Stripe, Inc. is an Irish and American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States, and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. Stripe is the largest privately owned financial technology company with a valuation of about $159 billion and over $1.9 trillion in payment volume processed in 2025, processing transactions for 5 million businesses in that year. == History == Irish entrepreneur brothers John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto, California, in 2010, and serve as the company's president and CEO, respectively. In 2011 the company received a $2 million investment, including contributions from Elon Musk, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. In March 2013, Stripe made its first acquisition, Kickoff, a chat and task-management application. In 2012 the company moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco. In October 2019, the company announced that it would be moving from the South of Market area to Oyster Point in the neighbouring city of South San Francisco in 2021. In February 2021, Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and of the Bank of England, was appointed to the company's board. Carney stepped down from his role with the company in 2025 in order to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Stripe acquired accountancy platform Recko in October 2021 whose solution was to be added to Stripe's existing suite of financial tools. In January 2022, Stripe entered a five-year partnership with Ford Motor Company. Through the deal, Stripe would handle transactions for consumer vehicle orders and reservations. That same month, Stripe partnered with Spotify to help the company monetize subscriptions. In April 2022, Twitter announced that it would partner with Stripe, Inc. (digital payments processor) for piloting cryptocurrency pay-outs for limited users in the platform. In April 2022, Stripe announced its strategic partnership with UK-based financial technology company ION. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2022 that the company's internal share price had fallen, causing its implied valuation to drop from $95 billion to $74 billion. In November 2022, the company announced it intended to initiate layoffs, terminating some 14% of its workforce. Throughout 2022 and 2023, the company announced a number of large enterprise customers, including Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, BMW, Maersk, Zara, Lotus, Alaska Airlines, Le Monde, and Toyota. The company also announced in March 2023 that OpenAI is working with Stripe to commercialize its generative AI technology. In January 2025, Stripe sent layoff notices to nearly 300 workers, primarily affecting roles in Product, Operations and Engineering. The company experienced controversy when the company sent a cartoon picture of a duck to the laid-off employees. Stripe's Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh later apologized for the mistake. After re-enabling cryptocurrency pay-ins in April 2024, starting with USDC, Stripe completed the acquisition of Bridge in February 2025. The acquisition of the two-year-old stablecoin platform company is valued at $1.1 billion. In June 2025, the company acquired Privy, which powers crypto wallets. In September 2025, Stripe announced it was powering Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and released Agentic Commerce Protocol for agentic commerce, which was co-developed with OpenAI. In October 2025, the company opened its second headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. In February 2026, Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer posted for employees and shareholders. The tender offer was about a 70% increase from Stripe's previous valuation published in February 2025, where it was valued at $91.5 billion. Stripe also announced that its total volume increased to $1.9 trillion USD in 2025, a 34% increase from 2024. == Technology company == === Payment processing === Stripe provides application programming interfaces that web developers can use to integrate payment processing into their websites and mobile applications. The company introduced Stripe Connect in 2012, a multiparty payments solution that lets software developers embed payments natively into their products. In April 2018, Stripe released antifraud tools, branded "Radar", that block fraudulent transactions. The same year, it expanded its services to include a billing product for online businesses, allowing businesses to manage subscription recurring revenue and invoicing. Stripe's point-of-sale service called Terminal was made available to US users on 11 June 2019. Terminal had previously been invitation-only. Terminal is currently available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. The service offers physical credit-card readers designed to work with Stripe. On 5 September 2019, Stripe launched a merchant cash-advance scheme called Stripe Capital. The scheme allows Stripe merchants to request an advance on future payments they expect to process through their Stripe merchant account. In June 2021, the company launched Stripe Tax, a service to allow businesses to automatically calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST, initially rolling out to 30 countries and all US states. As of 