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INTEREST: (Very Long) Marissa Mayer and the future of YAHOO(Alibaba)
by Wayne Billing 22 Dec '14

22 Dec '14

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer… What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs [cid:1FF4F8EC-B7DB-48EB-AF2B-33F7F1AFCC9C@cc.umanitoba.ca] Credit Illustration by Matt Dorfman. Photographs by Getty Images. Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com<http://Forbes.com>. Jackson, an influential … [View More]hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, to turn around the enormous yet floundering Internet company. It was July 21, 2014, almost exactly two years to the day since Mayer took over, arriving at Yahoo’s headquarters to an unfurled purple carpet and Shepard Fairey-style “HOPE” posters bearing her face. During those 24 months, Mayer eliminated dozens of products and rebooted others. She acquired 41 start-ups and even hired Katie Couric. But just one week earlier, Mayer announced the company’s lowest quarterly earnings in a decade. Jackson argued in his post that Yahoo no longer made sense as an independent entity. Instead, it might be a nice takeover target for one of the tech industry’s Big Four: Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Google. Jackson’s conclusion wasn’t based simply on a discouraging quarter. It was a result of an eye-opening calculation he had performed — what’s known on Wall Street as a sum-of-the-parts valuation. Yahoo had a market value of $33 billion at the time, but that figure owed largely to its stake in Alibaba, the Chinese Internet conglomerate. According to Jackson’s valuation, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba was worth roughly $37 billion. But if you subtracted that position, the entirety of Yahoo’s core business, all its web products and content sites, actually had a market valuation of negative $4 billion. A conquering company could theoretically buy Yahoo, sell off its Asian assets and absorb its business units free. This sort of sale would make a lot of money for Yahoo’s shareholders, Jackson wrote, even if it meant gutting the company and losing Mayer as C.E.O. after only two years. A day after his post, Jackson received an unusual email. A major Yahoo shareholder had written to explain that he and many other investors, along with numerous employees and advertisers, had themselves become extremely frustrated with Mayer. Her turnaround plan, he said, had failed. The start-ups she acquired (most notably the social blogging platform Tumblr, which Yahoo bought for $1.1 billion in 2013) had failed to revive the company’s flat revenues of roughly $5 billion per year. Nor had Mayer succeeded, despite her track record overseeing Google’s search engine, in turning any of Yahoo’s many products into an industry leader. There were also a number of embarrassing management setbacks. The best outcome for Yahoo, the shareholder said, might be to sell the company. One day later, on July 23, Jackson published a subsequent Forbes column that outlined parts of the shareholder’s argument. It went viral within the investment community, and in the following days, Jackson fielded several calls from other significant Yahoo investors, including managers of large mutual funds and hedge funds, who encouraged him to continue his campaign. Jackson’s own fund didn’t have the capital to mount an offensive, which would require buying a large stake in Yahoo and using it as leverage to effect changes within management. But he knew someone who might. Jeffrey Smith, who ran an activist fund called Starboard Value, had recently led such a campaign against AOL, leading the company to eliminate its money-losing local news network, Patch. While still on vacation, Jackson looked up Smith’s email on his Bloomberg terminal. Within hours, the two men were on the phone with a handful of associates from Starboard. Jackson’s dire calculation of Yahoo’s value would soon be reinforced in the markets. On Sept. 19, Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange, closing at $93.89 per share. But as Alibaba’s stock soared, Yahoo’s dropped, an indication that the market seemed to concur with Jackson’s analysis: Yahoo’s core business was worth less than zero dollars. A week later, Smith published an open letter calling for Yahoo to divest itself of its Alibaba assets, return the money to its shareholders and then merge with AOL. Redundancies could be eliminated, thousands of people could be fired and two former Internet superpowers would be downsized into a single and steady (if uninspiring) entity that sold ads against its collective online properties — news, blogs and Web products like email, maps and weather. “We trust the board and management will do the right thing for shareholders, even if this may mean accepting AOL as the surviving entity,” Smith wrote. Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com<http://Ask.com>, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate. She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan. On the afternoon of Oct. 21, she entered a web TV studio on Yahoo’s garrisonlike campus to present the company’s latest quarterly results. But the presentation effectively became a response to Starboard’s campaign. Even though Yahoo’s revenue had decreased in five of the past six quarters, Mayer attested that she had “great confidence in the strength of our business.” Mayer’s resolve was consistent with other remarks she had made at the time, in both public and private. She highlighted various signs of promise. Yahoo’s mobile revenues, while still small, had doubled from the previous year. Display advertising revenue was down 6 percent, but the number of ads sold had actually increased by 24 percent. Yahoo was engaging more mobile users than ever before. Mayer didn’t bother talking about a potential AOL takeover. Her goal was nothing less than to return her company to the level of the Big Four. “We believe deeply in the future potential of Yahoo,” she said into the camera, “and the transformation we are pursuing to bring an iconic company back to greatness.” Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising. Social-media companies, like Facebook or Twitter, may make cool products that connect their users, but they earn revenue by selling ads against the content those users create. Innovative media companies, like Vox or Hulu, make money in much the same way, except that they’re selling ads against content created by professionals. Google, which has basically devoured the search business, still makes a vast majority of its fortune by selling ads against our queries. Yahoo essentially invented the online-advertising business. In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford, Jerry Yang and David Filo, dreamed up a way to help early users navigate the web. They picked URLs that they each liked — beginning with around 100 links, including one for Nerf toys and one dedicated to armadillos — and listed them on a page called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Within a year, their guide had to be divided into 19 categories (art, business, etc.) and was generating one million clicks a day. In 1995, the year Yahoo started selling ads, a former company executive estimated that the entire market was about $20 million. By 1997, Yahoo’s ad revenues alone were $70.4 million. The next year, they were $203 million. To keep up with the growth, Yahoo quickly expanded beyond its directory to create a multitude of ad-supported products. The company aimed to be all things to all web users, and for most of a decade, it was a wildly successful strategy. In 1997, Yahoo added chat rooms, classified ads and an email service. In 1998, it introduced sports, games, movies, real estate, a calendar, file sharing, auctions, shopping and an address book. Even during the crash of the Internet bubble, a profusion of more traditional advertisers began to migrate from print to digital. The search business, in particular, was growing enormously. In 2002, Yahoo’s first full year monetizing search results with attendant ads, its revenues reached $953 million. In 2003, they eclipsed $1.6 billion. In 2004, they grew again to $3.5 billion. At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company. But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product. Soon enough, Yahoo was losing out to eBay in auctions, Google in search and Craigslist in classifieds. Then Facebook came along, replacing Yahoo as the home page for millions of people. The advertising dollars soon followed, and Yahoo’s revenue flattened. Between 2007 and 2012, the company churned through four C.E.O.s. The last of them, Scott Thompson, resigned in disgrace after five months when a large activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, published an open letter accusing him of fabricating a computer-science degree. After Thompson’s resignation, in May 2012, Yahoo was worth less than $20 billion on the public markets. As an ad-supported business, Yahoo had only two ways to increase its revenue. It could display more ads by attracting more people to its products — a plan that would require inventing (or acquiring) new products, improving old products or some combination. Alternately, it could elevate ad prices by upgrading its content. In the opinion of Thompson’s interim successor, Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo would be best positioned as such a “premium” content company. In Levinsohn’s vision, Yahoo had fallen so far behind its competitors in building successful back-end technology, like real-time advertising auctions and search, that it should cede most of those businesses altogether. In the process, the company could also shed more than half of its 15,000 employees, and home in