Advertising - Instant Ads Set the Pace on the Web: Via NYTimes.com .

Now, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft let advertisers buy ads in the milliseconds between the time someone enters a site’s Web address and the moment the page appears. The technology, called real-time bidding, allows advertisers to examine site visitors one by one and bid to serve them ads almost instantly.

For example, say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web.

If eBay finds out that he bought a driver at another site, it can update the ad immediately to start showing him tees, golf balls or a package vacation to St. Andrew’s, Scotland, often called the home of golf. If a woman was shopping, eBay could change the ad’s color or presentation. [ Read more ... ]

EFF Fights for Anonymity for Online Critic in Friday Hearing: Via EFF.org Updates.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked a federal judge in San Francisco to quash a baseless subpoena aimed at outing an anonymous online critic of a Pennsylvania company called USA Technologies. A hearing in the case is set for Friday.

Earlier this year, EFF's client -- Yahoo! user "stokklerk" -- posted to the Yahoo! message board dedicated to the company, criticizing USA Technologies and its CEO George Jensen, Jr., for plummeting stock prices, high compensation rates for executives, and consistent lack of profitability. Another anonymous poster had similar complaints. In response, USA Technologies filed suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, alleging that the statements violated federal securities regulations because they were part of a "scheme" for the authors to "enrich themselves through undisclosed manipulative trading tactics." USA Technologies also alleged that the online posts were defamatory. As part of that lawsuit, USA Technologies issued a subpoena out of the Northern District of California to Yahoo! asking for the critics' identities. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List: Via Threat Level.

Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers: Via Threat Level.

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.” [ Read more ... ]

Apple betrays the iPhone's business hopes by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech: Via InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech.

Thousands of users have been accessing e-mail, calendars, and contacts over Exchange connections through their iPhones or iPod Touches, not knowing they were compromising their corporate security. During that entire time, Apple has extolled its support of Exchange and convinced many businesses that the iPhone was a corporate-class device they should embrace or, at least, tolerate.

It also turns out that Apple had a similar issue -- with a similarly stealthy fix -- in its iPhone OS 3.0 update, which corrected misreporting about its VPN policy support. [ Read more ... ]

OpenID Pilot Program to be Announced by US Government: Via ReadWriteWeb Hat Tip to LauraS .

Ten private companies, a number of US Government Federal Agencies primarily in the Health sector and the OpenID and Information Card Foundations will announce this morning in Washington DC the launch of a pilot program to allow members of the public to log in to participating government websites with their credentials from approved independent websites.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement. [ Read more ... ]

Services' E-Mail Hacking Illegal, but Officials Need More Than That to Prosecute : Via washingtonpost.com .

But such services as YourHackerz.com are still active and plentiful, with clever names like "piratecrackers.com" and "hackmail.net." They boast of having little trouble hacking into such Web-based e-mail systems as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail, and they advertise openly.

And, experts said, there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it.

"This is an important point that people haven't grasped," said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "We've been using e-mail for years, and it's been insecure all that time. . . . If you have any hacker who is competent and spends the time and targets you, he's going to get you."

Federal law prohibits hacking into e-mail, but without further illegal activity, it's only a misdemeanor, noted Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and a former trial attorney in the Justice Department's computer crime section. [ Read more ... ]

Tighter oversight on border laptop searches: Via AP on Yahoo! News.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Thursday put new restrictions on searches of laptops at U.S. borders to address concerns that federal agents have been rummaging through travelers' personal information.

The long-criticized practice of searching travelers' electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers' machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.

Given all the personal details that people store on digital devices, border searches of laptops and other gadgets can give law enforcement officials far more revealing pictures of travelers than suitcase inspections might yield. That has set off alarms among civil liberties groups and travelers' advocates who say the government has crossed a line by examing electronic contact lists and confidential e-mail messages, trade secrets and proprietary business files, financial and medical records and other deeply private information.

In some cases, travelers suspected that border agents were copying their files after taking their laptops and cell phones away for time periods ranging from a few minutes to a few weeks or longer. [ Read more ... ]

PC World - Privacy Groups Oppose Microsoft-Yahoo Deal - Via PC World:

Regulatory agencies in both the U.S. and Europe must approved the proposed acquisition, which is already drawing ire.

Privacy groups are promising a fight before U.S. regulatory agencies if Microsoft 's offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion is accepted, and the deal could face significant hurdles in Europe as well.

Microsoft announced that it sent an offer to Yahoo' s board of directors on Thursday, going public with the news Friday morning. Immediately, the executive directors of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said the acquisition would raise serious privacy concerns. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo to Support OpenID Single Sign-On - Via NYT > Technology:

People with a Yahoo user name and password will be able to use that ID information to access non-Yahoo Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework, reducing the amount of different log-in information people need to create, remember and enter online.

Already, almost 10,000 Web sites support OpenID, an open framework available for free to end users and Web site operators alike, according to the OpenID Foundation.