2025, it has been made available in 102 countries. In May that year, Stripe introduced Payment Links, a no-code product allowing businesses to create a link to a checkout page and begin accepting payments on social platforms or direct channels. In January 2022, Stripe agreed to acquire Terminal manufacturing partner BBPOS, allowing the company to bring the hardware development of Terminal readers in-house. In February, it was announced as Apple's first partner on in-person Tap to Pay, which enables businesses to accept contactless payments using an iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app. In May, Stripe announced Data Pipeline, a tool for Stripe users who store data with Amazon Redshift or Snowflake Data Cloud. Data Pipeline syncs Stripe data and reports with Amazon Redshift or Snowflake Data Cloud, where they can be queried in combination with other business information. That month, the company also introduced Stripe Financial Connections, enabling businesses to establish direct connections with their customers’ bank accounts to verify accounts for payments and pay-outs, check balances to reduce payment failures, and cut fraud by confirming bank account ownership. In September 2023, Stripe announced that its optimized checkout suite allowed businesses to offer their customers more than 100 payment methods. In May 2025, Stripe announced a new AI foundational model for payments, and introduced stablecoin powered accounts. === Corporate finance === In July 2018, Stripe introduced Stripe Issuing, a product that allows online businesses and platforms to create their own physical and digital credit and debit cards. === Atlas === On 14 February 2016, the company launched the Atlas platform to help start-ups register as US corporations, targeting foreign entrepreneurs. The platform was originally invitation-only. In March 2016, Cuba was added to the list of countries covered under the program. Originally, companies registered using Atlas were set up as Delaware-based C corporations. As of 30 April 2018, the option to be registered as limited liability companies was added. Companies set up using Atlas automatically had a business bank account and Stripe merchant account set up. === Link === In May 2021, Stripe launched Link, a service for saving and auto-filling payment details when paying via Stripe. The service supported payments in over 185 countries and Stripe reported plans to make it available to platform businesses through its API. In September 2025, Patrick Collison announced that Link had surpassed 200 million users. === Other === In 2018, Stripe started a publishing company named Stripe Press to promote ideas that support businesses. In 2019, Stripe began offering loans and credit cards to businesses in the United States. The company stated that loans are approved automatically using machine-learning models, with no human intervention. The following year, the company introduced Stripe Treasury, which provides its platform users APIs to embed financial services, allowing their customers to send, receive, and store funds. In October 2020, Stripe announced Stripe Climate, a service for businesses to fund atmospheric carbon research and capture. In 2022, Stripe started a new subsidiary called Frontier that would direct spending on carbon removal. It announced $925 million in funding from major Silicon Valley companies to fund start up companies performing carbon capture to kick-start the industry. Stripe Identity, launched in Ju
Intel Threat Detection Technology
Intel Threat Detection Technology (TDT) is a CPU-level technology created by Intel in 2018 to enable host endpoint protections to use a CPU's low-level access to detect threats to a system. TDT consists of multiple components including Accelerated Memory Scanning, which uses the CPU's integrated GPU to scan memory, and Advanced Platform Telemetry, which uses processor-level activity monitoring to detect unusual activity. It is supported on sixth-generation or newer Intel Core CPUs and additional capabilities were added to the 11th generation Core processors. Intel TDT is integrated into several third-party anti-malware solutions including Microsoft Defender, Check Point Harmony Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, and others. == Accelerated Memory Scanning == Accelerated Memory Scanning (also referred to as "Advanced Memory Scanning") uses the CPU's integrated GPU to scan memory for malicious code, instead of using the CPU directly. This improves system responsiveness during anti-malware scanning. and lowers power consumption. Features include pattern matching, using random forest decision trees, string extraction, entropy calculation, and Euclidean clustering. == Advanced Platform Telemetry == Advanced Platform Telemetry collects CPU-level telemetry to detect uncommon activity patterns which might be indicative of malware. The telemetry data is collected from the CPU performance monitoring unit (PMU) and doesn't require a large signature database to detect malware. Instead, it uses machine-learning based correlations to identify indicators of attack For example, Microsoft Defender is able to use TDT's Advanced Platform Telemetry features to detect processor usage patterns indicative of ransomware and cryptojacking with TDT so it can detect them.
