Global Online Safety PSA

Today, more and more digital citizens are connecting to each other across various devices and Web services, making online safety paramount. Over the last year, Yahoo! has collaborated with a coalition of government, industry, and nonprofit organizations to develop a powerful and impactful consumer awareness campaign. Today, we have unveiled the unified public awareness message to help digital citizens stay safer online: “Stop. Think. Connect.”

This message evolved from President Obama’s call for a memorable national public awareness campaign focused on cybersecurity.  “Stop. Think. Connect.” is designed to be a simple tool that can be easily understood and used by everyone online. It’s a strong, effective message because it is actionable and it puts power in the hands of the user. Through the coalition’s extensive research, we learned that consumers are anxious to take personal control of their online actions and help the greater online community. In our own research, we found this was true, too, with the majority of parents taking action to manage their children’s online safety.

Members of the coalition are supporting this campaign in various ways, including promoting it on their websites and highlighting it in consumer-facing communications. At Yahoo!, we will leverage our network of consumer services, which reaches 600 million users worldwide, to promote and increase global awareness of this effort.

Digital Citizenship Summit

Additionally, we are gearing up for Yahoo!’s fourth annual Digital Citizenship Summit on Oct. 15. Yahoo! is partnering with the Santa Clara County Office of Education and leading national nonprofit organizations to help educators create digital environments that put safety within arm’s reach of children.

Discussions will center on how it takes collaboration among parents, teachers, nonprofit advocates, law enforcement, and Internet companies to create a safer online environment for children. Educational leaders from San Francisco Bay Area schools K–12 will learn strategies to build a safety network, including student guidance techniques and online incident mitigation.

Attendees will also hear from national safety experts, including Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, iKeepSafe, i-Safe, and NetSmartz.

Educators will receive a sneak peek at iKeepSafe’s Generation Safe™: New Media Mentor for Digital Citizenship™ program, and will have the opportunity to be a part of the pilot program for free.

And that’s not all. As part of our ongoing efforts with our nonprofit partners, we will be supporting a number of initiatives:

• Common Sense Media’s national TV and online public awareness campaign, called “Power to the People,” is designed to educate parents about the impact of media and technology on kids. Yahoo! is helping to increase awareness of this campaign by donating advertising inventory across our network.
• I have been appointed as the co-chair of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). The FOSI annual conference, to be held Nov. 9–10, is a marquee annual event that brings together thought leaders across government, industry, and nonprofit sectors to collaborate on solutions in online child safety.

It will be a busy month for Yahoo!’s online child-safety efforts and we are eager to help digital citizens and educational leaders create safer online experiences for themselves and the greater community.

-Catherine Teitelbaum, Yahoo!’s Director of Child Safety and Product Policy

As Yahoo! has grown, so has the company’s infrastructure needs. As Chief Architect, Raymie led transformative efforts to rewire Yahoo!, moving from a set of vertical silos to a horizontal platform infrastructure. As this strong foundation is laid, we’re ready to leverage the world’s most diverse collection of content to create innovative, more personalized consumer and advertiser experiences around the globe.

And as our business has expanded in scale and complexity, Raymie has provided technical insight and direction throughout the engineering organization. With his leadership, technical Yahoo’s have focused on core challenges like creating a stable, agile development environment, extracting value from masses of unstructured data, developing scalable global experiences, and architecting a cloud to serve as the foundation for every click across our network.

As CTO, Raymie reports to our Chief Products Officer, Blake Irving and will drive technology roadmaps in partnership with both Chief Scientist Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees science and research at Yahoo!, and David Dibble, who leads Service Engineering and Operations.

Academic research is facing new challenges in today’s Internet age. Universities often don’t have the equipment –- hardware and software -– to maintain in-depth research at Internet scale. Academic researchers are limited in the research they can conduct, and this, ultimately constrains the amount of large-scale Web innovations coming to the marketplace.

Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way towards building the next generation of the Web. As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.

The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a significant step in that it will not only allow researchers to run applications and data on large-scale supercomputers, they will be able to experiment and conduct research on a massive scale. It’s like letting them simulate a true Web environment and that’s exactly what you need to ensure which ideas will work in the wild.

Joining us in this first-ever large-scale international consortium are Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, with contributions from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well.

This is all part of Yahoo!’s overall focus and investment in cloud computing and data infrastructure. We recently announced the formation of the Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group (CCDI), a new group dedicated to building out our next-generation cloud infrastructure.

In addition, in November 2007, Yahoo! deployed a supercomputing-class data center, called the M45, for cloud computing research; Carnegie Mellon University was the first institution to take advantage of this supercomputer. In March 2008, Yahoo! announced an agreement with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to jointly support cloud computing research in India. The CRL supercomputer is one of the world’s top five supercomputers and is the first supercomputer available to academic institutions in India.

I speak for our many research scientists when I say we’re excited about this open testbed and being able to collaborate with leaders who share our same vision. The HP/Intel/Yahoo! Cloud Research Testbed is a truly global research effort, and more partners and researchers will be invited to join and participate in the program when all of the systems are up and running later this year. The sky is the limit from here on out.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Research

Photo from Nicholas_T