Recycled Yahoo! IDs

Jay Rossiter:

So, how are we making these Yahoo! IDs available? We’re freeing up IDs, that have been inactive for at least 12 months, by resetting them and giving them a fresh start. In mid July, anyone can have a shot at scoring the Yahoo! ID they want.

Via Christopher Blizzard, who notes that this could cause security problems. If you haven’t recently logged into your Yahoo account and you had listed your Yahoo e-mail address as the contact info for another site or company, any password reset e-mails will go to the new owner of your Yahoo address.

Update (2013-06-20): Manton Reece in 2002 (via Charles Parnot):

Late yesterday I logged into Yahoo Mail and almost dropped to the floor in shock. Instead of seeing my email, a message stared back at me stating that I had not logged in for at least 4 months. My account was disabled and all my mail was deleted! Unbelievable. I regularly log into other sections of Yahoo (the calendar, for example), and it never occurred to me that they would pull something like this on their customers.

Security Yahoo

A Brief History of Test Frameworks

Andrew Shebanow (via Chris Hanson):

The similarities seem fairly striking to me. Factor in the fact that Erich Gamma worked at Taligent at the time the Test Framework was developed, and in fact gave the engineering team some good feedback, and its pretty hard to argue that Alan and David don’t deserve at least some credit for developing one of the original ancestors of JUnit.

It turns out to be a case of convergent evolution, as JUnit was based on SUnit, which was separate from the Taligent and Pink work.

C++ Programming Language History junit Programming Taligent Testing