Rclone
Rclone is an open source, multi threaded, command line computer program to manage or migrate content on cloud and other high latency storage. Its capabilities include sync, transfer, crypt, cache, union, compress and mount. The rclone website lists supported backends including S3 and Google Drive. Descriptions of rclone often carry the strapline "Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage". Those prior to 2020 include the alternative "Rsync for Cloud Storage". Rclone is well known for its rclone sync and rclone mount commands. It provides further management functions analogous to those ordinarily used for files on local disks, but which tolerate some intermittent and unreliable service. Rclone is commonly used with media servers such as Plex, Emby or Jellyfin to stream content direct from consumer file storage services. Official Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Brew, Chocolatey, and other package managers include rclone. == History == Nick Craig-Wood was inspired by rsync. Concerns about the noise and power costs arising from home computer servers prompted him to embrace cloud storage and he began developing rclone as open source software in 2012 under the name swiftsync. Rclone was promoted to stable version 1.00 in July 2014. In May 2017, Amazon Drive barred new users of rclone and other upload utilities, citing security concerns. Amazon Drive had been advertised as offering unlimited storage for £55 per year. Amazon's AWS S3 service continues to support new rclone users. The original rclone logo was updated in September 2018. In March 2020, Nick Craig-Wood resigned from Memset Ltd, a cloud hosting company he founded, to focus on open source software. Amazon's AWS April 2020 public sector blog explained how the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center were using rclone in their Motuz tool to migrate very large biomedical research datasets in and out of AWS S3 object stores. In November 2020, rclone was updated to correct a weakness in the way it generated passwords. Passwords for encrypted remotes can be generated randomly by rclone or supplied by the user. In all versions of rclone from 1.49.0 to 1.53.2 the seed value for generated passwords was based on the number of seconds elapsed in the day, and therefore not truly random. CVE-2020-28924 recommended users upgrade to the latest version of rclone and check the passwords protecting their encrypted remotes. Release 1.55 of rclone in March 2021 included features sponsored by CERN and their CS3MESH4EOSC project. The work was EU funded to promote vendor-neutral application programming interfaces and protocols for synchronisation and sharing of academic data on cloud storage. == Backends and commands == Rclone supports the following services as backends. There are others, built on standard protocols such as WebDAV or S3, that work. WebDAV backends do not support rclone functionality dependent on server side checksum or modtime. Remotes are usually defined interactively from these backends, local disk, or memory (as S3), with rclone config. Rclone can further wrap those remotes with one or more of alias, chunk, compress, crypt or union, remotes. Once defined, the remotes are referenced by other rclone commands interchangeably with the local drive. Remote names are followed by a colon to distinguish them from local drives. For example, a remote example_remote containing a folder, or pseudofolder, myfolder is referred to within a command as a path example_remote:/myfolder. Rclone commands directly apply to remotes, or mount them for file access or streaming. With appropriate cache options the mount can be addressed as if a conventional, block level disk. Commands are provided to serve remotes over SFTP, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and DLNA. Commands can have sub-commands and flags. Filters determine which files on a remote that rclone commands are applied to. rclone rc passes commands or new parameters to existing rclone sessions and has an experimental web browser interface. === Crypt remotes === Rclone's crypt implements encryption of files at rest in cloud storage. It layers an encrypted remote over a pre-existing, cloud or other remote. Crypt is commonly used to encrypt / decrypt media, for streaming, on consumer storage services such as Google Drive. Rclone's configuration file contains the crypt password. The password can be lightly obfuscated, or the whole rclone.conf file can be encrypted. Crypt can either encrypt file content and name, or additionally full paths. In the latter case there is a potential clash with encryption for cloud backends, such as Microsoft OneDrive, having limited path lengths. Crypt remotes do not encrypt object modification time or size. The encryption mechanism for content, name and path is available, for scrutiny, on the rclone website. Key derivation is with scrypt. === Example syntax (Linux) === These examples describe paths and file names but object keys behave similarly. To recursively copy files from