I’ve always been annoyed by Yahoo. The Yahoo, as in the on-line computer thing, not the Yahoos, which are also annoying.Years ago, a small group of us ran a discussion list that was at the time the most heavily used discussion list in the area of Human Evolution. It was a good list. It had many of the top scholars on it. Brace, Wolpoff, Sarich, Harpending, Delson, lots of others regularly contributed, and a much wider range read it. Ann Gilbert, a frequent commenter on this site, can attest to this, as she was a regular contributer there as well.Jacques Cinq-Mars, one of the organizers of that forum, has subsequently developed a new forum called Palanth, so the tradition continues.One of the reasons that Jacques felt the need to create Palanth was because of what Yahoo did to us.As time went by, the original owners of the palanth list on Yahoo changed, and the individual who was the “super-user” … the person who could change account settings at the highest level, including adding and removing administrators, went away. That person, and the rest of us, contacted Yahoo to see about assigning a new superuser. Yahoo did not respond to our requests for help. For two years or so. Repeated emails to Yahoo simply went utterly unanswered. Eventually, the management of the discussion list became impossible and we were forced to close the most active and dynamic discussion list that ever existed in the area of human evolution.Screw you, Yahoo … I’ve not forgiven you and never will.(If you were a person, I would forgive you eventually. But you are not. You are an Evil Corporation with Nothing to offer but your drooling, rabid greed. In my opinion.)That is not, of course, the only annoying thing about Yahoo. Yahoo is the master of the obnoxious that you must click past to see what you are looking for. And so on.So, when I read the headlines, I had to laugh:Yahoo Executives Defend Company in China Case

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two top Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company’s role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime.”While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are [inappropriate term deleted],” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from the two Yahoo executives.He angrily urged Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan to apologize to journalist Shi Tao’s mother, who was sitting directly behind them.Shi Tao was sent to jail for 10 years for engaging in pro-democracy efforts deemed subversive after Yahoo turned over information about his online activities requested by Chinese authorities.Yang and Callahan turned around from the witness table and bowed from their seats to Shi’s mother, Gao Qinsheng, who bowed in return and then began to weep….[many interesting paragraphs deleted]…In 2005 Yahoo bought a 40 percent stake in China’s biggest online commerce firm, Alibaba.com (OOTC:ALBAF) , which has taken over running Yahoo’s mainland China operations. Callahan said it was up to Alibaba officials how to respond to the Chinese government’s demands.Smith dismissed that explanation as “plausible deniability.”…Human rights and free-speech advocates have lambasted U.S. companies including Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) for helping the Chinese government stifle the flow of ideas in exchange for greater access to the country’s rapidly growing Internet market. But the convictions of Shi and another Chinese journalist Yahoo provided information about have focused the most strident criticism on Yahoo.

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