geekosystem

The news broke yesterday that Yahoo will pay $1.1 billion for the Internet's foremost source for cat GIFs and teenage poetry, Tumblr. Not everyone is taking the news well, but Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has stated that she promises "not to screw it up." Then she outlined a plan to feature more ads on Tumblr. That sounds a lot like screwing up Tumblr.

Yahoo is holding a big media event in New York tomorrow, at which everyone was expecting them to announce they would be buying Tumblr. Instead of waiting for the big event, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo's board has approved the Tumblr purchase and its $1.1 billion price tag, which will be paid in cash.

Everybody is supposed to hate internet pirates. That's just how it is now: If you don't, you might end up on some kind of watch list or something. The Canadian government is going to be pretty embarrassed, then, when everybody finds out the Canadian Department of Finance recently bought ads on one of Canada's most popular websites, The Pirate Bay.

In their continuing bid to remain relevant, Yahoo! is apparently going to replace the corporate phones of all their employees. The old mainstays, BlackBerry devices, will be replaced by their much cooler cousins -- like the iPhone 5 and Nokia Lumia 920. Sure, this might come off as another stab at RIM, but really it's just Yahoo! attempting to get with the times.

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Regardless of how it gets to you, somebody paid for it. Paying is no longer a concern for Yahoo! employees in Silicon Valley as their new CEO, Marissa Mayer, has revealed that their cafe will be offering food to them free of charge. This kind of service was already a staple at Google and isn't unheard of in the professional world these days. A free lunch isn't the only thing Mayer's brought with her, though.

Have you had to change your login information in a paranoid fever after discovering that a major online service provider has been hacked in the last few weeks? Well, if you have a Yahoo! account, you might have some worrying to do. A hacker group called D33DS Company has apparently dumped 453,492 usernames and passwords obtained in plaintext from a Yahoo! service.

Yahoo!, once the darling of the early Internet, has fallen on hard times. In the past few years, the company has tried a number of new paths to make it more relevant to the modern web, but none of them have been able to recapture the company's glory days. Now, Yahoo! has unveiled a new visual-based web browser called Axis for iPad, iPhone, and as a desktop browser-plugin designed to unify your online experience between all your devices.

In a bit of sad news, Yahoo! has laid off 2,000 of its employees, registering as the largest wave of layoffs in company history. The layoffs will, as one might expect, trigger a restructuring of the company, though CEO Scott Thompson doesn't only see doom and gloom.

After holding its tongue for years, it seems, Yahoo! has unleashed a patent lawsuit against Facebook, arguing that Facebook's momumental success would not have been possible without the use of techniques developed and patented by Yahoo! in it's heyday. Like software patent suits that have laid claim to everything from the concept of the micro-transaction to the concept of torrenting, this suit is mainly concerned with broadly defined techniques and strategies, as opposed to specific technologies or anything so physical. Social networking juggernaut Facebook is no small target, and it this seems to be an all-or-nothing sort of play on Yahoo!'s part.

Venerable search engine-homepage-media company Yahoo has announced that Oscar winning actor and nice dude Tom Hanks will be streaming an original, scripted sci-fi webseries called Electric City through the company's video service. This would be Yahoo's first foray into scripted content, after greatly expanding their video service.

Yesterday, a group of nine of the biggest online companies took out a full page ad in the New York Times to voice their concern over two pieces of legislation in congress that could greatly affect the way America uses the Internet. In the letter, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Zynga, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL ask that their point of view be heard regarding the Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Some cryptic memos from the upper echelons of Yahoo! management have given new strength to rumors that the company's board might be planning on selling all or part of the online media organization. The first memo, signed by board chairman Roy Bostock and cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang is not at all explicit. It encourages the staff to keep working hard, and promises good times ahead, but also drops this tantalizing tidbit:

Our advisers are working with us to develop ideas that we will pursue proactively. At the same time, they are fielding inquiries from multiple parties that have already expressed interest in a number of potential options. We will take the time we need to select and structure the best approach for the company, its shareholders and employees.

Could this be the admission of a sale by any other name? We'll have to wait and see. The full text of the memo follows below, along with a second message from interim CEO Tim Morse, so you can read and judge for yourself.

Last night, executives from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced a plan to team up and cooperate on ad sales in order to try and maintain some level of competition with Google. The plan involves all three companies selling ad inventory on each others' sites in hopes of allowing them to collectively regain some of the ad spending that has been going to ad networks.

The three plan to share revenue on the ads and calculate that the profit gained through that approach will be greater than the slim pickings they would get by all individually going to ad networks. While the pact encourages a certain level of cooperation, it's an open relationship; no pact member is prohibited from breaking down and working with the very ad networks they are teaming up against or even from going to Google itself. The hope is that the mutual benefit of the situation will prevent that kind of behavior organically. We'll see if it actually works.

(via AllThingsD)

When logging into a website or establishing a new account, many users are prompted to decipher a visually distorted string of letters and numbers to keep spammers from gaining access. This list of characters is a CAPTCHA, a puzzle that is glaringly easy for most humans but that stops computers from automatically deciphering the text. CAPTCHAs also come in audio form for the visually impaired, but these audio puzzles are an easy target for would-be spammers. An audio CAPTCHA is a list of letters or numbers read along with additional audio distortion. The user has to list the characters correctly to gain access like with a regular visual CAPTCHA. A team of researchers from Stanford University, led by Elie Bursztein, has developed an algorithm that can automatically defeat audio CAPTCHAs. The ability to automatically solve CAPTCHA puzzles would allow spammers to create new accounts and thus even more spam.

Yesterday's news that the most notorious man of the 21st century had been killed struck a chord with millions of Americans. The younger folks seem to have been left out in the cold, though, as Yahoo! reported in a recent blog post. According to their search statistics, searches for "Osama Bin Laden" went up 100,000% making him the most searched person on Monday. One quarter of those searches came from those under the age of 24. Younger users, ages 13-17, were responsible for 1 in 3 of the searches for "how did Osama Bin Laden die," and 40% of searches for "who killed Osama Bin Laden." Most surprising, however, was Yahoo!'s report that 66% of the people searching for the phrase "who is Osama Bin Laden?" were also in the 13-17. For reference, these pubescent users would have been born in 1994-1998, meaning that the oldest amongst them were in first grade during the 9/11 attacks. While it's possible that they were simply too young to remember the attacks, and have -- as teenagers are wont to do -- ignored many of the news issues of the day, search traffic alone doesn't imply ignorance. They could have just as easily used the search term to learn more about the deceased leader of Al Qaeda. But, if you need to make a friend feel old and despair about the future, just share the above factoids with them. (Yahoo! Search Blog via BoingBoing)