directory remote_stuff, at the remote xmpl, to directory stuff in the home folder:- -v enables logging and -P, progress information. By default rclone checks the file integrity (hash) after copy; can retry each file up to three times if the operation is interrupted; uses up to four parallel transfer threads, and does not apply bandwidth throttling. Running the above command again copies any new or changed files at the remote to the local folder but, like default rsync behaviour, will not delete from the local directory, files which have been removed from the remote. To additionally delete files from the local folder which have been removed from the remote - more like the behaviour of rsync with a --delete flag:- And to delete files from the source after they have been transferred to the local directory - more like the behaviour of rsync with a --remove-source-file flag:- To mount the remote directory at a mountpoint in the pre-existing, empty stuff directory in the home directory (the ampersand at the end makes the mount command run as a background process):- Default rclone syntax can be modified. Alternative transfer, filter, conflict and backend specific flags are available. Performance choices include number of concurrent transfer threads; chunk size; bandwidth limit profiling, and cache aggression. == Academic evaluation == In 2018, University of Kentucky researchers published a conference paper comparing use of rclone and other command line, cloud data transfer agents for big data. The paper was published as a result of funding by the National Science Foundation. Later that year, University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing examined the impact of rclone options on data transfer rates. == Rclone use at HPC research sites == Examples are University of Maryland, Iowa State University, Trinity College Dublin, NYU, BYU, Indiana University, CSC Finland, Utrecht University, University of Nebraska, University of Utah, North Carolina State University, Stony Brook, Tulane University, Washington State University, Georgia Tech, National Institutes of Health, Wharton, Yale, Harvard, Minnesota, Michigan State, Case Western Reserve University, University of South Dakota, Northern Arizona University, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, University of Southern California, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and SURFnet. == Rclone and cybercrime == May 2020 reports stated rclone had been used by hackers to exploit Diebold Nixdorf ATMs with ProLock ransomware. The FBI issued a Flash Alert MI-000125-MW on May 4, 2020, in relation to the compromise. They issued a further, related alert 20200901–001 in September 2020. Attackers had exfiltrated / encrypted data from organisations involved in healthcare, construction, finance, and legal services. Multiple US government agencies, and industrial entities were affected. Researchers established the hackers spent about a month exploring the breached networks, using rclone to archive stolen data to cloud storage, before encrypting the target system. Reported targets included LaSalle County, and the city of Novi Sad. The FBI warned January 2021, in Private Industry Notification 20210106–001, of extortion activity using Egregor ransomware and rclone. Organisations worldwide had been threatened with public release of exfiltrated data. In some cases rclone had been disguised under the name svchost. Bookseller Barnes & Noble, US retailer Kmart, games developer Ubisoft and the Vancouver metro system have been reported as victims. An April 2021, cybersecurity investigation into SonicWall VPN zero-day vulnerability SNWLID-2021-0001 by FireEye's Mandiant team established attackers UNC2447 used rclone for reconnaissance and exfiltration of victims' files. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Analysis Report AR21-126A confirmed this use of rclone in FiveHands ransomware attacks. A June 2021, Microsoft Security Intelligence Twitter post identified use of rclone in BazaCall cyber attacks. The attackers sent emails e
Flask (web framework)
Flask is a micro web framework written in Python. It is classified as a microframework because it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions. However, Flask supports extensions that can add application features as if they were implemented in Flask itself. Extensions exist for object-relational mappers, form validation, upload handling, various open authentication technologies and several common framework related tools. Applications that use the Flask framework include Pinterest and LinkedIn. == History == Flask was created by Armin Ronacher of Pocoo, an international group of Python enthusiasts formed in 2004. According to Ronacher, the idea was originally an April Fool's joke that was popular enough to make into a serious application. The name is a play on the earlier Bottle framework. When Ronacher and Georg Brandl created a bulletin board system written in Python in 2004, the Pocoo projects Werkzeug and Jinja were developed. In April 2016, the