Yahoo's China page closes following gradual phase out

After seeing its popularity decline, Yahoo's Internet portal in China has formally closed down, in a sign that e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is transitioning away from the brand.

The portal went offline on Sunday. Its closure is rooted in an agreement Yahoo made last year with Alibaba Group, which has control over the Yahoo brand in the country.

For years now, Alibaba has operated Yahoo's China business as part of $1 billion deal investment from the U.S. company made back in 2005. In exchange, Yahoo acquired a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.

But last year, Yahoo agreed to sell part of that stake back to the Chinese e-commerce company, following ongoing disagreements between the two Internet giants. The share buy-back resulted in Yahoo granting Alibaba "a transitional license" to continue operating its brand for up to four years.

Since then, Alibaba has been phasing out Yahoo products. In December, Yahoo's music service in China went down. Then earlier this year, Yahoo's China site announced the closure of its email service, which formally went offline last month.

Sunday's shutdown of Yahoo's Chinese portal is the result of a strategy adjustment, the site's team said in an Internet posting. The portal, at cn.yahoo.com, now reroutes to an Alibaba site promoting public welfare projects.

Alibaba declined to elaborate on the site's closure. Yahoo had no immediate comment.

The popularity of the Yahoo portal site has gradually waned over the years, as the influence of Chinese Internet companies has only grown. In May, the site ranked as the tenth most-visited Internet portal in the country, according to CR-Nielsen, an Internet research company.

Alibaba likely has no more use for the Yahoo brand, considering that the company is focused on e-commerce, and not media portal sites, said Li Zhi, an analyst with Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.

"China Yahoo has been under Alibaba for many years. Its most valuable properties have been dismembered and used," she said, pointing to how Alibaba had originally wanted access to Yahoo's search technologies. In 2009, however, Yahoo decided to use Microsoft Bing to power its searches.

"Alibaba already has no need for a China Yahoo that's been squeezed dry," Li added.

Labels: Purchase Structured Settlements,Mesothelioma Lawyers San Diego,Secured Loan Calculator,Structured Settlement Investments,Endowment Selling,Mesothelioma Patients,Mesothelioma attorney san diego,Austin Texas dwi lawyers,New York Mesothelioma Lawyers,Phoenix dui lawyers,Secured Loans,Insurance Auto,Phoenix dui attorney,car free insurance online quote,students debt consolidation loans,Pennsylvania mesothelioma lawyers,data recovery Denver,adverse credit remortgages,bad credit remortgages,data recovery service los angeles

Following attacks, Networks Solutions reports MySQL hiccups

Network Solutions warned on Monday of latency problems for customers using MySQL databases just a week after the hosting company fended off distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

"Some hosting customers using MySQL are reporting issues with the speed with which their websites are resolving," the company wrote on Facebook. "Some sites are loading slowly; others are not resolving. We're aware of the issue, and our technology team is working on it now."

Network Solutions, which is owned by Web.com, registers domain names, offers hosting services, sells SSL certificates and provides other website-related administration services.

On July 17, Network Solutions said it came under a DDoS attack that caused many of the websites it hosts to not resolve. The company said later in the day that most of the problems had been fixed, and it apologized two days later.

"Because online security is our top priority, we continue to invest millions of dollars in frontline and mitigation solutions to help us identify and eliminate potential threats," it said.

Some customers, however, reported problems before Network Solutions acknowledged the cyberattacks. One customer, who wrote to IDG News Service before Network Solutions issued the MySQL warning, said he had problems publishing a website on July 16, before the DDoS attacks are believed to have started.

Several other customers who commented on the company's Facebook page reported problems going back to a scheduled maintenance period announced on July 5. The company warned customers they might experience service interruptions between 10 p.m. EST on July 5 and 7 a.m. the next morning.

Donna Marian, an artist who creates macabre dolls, wrote on the company's Facebook page on Monday that her site was down for five days.

"I have been with you 13 years and have not got one word about this issue that has and is still costing my business thousands of dollars," Marian wrote. "Will you be reimbursing me for my losses?"

Company officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Bits Blog: Following Public Dots to a Missing Phone

In retrospect, I should have checked the cab seat when I got out. I should have taken the receipt. And maybe I should have had more empathy for those people, like my daughters, who have lost their smartphones.

Because there I was, at 1 a.m. on a recent night, just back from the airport with a sinking feeling that I’d left my iPhone in the taxi.

No immediate solution appeared, so after a fitful few hours of sleep, I began my quest to find my phone. Along the way, I was reminded, in this time of debate about how much personal information the government secretly keeps about us, just how much information is already publicly available.

My hunt started with a trip to the Apple store to get into my iCloud account (I didn’t know my password) and use the Find My iPhone service that I had turned on for my iPhone. I learned just how critical it is to have the program activated, although there were still several caveats.

 A screen shot of the Find My iPhone app showing location of the writer’s iPhone on Thursday. Because of that feature, locating the phone was the easy step. The trick was getting it back.

The tracker showed the phone at a house at the entrance to a cul-de-sac a little east of Queens in Nassau County. But I didn’t have the house number. The police there told me they could assist me if I showed up at the location, but that they wouldn’t go to the house on their own. I needed to talk to someone in that house.
I initially didn’t have much luck searching online for a free reverse directory, and a librarian at a nearby branch would not give out resident information if they could find it in their reverse directories. But Zillow.com, the real estate site, let me identify the house number, which gave me enough information to look up county records. Those told a lot about the property — Colonial, two-family home, built in 1962, 2,150 square feet, last sold in 2004 for $430,00 — but had no owner information. A call to the assessor’s office turned up the homeowner’s name, and the white pages provided the phone number. It went to a generic voicemail.
While I waited for a call back, I searched the Open Data service on NYC.gov for a taxi driver with the resident’s name. One seemed to show up, though the first name started with a different letter. That gave me a taxi license for that driver, though not the coveted medallion number.

To triangulate, I turned to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. I wasn’t expecting much here, since when I called the night before I heard the after-hours recording, which made it clear that the commission has lots of drivers and lots of lost property reports, and that you have to fill out a form online. I got through to a helpful employee who was soon digging into the case. She took the license number and within a couple minutes had the driver on the line. But the person she had on the phone was not the right one — it was a woman, not a man. So the records showing a slightly different first name were indeed accurate.

But there was another option: because I paid with a credit card, the staffer told me, the medallion number of the driver would show up in that transaction. But it hadn’t yet been fully processed and there was no medallion number, according to my online statement and my credit union. But we did have the amount, $36.43, and the pick up and drop-off locations, so the staffer was going to see what she could do.
In the meantime, I called the house again and a man picked up. Though he wasn’t my driver, he said a taxi driver did live there and he gave me a cellphone number.

When I called that number, a man picked up and he said he had my phone. I got his name and medallion number and called the clerk at the taxi commission. She, too, had come up with a medallion number. They matched.

Less than 24 hours since his cab drove off with my phone on the back seat, the driver was outside our apartment again.

It is said that the chances of getting a phone back are not so good after someone hops into the cab you exited. As a tractor-trailer honked behind the cabby and I gave him $30 bucks for the effort and he handed me the phone, he told me we had been his last passengers after that airport run.
So in the end, it helped to have a little bit of luck, and a lot of data, on my side.