Yahoo! has been on a tear lately revamping its mobile apps. The latest is Yahoo! Sports 4.0 for iOS (formerly known as "Sportacular"). The most noticeable improvement is that the app is now universal. The app has also been completely redesigned with a slick new look, and lets you sync your favorite teams across iOS devices. Finally, users can also see built-in Twitter feeds of local sports writers. Here's the full release notes:

Sportacular is now Yahoo! Sports - Faster, cleaner and more useful than ever before.

+ iPad is here! Enjoy the new universal iOS support.

+ Login to Yahoo! Sports to sync your favorite teams across mobile apps and the web.

+ Refreshed design - A clean new look for a new era makes scanning and navigation a breeze.

+ "Live Games" - Follow every in-progress game across all supported leagues from the "Live" tab on Trending scores.

+ Game tweets - Follow the action with live game tweets from local beat writers and team experts.

+ Pitch by pitch - Our baseball game experience is even better with pitch-by-pitch information for every at-bat.

**Note: Chat is no longer supported in v4.0.

Thank you for your continued support. We sincerely appreciate it.

Yahoo! Sports 4.0 is a free download.

One of Yahoo’s senior international execs and longtime entrepreneur Ahmed Nassef is leaving the company to create a new startup called Telfez, which will be a social television effort aimed at emerging markets.

Nassef, who was until now the head of Yahoo’s efforts in the Middle East and Africa, is co-founding the new company with Tamer Rashad, a top Merrill Lynch in the same region. Telfez will be based in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Today the Middle East and Africa region represents an inflection point for television viewership, skyrocketing growth in the penetration of smartphones and connected devices, and heavy social engagement,” said Nassef in a press release. “Increasingly, the millions of TV viewers in places from Capetown and Casablanca to Dubai and Istanbul are watching TV while holding a mobile phone or tablet and connecting with friends on their favorite social platforms.

Nassef has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant for four years, in which he has doubled its audience and improved revenue growth. He came to Yahoo after the company acquired Maktoob.com, an Arabic language site, in late 2009.

Starting the week of June 3rd, tomorrow, Yahoo is discontinuing Mail Classic. It’s requiring all Mail users to switch to the new version of Mail and accept a TOS/Privacy Policy update that lets it scan emails to “deliver product features, relevant advertising, and abuse protection”. You can opt out of the ads, but if you don’t want to be scanned, you have to ditch Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo launched the new version of Mail in December, and announced the discontinuation of Classic back in April. However, it didn’t mention anything about the new terms of service and privacy policy until it just began sending Classic users an email about having to switch. In an aptly named Help center entry “Do I have to upgrade to the new Yahoo! Mail?”, the company explains

“Beginning the week of June 3, 2013, older versions of Yahoo! Mail (including Yahoo! Mail Classic) will no longer be available. After that, you can access your Yahoo! Mail only if you upgrade to the new version. When you upgrade, you will be accepting our Communications Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This includes the acceptance of automated content scanning and analyzing of your communications content.”

Those who upgrade can opt out of contextual ads through Yahoo’s Ad Manager. Yahoo bluntly tells users who refuse its new policies that they should either download their mail to another IMAP client, or close their account. Premium Mail Plus users who want to cancel their accounts can get a prorated refund.

Some are labeling the switch an aggressive invasion of privacy. An anonymous Jottit user writes “Yahoo can now openly troll through email for personal information that it can share or hold onto indefinitely. Gay and haven’t come out yet? Yahoo knows.”

However, as commenters on Hacker News note, Gmail has long scanned your email to show you related ads. Even if you use a system like StartMail that doesn’t scan your messages, the system your conversation partners use might not be so hands-off. And as many warn, anything you send in an email could end up public, so keep the naughty stuff off the web.

Yahoo recently bagged the popular blogging site, Tumblr, in a rather sizable buyout raking in more than a billion dollars. The buyout has been criticized by many, although Yahoo has vowed to keep Tumblr as awesome as it has been. According to reports, Tumblr’s Creative Director has now decided to quit the company.

Jacob Bijani has been a part of Tumblr for the last five years and until recently, served as the Creative Director at the company. Now, less than two weeks after Yahoo acquired Tumblr, Bijani has decided to quit his position at the company.

However, he hasn’t cited any clear reasons as to why he is quitting at this time. Some may have thought that his resignation may be because of Yahoo’s acquisition, but Bijani hasn’t expressed any such sentiments.

According to him, “Today was my last day at Tumblr. I’m so proud of what we’ve all created together, and it’s been a privilege to contribute to something beloved by so many.”

As to what his plans are now, he wrote, “There’s still a lot more I want to accomplish, and I’m really excited about this next chapter. For now, I’m going to take some time off to digest the last few years. I have about a dozen different projects planned, so expect more from me soon!”

The sizable Tumblr buyout may have let Bijani the very resources that he requires to launch his own different projects. However, let’s hope that his departure is not one of the many in the wake of Tumblr’s acquisition.

Source: Jacob Bijani

BT, the UK-based telecommunications company with more than 18 million customers, is dumping Yahoo Mail following a successful hacking campaign that hijacked e-mail accounts and used them to send spam, according to published reports.

BT's plans come four months after Ars was among the first publications to report on the mass campaign. At the time, attackers were able to commandeer Yahoo Mail accounts because administrators had failed to apply an eight-month-old security patch in the WordPress content management system that powered one of its blogs. By including malicious JavaScript in innocuous-looking webpages, the attackers were able to exploit the vulnerability and seize control over Yahoo Mail accounts that happened to be open while the booby-trapped webpages were viewed.

In March, more than two months after Yahoo finally applied the WordPress fix, criminal spammers continued to hijack Yahoo Mail accounts, suggesting that other security holes remained.

A BT official on Thursday told The Telegraph that the telecom company would begin moving away from Yahoo within weeks. The new e-mail system will be hosted by California-based Critical Path and will include built-in spam and antivirus protections. The move should serve as a wakeup call to Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who took Yahoo's helm with a mandate to revive the ailing Web company. Staying on top of things like WordPress security patches may seem mundane and an interruption from more business-critical operations, but they're actually not. In fact, they're key to a company's success.