Pocoo team was disbanded and development of Flask and related libraries passed to the newly formed Pallets project. Flask has become popular among Python enthusiasts. As of October 2020, it has the second-most number of stars on GitHub among Python web-development frameworks, only slightly behind Django, and was voted the most popular web framework in the Python Developers Survey for years between and including 2018 and 2022. == Components == The microframework Flask is part of the Pallets Projects (formerly Pocoo), and based on several others of them, all under a BSD license. === Werkzeug === Werkzeug (German for "tool") is a utility library for the Python programming language for Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) applications. Werkzeug can instantiate objects for request, response, and utility functions. It can be used as the basis for a custom software framework and supports Python 2.7 and 3.5 and later. === Jinja === Jinja, also by Ronacher, is a template engine for the Python programming language. Similar to the Django web framework, it handles templates in a sandbox. === MarkupSafe === MarkupSafe is a string handling library for the Python programming language. The eponymous MarkupSafe type extends the Python string type and marks its contents as "safe"; combining MarkupSafe with regular strings automatically escapes the unmarked strings, while avoiding double escaping of already marked strings. === ItsDangerous === ItsDangerous is a safe data serialization library for the Python programming language. It is used to store the session of a Flask application in a cookie without allowing users to tamper with the session contents. === Click === Click is a Python package used by Flask to create command-line interfaces (CLI) by providing a simple and composable way to define commands, arguments, and options. == Features == Development server and debugger Integrated support for unit testing RESTful request dispatching Uses Jinja templating Support for secure cookies (client side sessions) 100% WSGI 1.0 compliant Unicode-based Complete documentation Google App Engine compatibility Extensions available to extend functionality == Example == The following code shows a simple web application that displays "Hello World!" when visited: === Render Template with Flask === ==== Jinja in HTML for the Render Template ====
Yahoo Mail
Yahoo! Mail (also written as Yahoo Mail) is a mailbox provider by Yahoo. It is one of the largest email services worldwide, with 225 million users. It is accessible via a web browser (webmail), mobile app, or through third-party email clients via the POP, SMTP, and IMAP protocols. Users can also connect non-Yahoo e-mail accounts to their Yahoo Mail inbox. The service was launched on October 8, 1997. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. It is also available in several languages other than English. == History == === 1997–2002 === On October 8, 1997, Yahoo announced its acquisition of online communications company Four11 for $92 million in stock. As part of the purchase, Yahoo received Four11's RocketMail webmail service. Yahoo Mail, based on the RocketMail technology, launched at the same time. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical." On March 21, 2002, Yahoo! eliminated free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service. Mary Osako, a Yahoo! Spokeswoman, told CNET, "For-pay services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have experienced great acceptance from our base of active registered users, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow." === 2002–2010 === During 2002, the Yahoo network was gradually redesigned, including the company website, Yahoo Mail and other services. Along with the new design, new features were implemented, including drop-down menus in DHTML and keyboard shortcuts. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, a webmail service which simulated a desktop email client. Oddpost had features such as drag-and-drop support, right-click menus, RSS feeds, a preview pane, and increased speed using email caching to shorten response time. Many of the features were incorporated into an updated Yahoo! Mail service. ==== Competition ==== On April 1, 2004, Google announced its Gmail service with 1 GB of storage, although Gmail's invitation-only accounts kept the other webmail services at the forefront. Most major webmail providers, including Yahoo! Mail, increased their mailbox storage in response. Yahoo! first announced 100 MB of storage for basic accounts and 2 GB of storage for premium users. However, soon Yahoo Mail increased its free storage quota to 1 GB, before eventually allowing unlimited storage from March 27, 2007, until October 8, 2013. === 2011–2021 === In May 2011, Yahoo Mail rolled out a new interface. It included updated design, enhanced performance, and improved Facebook integration. In 2013, Yahoo! redesigned the site and removed several features, such as simultaneously opening multiple emails in tabs, sorting by sender name, and