Remember David Kernell? He was the one that hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and posted her personal photos on 4chan. And then Gawker retrieved those images and posted it on their website. Kernell was able to hack Palin’s e-mail by getting through Yahoo! Mail’s security questions. Today it was announced that three more federal charges were made against Kernell, the University of Tennessee student.
The three new chages are fraud, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tennessee, and an attempt to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation.
David pleaded not guilty to all charges. The magistrate agreed to push back Kernell’s trial from May to October. David is the son of a Democratic Tennessee legislator.
Digg cut about 10% of their workforce last week and announced that they wanted to expand upon their sales team in order to lean towards profitability. This is why Digg has hired Tom Shin as their new head of sales. Shin comes from Yahoo! where he was one of the top salesman in the Northwest region. Shin’s job will be to manage the relationship with Microsoft and find leads for direct advertising.
While Shin was at Yahoo! he helped Yahoo! Mail grow from $20 million in revenue to $300 during the 7 years that he was Director of Product Marketing for the division.
I believe that with Shin on board, Digg will be able to achieve profitability based on Shin’s track record. Given Digg has 35 million users and many are tech-savvy, this gives Shin a lot to work with in terms of pitching advertising campaigns to Fortune 500 companies. Now hopefully we’ll stop seeing ads like these:
Yahoo! is taking a big step towards ensuring their Mail users receive less spam. The search engine company with a new CEO has hired a couple of companies to enhance their mailing technology in order to detect spam and notify marketing companies about e-mail user habits.
Yahoo! recently hired Abaca, a company that makes e-mail security technology to detect phishing and spam messages. Yahoo! will be using Abaca to detect spam messages and filter them out of Yahoo! Mail inboxes and into a spam folder. Abaca’s technology partners include VMWare, First Class Application Partner, and Coyote Point Systems Inc.
Return Path was also hired by Yahoo! Return Path monitors e-mails that were reported as spam and notifies e-mail marketers. This way it will train e-mail marketers how to brand their e-mails to prevent looking too much like spam.
Lastly Yahoo!’s anti-spam team will be utilizing a “supercomputer” made of thousands of PCs as part of the open source Hadoop project to detect spammers even further. Yahoo! partnered with several universities for this project.
Mark Risher, Anti-Spam Czar for Yahoo! reminds Mail users that “if Yahoo! Mail does let something slip through into the wrong folder — either allowing spam into your inbox or mistakenly putting a good message in your Spam folder — please use the ‘Spam’ and ‘Not Spam’ buttons to let us know. Clicking those buttons sends an immediate and powerful signal to our systems (and to me so that we can quickly try to correct the problem. It’s the best way for us to get better, and to continue keeping your e-mail experience great!”
so that we can quickly try to correct the problem. It’s the best way for us to get better, and to continue keeping your e-mail experience great!”
