Yahoo's new killer app | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo's new killer app

medium.com

39 pointsjunto48 comments

They're currently focusing on designing 29 logos people will like better than their final design. They'll get to transforming global communications right after that.

This is silly. If I'm a shareholder in Y!, I don't want them wasting time/money on something like this right now. Honestly, the majority of the population doesn't care about the government email tracking or what-have-you. A very vocal minority seems to care, for now, but your average accountant / builder probably didn't spend 5 minutes caring. If Y! did do something like this, I doubt it would last--just not enough people care to make it profitable.

Right now the publicity--the "Yahoo! is doing something new and interesting and helpful" is exactly what I'd want to see as a shareholder. And as an employee. And as someone with a Yahoo! login. Keep in mind that Yahoo's old enemy at this point is the idea that they are doing nothing new, nothing interesting. This feeling is what necessitates the acqui-hires and leads to new CEOs and low stock prices.

What would be truly awesome would be for the general population to login into their webmail account and the entire thing works just the same, they have the same "email address" but somehow as if by magic it isn't using email anymore, but the new protocol. Seriously easy and effective on-boarding.

But then why the heck would anyone use it / switch to it? Aside from the very technical crowd, which is a tiny portion of Y! users. It'd have nothing tangible to offer to new users--just invisible promises.

You are right. General population doesn't care. But the vocal minority includes some of the best minds in engineering. Yahoo gain's their respect. Some of them will join Yahoo and go on to make products for the general population. I'm a shareholder and I like this move.

Silly Google for creating and releasing Android too - helping competitors out!

    "Honestly, the majority of the population doesn't care about the government email tracking or what-have-you. A very vocal minority seems to care"

I keep hearing it's supposedly a minority, but everyone I speak to has concerns about the general issue. While my circles are biased I actually haven't met a "think of the children/terrorists" person in my life, only pundits in national papers and a seeming (biased sample again) minority of people on the Internet support the anti-privacy position.

With regard to more concrete evidence there is a much larger group in the opinion polls that see Snowden and his actions favourably than otherwise.[1] I also highly doubt the recent vote on limiting the NSA would have been only narrowly in favour of the status quo, 205 to 217, if it was a minority concern.[2] Congress members are well aware of public opinion, or alternatively the opinion of their backers.[3]

[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-security-po... [2]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/congress-nearly-s... [3]http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/

I genuinely don't care about US / UK government agencies slurping my data. I wish it actually did something to lower crime[1], and I wish it wasn't so expensive, and I wish the money went to other places, but I don't care about the privacy violation of my email being on more than one cache.

I am much more concerned about other privacy breaches that I'm subjected to.

People talk about the "decrypt your data or go to jail" parts of RIPA, and while that is worrying I'm a lot more worried about the other sections of RIPA which have been abused and caused actual harm to people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...)

Hey Junto, I suggest you put a date on the post, something like "Aug 09th, 2015", so people can understand more easily it's a fictitious post. But the idea is awesome! I hope it can get to Marissa or some other visionary executive/entrepreneur to make something like this a reality in the years to come.

Sadly, Medium doesn't seems to let me change it. I already looked. If their is anyone from Medium.com reading, feel free to tweak the date in your db!

I've just added it inline. Not quite as good but better than nothing.

hmm.. maybe place it hard-coded in the text somewhere. it may affect aesthetics but will enhance understanding. :-)

Ha - yeah. I had a wtf! moment and started searching online. Turns out there IS a Yahoo OMS

Sadly its a Online Marketing Summit: http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/blog/

This is indeed an article from the future! (notice how it says "Two years ago Edward Snowden released..."). It is basically saying that Yahoo has a serious opportunity on their hands if they want to disrupt email right now.

Indeed, it is just a serious opportunity for them to become relevant again.

but not only Yahoo, also other could jump on the train now... it is not a matter of $ in the beginning, it is a matter of conception.

@junto it took me some minutes to understand the article, thanks for this awesome piece of content.

Trusting coporations with our private communications has been disastrous so far. Perhaps we should find ways to take out the middle man and communicate more directly. P2P or federation perhaps?

That hasn't worked out so well for the Jabber protocol so far, and its federated. We probably need something simpler with OTR built into it.