on its best asset: reach. Some 700 million people still visited Yahoo’s home page every month, making it almost seven times as large as the combined online audiences of The New York Times, The Daily Mail and The Washington Post. Levinsohn believed that offering this audience better content could raise Yahoo’s earnings by up to $2 billion in two years. But in Silicon Valley, the big money, and most of the prestige, is in making cool products. This is partly because product businesses, based on technology, are easier to scale than content ones, which require more human labor. It also reflects a cultural bias. The Valley’s greatest companies, from Hewlett-Packard onward, have been built around technological ingenuity. Tech executives know how to hire engineers and designers; they’re less adroit at recruiting editors or producers. When Loeb joined the Yahoo board, he recruited Michael J. Wolf, the former president of MTV, and the two consulted the noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen about who should become the next C.E.O. of Yahoo. Andreessen made the case for a product executive. Loeb’s decision was facilitated by another factor too. At the time, Google was valued at $250 billion; Facebook was worth $100 billion. Loeb opted to refashion Yahoo in their image. And so, in the spring of 2012, Loeb and Wolf began coveting a product C.E.O. The two board members asked the executive recruiter Jim Citrin of Spencer Stuart to approach Marissa Mayer, the wunderkind engineer who oversaw the user interface of Google’s search engine. Citrin cautioned that Mayer, who was among the first 25 people to join Google back in 1999, appeared to be a lifer. She had already earned hundreds of millions of dollars following Google’s 2004 I.P.O. and presumably had her pick of job opportunities. Still, he said he’d reach out to her. Unknown to Citrin, however, Mayer was interested in pursuing her own turnaround of sorts. A couple of years earlier, she lost a turf battle to a powerful engineer within Google and was quietly reassigned to oversee Google Maps and other so-called local products. Mayer tried to spin the move positively, but that became harder after Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, regained the role of C.E.O. and removed Mayer from the group of executives reporting to him. According to one friend, Mayer had been observing the Yahoo vacancy for months. After Citrin called her cellphone, she told him she was interested. The challenge of redirecting Yahoo was immense, but the next C.E.O. would have one tremendous advantage. In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in a little-known company called Alibaba. It turned out to be a remarkably prescient bet. Alibaba is commonly referred to as the Google of China, but it’s something more akin to the country’s version of Google, eBay and Amazon all in one — a web portal that provides e-commerce and business to business services. Weeks before Mayer was hired in July 2012, Yahoo sold half its 40 percent stake back to Alibaba for $7.1 billion. As a part of that deal, Alibaba agreed to hold an initial public offering sometime before the end of 2014. Suddenly the easiest way for Wall Street to make a bet on Alibaba — a hot start-up in a hot market, guaranteed an I.P.O. — was through an investment in Yahoo. The arrangement ensured that Yahoo’s stock, for the next two years, would be tied to the performance of Alibaba rather than that of its own core business. This was a tremendous benefit to an incoming C.E.O., essentially offering a two-year air cover. Without having to manage the company’s stock price, inevitably one of a chief executive’s most distracting tasks, Mayer could focus on acquiring start-ups, jump-starting products and making strategic changes. Moreover, in two years she would be able to use the Alibaba cash to reinvest in her putative growth. When Citrin offered the job, she accepted. Turning around a technology company has been historically rare. Tech companies invent new ways of doing things, but as they expand, often metastatically, they tend to shift their focus toward protecting their booming business rather than investing in new disruptive ones. Inevitably some newer company, usually financed by a wealthy venture-capital firm, beats them to it. It’s a cycle that happens in all industries, but everything moves faster in technology — too fast, usually, to allow for turnarounds. Steve Jobs may have resurrected Apple, and IBM was able to reinvent itself from a P.C. company into a business-services firm. But the next best example is probably Jeffery Boyd’s deliverance of Priceline — not exactly a titan of the industry. And his plan was almost a total restart, including dialing down the “name your price” pitch line and switching the company’s strategy from air travel to hotel bookings. In order to revive Yahoo as a product company, Mayer would try to treat it as a giant start-up itself. Hours after entering Yahoo’s complex on the morning of July 17, 2012, she set up her computer to log into the company’s code base so she could personally make changes, much like the founder of a tiny tech firm might do. During her second week, she devised a weekly all-staff update, called “F.Y.I.,” that she would host at URL’s, a cafeteria on the Yahoo campus. (Employees pronounce it “Earl’s.”) She also tried to make the company a more desirable place to work. Yahoo employees, until then confined largely to BlackBerrys, were given iPhones or Samsungs as their company phones. All meals at URL’s would henceforth be free. For years, the partitions between the bathroom stalls didn’t go all the way to the wall. People hung toilet paper to try to fill the gaps. Soon after Mayer’s arrival, new partitions were installed. Mayer saw her plan as a return, in a sense, to Yahoo’s original mission. Yahoo grew in popularity and value during the late 1990s, when it was the most user-friendly way to peruse the World Wide Web. Now, Mayer believed, it could ride the shift from P.C.s to smartphones and make the mobile web-browsing experience more user-friendly too. Yahoo, in other words, would need to become a really great apps company. Mayer wanted to narrow its product portfolio down to approximately a dozen from more than 100. She and her C.M.O., Kathy Savitt, did some market research and found a list of common user activities on mobile devices. She called this list the “Daily Habits,” and they included news-reading, checking weather, reading email and photo-sharing. Mayer was determined to ensure that Yahoo had the best mobile app for each. This was going to be difficult. Previous Yahoo C.E.O.s had underinvested in mobile-app development, plowing money into advertising technology and web tools instead. A couple of days into the job, Mayer was having lunch at URL’s when an employee walked up to her and introduced himself as Tony. “I’m a mobile engineer,” Tony said. “I’m on the mobile team.” Mayer responded to Tony, “Great, how big is our mobile team?” After some back and forth, Tony replied that there were “maybe 60” engineers. Mayer was dumbfounded. Facebook, for instance, had a couple of thousand people working on mobile. When she queried the engineering management department, it responded that Yahoo had roughly 100. “Like an actual hundred,” Mayer responded, “or like 60 rounded up to 100 to make me feel better?” The department responded that it was more like 60. Companies like Facebook and Google are known for their fast-paced product updates. Yahoo, by contrast, was sluggish. Yahoo Mail, with its 30 billion emails a day, was arguably the company’s most important product. But despite the decline in desktop email use, Yahoo hadn’t built mail apps for smartphones. It had simply made the Yahoo Mail website usable on smaller mobile screens. Now an app was going to be designed for four separate platforms, including both Apple’s and Google’s mobile operating systems. During her first meeting with the executive in charge of Mail and Messenger, Vivek Sharma, Mayer said that she wanted it done by December. (Mayer declined to comment for this article.) Mayer subsequently immersed herself in the redesign. Months into her tenure, she was meeting with Sharma’s team regularly in a conference room that started to look more like a design studio: projectors hung from the ceiling, rendering screens displayed on the wall. All around, dozens of foam core boards were pinned with ideas. Mayer would regularly interrogate designers about the minutest details of display and user experience. By early December, one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand. Some around the table were encouraged that their C.E.O. refused to release a product that she was less than fully satisfied with. If changing a few pixels led to an increase of 0.01 percent more users, that could translate to millions of dollars in ad revenue. Others, however, were visibly furious. According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news. In reality, Yahoo needed to move fast. And Mayer, who had begun her tenure while six months pregnant, tried to lead by example; she often slept only four hours a night and thrived on the breakneck pace. In her first months on the job, she unveiled a new version of Flickr, Yahoo’s photo-sharing social network, and a new Yahoo home page. Then Mayer overhauled the same products again, even as the company released new apps like Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News Digest. She outbid Facebook by a couple hundred million dollars to buy Tumblr. In the three quarters before Mayer’s arrival, Yahoo’s home-page team tested five new looks. In Mayer’s first two months, she prototyped 37. Mayer also announced that she wanted to repair Yahoo’s search engine, her specialty at Google. “I don’t see a reason why our