yahoo

What do you get when you mix social media and local search? Well the team at Yahoo Local would like you to think they have the answer. They may not be too far from wrong.

Social media sites have become all the rage as they bring human connection and interaction to an electronic world. We can share photos with not only friends and family, but the entire world, tell others what we think of a particular product, upload movies of the crazy stuff we do in our spare time, or chat with anyone who happens to find their way to … Read more

There's a new zero-day attack in progress against Yahoo Messenger users. The instant messaging solicitation invites users to open their Webcam. However, the code used in this China-based exploit causes a heap overflow to be triggered when the target accepts a Webcam invitation. That means a remote attacker could execute malicious code on a compromised machine.

The McAfee security blog recommends the following: do not accept Webcam invites from untrusted sources until a patch is released, and block outgoing traffic on TCP port 5100 on your firewall until a patch is released.

Yahoo has been informed and says it … Read more

iPhone has its touch Safari browser, ZenZui will have its tiles, and Yahoo has Yahoo Go 2.0 Beta, a free service that also seeks to give users a novel Internet experience--especially if the users in question are Yahoo groupies.

Essentially a buffed and polished vehicle for its products and services, Yahoo Go groups its search bar, calendar, e-mail, news feed, and Flickr photo services in a single, well-proportioned design. Rotating carousel icons launch each service and keep the interface snappy. The app stays on top of frequently refreshing the page.

Yahoo Go avoids the problem of overcrowding suffered by Yahoo's Web portal by limiting its quick-launch services to maps, e-mail, photos, entertainment, weather, news, sports, and finance headline feeds. It sounds like a hefty load until you skim Yahoo.com's landing page and realize the leagues of content left behind, including auto, auction, Answers, personals, travel, tech, groups, and games; not to mention the new OMG! gossip headlines leveled at teenage it-girls. … Read more

Yahoo is making its biggest update in the last two years to its local search site, allowing customer reviews and proximity to influence results.

To start with, the Yahoo Local site gets a whole new look. It's better organized and more visually appealing than before. The home page shows a customized skyline for 20 cities (in San Francisco it's the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and the Transamerica Pyramid Building), along with local weather.

The top center portion of the site features rotating links to the most popular reviews, events, maps and buzz, or the most popular search … Read more

Good news for Yahoo: a new survey finds that customers are more satisfied with Yahoo than the other search engines and portals.

According to the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index, Yahoo's score in the index rose 3.9 percent over the past year to 79 while Google's score fell 3.7 percent to 78.

But it's hard to really get a read on things because the survey combines two different categories: search engines and portals. No question, Google by far leads the pack when it comes to search and it is not a portal. … Read more

All too often execs are exercising options and making money by getting rid of shares of their company stock. But Yahoo President Sue Decker is bucking that trend.

Decker paid about $1.1 million to buy roughly 47,000 shares of Yahoo stock this week in a sign that she thinks the company's future is bright.

Her purchases, which began a day after the stock hit a three-year low of $22.44 on Monday, were revealed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile, the man who was at the helm of Yahoo for the … Read more

Google News is getting an interesting feature this week, and by interesting I mean it's downright peculiar. Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they're somehow involved in it. The process is not for everyone, and in fact requires a lengthy verification process of sending off your comment and credentials to a special Google e-mail address, and later verifying your identity via domain name and an e-mail follow-up from Google staff. If you pass the test, your comment will show up alongside the article.… Read more

The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee has ordered an investigation into Yahoo's role in the arrest of a Chinese Internet journalist serving a 10-year sentence for allegedly distributing state secrets in e-mail, according to the Associated Press.

Shi Tao was arrested in 2004 by Chinese officials after Yahoo cooperated with a request to provide information about the Yahoo Mail customer. At a hearing last year, Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan said that Yahoo did not know what the nature of the investigation of Shi was when it handed over the information to the Chinese government. … Read more

Amid the growing group of instant-messaging solutions for the IM-less iPhone, Mundu (a Webware 100 winner) has just released a new contender that handles four of the most popular chatting protocols with a fantastic interface. If you're an iPhone user, just navigate your Safari browser to http://iphone.mundu.com, which takes you to a log-in screen with access to your AIM, Yahoo, MSN, .Mac, and Google Talk accounts. You can log into all of them simultaneously, although there's no master password system like you get with Meebo.

Each client gets its own buddy list, and any additional … Read more