Verizon to buy Yahoo for $5bn

I’ve read elsewhere that Verizon also owns AOL (who incidentally owns Netscape) and that they plan to merge Yahoo with the dial-up service of yore. Maybe they’re planning on opening a mid-1990s museum dedicated to ‘Brand Necrophilia’? :slight_smile:

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That’s exactly my first thought, as well.

“We got a terrific deal! Not only did we talk them down from $5.2 billion, but we got them to throw in the latest version of Netscape! Plus a whole box of those toys from ‘Hotel Transylvania 2’!”

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Crap, guess it’s time to get rid of my Yahoo email address and delete the Tumblr account. Good thing all of my email is on Gmail now.

But that’s the whole point! The government protects the companies so they can do that!

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Wonder what Verizon thinks of the Yahoo>Bing search alliance, where Bing’s been powering their searches since 2009.

What characteristic(s) would make a place on the 'net a refuge for girls and young women?

This is a sincere question, posed from ignorance. I consider that being such a refuge is a good thing, I just don’t understand what it is that makes them refuges.

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Just a little outdated question for the purchase…

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Heh, I’ve got a 20-year-old Earthlink address, for kinda the same reasons. Here’s hoping Verizon doesn’t get any new ideas…

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Not comprehensive, but in a refuge, the users don’t tell each other that whatever they are interested / talking about in is wrong / bad / stupid / something unworthy of interest.

To craft a rough analogy: if someone came into the fermenting thread here, and started telling us how disgusting it is to eat “rotted food” or that we are gross for enjoying it, they would be swiftly and mercilessly flagged (I imagine). With the troll gone, that thread goes back to being a refuge for fermentation enthusiasts.

I don’t actually know what girls and young women talk about (because I am not young) but whatever it is, they ought to be able to talk about it in peace regardless of what others may think.

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Well, I’d like to think that we’d have fun teasing them about their over-reaction.

Most people are women, and I think they benefit from batting the dead mouse around before they eat it, rather than running away.

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My old yahoo address has been relegated to spam and porn. I’ve had it for years, but I don’t like Verizon at all. They’re one rotten company.

I haven’t bothered to check, but what’d they do with Shingy in the meantime?

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I was just reading another bit about the deal on Consumerist.

I read the first line as “four years of ruining Yahoo”. It seems to fit pretty well.

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In my experience it’s these characteristics that make tumblr a (relatively) safe place for women (and LGBTQIA, minorities, and other targeted groups on the net):

  • Control over feeds. You only see posts from who you follow, and you can further filter that by the tags people give their posts. You can silently block people such that you never see their posts even if you follow them.

  • Control over privacy. You can disable direct messages, anonymous messages. Tumblr doesn’t needle you for personal information and does not make any part of your profile public under any conditions.

  • Already has a supportive community of women, lgbtqia, minorities. With that comes community rules like tagging trigger warnings and signal boosting calls for aid.

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What’s it with these guys? Is there some $2 billion coin that I have never heard about? Every huge software company with no physical assets seems to go for $2G. Oh sorry, the small change is in my other jacket, can you break one of these? What’s it worth? Who knows? But if I paid that, it must be worth at least that, right?

If you are as depressed as I am about the mindlessness of finance, and search for ‘giga-’ for some enormous unit of pointlessness, the web always knows what you actually want…

Thank you, internets. Your companies change, but you are always there for us (smiley and double-thumbs-up emoticon).

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I’ve seen Giga Pudding before but it never ceases to amaze me that someone came up with a kawaii kaiju flan.

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For a non-google email, for a long time I registered a domain and just had my name@domain (I did this before gmail existed). The domain registrar offered free email hosting, so they took care of that for me as part of my yearly fee (.nz domains can only be registered for a year at a time).

In more recent years however, I migrated the email handling over to gmail because integrating the registrars email with my iphone was a hassle. Now on my phone it acts just like a regular gmail account except it’s still name@domain.

To be honest I kind of regret the second bit - that email address was my account for a lot of google services that ended up getting all weird and uncooperative because once it was a gmail account it treated it like a corporate account and I had to administratively give my self permission to use my perfectly-fine-up-to-now accounts on youtube and gplus (I played ingress, don’t judge me…) etc

I’ve used Apple email for, cripes, a long time, but I can’t really blame you there. It’s very stable and their webmail has gotten much better (and it’s a thousand times less wacky than gmail) but their frequent switching of default domain names has played hell with my email. From .mac to .me to the awful .icloud, I don’t know who I am half the time.