Security Pie

So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities.

Still among the top 200 networks, Geocities which was up for more then a decade and was the first example of an open, simple to use, free personal Internet is now being closed. 2,000,000+ sites hosted on Geocities will be gone forever.

There are many morals for this story, but I’d like to point you to just one. Only 10 years ago Yahoo! acquired Geocities for ~ $4,000,000,000 (in stock….) to get this site.

The agreement, which combines two of the World Wide Web’s most popular destinations, would be the largest acquisition involving a Southern California Internet start-up. It also would solidify Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo’s position at the head of the portal pack.

Can it happen again? Can one of today’s web-based leaders will be taken down and its content will be lost forever?

Will anyone pay such amount today?

11.22.2009 Update:

Almost a month later and the site is still pretty high on Alexa…..

Change log

11.22.2009 12:35 am Changed So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities today to So Yahoo! is taking down Geocities..

Yahoo! is reducing costs and sending people home. In my opinion they could have saved a lot of money just by not sending all those proxy letters and tons of other items to my address. (Yea, I have some few shares). As expected, the internal presentation explaining how to cut employees was leaked to the Internet. I guess that the Internet Protocol (IP) doesn’t really work that well when the Do Not Forward bit is defined as text on a Power Point.

As a second thought, maybe there’s an opportunity for a new start up to create the technology to embed ‘Do Not Forward’ text into packets that can never leave the network.

So Aaron got the sack and articles regarding the threats of a slugging economy and recession era (such as this) are common.   Organizations should protect sensitive data at all times based on their risk management strategy. Unfortunately, such times help us to understand the risk better. I’m not saying that the damage of leaked presentations (BTW, I think that the content itself is good, but the context is awful) is on Yahoo!’s top risk matrix, but I do think that organizations should set their strategy for data protection.

I guess that I’m writing this few months later than I should. As a Yahoo share holder I should have taken a more proactive approach. Unfortunately, I have this habit of buying stocks at their highest price just to watch them falling almost as fast as I’m falling during ski (I blame Assaf, he thought me how to ski .

As a service to the new CEO, here is an important lesson from Shpigler the Shark: