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Yahoo Is Going To Stop Email Service In China
An anonymous reader writes with news that Yahoo will be ending their email service in China on August 13th. A support post on the Yahoo China site tells users how to migrate their account to a different email service called Aliyun. If they do so, their data can be migrated and they will continue to receive emails to their Yahoo address until the end of 2014. From the article:
"The US Internet giant Yahoo! has come under criticism in the past over its business in China, with executives apologising in 2007 for providing evidence that Chinese authorities used to convict government critics. The company said it was legally obliged to divulge information about its users to the Chinese government but that it was unaware it would be used to convict dissidents. The end of the service will affect millions of users, the paper quoted Alibaba public relations official Zhang Jianhua as saying, though he did not have a total figure."
Yahoo also announced the closure of six other products today: Upcoming, Deals, SMS Alerts, Kids, Mail and Messenger feature phone apps, and older versions of Mail.
You can't have it both way. We're (Americans) are constantly told that we shouldn't push our laws on other countries. That's correct, we should not. We should follow the laws of the land that we're operating in. This can result in following laws that would be looked down on, or even illegal, in our own country. Yahoo! tried to follow the laws of the land it was operating in and got burned for its efforts, and now it's pulling out.
You can't have it both way ways. Either you push your laws on another country or you follow the other country's laws. You can't pick and choose. The only other alternative is to leave. Yahoo! makes far more money in the US than in China, so it can't keep drawing bad publicity. They left. A sensible move.
So to do business in China, corporations will be beholden to the whims of the government, as opposed to the American way... whereby the government is beholden to the whims of corporations.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
people still use yahoo?
I'm no apologist for the government, but the US still has greater protection of free speech than any other country.
In these days of scummy behavior by the people who are supposed to work for us and defend our freedoms, this is one thing I'm truly proud of.
Just like an old phone number you keep so people can contact you, I have a yahoo.com email id from a long back. I had a positive experience with their customer service this past week. Yahoo.com used to be a good place to buy and host domains from, but about a decade ago, they made their domains 4x the price of other hosting companies... So I switched back then. But all in all I'm pleased with yahoo. My friend and I joke about FPY(Front Page Yahoo), on how their news items are normally bizarre or barely news at all. Their search engine is pretty good too. I search Google and Yahoo equally, but it is sometimes good to have more than one search engine.
God spoke to me
A Chinese dissident imprisoned for 10 years for subversion, whose conviction was supported by evidence from Yahoo, was released early on Friday after completing his term, his wife said. [..] Wang was detained in September 2002 and later sentenced for "incitement to subvert state power", a vaguely defined charge used frequently to punish political critics. Wang distributed pro-democracy writings by email and through Yahoo groups.
Find a comparable case in the US.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Geeze, "the paper quoted Alibaba public relations official Zhang Jianhua", so why is Yahoo! US being cited?
I don't think Yahoo! US is being cited. Alibaba group acquired Yahoo China back in 2005 and operationally, Yahoo China is being cited (which is owned and run by Alibaba)... It's kind of like how you'd have a Google spokesperson being cited when talking about Android (which used to be a separate company and was coincidentally bought by Google also in 2005)...
As for why this is happening... I'm guessing that back in 2005, the Alibaba group got a lot of mileage from using the Yahoo name, but now that value is probably declining. As Alibaba and Yahoo start unwinding their relationship (Yahoo recently promised to divest itself of its Alibaba holdings*** which would simplify Alibaba executing an IPO) and they are starting to develop their own internet holdings to compete with Baidu (the leader in China) they have even less incentive to continue to use the Yahoo name.
***I think I remember for a time it was estimated that the value of ownership that Yahoo held in Alibaba (which is currently a privately held company) as a result of the transfer of Yahoo China was worth more than the entire market cap of Yahoo (meaning either the value of Yahoo's investment was underestimated by the US stock market players, or maybe that the rest of Yahoo had negative value, depending on your point of view)
The company said [...] that it was unaware it would be used to convict dissidents.
I have some family members still alive who each spent at least a year in a work camp in Siberia courtesy of Stalin. I guess it'd do some good to get some corporate upper echelons to stay at a work camp in Siberia for a winter or two to get a message what totalitarian regimes are all about. If you read their PR and are all like "Don't know if trolling or just stupid", then a cold clue bat is perhaps the device of choice.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The problem with the US is that it has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. While there may or may not be a directly comparable case the entire legal structure routinely delivers radically out of balance punishments for minor crimes.
In 1970 there were perhaps 200,000 people in US prisons. Today the number has reached an extraordinary 2.5 million.
During this period the number of inmates convicted of violent crime decreased. Estimates are that less than 8% of the population are in for violent crimes. About 6% are not US citizens.
Die
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Replace "pro-democracy writings" with "sexual stories involving fictional characters said to be under age 18" or "pictures of fully clothed people under the age of 18" and you'll find many cases...
Yahoo is still in business???
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.