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Yahoo! Japan May Have Had 22 Million User IDs Stolen
hypnosec writes with report of the possible theft of up to 22 million user IDs revealed by Yahoo! Japan. That scale is massive, but, he writes, "According to Yahoo, the information that was stolen didn't have passwords or any other information that would allow unauthorized users to carry out user identity verification." A story at the Japan Times adds a bit more detail.
Yahoo! Japan (and its fellow Softbank) is incredibly popular in Japan, and plays a top role re Internet: ISP, search, mail, cell phones (SB)... ...) are still that popular? Why the Japanese didn't follow the Google trend (as much as the Western countries) during the mid 2000, where Yahoo! had (and still has) those very busy pages and (for a long time) the search was of a much lower quality compared to Google, having a lot of results being sponsored by 3rd parties displayed on top without further indications about that sponsoring.
Question is "why?" Why Yahoo! (mail, search,
There is a technical answer: most PCs come with Yahoo! stuff, the search is set to Y! and nobody changes that. The thing is, compared to the West, the Japanese do not have that "pursuit of genuineness" reaction - they trust what is popular and Y! is very popular...
Furthermore, there is no strong consumer association in Japan, and abuses (in any field) may remain undisclosed for a long time (yes, there is a connection between Y! and abuses).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Also, Google Japan is abysmal. You can set Google's language settings to "Japanese only", but you enter your search term in kanji, you inevitably end up getting back mostly Chinese hits. You have to add a hiragana character (I usually use hiragana "no") to your search term to get back Japanese hits.
Yahoo (back when they had their own independent search engine in Japan...they later switched to Bing and now I they're sadly using Google), Bing and others do not have this same issue nearly as badly as Google.
Plus Yahoo Japan actually has a pretty nice start page with access to dictionaries, etc.
Also, Google Japan is abysmal. You can set Google's language settings to "Japanese only", but you enter your search term in kanji, you inevitably end up getting back mostly Chinese hits. You have to add a hiragana character (I usually use hiragana "no") to your search term to get back Japanese hits.
I've been living in Japan since 2006 and never experienced this. Google Japan will return Japanese sites. It doesn't matter if I write in Kanji, Kana or any western Alphabet. My only complaint is when I'm looking for information in English(mostly programming stuff), I need to manually set up my Google settings to english both for language and locale, otherwise I will still get Japanese pages(and now that they decide to auto translate everything things got even worse). But for the average Japanese, I see no problem at all.
> So 20 million Yahoo user names are revealed. Why is that interesting at all?
This is almost as bad as the pin number leak the other week:
http://pastebin.com/2qbRKh3R
I've already changed my pin because of this; I guess a lot of Yahoo users will be changing their user names now.