In the olden days, Yahoo shuttered some of the largest digital properties on the internet with too little notice for them to be meaningfully archived (especially Yahoo Groups (easily the Reddit and Fediverse of its day) and Geocities (at a time before social media, a place to make a corner of the internet one’s own, it had mountains of longform geekery that’s now lost forever)).
Yahoo also used to be one of most widely used free email providers. Not as ubiquitous as Gmail, but definitely very popular. During that time, they had at least two – and almost certainly more than four – instances where bad actors gained access to user accounts and Yahoo failed to immediately notify impacted users.
This one time, they admitted that all their user email addresses, which then numbered in the billions, had been compromised by a years-old hack whose disclosure they seem to have withheld. The same thing happened a few months later, but affected only some email addresses. For the latter event, they were proven to have withheld discovery of the breach.
There was this one journalist whose email details they gave to the Chinese government to enable his arrest. Then they lied about it to Congress.
And while the NSA likely listens to every piece of data available to them, which trivially and almost effortlessly includes emails, and while Yahoo is one of the tech companies whose NSA PRISM membership is documented, Yahoo additionally performed scans for crime-adjacent keywords on all its users’ incoming and outgoing emails for years.
If you don’t mind the magical thinking monotheism and 1930s pseudoscience and sexism that must never be changed, then it may work for you. Plus its success rate is a non-negative number. What’s not to like??
This part is a slippery slope that I don’t have a pithy hot take for. I wish I did.
I mean, do I really want to wait from 1776 or 1791 until 2013¹ for the state to mandate that all marriage license-issuing court clerks be required to issue marriage licenses to any unmarried pair of adults, even if the pair was assigned the same gender at birth?
Lots of Americans still resent that those clerks are funded by their tax dollars.
marriage between those without matching birth-certificate sex was the only legal marriage in the United States during this period
Lots of people whose parents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (which had a shorter nickname until 2018, but even a church that self-identifies as the Universe’s one true church should not be deadnamed after transitioning) teach their children to:
go proselytize, door-to-door, for two years after high school, during which, they must
spend all that time being never alone, with a person of the same sex as they were assigned at birth, and they must
never masturbate, and then
come home and go [back] to BYU, but also
begin having children with a spouse as soon as possible, all the while,
being at the age of their highest libido ever and surrounded by people, each in their physical prime, and then most importantly, they must
not discover, realize, or admit they might not be straight. It is forbidden. Like fruit of the tree of knowledge. For to do so would mean they must never ever have sex, or alternatively, that they must marry a person to whom they are not attracted, and then be encouraged to procreate with that person anyway.
THIS IS WHAT MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS ARE ACTUALLY TOLD TO BELIEVE
In the olden days, Yahoo shuttered some of the largest digital properties on the internet with too little notice for them to be meaningfully archived (especially Yahoo Groups (easily the Reddit and Fediverse of its day) and Geocities (at a time before social media, a place to make a corner of the internet one’s own, it had mountains of longform geekery that’s now lost forever)).
Yahoo also used to be one of most widely used free email providers. Not as ubiquitous as Gmail, but definitely very popular. During that time, they had at least two – and almost certainly more than four – instances where bad actors gained access to user accounts and Yahoo failed to immediately notify impacted users.
This one time, they admitted that all their user email addresses, which then numbered in the billions, had been compromised by a years-old hack whose disclosure they seem to have withheld. The same thing happened a few months later, but affected only some email addresses. For the latter event, they were proven to have withheld discovery of the breach.
There was this one journalist whose email details they gave to the Chinese government to enable his arrest. Then they lied about it to Congress.
And while the NSA likely listens to every piece of data available to them, which trivially and almost effortlessly includes emails, and while Yahoo is one of the tech companies whose NSA PRISM membership is documented, Yahoo additionally performed scans for crime-adjacent keywords on all its users’ incoming and outgoing emails for years.