

Yahoo collaborated with Iran, providing info of 200,000 users with blogs - rms
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547

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garply
I don't see this as any more troubling than the fact that Google turns over my
email if the US government demands it for a lawsuit.

~~~
junklight
not much chance of you being tortured or killed for the content of your email
though.

While I get the sentiment - if you operate in a country you need to follow the
laws of the land no matter how you might personally view them - the reality is
that this action might have actually killed people. Even if it didn't do - do
you think that in that position yourself you could have said with a clear
conscience: "nothing bad will happen to these people" if I give out their
details?

~~~
davidw
I didn't think US companies were supposed to operate in Iran in any case.

~~~
quant18
For almost a year, Yahoo stopped accepting new e-mail registrations from Iran
[1], but I'm told they didn't touch existing accounts. Last August they
started accepting new registrations again [2]. I think sanctions wouldn't be
any issue because no money changes hands? That was apparently Google's
position.

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/yahoo_google_microsf...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/yahoo_google_microsft_iran/)

[2]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/yahoo_microsoft_iran...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/yahoo_microsoft_iran_reinstated/)

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far33d
While US companies have no obligation to act in the interest of human rights,
it would be nice if they, nonetheless, felt compelled to do so.

Google claims "don't be evil" - this should extend to using information to
help, not hurt, the oppressed people of the world.

Yahoo makes no such claim, but the beneficiaries of a free nation have a moral
obligation not to choose short-term profits over the lives of those unlucky
enough to be born into nations that have no such freedom.

~~~
ivankirigin
Indeed.

The thing about "don't be evil" is that once you do something evil, saying you
follow that rule is extremely cynical.

------
acg
At first glance this appears to be a shameful betrayal. But included in
yahoo's terms are agreements that users will not use their services to violate
local laws. Dissident Iranians are much better off following advice from
Reporters without Borders:

[http://www.rsf.org/spip.php?page=article&id_article=3384...](http://www.rsf.org/spip.php?page=article&id_article=33844)

------
rizzn
This thing fails the smell test, IMO
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870920>).

The idea that Yahoo, in a matter of a few short hours, was able to search and
index all the user accounts that touched a blog system over the course of five
years is a bit odd to me.

It's not impossible, and given the China issues in Y's past, it's not
implausible, just not that likely to me.

~~~
tom_b
I can't make any reasonable statement about the likelihood of Yahoo having
done this, but it seems easily possible to do in a few minutes. Forget hours,
unless there is some fundamental aspect of the data structure used that I'm
missing.

For example, I have a nightly process (plain jane RBDMS) that searches over 85
million records to match up with 100K records where the matches may be exact
or provide potential matches from the larger table back to the smaller. This
process typically takes less than 20 minutes and the system runs on what I
would define as relatively average hardware.

I am assuming that the user accounts are logged in some way that keeps them
from having to do some awful full text scan of blog comments for each of the
20 million users checked.

[EDIT: Rechecked log files, runtime is 15-20 mins instead of 5]