search share should fall below 15 percent, which is where it roughly is today,” she told employees at an F.Y.I. “I also don’t see a reason why it can’t climb back up to the 20 percent that we had.” According to one executive, she told a group of six vice presidents that she wanted a redesigned search product unveiled by the end of the year. “Tell me if you can do it,” she instructed the group. “Otherwise, I’ll find people who can.” Largely owing to Mayer’s age and Google pedigree, her hiring had initially brought her overwhelmingly positive press during her first months at Yahoo. An article by Dan Frommer, an influential beat reporter for the industry news site ReadWrite, summed up a popular view: “This is a great move for Yahoo, which has stewed in mediocrity for years.” And by the beginning of 2013, just six months into the job, Mayer’s turnaround seemed to be ahead of schedule. In March, Yahoo’s stock rose to $22 per share, and Mayer added a tool to the company’s internal network that allowed employees to view their stock compensation. At a board meeting in April, Mayer admitted that she had not yet identified a “breakthrough product,” but she reminded those in attendance that Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the iPod until five years into his second tenure at Apple. At an F.Y.I. around that time, she read a speech that Jobs gave to Apple employees at the beginning of his turnaround. Afterward, channeling Jobs, Mayer told hundreds of employees sitting at URL’s, “Our purpose is to inspire and delight our users, to build beautiful services, things that people love to use and enjoy using every day, and that’s our opportunity.” She continued: “We are the world’s largest start-up. We have $5 billion in revenue, but it can and will go in the blink of an eye if we don’t do our jobs.” At Google, Mayer made her name as the executive who helped determine how products would look and work. She was less sure, however, about how to monetize them. At Yahoo, her most important hire was supposed to be someone who could figure all that out for her while also running Yahoo’s 1,000-plus-person sales force. Mayer did not have to search far. Within weeks of becoming C.E.O., she received an email from Henrique de Castro, the fashionable Portuguese president of Google’s media, mobile and platforms businesses. De Castro asked if she was available for a dinner and suggested a place. Mayer countered with a quieter venue and even arranged to get a table in the back. Over dinner, de Castro impressed Mayer with his knowledge of Yahoo’s business and his specific proposals for building it. For several mornings in a row, the two exchanged emails to negotiate de Castro’s salary. Every night, Mayer would make an offer, only to wake up to a reply with a list of more conditions. Eventually de Castro negotiated himself a contract worth around $60 million, depending on the value of Yahoo stock. The Yahoo board was aghast, but Mayer argued that de Castro had to be compensated for the unvested Google stock he was abandoning. Anyway, she said, his talent ensured that Yahoo would reap many multiples of his salary in return. Henrique de Castro would pay for himself. Mayer’s turnaround plan may have been predicated on building irresistible products to sell ads against. But hundreds of employees at Yahoo already worked on a side of the business that generated advertising revenues the more traditional way — by creating or licensing content, from beauty tips and Kardashian stories to daily videos on the financial markets and scripted comedies. For most of her first year at Yahoo, Mayer hardly paid any attention to this group, which generated $1.5 billion in annual revenue. This began to change in the spring of 2013, however, when Mayer attended the NewFronts, the annual event in New York where digital-content businesses display their coming programming for ad-agency buyers. Mayer kicked off the show by reading a corporate script from a prompter in an office-casual cardigan. Her talk felt woefully out-of-place at a splashy event whose other attendees included Ed Helms, the actor, and the Lumineers, the popular rock group. Still, the glamour of the event seemed to ignite Mayer’s interest in content, and within a month she asked that all programming decisions be run by her. While some at the company favored upgrading Yahoo’s content, there was a fear that Mayer, who preferred to read Town and Country and wear Oscar de la Renta couture, might undermine the company’s middle-American brand. To some, she also seemed to lack the instincts of a media executive. During a breakfast with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Mayer asked if there might be any partnership opportunities between the magazine and Shine, Yahoo’s site for women. According to Mayer’s own telling of the story to top Yahoo executives, Wintour looked appalled. Shine, with its 500 million monthly page views, appealed to a mass audience, not a narrow and affluent one. Nevertheless, Mayer quickly became infatuated with the idea that Yahoo could attract more sophisticated consumers. She began pushing for deputies to commission high-quality shows, the way Netflix was doing with “House of Cards” and “Orange Is the New Black.” One Yahoo executive was forced to explain that only a company that sold subscriptions to consumers could expect to make money off such expensive productions. Reared in Google’s data-obsessed culture, Mayer tended to require countless tests about user preferences before making an important product decision. But when it came to media strategy, she seemed perfectly comfortable going with her gut. As a teenager in Wisconsin, she grew up sneaking into the living room to watch “Saturday Night Live” and occasionally recited sketches during meetings; in April 2013, Yahoo paid an estimated $10 million per year for the “S.N.L.” archives. Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college. Over the summer, Mayer greenlighted a plan to hire Katie Couric, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News” and former co-host of the “Today” show. As was the case with de Castro, Couric put the idea in Mayer’s head herself after the two shared a stage at an advertising event in the Turks and Caicos. Couric, who was then hosting a failing daytime talk show on ABC, told Mayer she wanted to do something big for Yahoo. Couric had previously worked with the company to produce a video series, “Katie’s Take,” in which she interviewed experts on topics like health and parenting. Despite Couric’s star power, users didn’t click on her videos, no matter how prominently editors positioned them on the page. Mayer ignored those metrics, and in mid-2013, she named Couric Yahoo’s “global anchor” in a deal worth more than $5 million a year. Yahoo also lured a slate of expensive journalists to helm a series of new “digital magazines.” Mayer hired David Pogue, The New York Times’s gadget columnist, to be the editor of Yahoo Tech. She personally recruited Joe Zee, the creative director of Elle, telling him to consider Yahoo his “playground.” Mayer’s team asked the former Page Six editor Paula Froelich to run Yahoo Travel; the makeup star Bobbi Brown would oversee Yahoo Beauty. And Yahoo Shine, with its $45 million in yearly revenue, was shot down. For the NewFronts event in June 2014, Mayer wore a designer dress and introduced a slate of buzzy new shows that she personally approved. Behind the scenes, though, her hands-on strategy was backfiring. “I just think it is a strategic mistake to take on big media where they are strongest,” Jonah Peretti, the C.E.O. of Buzzfeed, wrote me in an email earlier this year, referring to her focus on stars, scripted shows and glossy content. “Especially when there is a huge open space at the intersection of media and tech where it is hard for other big companies to compete.” Couric, meanwhile, had done several interviews with high-profile figures, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, but Yahoo’s users weren’t clicking on the videos. In May, Yahoo Tech had just nine million visitors, placing it in seventh place among competitors, far behind rivals like CNET and Gizmodo. Yahoo Tech would sometimes go weeks without running a single ad. Yahoo Food was 12th in its market. Yahoo’s display advertising revenues dipped 7 percent during the second quarter of 2014. One of the Yahoo board’s hesitations upon hiring Mayer was her relative lack of experience as a manager. While running search at Google, she oversaw 250 people. Mayer liked to spin her demotion by saying that it left her in charge of more than 1,000 staff members, but a majority of them were contractors. Either way, in her haste to turn around Yahoo, this relative inexperience began to surface. Some on the board had hoped that Ross Levinsohn would stay on as C.O.O., but any hope was jettisoned when Mayer asked him to fly from L.A. for a meeting and then stood him up. Mayer’s refusal to delegate became a sticking point, too. She insisted on personally approving every hire. One executive complained to a friend that Mayer spent as much time deliberating Yahoo’s parking policies as she did strategizing over the sale of its Alibaba stock. Mayer also had a habit of operating on her own time. Every Monday at 3 p.m. Pacific, she asked her direct reports to gather for a three-hour meeting. Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6 p.m., and Europe, where it was 11 p.m. or later, would dial in, too. Invariably, Mayer herself would be at least 45 minutes late; some calls were so delayed that Yahoo executives in Europe couldn’t hang up till after 3 a.m. In theory, Mayer kept up with her direct reports through weekly individual meetings. In practice, she often went weeks without seeing them. This delinquency eventually became a problem outside Yahoo. At a major advertising event in the South of France, Mayer sat for an interview with Martin Sorrell, the C.E.O. of WPP, one of the world’s largest agencies. In front of a filled auditorium, Sorrell asked Mayer why she did not return his emails. Sheryl Sandberg, he said, always got back to him. Later, Mayer was scheduled for dinner with executives from the ad agency IPG. The 8:30 p.m. meal was inconvenient for the firm’s C.E.O., Michael Roth, but he shuffled his calendar so he could accommodate it. Mayer didn’t show up until 10. At F.Y.I.s, Mayer liked to tell employees that she believed in taking risks and that she was unafraid to admit failure. This philosophy worked well for web products but not for strategic hires. Despite the board’s urging, Mayer opted against vetting Henrique de Castro. As a result, she was unaware that de Castro had a poor reputation among his colleagues in Google’s advertising business. Many had derisively called him the Most Interesting Man in the World, in reference to the satirically fatuous spokesman for Dos Equis beer. De Castro had a tendency to make grand, awkwardly worded pronouncements. He was the inspiration for the Twitter handle @HdCYouKnowMe, which posted tweets that straddled the line between reality and parody: “To incentivize the sales force, you need to hit them with the carrot” and “Product is like snakes . . . slippery — we need someone with a big hammer.” De Castro’s new Yahoo colleagues got a full dose of his strange locution at the company’s annual sales meeting, in early 2013, when he berated his sales force with a rangy, pedantic speech. (De Castro did not respond to requests for comment.) De Castro’s plan for growing Yahoo revenues focused on user-generated content, like the videos available on YouTube or Instagram. The only problem was that Yahoo did not have access to enough user-generated content to support this plan. (Its attempt to acquire Daily Motion, a YouTube clone, had fallen apart.) As Yahoo’s ad revenues continued to decline, de Castro began to alienate his staff and fellow executives. After one of his direct reports gave a presentation about Yahoo’s business in front of some 40 senior executives, de Castro humiliated the person, saying: “I think your strategy’s more of a fantasy. You make it up. You just make it up.” More important, advertising revenue declined in every quarter since he was hired. Within a year, Mayer had personally taken control of Yahoo’s ad team. De Castro would leave the company in January 2014. For about 15 months of work, he would be paid $109 million. Mayer’s largest management problem, however, related to the start-up culture she had tried to instill. Early on, she banned working from home. This policy affected only 164 employees, but it was initiated months after she constructed an elaborate nursery in her office suite so that her son, Macallister, and his nanny could accompany her to work each day. Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score. One of the uglier parts of the process was a series of quarterly “calibration meetings,” in which managers would gather with their bosses and review all the employees under their supervision. In practice, the managers would use these meetings to conjure reasons that certain staff members should get negative reviews. Sometimes the reason would be political or superficial. Mayer herself attended calibration meetings where these kinds of arbitrary judgments occurred. The senior executives who reported to Mayer would join her in a meeting at Phish Food and hold up spreadsheets of names and ratings. During the revamping of Yahoo Mail, for instance, Kathy Savitt, the C.M.O., noted that Vivek Sharma was bothering her. “He just annoys me,” she said during the meeting. “I don’t want to be around him.” Sharma’s rating was reduced. Shortly after Yahoo Mail went live, he departed for Disney. (Savitt disputes this account.) As concerns with Q.P.R.s escalated, employees asked if an entire F.Y.I. could be devoted to anonymous questions on the topic. One November afternoon, Mayer took the stage at URL’s as hundreds of Yahoo employees packed the cafeteria. Mayer explained that she had sifted through the various questions on the internal network, but she wanted to begin instead with something else. Mayer composed herself and began reading from a book, “Bobbie Had a Nickel,” about a little boy who gets a nickel and considers all the ways he can spend it. “Bobbie had a nickel all his very own,” Mayer read. “Should he buy some candy or an ice cream cone?” Mayer paused to show everyone the illustrations of a little boy in red hair and blue shorts choosing between ice cream and candy. “Should he buy a bubble pipe?” she continued. “Or a boat of wood?” At the end of the book, Bobby decides to spend his nickel on a carousel ride. Mayer would later explain that the book symbolized how much she valued her roving experiences thus far at Yahoo. But few in the room seemed to understand the connection. By the time she closed the book, URL’s had gone completely silent. Mayer’s plan to restore Yahoo to the ranks of the tech giants had been premised on producing apps that hundreds of millions of people wanted to use. But as the Alibaba I.P.O. approached this fall, Yahoo’s new and updated apps weren’t getting enough traction. The digital-magazine strategy had not taken off, either; few of the strategic acquisitions seemed poised to break out; and Yahoo’s search business, which Mayer hoped to grow to a 20 percent market share, had dropped to around 10 percent. Mayer’s plan to sell a new kind of advertising in apps had been undermined by her trouble building relationships with clients, like Sorrell and Roth. Despite her efforts, Yahoo was still not growing. On July 15, the company reported dismal second-quarter revenues. Weeks later, Alibaba went public, and Jeff Smith pounced. Since Starboard began its campaign to force an AOL merger, Mayer has been meeting with shareholders to reassure them about her strategy. Many public-company C.E.O.s become belligerent when activist investors come charging, but Mayer appears to be open to a compromise. Most Yahoo observers expect that, in the coming weeks, she will announce a plan to transfer almost all of the company’s Alibaba gains to shareholders while simultaneously resisting any merger with AOL. Mayer often compares her situation with the one Jobs inherited, and many expect her to insist that she needs at least the five years he received before his turnaround began to succeed with the release of the iPod. But Mayer may not be able to buy herself the time. Major Yahoo shareholders have recently begun collaborating on a series of spreadsheets that calculate that AOL and Yahoo are worth between 70 and 80 percent more when combined than they are apart. Some investors are further attracted to the merger because it will bring AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, into Yahoo. Like Mayer, Armstrong made his career as an early Google employee — but he was in charge of its sales force. After a rough start, Armstrong has managed to get AOL’s stock going again, not by inventing some new consumer product but by optimizing its ad and media assets. Armstrong, who has seen a version of this analysis, appears willing to consider a deal. Doing so, of course, would provide enormous personal benefit; Armstrong, who owns 5 percent of AOL, could stand to gain tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. For Mayer, the calculus is less enticing. It’s unlikely that her personal turnaround plan included shrinking a $30 billion company into a $5 billion one, all to combine it with a $3 billion company and realize $1 billion in cost-savings. But it’s also unclear what, if any, other options she has. Turning Yahoo into a growing products company and appeasing its activist shareholders are now almost mutually exclusive tasks. If Yahoo were to sell off its stake in Alibaba, it would become an entirely different sort of entity. Its market capitalization could drop to $5 billion from $50 billion. Efficiencies that once seemed small would become, in the language of investors, “material.” Starboard might pressure Mayer to sell Yahoo’s real estate or to lay off 10,000 employees. Acquisitions would get harder, as smaller bets would become much bigger relative to Yahoo’s market capitalization. Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.” In many ways, Yahoo’s decline from a $128 billion company to one worth virtually nothing is entirely natural. Yahoo grew into a colossus by solving a problem that no longer exists. And while Yahoo’s products have undeniably improved, and its culture has become more innovative, it’s unlikely that Mayer can reverse an inevitability unless she creates the next iPod. All breakthrough companies, after all, will eventually plateau and then decline. U.S. Steel was the first billion-dollar company in 1901, but it was worth about the same in 1991. Kodak, which once employed nearly 80,000 people, now has a market value below $1 billion. Packard and Hudson ruled the roads for more than 40 years before disappearing. These companies matured and receded over the course of generations, in some cases even a century. Yahoo went through the process in 20 years. In the technology industry, things move fast. “Sometimes,” Damodaran told me, “companies have to act their age.” For Yahoo, embracing its maturity means settling for a business that earns close to $1 billion in profit every year. It has outlasted other formerly iconic Internet portals, from AltaVista to Excite, and even dwarfs more recent web sensations like Myspace and Ask.com<http://Ask.com>. For a company that started out as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” that’s not a bad way to grow old. [View Less]