Yahoo's move will triple the number of OpenID accounts to 368 million by adding its 248 million active registered users to the rolls, the company said Thursday. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo Outed Chinese Dissident Knowing Investigation Was Political, Documents Show :

Following on yesterday's post about a newly unearthed document that contradicts Yahoo's statement to Congress about its involvement in China's jailing of a dissident, the same human rights group has translated emails in another case, showing that Yahoo turned over emails about a democratic political movement that led to political persecution by China.

Wang Xiaoning, whose poignant story Luke O'Brien told for Wired several months ago, is now serving a 10-year sentence for 'subversion,' following an investigation that involved subpoenas to Yahoo's China office. [ Read more ... ]

Slashdot | Letter Casts Doubt On Yahoo China Testimony: Saint Aardvark writes "A hand-written letter has surfaced that sheds new light on the case of Chinese reporter Shi Tao. The letter (PDF), believed to be from Chinese police, 'is essentially a standardized search warrant making clear that Chinese law enforcement agencies have the legal authority to collect evidence in criminal cases. This contradicts Yahoo's testimony (PDF) to Congress in 2006 that they 'had no information about the nature of the investigation.' [ Read more ... ]

Ask.com Takes the Lead on Log Retention; Microsoft and Yahoo! Follow: "

We've often regretted that the most popular search engines have been keeping a dossier of everything you search for -- forever. It's easy to forget just how intrusive this kind of record can be until something like the AOL search history leak occurs and confronts users with even a portion of the search logs that track their everyday on-line activities. These logs are a tempting target for subpoenas (although most search companies refuse to reveal how often they receive subpoenas or how much data they disclose); they imply an on-going risk that this sensitive data may be stolen or leaked. [ Read more ... ]

Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?: "thefickler writes 'It appears that spammers have found a way to automatically create Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They have already generated more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender. The company says that a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, [ Read more ... ]

CDT Defends Protection for Internet Providers: "CDT joined with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of Internet industry trade associations in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the federal court of appeals in Texas, arguing that Yahoo! should not be held liable for illegal content posted on a Yahoo Group. CDT believes that statutory immunity for service providers is a critical requirement to protect free speech on the Internet. [ Read more ... ]

ABC News: Yahoo's New Ad Program Gets Personal: "This week, Yahoo unveiled a new advertising program that allows its clients to tailor ads to individual Web surfers based on their own unique search history, geography, and demographic information including age, sex, and occupation.

Yahoo hopes that SmartAds, announced Monday, will give the once high-flying Internet company a leg up on its dominant competitor Google by providing firms with unprecedented access to the habits and hobbies of Web surfers.

With Yahoo's SmartAds platform, if you list San Francisco as your location in Yahoo weather and run a Yahoo search for Las Vegas, Yahoo will automatically generate an ad displaying real-time rates for flights from San Francisco to Las Vegas. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo Unveils Personalized Ads: Let's say a 25-year-old man in San Francisco is shopping online for a hybrid car. Suddenly, a display ad for the Toyota Prius appears on the Web site he's viewing. The ad appears in colors known for grabbing the attention of men his age. The ad lists San Francisco prices and directs him to his nearest dealer for a test drive.

In a bid to keep up with its competition, Yahoo yesterday launched a system to let marketers tailor advertising content to individual users, theoretically making the ads more effective and, therefore, more lucrative for Yahoo.

Behavioral targeting has been the focus for the Internet giants, many of which have offered large sums for online advertising firms that help track Web users' habits. [ Read more ... ]

Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer: Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called "behavioral targeting," that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person's home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach. [ Read more ... ]

Google Achieves Behavioral Targeting Nirvana: "In an March 2007 article in Business 2.0 titled The Quest For The Perfect Online Ad, the author points out that Yahoo is one of the leading companies in the behavioral targeting space. A candid interview with Yahoo's Dr. Usama Fayyad the company's Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions shows Fayyad thinks showing ads based on behavioral targeting is much more powerful than simply showing ads based on simple search queries.

A salient quote from Fayyad in fact is 'I know more about your intent than any 1,000 keywords you could type. [ Read more ... ]

The Quest for the Perfect Online Ad: (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog. In fact, legions of Internet companies also know your breed, your gender, your age, the neighborhood you live in, that you like pickup trucks, and that you spent, say, three hours and 43 seconds on a website for pet lovers on a rainy day in January. All that data streams through myriad computer networks, where it's sorted, catalogued, analyzed, and then used to deliver ads aimed squarely at you, potentially anywhere you travel on the Web.

Online advertising, to put it mildly, ain't what it used to be.

[...]

But unlike the first Internet boom - where dumb, old banner ads were slapped up with zero regard to effectiveness - this time around, the programmers and analysts are taking center stage, helping to create new forms of display ads that not only do a better job of getting your attention but also can be tracked with laserlike precision. The new breed of supersmart, supertargeted display ads, says Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's (Charts) head of research and data, is "just so much more powerful than search." [ Read more ... ]

Google Achieves Behavioral Targeting Nirvana: "In an March 2007 article in Business 2.0 titled The Quest For The Perfect Online Ad, the author points out that Yahoo is one of the leading companies in the behavioral targeting space. A candid interview with Yahoo's Dr. Usama Fayyad the company's Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions shows Fayyad thinks showing ads based on behavioral targeting is much more powerful than simply showing ads based on simple search queries. [ Read more ... ]