The Many Problems of Yahoo

You may or may not have heard but Yahoo has been in the news quite a bit. First they were being sold to Verizon for 4.8 billion dollars. This was no surprise to people that follow technology because Yahoo has been doing poorly in the last couple years despite acquiring other companies, investments, and changes to the company. Verizon bought Yahoo because they have a lot of online advertisement revenue and technology patents.

Many technology reporters have disliked Yahoo's website, search, and e-mail for sometime. The reason for this dislike was that the company has paid associate and referral payments to companies that sent them users despite many of those companies doing so through malicious and illegal means such as malware, ad ware, and deceptive software downloads.

News recently came out that Yahoo's e-mail system was hacked and 500 million users accounts were affected. It is unclear how long Yahoo knew this occurred but the breach was from 2014 and they just notified the public last month. This Business Insider article claims that the real number of affected accounts is probably closer to one billion http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-insider-hacking-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T and this article discusses who may have pulled off this massive hackhttp://fortune.com/2016/09/29/yahoo-hacked-by-eastern-european-gang-cybersecurity-firm-says/

Then just a few weeks after this happened an insider at Yahoo discussed that the National Security Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation asked for a real time filter of all e-mails to find and record suspect conversations (Here is a New York Time article discussing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/yahoo-email-tech-companies-government-investigations.html?_r=0 ) . It turned out that it was much worse, there was a 'rootkit' on Yahoo's system which may have allowed government employees access to any and all communications that were being made on Yahoo's system http://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

Why does this all matter to you?
Many articles from technology publications and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have asked that users close their accounts with Yahoo. They say this because Yahoo has not taken security seriously and not protected its users information from the government or from outside bad actors.

While I think that everyone who has a Yahoo account should immediately change their password; I do not think that you should delete your account and the reason that I say that is because Yahoo recycles e-mail addresses. If you have 'ABC123@yahoo.com' and you go delete your account then in 6 months Yahoo will make 'ABC123@yahoo.com' available for someone else. If you fail to inform everyone from your family and friends to that website that sends you reset codes to change your password, it means that someone else will have that e-mail address and may get an e-mail that was intended for you.

If you have an account with Yahoo change the password and try to change all your accounts that have a Yahoo e-mail address as the username / contact to another provider. I have had one employee and a few patrons that have had people try to get into their Apple account, Facebook account, or receive text messages that were "phishing". In one case a patron was called and told that they had been "hacked" and that they needed to purchase protection or assistance. Luckily that patron called me and we were able to determine that this was a scam.

Search Ads

I decided to write about this topic because recently I heard an episode of the podcast “Reply All” where someone lost their camera in a taxi in New York City and the website that they found through a Google search said that they would help them recover their item for $47. The website was misleading, it doesn’t do much to help. here are a lot of other websites that mislead consumers into thinking that they are official or legitimate but in the fine print they explain that they are not official or affiliated with the legit company or government entity.. To hear all the examples and an in-depth discussion you can listen here: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/76-lost-in-a-cab/

One of the things that I have seen occur in the library is that patrons will accidentally navigate to websites that charge them for services that are not necessary, or collect personal information to sell to advertisers. When people search for something on Google, Yahoo, or Bing many times they often mistake the websites listed as ads for non-profits, government, or free services. Unfortunately, the disclaimers on the search websites can be small and not easily noticed.

I have two examples below based on recent patron interactions. One patron searched for “McDonald’s application” and they used a website that gave their website to marketing companies that sent them spam to their e-mail address and phone calls trying to sell services. You can tell from the examples where the arrows are red are for websites that are not connected to McDonald’s. The word ad is listed to the side but it is small. Sometimes there is a disclaimer. This seems misleading at best and a scam at its worst. You can see the correct website with a green arrow beside it. When you are searching on mobile it can be harder to tell which ones are advertisements.

The other example was a patron that was searching for a way to “create a resume”. As you can see in the examples below have web addresses that end in “.COM” this denotes company, and they all have “Ad” in front of the web address. What I noticed is that people will mistake the website for a free resume creation tool but when someone wants to print or download the website requires that they pay. In a lot of cases the peron spent hours working on a resume and are now held hostage or have to start all over.

When you are searching for a government website try to make sure that it ends in ”.GOV” or that it is the “official website” of a federal, state, or local government. For instance if you are looking for a tax form you want to make sure that the web address begins with https://www.irs.gov . I have seen websites for the most common searches related to government such as grants, unclaimed property, government auctions, etc. that direct people to websites asking you to pay for forms, help, or searching services. Please double check the web address and try to notice when searching whether there is any indication that this could possibly be an “ad” or “sponsored site”.

When in doubt… ask a librarian!

Also there have been two scams where people claim to be from the IRS or Microsoft. These are scam! Neither will ever call and claim that you owe them money.

Online Movies and Television For Free Legally

Hulu (online and app): www.hulu.com tons of free shows and movies usually users must wait a week for television programs; if you enjoy television and movies you can purchase a monthly subscription.

Crackle (online and app): www.crackle.com lots of free movies and a handful of television programs provided free.

PBS Video, PBS Kids Video, PBS News Hour (online and app) http://video.pbs.org/ http://pbskids.org/video/ a variety of high quality programs provided free to educate and inform

Yahoo Screen (online and app) https://screen.yahoo.com/ Yahoo started an online video segment of their company last year by creating some original content and getting the rights to air some sports clips from baseball and some international sports. Right now it is free, in the future it may require payment for certain content.

You Tube Movies (online and app): https://goo.gl/oAg0UZ A wide variety of independent, low budget, foreign, and home made movies. The regular You Tube site has clips from TV shows and recently added 100 years of Associated Press new reels.

Classic Cinema Online (online): http://www.classiccinemaonline.com/ older films such as black & white and silent films most content is from 1910-1950’s.

Classic TV Online (online): http://classictelevisiononline.com/ Popular shows from the 50’s and 60’s

The Internet Archive – Moving Images Archive (online): https://archive.org/details/movies an interesting mix of videos created by users, local governments, educational institutions, and older films.

Lifetime (online and app): http://www.mylifetime.com/watch-full-episodes-online unfortunately like a lot of networks they used to offer a lot of free content but now they have cut back to a handful of videos

Indieflix (online) https://indieflix.com/ Independent movies that range in quality and length, some of them are foreign and some from actors / directors that were not famous but are now.

Tubi TV (app) Independent movies and some from small studios that produced movies in the 90’s

Top Documentary Films (online) http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/ Most of these are not as long as a feature-length film but with over 2,400 films to choose from you can find something educational or entertaining to watch.

Snag Films (online and app) http://www.snagfilms.com/ Documentary, independent, and classic films with some big name actors. They are categorized and displayed in a very easy to search format. There really is a very nice selection with slick presentation.

Open Culture (online) http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline An interesting selection of 700 movies from independent film makers or small studios. It gives a nice summary of what makes the film so great or why you might like it.

Big Five Glories (online) http://www.bigfiveglories.com/ Classic movies from 1910 – 1970’s. There are some memorable films listed and some lesser known ones by famous actors.

Vimeo (online and app) https://vimeo.com/ Much like YouTube, it has a lot of independent films but what is really nice are the concert and music videos. Very high quality

Can I Stream It (online and app) canistream.it Helps you find if a television show or movie is available for free, available on a subscription service (which sometimes have 30 day free trial periods) or available to download for a fee. It can also notify you if it becomes available on one of your favorite sites.