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FYI: Security updates: iOS 8.1.2 for 4s->, iPad2->, touch(5th)
by Wayne Billing 10 Dec '14

10 Dec '14

...from: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6590 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6590 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1222 Security updates Name and information link Available for Release date iOS 8.1.2<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6598> iPhone 4s and later, iPod touch (5th generation) and later, iPad 2 and later 9 Dec 2014 On Dec 10, 2014, at 14:00 , security-announce-request(a)lists.apple.com<mailto:security-announce-request@lists.apple.com> wrote: -----------… [View More]--------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:28:58 -0800 From: Apple Product Security <product-security-noreply(a)lists.apple.com<mailto:product-security-noreply@lists.apple.com>> To: security-announce(a)lists.apple.com<mailto:security-announce@lists.apple.com> Subject: APPLE-SA-2014-12-9-1 iOS 8.1.2 Message-ID: <FF18CF09-18C3-4C87-96C8-70E8F76A3C05(a)lists.apple.com<mailto:FF18CF09-18C3-4C87-96C8-70E8F76A3C05@lists.apple.com>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 APPLE-SA-2014-12-9-1 iOS 8.1.2 iOS 8.1.2 is now available and includes the security content of iOS 8.1.1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6590 Installation note: This update is available through iTunes and Software Update on your iOS device, and will not appear in your computer's Software Update application, or in the Apple Downloads site. Make sure you have an Internet connection and have installed the latest version of iTunes from www.apple.com/itunes/<http://www.apple.com/itunes/> iTunes and Software Update on the device will automatically check Apple's update server on its weekly schedule. When an update is detected, it is downloaded and the option to be installed is presented to the user when the iOS device is docked. We recommend applying the update immediately if possible. Selecting Don't Install will present the option the next time you connect your iOS device. The automatic update process may take up to a week depending on the day that iTunes or the device checks for updates. You may manually obtain the update via the Check for Updates button within iTunes, or the Software Update on your device. To check that the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad has been updated: * Navigate to Settings * Select General * Select About. The version after applying this update will be "8.1.2". Information will also be posted to the Apple Security Updates web site: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 This message is signed with Apple's Product Security PGP key, and details are available at: https://www.apple.com/support/security/pgp/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org<http://gpgtools.org/> iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJUh5NeAAoJEBcWfLTuOo7tU1wP/2nkHWHE6tMk3MliuGTWPgOQ bBTUTn71tc46iniZYosRTSKVY8b23jED57OhubCy4jS9Nw3gXOpguGMhNp9+9yWh 3F5fDnkmEjUwX8DTEya/XH+E+89CGUB7ysqDgy2pdkAsHPS8NHDeapRgXWFEK/F6 l5xvWGYTpqKE9JlEZisBKOox9Bm5C2i0/0oNtPIIB9mqPbFgrX4bZe5dP53RBABE 8JVPSI0uRRqNJHc0Q4wg2Re5e4MmT6n9apcHDr9A7d7XL4d9nf1erEdSiItk5ov5 reI4yRxJ6j/yE3FZQL7dikcKjEOXcKlujWkTfZUT3W0sBVcz4bua6pbQbfjgQJTv z0d7/gg9ftOOqdjjJ7chKzr6NRsc1VDUpY56nQwNSG88sssAsSKi3iOngAxpDCEi nzbk2MDaQ0XrCjF1ViZe0mCysqhcQ26MgYb2eIb2HWzHu4fajNZjaIJnz5OUtpD3 gafTgwmsVYAEuzdpWsyAHuP8GzbN76ckYowZUzc265wY3WMKJ2qEtJxDqJDX3c7Y gERP8NpDomVImrAJzLaBc+EDudWuZ7pVWNtoALgPoudyJJQkUAaFnapA1tr2BBFF Q83czo7WK91L0SWPlrCLPWoSMqGrENsR9NC39YaPPMJr/LTV3IuH+51erbFT/7tR 6zaepHK412hfvYrFbSXD =aVu1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Security-announce mailing list Security-announce(a)lists.apple.com<mailto:Security-announce@lists.apple.com> https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/security-announce End of Security-announce Digest, Vol 11, Issue 30 ************************************************* [View Less]

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INTEREST: SONY: security analysts talk about recent security breaches
by Wayne Billing 09 Dec '14