dragging mails to folders. The new email interface was geared to give an improved user-experience for mobile devices, but was criticized for having an inferior desktop interface. Many users objected to the unannounced nature of the changes through an online post asking Yahoo! to bring back mail tabs with one hundred thousand voting and nearly ten thousand commenting. The redesign produced a problem that caused an unknown number of users to lose access to their accounts for several weeks. In December 2013, Yahoo! Mail suffered a major outage where approximately one million users, one percent of the site's total users, could not access their emails for several days. Yahoo!'s then-CEO Marissa Mayer publicly apologized to the site's users. China Yahoo Mail announced in April 2013 that it would shut down that August as part of Yahoo ceasing services in China since acquiring a stake in Alibaba in 2005. Users with email address suffixes @yahoo.com.cn and @yahoo.cn could transfer their accounts to AliCloud to continue receiving messages through the end of 2014. In January 2014, an undisclosed number of usernames and passwords were released to hackers, following a security breach that Yahoo! believed had occurred through a third-party website. Yahoo! contacted affected users and requested that passwords be changed. In October 2015, Yahoo! updated the mail service with a "more subtle" redesign, as well as improved mobile features. The same release introduced the Yahoo! Account Key, a smartphone-based replacement for password logins. The app also added support for third-party mail accounts. In 2017, Yahoo! again redesigned the web interface with a "more minimal" look, and introduced the option to customize it with different color themes and layouts. In 2019, Yahoo released a redesigned Yahoo Mail app to organize user inboxes, introducing features including a one-tap unsubscribe tool, package tracking, and travel updates. In 2020, Yahoo Mail users were able to fill Walmart shopping carts directly from their inboxes, an industry first. Yahoo! also added a feature to view NFL matches. === 2022–present === In 2022, updates to the Yahoo Mail mobile app added tools to help manage receipts, gift cards, and subscriptions. AI-based additions in 2023 included a feature that automates tracking coupon codes and credits for online shopping, as well as updates to search suggestions, message summaries and AI writing assistance. In 2024, updates to the desktop interface added more AI-based features, including a "priority inbox" tab with automatically generated summaries of important messages and automated suggestions of next actions based on message contents. In February 2025, Yahoo aired its first Super Bowl ad since 2002, in which Bill Murray invited viewers to contact him at his Yahoo Mail email address ([email protected]). The address received nearly 150,000 emails in the first two hours after broadcast. In June 2025, Yahoo Mail introduced a "Catch Up" feature that provides AI-generated summaries and email previews and prompts users to choose to delete or retain each one. As part of the feature's launch, Yahoo Mail collaborated with streetwear brand Anti Social Social Club on an apparel release. == User interface == As many as three web interfaces were available at any given time. The traditional "Yahoo! Mail Classic" preserved the availability of their original 1997 interface until July 2013 in North America. A 2005 version included a new Ajax interface, drag-and-drop, improved search, keyboard shortcuts, address auto-completion, and tabs. However, other features were removed, such as column widths and one click delete-move-to-next. In October 2010, Yahoo! released a beta version of Yahoo! Mail, which included improvements to performance, search, and Facebook integration. In May 2011, this became the default interface. Their current Webmail interface was introduced in 2017. == Spam policy == Yahoo! Mail is often used by spammers to provide a "remove me" email address. Often, these addresses are used to verify the recipient's address, thus opening the door for more spam. Yahoo! does not tolerate this practice and terminates accounts connected with spam-related activities without warning, causing spammers to lose access to any other Yahoo! services connected with their ID under the Terms of Service. Additionally, Yahoo! stresses that its servers are based in California and any spam-related activity which uses its servers could potentially violate that state's anti-spam laws. In February 2006, Yahoo! announced its decision (along with AOL) to give some organizations the option to "certify" mail by paying up to one cent for each outgoing message, allowing the mail in question to bypass inbound spam filters. Few mailers used it and, Goodmail, the company running the certification process, shut down in 2011. === Filters === In order to prevent abuse, in 2002 Yahoo! Mail activated filters which changed certain words (that could trigger unwanted JavaScript events) and word fragments into other