post by __derek__ »

hughw wrote: post #133
mholmes680 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Anecdotally, my mother called me last night asking what she needed to do about Yahoo's new breach. I said, no no, dont worry we already changed your password. She said nope, NEW news! My mother (and her news) heard this loud and clear. Thats a problem, and VZ has every right to renegotiate -- this has passed the point of "we're yahoo so we're big and an unlucky target". This is, in my mother's words, "what th…

If you changed her password in September, you shouldn't have to change now, right? Since the "new" breach is from 2013.

That's the thing: people who don't understand this news may now think that this is an ongoing, regular thing with Yahoo. If they react by switching, Yahoo will only be left with people's spam-collecting accounts.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#162

Post by vertex-four »

skuhn wrote: post #68
oddevan wrote: post #3

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.

The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the…

Well, they can't crack down on it because a significant amount of Tumblr's actual users are there for porn (both fanart and "regular" porn), at least in part, and would see doing so as censorship and being disconnected from the community.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#163

Post by jeffdavis »

bmh100 wrote: post #57

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information secur…

That's a part of it, but we've seen other examples like Target, without a lot of real change.

The problem is that it's hard to evaluate security. Unless you know the area very well, it's hard to hire someone that knows the area well, which is a catch-22.

Do we know that Yahoo skimped on security, or did they just not get what they paid for because they didn't know better?

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#164

Post by sytelus »

skuhn wrote: post #68
oddevan wrote: post #3

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.

The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the…

Why Tumblr has such high costs? It doesn't seem to warrant complicated infrastructure like search or Flickr. It shouldn't require 100s of people to maintain. A tons of eyeballs should translate to very significant revenues here.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#165

Post by siggypop »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118
bmh100 wrote: post #57

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information secur…

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

BitSight provides a service that quantifies the security of a company based on publicly visible data. Even now it is being used for underwriting insurance and for evaluating alternative partners.

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#166

Post by [deleted] »

anton_tarasenko wrote: post #6

Yahoo controls 8% of search traffic and costs $4bn. Google controls 64% of search traffic and costs $558bn. That's a 17-fold difference in the price for 1% of the traffic. Even more if you take US search traffic only (to exclude Yahoo Japan). Verizon can get rid of the costly parts of Yahoo (mostly its media business) and have its own small Google to make cash. That was $1.8bn per year in 2015, while Yahoo's overall…

[deleted]

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#167

Post by xkcd-sucks »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118
bmh100 wrote: post #57

One benefit of these incidents at Yahoo! is that they represent salient, clear examples of the cost of poor information security. CIOs and security directors will be able to point to this deal as evidence that poor security can have material impact on the business and destroy massive shareholder value, even years after the fact. A 6.5% intra-day dip sends a clear message. Even a CFO can now see that information secur…

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

So basically people who grab a company's data can extort the execs instead of trying to sell the data to third partied

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#168

Post by kak9 »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #167
ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important point. Yahoo!'s troubles help make a quantitative point to people who care only about money. Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are; * "Will the product run faster?", * "Will the customers get better service?", * "Will someone choose us over a competitor because of this?" Generally 'no', 'no', and 'hard to quantify' so the answer to the funding…

So basically people who grab a company's data can extort the execs instead of trying to sell the data to third partied

Yes, but would be tough, since how could you guarantee you deleted the data you stole

Re: Verizon Explores Lower Price or Even Exit from Yahoo Deal

#169

Post by tclAmockingbird »

tptacek wrote: post #159
DannyBee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably completely wrong. The patent landscape has changed dramatically in the past 5 years. The likelihood they could extract significant sums of money from these patents drops every day.

I'd really love to read the summary of the patent landscape that explains that.

This might be a good starting place, "Software Patents: A One-Year Review of Alice v. CLS Bank" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619388)
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