09 Dec '14

...from: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/12/unprecedented-cyberattack-no-excuse… “Unprecedented” cyberattack no excuse for Sony breach, pros say If the security industry can’t save you, it will apologize for you. by Robert Lemos<http://arstechnica.com/author/roblemos/> - Dec 9 2014, 4:30pm CST * Share<https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fsecuri…> * Tweet<https://twitter.com/share?text=%E2%80%9CUnprecedented%E2%80%9D+cyberattack+…… [View More]> 1<http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/12/unprecedented-cyberattack-no-excuse…> The security company investigating the attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment has reportedly penned a letter that seemingly holds the entertainment firm blameless for the breach of its systems—a move that has opened up the investigating firm to criticism by security professionals. The letter—to SPE’s CEO Michael Lynton from Kevin Mandia, the head of FireEye’s Mandiant, the incident response service the company hired to investigate the attack and restore its network—calls the attack “unprecedented in nature.” Mandia states that the attack would not have been detected by antivirus programs, and the attackers used non-standard strategies to cause damage to the company. “In fact, the scope of this attack differs from any we have responded to in the past, as its purpose was to both destroy property and release confidential information to the public,” Mandia states in the letter, which was leaked to media outlets<http://recode.net/2014/12/07/sony-describes-hack-attack-as-unprecedented/>. “The bottom line is that this was an unparalleled and well planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither SPE nor other companies could have been fully prepared.” Yet, security professionals aren’t buying it. Within 24 hours, several security experts had criticized the statements and refuted Mandia’s characterization of the attacks. “We have tremendous respect for Kevin Mandia and the team he’s assembled at FireEye’s Mandiant, but we completely disagree with the statement he made over the weekend,” Ken Levine, president and CEO of security service provider Digital Guardian, said in an e-mail sent to Ars. “He is clearly offering Sony the opportunity to hide behind the veil of advanced persistent threats.” Another outspoken security researcher, known online as “the grugq,” likened the letter to the Catholic Church selling forgiveness to sinners in the Middle Ages. “TIL [today I learned] Mandiant sells indulgences,” he tweeted on Monday<https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/541989738580688896>. In some ways, Mandia’s argument reflects the current wisdom in the security industry that, “There are two types of companies: Those that have been breached, and those that don’t know yet that they’ve been breached.” Yet, even for security professionals that accept that mantra, it does not mean that a successful compromise needs to lead to a significant breach, Levine told Ars. “There is a lot of post-breach thinking,” he said. “What we are saying is, not that all breaches are preventable, but what the bad guys get from the breach is absolutely preventable.” In the case of Sony Pictures, the attackers got quite a bit. The entertainment company has reportedly lost control of more than 100 terabytes of data [including unreleased movies, correspondence, contract, and other proprietary supplier, partner, and other industry-related information] without the company, or its security measures, detecting the breach. SPE’s security teams’ inability to catch the attackers in the act of stealing so much data is a direct result of its lack of focus on security, according to a paper by security-services firm Thinkst<http://blog.thinkst.com/2014/12/yabotsb-yet-another-blog-on-sony-breach.html>, outlining the lessons learned from the attack. Thinkst points to a previous statement in 2007<http://www.cio.com/article/2439324/risk-management/your-guide-to-good-enoug…> by Sony’s executive director of information security that it had to focus on making cost-effective security decisions. While the executive, Jason Spaltro, maintained that the company had gone beyond requirements in many places, Thinkst characterized that mindset as focused on “minimum compliance.” “That minimum compliance is the goal speaks volumes  about Sony Pictures’ attitude towards the security of their  data,” the company stated in its analysis. “Sony subsidiaries have fallen victim to tens of successful attacks in recent years, leading us to question the importance of security in the broader conglomerate.” The company has invested mostly in a top-heavy security team, according to other analyses, which—along with the success of so many attacks—suggests that it is not adequately focused on security, according to Thinkst. “What is abundantly clear from the attack is that Sony’s detection and response capabilities were about as poor as possible,” the company stated. “The public timeline of events implies that the intrusion was only discovered when the attackers moved from theft to destruction, announcing their presence bombastically with the altered desktop.” Sony and FireEye declined to comment on the letter or any criticism of the letter. When the details finally become clear, Levine believes that the overall picture will be of a familiar attack. “The truth is, there is nothing new about what these attackers are doing,” he said. “They are using the same tactics they’ve used before to get inside these organizations—someone clicks on an attachment with malware and the malware sits and waits—and FireEye and/or other security products could have, should have caught this, especially given the volume of data that was stolen.” [View Less]

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INTEREST: Firefox coming to iOS because "that’s where our users are"
by Wayne Billing 06 Dec '14

06 Dec '14

...from: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/firefox-coming-to-ios-because-thats-… https://twitter.com/lsblakk/status/539843892300898304 https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-experience-for-i… Lukas Blakk ‏@lsblakk We need to be where our users are so we're going to get Firefox on iOS #mozlandia Firefox coming to iOS because that’s where the users are New iOS behavior makes this a little more palatable than before. by Peter Bright<http://arstechnica.com/author/… [View More]peter-bright/> - Dec 3 2014, 1:17pm CST * Share<https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fgadget…> * Tweet<https://twitter.com/share?text=Firefox+coming+to+iOS+because+that%E2%80%99s…> 68<http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/firefox-coming-to-ios-because-thats-…> Saying that Firefox "need[s] to be where [its] users are," it appears that Mozilla is going to produce a version of Firefox for iOS. Mozilla is having a large, week-long working and meeting event in Portland, and TechCrunch<http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/02/firefox-could-soon-come-to-ios/> spotted a couple of tweets coming from Mozilla employees talking about bringing Firefox to iOS. Mozilla Release Manager Lukas Blakk tweeted<https://twitter.com/lsblakk/status/539843892300898304> that Mozilla was going to get Firefox on iOS because that's where its users are. Manager of Data Science Matthew Ruttley tweeted<https://twitter.com/matt_ruttley/status/539844872522301440>, "Firefox for iOS!! Let's do this!!!" (exclamation points all his), and he accompanied the tweet with a photo of a presentation that included a picture of an iPhone. In a brief statement confirming the tweets, Mozilla has announced that it is experimenting<https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-experience-for-i…> with "something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a Firefox experience." As recently as March 2013<http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/firefox-is-out-of-the-ios-game-until-a…>, Mozilla ruled out bringing Firefox to iOS due to the technical restrictions that Apple imposes on its platform. Then, as now, Apple effectively prohibits the creation of high-performance browser engines on its smartphone operating system through a number of technical restrictions. The only option browser developers have had is to embed Apple's own WebKit and provide a custom user interface around that. Prior to the release of iOS 8, even this option was unappealing, as the embedded WebKit did not have access to the high-performance JavaScript engine that the built-in Safari includes. While the former restriction hasn't been lifted, iOS 8 allows the embedded WebKit to use the full-power JavaScript engine, and as such, it means that third-party browser front-ends no longer operate at a performance disadvantage relative to Safari. Using Apple's WebKit—as Google has done with its Chrome for iOS—still allows Mozilla to plumb in its own interface, password and bookmark syncing, and other features. This will give Firefox users the same kind of cross-platform experience that users of some other browsers enjoy. Mozilla Press Center Mozilla News, Announcements, and More Mozilla Designing a Firefox Experience for iOS DEC 2 2014 At Mozilla, we put our users first and want to provide an independent choice for them on any platform. We are in the early stages of experimenting with something that allows iOS users to be able to choose a Firefox experience. We work in the open at Mozilla and are just starting to experiment with a couple of different concepts, so we’ll update you when we have more to share. ......seems things have changed at Mozillia since 20 September 2013, at 08:07 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms iPhone/iPad/iPod We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for iOS. The iOS SDK agreement requires apps to use Apple's own JavaScript engine (or none at all, like Opera Mini which downloads pre-rendered pages from Opera's servers and cannot run JavaScript code in the client). Because of this, we have no supported way to distribute Firefox's rendering and JavaScript engine to iPhone users. [View Less]

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FYI: Nature makes all articles free* to view
by Wayne Billing 02 Dec '14

