Technology, Email | featured news

A Berkeley city councilman has proposed a tiny levy on senders of large batches of unwanted time-wasters. The most courageous politician in California — probably the nation — is a Berkeley city councilman, Gordon Wozniak.

Harvard said it had not notified most of the employees involved because it wanted to protect the one who inadvertently leaked confidential material to the news media.

Emails from former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, published below, are at the center of a lawsuit that that connects the tech industry's most powerful executives and companies. Five tech workers are suing Apple, Google, and Intel. They say that top executives at these companies agreed to not hire each other's employees.

Yahoo is spiffing up and expanding its email service in an attempt to regain some of the ground lost to a Google alternative that lured away millions of users. The changes unveiled Tuesday are meant to make Yahoo's email faster and easier to use on the Web. To cater to the growing audience checking their email on smartphones and tablet computers, Yahoo also introduced mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad and devices powered by Microsoft Corp.'s recently released Windows 8 system.

Several Google Inc Web products, including the popular GMail service, appeared to go dark for users on several continents on Monday.

A Senate committee approved a measure Thursday that would require law enforcement agencies to obtain a court-approved search warrant before reviewing any e-mail or other electronic content. The measure would close what privacy advocates describe as a loophole in the law in which Internet service providers such as Yahoo and Google may turn over e-mail older than six months if authorities obtain a subpoena, which does not require a judge’s approval.

Yahoo says it has fixed the vulnerability that allowed 450,000 user email addresses and passwords to be stolen from its user-generated content service, Yahoo! Voices. In a blog posting, Yahoo said that the "compromised information was provided by writers who had joined Associated Content prior to May 2010, when it was acquired by Yahoo!. (Associated Content is now the Yahoo! Contributor Network.) This compromised file was a standalone file that was not used to grant access to Yahoo! systems and services."

The company said that although the breached accounts include user names from Yahoo and other companies, only 5% of the accounts had valid passwords. Yahoo said it is working to fix the vulnerability and is changing the passwords of the affected users. The company also said it is notifying other companies whose users may have been affected -- earlier we reported that they may include people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others.

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text. The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords... The little-known group was quoted as saying that they had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection -- the name given to a commonly-used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.