Internet

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Acquisitions Compared

Nov 20, 2007   3 am
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See what sort of tone a company’s acquisitions set

The LibraryHouse blog has a nice summary of recent acquisitions (July 2006 through June 2007) by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, roughly color coded by category:

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Business

Yahoo, eBay and PayPal Fighting Against Phishing Email

Oct 4, 2007   1 pm
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ebay Yahoo hopes to spur on an industry that has been slow to fight the scourge of so-called phishing attacks.

If you use Yahoo Mail you should be seeing a significant reduction in the number of e-mail scams purporting to be from eBay and PayPal very soon.

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Software

Yahoo brings oneSearch to the desktop

Oct 3, 2007   2 pm
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yahoo_logo_big The oneSearch service offers results from a number of sources, combining web pages with videos and images.

The new search engine aims to deliver more relevant results, by offering results from a number of sources, combining web pages with videos and images. Users hesitating when they enter a search query will be presented with a list of suggested search terms, allowing them to better define their query.

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Security

Yet Another Yahoo Messenger Bug

Aug 16, 2007   4 am
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Yahoo-Messenger

The popular IM, Yahoo Messenger, now get another strike. Researchers at McAfee have verified and reproduced a bug first reported by a Chinese researcher.

The bug is caused by the Webcam function and on the most recent version of Yahoo Messenger as of today, V8.1.0.413.

“It seems like a classic heap overflow, which can be triggered when the victim accepts a Webcam invite,” wrote one of the McAfee researchers.

The bug, according to McAfee, may enable user-assisted remote-code execution attacks. Informationweek.com claims that they have not seen any exploit code for this flaw published yet. However, a complied code is currently available as prototype and will initiate a DoS(deny of service) attack to victim computer(i.e. anyone using Yahoo Messenger).

McAfee said it has contacted Yahoo’s security team and notified it of the problem.

“Since learning of this issue, we have been actively working towards a resolution and expect to have a fix shortly,” said a Yahoo spokesman in an e-mail to InformationWeek. “Yahoo takes security seriously and consistently employs measures to help protect our users.”

However, the hacker who found this bug claimed that Yahoo Messenger was poorly written, and there might be more potential security flaw.

Back in June, Yahoo Messenger was patched due to a buffer-overflow flaw in an ActiveX control, which is also part of the Webcam.

McAfee’s researchers offer up a few recommendations to deal with this latest bug:

  • Users should not accept Webcam invites from untrusted sources until a patch for this vulnerability is released and installed
  • Block outgoing traffic on TCP port 5100 until Yahoo can patch the flaw.