Tuesday 22 April 2014
Sunday 20 April 2014
A new blog - And Yahoo! Mail
I guess if you've ever watched TV in the 90's you probably heard about Sienfeld - the TV show about nothing. And that's what it is. Except it's a TV show about 4 friends who are constantly doing fun shenanigans and having a wonderful time together, but ultimately it's about nothing, right? :) God, that was a fun TV show. They really should make more like that. I don't watch TV hardly at all anymore, but if it were a show like Sienfeld I might watch it again.
So, this is going to be a brand new blog that I am writing mostly as a creative output to various rantings and ravings that I have, occasional tech tips, and ... well, I don't know, other things I feel like blogging about. I probably won't put much of my personal life in here except for things that I think relate to other people - who knows, I guess.
I may post here often, I may post here rarely. I know I want to try and keep it straight and relevant. So, enjoy.
Today's topic? Yahoo Mail.
Yeah, one time, I used that. I actually loved it. It was a fun service, and I could get a lot done and I was very productive with it. It was so great that I actually subscribed to Yahoo! Mail Plus. But, today, it's nothing like it once was. It started out as an email service I used specifically as part of a volunteer customer service organization for a game that I really loved, but with how much I loved it and its features in general it grew way past that, and it has become the email service that I have used for pretty much all aspects of my life - both online and off.
About a year ago I ended my subscription with Yahoo! mail. A lack of money was the main motivation but they were also undergoing massive changes to their infrastructure which really put me off. For several years by that time they were purporting a new AJAX webmail client that was really neat but unusable for me because it demanded a lot of system resources. (I use old computers - don't ask)
But that was not the worst of the matter. In the intervening year (up until now) I have started seeing many reasons to dislike Yahoo mail, and after the way the company handles their affairs, both internally and with their customers and prospective bug hunters (HELLO, SECURITY, riiiight?), I've finally decided that it's time to call it quits.
What it comes down to is this - the first and foremost is that they tried to force a change on me that I did not like. I do not want to use their AJAX client - it's slow and resource consuming. Luckily, I had an option to keep using the old web mail interface, but it was completely changed and foreign to me and nothing like what the old one was. And worst of all - it's highly unstable. I get very frequent temporary errors, especially when using the search functions. It may have something to do with how old my account is.
And if that's not bad enough ... *cue dun dun DUNNNN...* then there's the aspect of security. You know how old Yahoo!'s bug bounty reward campaign is? Not even a year old. The entire Yahoo! infrastructure has more holes in it than an average politician's credibility, and I think it took some professional security researchers not more than an hour to discover a password-stealing cross-site vulnerability. This, after being plagued with repeated reports of people finding and exploiting these bugs. You want to know why that concerns me? Yes, I am a victim of some of those vulnerabilities. My email account has been used to send out malicious emails - not because of my password, not because I was phished or scammed, but because someone was able to steal my session id through a fake site. To think that so many banking and other high-security institutions rely on email as a means to verify a person's identity is shocking, especially with a service as insecure as this.
Then it comes to how they treat their employees. They used to treat them really well. I am not an employee of Yahoo so this should not concern me, right? Wrong. How a company treats their employees directly relates to how they will treat their customers, and even more so influences how those same employees will also treat their customers. I won't get into too many details but some of the benefits they used to have, have been taken away, with the CEO of course keeping her own pie while everyone else under her suffered.
And last but not least? It's next to impossible, if not fully impossible, to get in touch with the company. I've tried submitting tickets about some of my issues with Yahoo before. The only way to get help is to post about it on their Answers website. I don't even know if that site is frequented by Yahoo representatives or not, but it's a whole can of worms and, if it's improperly moderated (I don't know if it is or not), it's open to trolling and other childish behavior that is common on the internet.
So all in all? I think I'll start using GMail, thank you very much.
So, this is going to be a brand new blog that I am writing mostly as a creative output to various rantings and ravings that I have, occasional tech tips, and ... well, I don't know, other things I feel like blogging about. I probably won't put much of my personal life in here except for things that I think relate to other people - who knows, I guess.
I may post here often, I may post here rarely. I know I want to try and keep it straight and relevant. So, enjoy.
Today's topic? Yahoo Mail.
Yeah, one time, I used that. I actually loved it. It was a fun service, and I could get a lot done and I was very productive with it. It was so great that I actually subscribed to Yahoo! Mail Plus. But, today, it's nothing like it once was. It started out as an email service I used specifically as part of a volunteer customer service organization for a game that I really loved, but with how much I loved it and its features in general it grew way past that, and it has become the email service that I have used for pretty much all aspects of my life - both online and off.
About a year ago I ended my subscription with Yahoo! mail. A lack of money was the main motivation but they were also undergoing massive changes to their infrastructure which really put me off. For several years by that time they were purporting a new AJAX webmail client that was really neat but unusable for me because it demanded a lot of system resources. (I use old computers - don't ask)
But that was not the worst of the matter. In the intervening year (up until now) I have started seeing many reasons to dislike Yahoo mail, and after the way the company handles their affairs, both internally and with their customers and prospective bug hunters (HELLO, SECURITY, riiiight?), I've finally decided that it's time to call it quits.
What it comes down to is this - the first and foremost is that they tried to force a change on me that I did not like. I do not want to use their AJAX client - it's slow and resource consuming. Luckily, I had an option to keep using the old web mail interface, but it was completely changed and foreign to me and nothing like what the old one was. And worst of all - it's highly unstable. I get very frequent temporary errors, especially when using the search functions. It may have something to do with how old my account is.
And if that's not bad enough ... *cue dun dun DUNNNN...* then there's the aspect of security. You know how old Yahoo!'s bug bounty reward campaign is? Not even a year old. The entire Yahoo! infrastructure has more holes in it than an average politician's credibility, and I think it took some professional security researchers not more than an hour to discover a password-stealing cross-site vulnerability. This, after being plagued with repeated reports of people finding and exploiting these bugs. You want to know why that concerns me? Yes, I am a victim of some of those vulnerabilities. My email account has been used to send out malicious emails - not because of my password, not because I was phished or scammed, but because someone was able to steal my session id through a fake site. To think that so many banking and other high-security institutions rely on email as a means to verify a person's identity is shocking, especially with a service as insecure as this.
Then it comes to how they treat their employees. They used to treat them really well. I am not an employee of Yahoo so this should not concern me, right? Wrong. How a company treats their employees directly relates to how they will treat their customers, and even more so influences how those same employees will also treat their customers. I won't get into too many details but some of the benefits they used to have, have been taken away, with the CEO of course keeping her own pie while everyone else under her suffered.
And last but not least? It's next to impossible, if not fully impossible, to get in touch with the company. I've tried submitting tickets about some of my issues with Yahoo before. The only way to get help is to post about it on their Answers website. I don't even know if that site is frequented by Yahoo representatives or not, but it's a whole can of worms and, if it's improperly moderated (I don't know if it is or not), it's open to trolling and other childish behavior that is common on the internet.
So all in all? I think I'll start using GMail, thank you very much.
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