Jabber is just a protocol. They only did half the job. Non-hackers need something more accessible that they can simply put on their devices without having to run their own server. I don't have the answers, but the only thing I see being truly viable in this environment is decentralized point to point communication. The only reason the NSA can easily collect all this data is that it is all bottlenecked through corporate datacenters.

A little idea I had after posting this earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185263

Thought others might like the idea!

> The replacement had to be open source, secure, no metadata leakage and as easy to use as email is today.

This actually sounds a lot like BitMessage [0], although it's not completely trivial to setup, since you have to setup a not so user friendly address and such.

[0] https://bitmessage.org

update okay, so the whole article was fictional. That explains some of that. But does not leave me any happier about it. --------------

It sounds like an interesting protocol/app, which I hadn't heard of before -- and which this article told me just about NOTHING about.

"More importantly the NSA is screaming bloody murder" Really? Citation please?

And maybe a link to an actual software or project page?

And some summary -- or just a LINK to an explanation -- of what makes OMS more secure than email?

I know that Medium is a collection of posts from different authors--but sadly, this is what I have come to expect from medium. Their 'brand' is becoming, in my mind, 'content farm'.

> A multi-million dollar industry has sprung up around the OMS concepts.

Several million dollars would be a drop in the bucket of Yahoo's annual revenue.

Sorry, but I can't find any sign of an "Open Messaging Service" by Yahoo anywhere. I can't find clients, I can't find sources. The OP doesn't cite a single post but brazenly makes broad assertions with nothing to back them up.

Citations, links, anything, please?

Edit: Apparently the post is fictional. I didn't realize this when I skimmed it.

The post is fictional; set in 2015.

   "Two years ago Edward Snowden released a slow trickle
   of highly damaging revelations about the NSA and the
   erosion of privacy that affected people not just in the
   USA, but across the world."

Sorry, if that wasn't clear.

It would be nice to tag something as fiction in its title here, in a category on Medium, or something like that. Sorry to be a downer, but I come here to read news and often only skim the (oft useless) introduction to an article.

Not quite clear - took a minute for me to figure out. Maybe I am in the minority though :)

You realise that this post speaks about 2013 as it would be in the past, right?

Oops. Where is that, I can't find it?

Hm, I'm confused now - maybe my sentence wasn't clear enough. What I wanted to say is wether he realises that the blogpost was written in the future (2 years from now)..

I now get what you were saying! :)

The "day dreamer" signature is relevant

It appears to be a projection of what could be, if Yahoo! followed through with juntos' vision.

I feel like this privacy issue only compels a small group of individuals to find alternatives to email. A project like this would be never adopted by the masses, simply because the cost of switching is too high and the immediate return is too low.

This is the most confusing blog post I've ever read. Is this guy on planet earth?

I don't get it. Is this real?

> Junto - Day dreamer.

From the page.

If anybody develops a truly secure messaging system, free from NSA's snooping, it won't be Yahoo. Simply because Yahoo is US based and can be secretly forced to change the code or push a hidden update that will decrypt everything.

And by the way, such systems already exist

1) https://crypto.cat (after a few bad releases it looks like they got it right... probably)

2) https://github.com/ChatSecure for iOS

There are a few more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Nativ...

They can be forced to change their code, affecting their endpoints, and acting as a wiretap yes. But in the OP's view he said it was an Open Source protocol, which wouldn't get a lot of "forced/secret patches" because it's too easy to see.

That's why it would need to be open source and available for any security researcher to go looking around.

The reason I chose Yahoo, was that they have the marketing clout and the brand to pull this off. This needs to be something that really replaces email, and kicks in into obscurity. Otherwise it is just another hacker tool used by a minority of privacy conscious geeks like us.

Most people won't bother compiling from open source.

We need a trusted company outside of jurisdiction of all these insane new laws.

Serious question: Could they build their IT center on big boats like casinos?

Sure, the traffic would still go through US, but that can be encrypted (with something better than SSL).

How do you power the data centre?

A low latency uplink without a single point of failure is another major problem too.

waves and sea snakes:

http://knowledge.allianz.com/environment/energy/?246/sea-sna...

Sure they could.

They could also spend billions buying every block of lego to create a Yahoo logo visible from space. Which makes about as much sense as introducing significant legal risks to their business all for a few thousand new email accounts.

They could, but that doesn't change anything, Yahoo is still US based and can be forced to do whatever they want.

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