02 Dec '14

[* - well, free to subscribers..... others, sort of....] ...from: http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460 Nature makes all articles free to view [cid:286F8AB4-65F7-4822-857F-8D57B280E401]<http://www.nature.com/news/dummy-jpg-7.22111?article=1.16460> Annthea Lewis/Nature Nature will make its articles back to 1869 free to share to be read online but not to be printed or downloaded. All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a … [View More]proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced<http://www.nature.com/press_releases/share-nature-content.html> on 2 December. The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles. ReadCube<https://www.readcube.com/>, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles' PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment. Annette Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan Science and Education, says that under the policy, subscribers can share any paper they have access to through a link to a read-only version of the paper’s PDF that can be viewed through a web browser. For institutional subscribers, that means every paper dating back to the journal's foundation in 1869, while personal subscribers get access from 1997 on. Anyone can subsequently repost and share this link. Around 100 media outlets and blogs will also be able to share links to read-only PDFs. Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts. PDF articles can also be saved to a free desktop version of ReadCube, similarly to how music files can be saved in iTunes. “We know researchers are already sharing content, often in hidden corners of the Internet or using clumsy, time-consuming practices,” said a statement by Timo Hannay, the managing director of Digital Science, a division of Macmillan that has invested in ReadCube. “At Digital Science we have the technology to provide a convenient, legitimate alternative that allows researchers to access the information they need and the wider, interested public access to scientific knowledge, from the definitive, original source,” Hannay said. The policy comes as research funders are increasingly mandating that scientists make their papers free to read, download and reuse in various other ways. Natureand its sister journals already allow scientists to freely archive online the peer-reviewed manuscripts of their papers, but only after a delay of six months following publication. And papers published in some NPG journals — 38% of all papers NPG published this year, says Thomas — are already being made free to read immediately on publication, a ‘gold open-access’ model in which publishers charge authors or their funders, rather than subscribers, for publishing each paper. But Thomas says that she expects that the subscription and the open-access business models would exist side by side for a long time to come. Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature and the other Nature-branded journals, has said that Nature's internal costs of publishing<http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/495426a> run at £20,000–30,000 (US$31,000–47,000) per paper, an extremely high charge to load onto authors or funders rather than spread over subscribers. Initial reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some note that it is far from allowing full open access to papers. “To me, this smacks of public relations, not open access,” says John Wilbanks, a strong advocate of open-access publishing in science and a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. “With access mandates on the march around the world, this appears to be more about getting ahead of the coming reality in scientific publishing. Now that the funders call the tune and the funders want the articles on the web at no charge, these articles are going to be open anyway,” he says. Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that the programme is a step forward. But, he notes, if authors prefer to share links to PDFs rather than actually deposit their manuscripts in an online repository, the programme could be a step backward, because repositories host copies independently from the publisher, and those copies can be printed or saved and are generally more reusable than a screen-only file. Thomas says that the publisher intends the policy as a pilot and will be evaluating it over the coming year. She says that she expects libraries and personal users to continue to subscribe to the journal, but also that scientists would embrace the new sharing model. Other science publishers, such as Wiley, use ReadCube to display preview versions of their papers, so it is possible that the same idea might spread to others, Thomas adds. [View Less]

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FYI: Autodesk Makes Software Free to Schools Worldwide
by Wayne Billing 02 Dec '14

02 Dec '14

....from: http://news.autodesk.com/press-release/autodesk-consumer-group-and-educatio… Autodesk Makes Design Software Free to Schools Worldwide Design Software Leader Expands Reach of Free Education Offering to Prepare an Industry-ready Workforce LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE<http://www.businesswire.com/>)--Fulfilling its promise to expand access to its professional design software in education, Autodesk, Inc.<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.… [View More]autodes…> (NASDAQ:ADSK) has made its industry-leading design, engineering and entertainment software free* to students, instructors and academic institutions worldwide. Through this action, more than 680 million students and educators from over 800,000 secondary and post-secondary schools in 188 countries can take advantage of free access to Autodesk’s professional software and services for use in classrooms, labs, and at home. “The way we make things is changing rapidly, and we need a workforce ready to design for new manufacturing and construction techniques. By providing free professional design tools to students, faculty members and academic institutions around the world, we’re helping get industry ready for the next phase,” said Carl Bass, CEO, Autodesk. Following its announcement<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.autode…> of free software for academic institutions in the United States earlier this year as part of President Obama’s ConnectED initiative, Autodesk has gradually expanded free access to its leading design software to academic institutions across Asia Pacific and Europe. The leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software is also helping schools move to the cloud by providing academic institutions with its full suite of next generation cloud-based design products, cloud services such as the A360<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.autodes…> collaboration platform, as well as maintenance subscription for free. From students as young as 13 years old leveraging Fusion 360<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffusion360.a…> to conceptualize and 3D print prosthetic devices<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Finthefold.a…>, to college teams developing environmentally sustainable homes<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Finthefold.a…> using BIM 360 Glue<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Finthefold.a…>, young talent are pushing the boundaries of design and innovation both inside and outside of the classroom using the same design software used by professionals every day. “Our students are using Fusion 360 to design an Energy Scooter which we are bringing to market via Kickstarter<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kickst…>, and they’re only in 8th grade! If we can help more classroom teachers incorporate learning through design in their curriculum, and technologies that engage students in problem-solving through engineering, students will see how math and science are springboards to careers as future innovators and entrepreneurs,” said Karen Kaun, Founder of Makeosity. To facilitate the integration of design tools into curricula, Autodesk also offers free project-based learning content and resources including the Digital STEAM Workshop<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitalstea…> and Design Academy<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Facademy.aut…>. “Closing the digital gap in education starts by providing European schools with common access to the same advanced technology being used by industry professionals today. Autodesk’s pledge<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fec.europa.e…> to provide our schools, students and teachers with free access to its professional 3D design software will enable educators to introduce design thinking into our classrooms; equip digital natives with the design tools to learn to solve real-world challenges in new creative ways; and prepare the next-generation workforce with the 21st century skills to meet industry demands and advance our economies,” said Neelie Kroes, former vice-president of the European Commission. To learn more or to request free educational access to Autodesk software, visit http://www.autodesk.com/education<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.autodes…>. About Autodesk Autodesk helps people imagine, design and create a better world. Everyone—from design professionals, engineers and architects to digital artists, students and hobbyists—uses Autodesk software to unlock their creativity and solve important challenges. For more information visit autodesk.com<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fautodesk.co…> or follow @autodesk<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.co…>. Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, A360, BIM 360 and Fusion 360, are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services offerings, and specifications and pricing at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2014 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved. * - Free Autodesk software and/or cloud-based services may only be used for educational purposes and are subject to acceptance of and compliance with the terms and conditions of the software license agreement or terms of service.Details and restrictions available at http://usa.autodesk.com/legal-notices-trademarks<http://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&url=http%3A%2F%2Fusa.autodes…>. Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20141201005128/en/ [View Less]

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INTEREST: Microsoft to unveil Windows 10 consumer features at January event
by Wayne Billing 29 Nov '14

29 Nov '14

...from: http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/27/7298717/windows-10-consumer-features-jan… Microsoft to unveil Windows 10 consumer features at January event Consumer Preview is on the way * By Tom Warren<http://www.theverge.com/users/tomwarren> * on November 27, 2014 10:10 am * @tomwarren<https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=tomwarren> * 85<http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/27/7298717/windows-10-consumer-features-jan…> [windows10jay.0.0.jpg] Microsoft is … [View More]

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INTEREST: European parliament: "Break up Google"; US lawmakers ask to not break up Google
by Wayne Billing 29 Nov '14

