Yahoo poised for a violent downfall?

[redrumloa]

Yahoo has seemed aimless in the past, but now they seem completely out of control. I had an Yahoo email account for many years. This account was also tied to Yahoo Message Boards. About 10 days ago I was unable to log into my account and noticed a message "if unable to access your account, contact tech support" or some nonsnese. I email tech support and get a boiler plate response that my account had been deleted for one of a number of possible TOS violations and they reserved the right to deleted the account for any reason at any time. Reading down the list of TOS violations, I was not guilty of a single one. I replied to the boiler plate response and got a secondary boiler plate response saying basically sorry, we had the right to delete the account without notice and they don't disclose why they took such actions.

Poof, without warning emails dating back to 2003 are gone. Poof, email address book gone. After doing a little of Googling, it seems there are automated "greasemonkey" scripts where one person on Yahoo Message Boards can target someone with multiple bogus "report abuse". I can only guess someone did this to me on Yahoo Finance Message board and yahoo deleted the account without investigating. Speaking of Yahoo Message Boards, look how popular their recent changes are (feedback is down the page a little):

http://www.yfinanceblog.com/blog/2009/1 ... d-replies/

What a total disaster Yahoo has become. I have other gripes with them too, but this is the easy stuff. I wonder how bad things must be behind closed doors there if this nonsense is going on. It might be time to explore taking a short position in this POS company's stock.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Youtube seems to be troubled by such dickery too. Bots roam about rating vids down, a-holes flag abuse, file false DMCA claims. It's open warfare out there - having ethics is a weakness out there in the wild - which is what we got partly because legislation has given abusive weapons to the abusers.

So long as it only happens to a few people though no-one sees a need to fix it, and it doesn't seem to do any harm to the site operators so they don't care.

 

[Glaucus]

Well, that sure is a problem, but there's much bigger problems out there these days. Hacking and security in general takes up a massive amount of resources, almost to the point where it's almost not worth it. And even here, laws are a poor weapon against such mischief as it's global in nature. Good luck tracking down those script kiddies (and they probably are under the age of legal responsibility) in Eastern Europe. A global crack down on hacking would be nice, but if that ever happened we'd have a crack down on other things too. As per usual, we can only lose.