words. "mocha" was changed to "espresso", "expression" became "statement", and "eval" (short for "evaluation") became "review". This resulted in many unintended corrections, such as "prevent" (prevalent), "revalidation" (evaluation) and "media review" (medieval). When asked about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the changed words were common terms used in their privacy dashboard and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands via the program's HTML function. Starting before February 7, 2006, Yahoo! Mail ended the practice, and began to add an underscore as a prefix to certain suspicious words and word fragments. === Greylisting === Incoming mail to Yahoo! addresses can be subjected to deferred delivery as part of Yahoo's incoming spam controls. This can delay delivery of mail sent to Yahoo! addresses without the sender or recipients being aware of it. The deferral is typically of short duration, but
Gas (app)
Gas (sometimes stylized in all caps), formerly known as Melt as well as Crush, was an American anonymous social media app. Launched in August 2022, the app is oriented towards high schoolers. The app was developed by Nikita Bier, Isaiah Turner, and former Facebook engineer Dave Schatz. Gas was largely based upon the prior tbh app developed by co-founder Nikita Bier, along with Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza, and Nicolas Ducdodon in September 2017. tbh was acquired by Facebook inc. (now Meta Platforms) on October 16, 2017, and nearly a year later in July 2018 was dissolved, owing to low usage. Gas follows a similar purpose to tbh in being a social media app oriented towards high schoolers. In the app, users participate in anonymous polls regarding pre-written complimentary statements to their peers, such as "I'd say yes if (blank) asked me out on a date," "I think (blank) is the coolest kid in school," or "would make an ugly face and still look pretty." Winners of said polls receive a "flame." The name of the app is derived from this, with "gassing someone up" being Gen Z slang for complimenting someone. Users can pay a $6.99 subscription that enables "God Mode," which shows hints regarding who voted for them in a poll. Gas overtook TikTok and BeReal as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store in October 2022 (the app is currently not available for Android). The app has over 5.1 million downloads as of early November 2022, over a million active users and 300 thousand daily downloads as of October 2022. Currently, the app is available in Canada and the majority of the United States. On January 17, 2023, Gas was acquired by Discord, however it would remain a standalone app and its developers became Discord staff members. On October 18, 2023, Discord announced that service for Gas would be permanently ending effective November 7, 2023, due to a steep decline in users. Effective November 7, the app became completely unusable. == Controversy regarding human-trafficking == Beginning in October 2022, rumors spread largely throughout TikTok and Snapchat alleged that the app was linked to human trafficking (in particular sex trafficking). According to Bier, the rumor originated with a single user review from China on October 5, and then was disseminated through TikTok accounts with "few to no US teen followers." Although largely dismissed as a hoax by experts, who cite how the app doesn't log user locations and general anonymity, the hoax became pervasive to the extent that various police departments, school systems, and local news outlets began issuing warnings regarding the app. For instance, on October 31, 2022, the police department of Piedmont, Oklahoma issued a warning to parents, encouraging them to check their children's phones, while on November 3, the Oklahoma Oktaha Public School system stated in a Facebook post that "Children are being kidnapped in other towns and this new app is thought to be the source of predators finding their location." (both statements have since been retracted by Police Chief Scott Singer and Superintendent Jerry Needham respectively). Additionally, local medial outlets such as KOCO in Oklahoma City ran stories making similar statements. The rumor had a negative impact on the app, with downloads plateauing for a two-week period in late October and with 3% of users in a single day reportedly uninstalling the app. Revenue and ratings have also reportedly dropped and the company's social media accounts have been bombarded with comments labeling them as sex-traffickers. Additionally, the four-person development team has reportedly been bombarded with various death threats as a result.
Monitoring as a service
Monitoring as a service (MaaS) is a cloud-based framework for the deployment of monitoring functionalities for various other services and applications within the cloud. The most common application for MaaS is online state monitoring, which continuously tracks certain states of applications, networks, systems, instances or any element that may be deployable within the cloud.