29 Nov '14

...from: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/european-parliament-votes-in-fav… European parliament votes in favor of breaking up Google [cid:5ADFFBCA-0F87-4B7D-9B3C-51F70D0B6494] Trey Ratcliff / flickr<http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/4323977677/> In a vote on Thursday, European Parliament members voted 384 to 174 in favor<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/27/eu-google-idUSL6N0TH2FS20141127> of a resolution that calls for the unbundling of search engines … [View More]from other commercial services to ensure competition among online companies. Although Google is not named specifically in the resolution, it's clearly targeted at the dominant search engine. The resolution would still have to be approved by the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to take effect, but the overwhelming vote in favor of separating search from other online products increases the likelihood that Google could face a major regulatory headache. In a press release<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20141125IPR80501/ht…>, the European Parliament called on EU member states and the European Commission to “break down barriers to the growth of the EU's digital single market” (a “single market” refers to the EU as an association of 28 countries trading freely between each other without restrictions). The Parliament also “stressed the need to prevent online companies from abusing dominant positions.” Lawmakers expressed concern, in particular, that Google was using its dominance to promote its own services unfairly and to obscure the services of its competitors. In the resolution, the Parliament asked the European Commission “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines,'” and asserted that "Indexation, evaluation, presentation, and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent.” Reuters reports that European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager “has said she will review the case and talk to complainants before deciding on the next step.” Earlier this month, when the Financial Times reported<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/europes-parliament-poised-to-cal…> on the draft resolution, it noted that the European Commission has been investigating Google for unfair practices for years. Earlier this week, US lawmakers urged<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/us-lawmakers-ask-europe-not-to-b…> the European Parliament not to vote to break up Google. Google declined to comment<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/27/eu-google-idUSL6N0TH2FS20141127> to Reuters. Ars has contacted Google and will update if we receive a response. This is only the latest in a slew of troubles Google has had with European regulators. It has also seen regulation, fines, and warnings from Europe with respect to taxation, copyright concerns, and the “right to be forgotten<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/google-must-erase-inadequate-lin…>.” ...from: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/us-lawmakers-ask-europe-not-to-b… US lawmakers ask Europe not to break up Google European parliament considering a nonbinding resolution to unbundle search engines. by Jon Brodkin<http://arstechnica.com/author/jon-brodkin/> - Nov 26 2014, 10:50am CST * Share<https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Ftech-p…> * Tweet<https://twitter.com/share?text=US+lawmakers+ask+Europe+not+to+break+up+Goog…> 134<http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/us-lawmakers-ask-europe-not-to-b…> [cid:DA28E3AB-355C-4A9E-9DBD-70C0B0BCA57D] keso s<http://www.flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/> A European proposal to unbundle search engines from other commercial businesses—which could result in the breakup of Google—has brought a response from US lawmakers. "Capitol Hill hit back at EU lawmakers on Tuesday for politicizing an antitrust investigation into Google, as tensions rose ahead of a European parliamentary vote calling for the possible break-up of the technology group," the Financial Times reported last night<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3d903290-74c9-11e4-a418-00144feabdc0.html#ax…>. Lawmakers sent letters to European counterparts expressing alarm at the proposal. The letters don't specifically mention Google, the world's largest search company, but neither does the European draft resolution. That says the European Commission should "consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services." The resolution in the European parliament is likely to pass on Thursday, but it would be nonbinding, because any final action would have to be taken by the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. One European member of parliament argued that "search engines like Google should not be allowed to use their market power to push forward other commercial activities of the same company.” However, EU digital commissioner Günther Oettinger spoke out against a breakup of Google. US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) wrote<http://judiciary.house.gov/_cache/files/930df244-ccf0-44c6-965d-6f91712adb2…> to European members of parliament, calling himself "troubled to learn that some European elected representatives are encouraging antitrust enforcement efforts that appear to be motivated by politics, rather than grounded in factual and legal principles. We believe that antitrust enforcement should be applied independent of politics and firmly rooted in our shared international principles. Policies that run counter to these principles undermine our free markets and ultimately harm both our businesses and our consumers." Another letter from US lawmakers said "'proposals that seem to target US technology companies' raised questions 'about the EU’s commitment to open markets,'" the Financial Times reported. The letter was signed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Reps. Dave Camp (R-MI) and Sander Levin (D-MI). A third letter<http://eshoo.house.gov/uploads/Letter%20from%20U%20S%20%20Congressional%20D…> signed by 12 members of US Congress led by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) said the resolution "would deter continued innovation and investment from US based Internet companies." The letter described "the transformative impact of online based services, including e-mail, social media, and search on our society and the economy," plus the contributions of US companies to the European economy. "It is therefore troubling to us that the European Parliament is suggesting an action that would stem cross-border data flows at the expense of millions of people across Europe who enjoy the use of these online services every day," the letter states. "We support healthy competition and a fair playing field for Internet companies in the US and around the globe, and we believe these goals can be accomplished through the traditional regulatory process." [View Less]

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FYI: Malware’s new target: your password manager’s password
by Wayne Billing 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

...from: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/citadel-attackers-aim-to-steal-vict… Malware’s new target: your password manager’s password Citadel trojan attempts to grab your master key. by Robert Lemos<http://arstechnica.com/author/roblemos/> - Nov 19 2014, 12:42pm CST * Share<https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fsecuri…> * TweetCyber criminals have started targeting the password managers that protect an individual's most sensitive … [View More]credentials by using a keylogger to steal the master password in certain cases, according to research from data-protection company IBM Trusteer.<https://twitter.com/share?text=Malware%E2%80%99s+new+target%3A+your+passwor…> Cyber criminals have started targeting the password managers that protect an individual's most sensitive credentials by using a keylogger to steal the master password in certain cases, according to research from data-protection company IBM Trusteer. The research<http://securityintelligence.com/cybercriminals-use-citadel-compromise-passw…> found that a configuration file, which attackers use to tailor the Citadel trojan for specific campaigns, had been modified to start up a keylogger when the user opened either Password Safe or KeePass, two open-source password managers. While malware has previously targeted the credentials stored in the password managers included in popular Web browsers, third-party password managers have typically not been targeted. While the current impact of the attack is low, the implications of the attacker’s focus is that password managers will soon come under more widespread assault, Dana Tamir, director of enterprise security for IBM Trusteer, told Ars Technica. “Once the malware captures this master key, then they can use that master key to exercise complete control over the machine and any of the user’s online accounts,” she said. Cyber criminals have increasingly focused on stealing passwords from online repositories and services. Passwords are generally not considered an adequate security solution for important data or online services because easy-to-remember passwords are also easier to guess, reducing the security of the protected data. Password managers boost the security of online accounts by allowing users to create a different and complex password for each of their accounts, additionally encrypting the information to prevent access. But the technology is not foolproof, as researchers found this summer when they published details of flaws<http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/severe-password-manager-attacks-ste…> in five different programs for storing passwords. Yet, when implemented correctly, the software can allow individuals to securely store a different credential for every site and system they use, avoiding reusing keys. It's no surprise, then, that attackers have started targeting that master key. The Citadel configuration files found by the IBM researchers commanded the malware to begin keylogging whenever Password Safe or KeePass started running. The system also monitored for passwords to an authentication solution known as the neXus Personal Security Client. The master passwords, if captured by the program, were sent to a legitimate Web server that appeared to have been compromised by the attackers. It was not clear whether the attack was part of a targeted campaign or just opportunistic attackers aiming to grab credentials from users of the password managers, IBM Trusteer’s Tamir said. Despite the attack, password managers are still better than just using a few passwords, or worse, a single password, she said. “I think that password managers and authentication solutions are more critical than ever,” Tamir said. “But it is important to keep in mind that these solutions are not sufficient in and of themselves—they have to be accessed from a clean machine.” Wayne Billing Classroom Technology Support Audio Visual and Classroom Technology Support Computer and Network Support 130 Machray Hall Building 204-474-6649 204-807-3153 (cell) 204-474-7625 (fax) Wayne_Billing(a)umanitoba.ca<mailto:Wayne_Billing@umanitoba.ca> [View Less]

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FYI: Mozilla/FireFox to drop Google default
by Wayne Billing 19 Nov '14

19 Nov '14

...from: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/mozilla-ends-google-r… Mozilla ends Google relationship, Firefox will now default to Yahoo in the US Ten-year partnership that paid most of Mozilla's bills coming to an end. by Peter Bright<http://arstechnica.com/author/peter-bright/> - Nov 19 2014, 5:10pm CST * Share<https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Finform…> * Tweet<https://twitter.com/share?text=Mozilla+ends+Google+… [View More]

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