Verizon bought Yahoo, so Flickr and Tumblr users with AT&T email addresses are being cut off

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/27/end-times.html

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The trouble with Verizon gobbling up all these struggling companies is that eventually they’ll eat something valuable. :anguished:

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Neither Yahoo nor AT&T seem to be explaining why they’re making this move. Everyone seems to assume that it’s just a dick move on Verizon’s part to spite a rival. But as a former Yahoo employee I suspect it is far more likely somehow an unwinding of the longstanding partnership between Yahoo and AT&T where AT&T home internet customers had their AT&T account tied to Yahoo.

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Verizon has done us a great service, reminding us once again never to willingly entrust our e-mail accounts to the phone companies.

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Longtime Flicker are probably used shit like this by now. First I had a Flickr logon and then forced to use Yahoo and then for awhile they let me use google and then forced back to Yahoo.

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This move will definitely bring Yahoo back to relevancy.

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Maybe I’m new here but… aren’t there some anti-trust laws left in this country? This seems so petty and nakedly anticompetitive, are they just assuming that no one at the federal level is capable of pushing back on this?

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Probably this. I remember when Rogers was our ISP and then suddenly they told everyone that we could enjoy using Yahoo’s services now, and their website acquired a bunch of yahoo branded crap. I remember being forced to change my flickr login to a yahoo login, then to a rogers login, then the co-branding deal ended and instead of trying to figure out how the hell I was supposed to log in to my Flickr account for the third or fourth time I just walked away and have never used Flickr since.

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I don’t think there’s been any criminal antitrust legislation for the better part of 20 years so…no, not really. Even if the US deigned to enforce it’d be a tough case though; Flickr hardly has a monopoly on photo sites, Tumblr on blogging has a better shot, but what market are they trying to leverage their monopoly in blogging to get into? Providing email accounts?

Like @jheiss said, I’m pretty sure that it’s just a deal for single sign on that’s no longer being honored, like how you used to be able to log into yahoo messenger with your msn messenger account.

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I think there is some tit for tat going on. My wife’s email, hosted by Yahoo, inexplicably is having outgoing mail to Comcast address bounced back, 421, after a 24hr wait.

How nice is that - send out an email, don’t learn till 24hrs later that Comcast would not accept it. Talk about f-cking you over. We don’t even have a yahoo.com address, its our own domain, just sending through yahoo servers.

From the AT&T notice it says “with the launch of the new ATT.net home page…”

Sounds to me like they had a single-sign-on token going and the two sides are separating the deal.

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It’s okay, you’re allowed to say “fuck” on the internet.

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My guess is that this is the first step towards even more restrictive practices. This move doesn’t really create any revenue, the next step probably will by forcing users down a particular path, like access to all your stuff only if you are an AT&T customer.

Did anybody actually read the Techcrunch article?

What’s baffling to me is this advice:

For anyone affected, here’s how to change an email address to something more suitable to Oath:

  1. In a web browser, click “Settings” under the account menu at the top of the dashboard (looks like a person’s silhouette)…

I do not have an account menu, nor a dashboard. Are these ATT artifacts? Does ATT require its users to broadcast an email address to every site they visit? Because I would expect an upsurge in mail to the FU.com domain.

no fucking way!

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YAY!

Fuck the fucking fuckers. (Ok, it’s out of my system now)

Like others have said, it sounds like an SSO trust issue to me, which seems perfectly logical that the trust would be disolved given the new ownership. Also, since Verizon has been actively encouraging existing customers to move away from Vz hosted email accounts, as they try to exit that market, at least for a while they were offering to create AOL Mail accounts for users and migrate the existing account data. Ah, AOL, another fine purchase by the folks at Verizon.

Maybe they don’t want to a$$hole!

:wink:

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