yahoolabs:

By Seth Tropper

The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have something new to buzz about this week. On Monday, Yahoo gifted Georgia Tech 200 servers! These servers, donated through our Y-STAR program (Yahoo Servers To Academic Researchers), will significantly contribute to Georgia Tech’s education and research activities by enabling a large-scale, hands-on education experience for undergraduate and graduate students, and opening up new possibilities for data-intensive research.

Supporting the academic community is one of the top priorities at Yahoo Labs; and the vision of the Labs’ Academic Relations group is to help Yahoo be one of the first companies that academics think of for new research or business collaborations, employment opportunities, inspiring and entertaining online products, open publications, tools, and datasets.

yahoopolicy:

By Olivia Khalili, Director, Yahoo for Good

If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.

This is the defining ethos of a giving circle, a form of participative philanthropy in which a group pools its funds and jointly decides how and where to donate. Through collective action, participants are able to leverage time, resources, and intellectual capital toward a shared goal of impact.

Since 1999, Yahoo employees have been engaging in a modernized version of an old tradition, bringing it, appropriately, online via electronic ballot. The volunteer-run Yahoo Employee Foundation (YEF) has donated nearly $20 million to organizations that reflect employee interests from STEM education and family welfare in the San Francisco Bay Area to child hunger and disaster relief globally. Employees who donate to YEF are eligible to champion an organization to receive a grant of up to $50,000. 

This week, YEF celebrates its 1,000 grant, awarded to Teens eXploring Technology (TxT). The Los Angeles-based organization uses coding and technology to promote positive development and leadership among low-income males in middle and high school.

yahoopolicy:

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director, Accessibility

We put our users first in all that we do, and accessibility is no exception. Accessibility is about ensuring that every user, regardless of his or her capabilities , can fully enjoy using Yahoo’s products. That is why we are excited to introduce…

yahoopolicy:

By Ramses Martinez, Senior Director of Investigations, Intelligence, and Response

Users come first at Yahoo and we’re committed to protecting their security. Our security team, which we affectionately call the Paranoids, is continuously monitoring for, analyzing, and responding to many potential threats.

The Paranoids do an amazing job — but in today’s complex security environment we can’t do it alone. This is why in October of 2013 we launched our Bug Bounty program. Through this community effort we invited researchers to report potential technical vulnerabilities to our security team.

Our Bug Bounty program has matured and grown since last October. We are proud to now have more than 600 contributors, we’ve also paid over $700,000 in bounties to contributing researchers since our launch. Inspite of this growth we haven’t forgotten our roots. This is why we still send the occasional t-shirt to researchers who successfully identify a tech vulnerability of significant value.

yahoolabs:

By Liangjie Hong and Suju Rajan

At Yahoo, we invest a lot of effort in generating, retrieving, and presenting content that is engaging to our users. The hypothesis being that the more users are truly engaging with the content in a site, the more they will return to it. Now, what is…

yahooanswers:

We’ve rolled out some new updates to make Yahoo Answers simpler to navigate, easier to use, and more personalized.

Navigation is now Simpler

The left navigation now features links to the Answers homepage, notifications and Answers profile

• On the Answers Home, we’ve trimmed down…