@skcd42 Hey, is there any scenario where Grok Build can cripple my internet on a hotspot? Crippling it to the point it is unusable on both my phone and PC?
My fix seems to be disconnecting my PC and then the phone picks up normally.
So is Grok build the culprit?
Nigeria’s biggest governance challenge is not the absence of ideas or plans. It is the consistent failure to build institutions that can convert plans into sustained results, regardless of who is in power.
We keep cycling through new administrations, new policies, and new promises, while the underlying structures that determine whether anything actually works remain largely untouched. This is why outcomes often feel familiar, even when the faces change.
Until we confront how power is structured, how resources are controlled, and how accountability is enforced, we will continue to mistake political activity for institutional progress.
While Yahoo was busy collapsing in the United States, its name quietly became one of the most recognized brands in global cybercrime — in Nigeria.
In 2008, Yahoo’s board made one of the most expensive mistakes in tech history. They rejected Microsoft’s offer of $44.6 billion for the company. Nine years later, what remained of the once-dominant internet giant was sold to Verizon for just $4.48 billion — roughly one-tenth of Microsoft’s offer. By then, Yahoo had already lost its position as the default homepage of the internet and was widely seen as a relic of the early web.
At the exact same time Yahoo was fading in the West, something very different was happening with its name in Nigeria.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as internet access slowly spread through cyber cafés in cities like Lagos and Benin City, a new form of fraud began to take shape. Young men started using free Yahoo email accounts to send mass messages to people abroad, promising them large sums of money — often framed as inheritances, business deals, or government contracts — in exchange for small upfront payments to “release” the funds. These were not entirely new scams. They were the digital evolution of older advance-fee fraud schemes that had existed in Nigeria for decades, commonly known as “419” scams after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code.
What changed everything was the internet. Yahoo Mail became the primary tool because it was free, widely available, and easy to create multiple accounts from. The term “Yahoo Yahoo” was born directly from this period — referring to people who used Yahoo accounts to run these scams. Over time, the name stuck so firmly that even when most people moved on from Yahoo Mail, the label “Yahoo Boys” remained the default term for internet fraudsters in Nigeria.
The contrast is striking. In the United States, Yahoo represented the promise of the early internet — search, email, news, and community all in one place. In Nigeria, during those same years, the brand became associated with something entirely different: the first major wave of organized, internet-enabled advance-fee fraud that would later evolve into romance scams, business email compromise, and more sophisticated operations.
While the American version of Yahoo was missing every major technological shift after 2005, the name itself was being turned into a global synonym for cybercrime originating from West Africa. SoftBank may have gotten the better end of the 1996 Yahoo Japan deal, but in an unexpected way, Nigeria ended up giving the Yahoo brand its most lasting — and infamous — cultural footprint in the 21st century.
Sometimes a company doesn’t just lose its market. It loses control of its own name.
Yahoo turned down $44.6 billion from Microsoft in 2008. A Wall Street firm later bought the whole company for a tenth of that price. Meanwhile in Japan, Yahoo runs the most-visited news site on Earth. The two have been different companies since 1996.
That January, Yahoo cut a deal with Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son and his company SoftBank. They'd take 60% of a Japanese version. Yahoo would keep 40%. Son's side ran everything in Japan from day one.
While the US side spent the next 25 years missing every big deal in tech, Son kept building. In 2002, Yahoo could have bought Google for $5 billion. It didn't. In 2006, it tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion. Mark Zuckerberg said no. In February 2008, Microsoft showed up offering $44.6 billion for the whole company. Yahoo's board said no, they wanted more. Microsoft raised it to $47 billion. Yahoo still refused, so Microsoft walked away in May.
Nine years later, Verizon bought all of US Yahoo for $4.48 billion. About a tenth of what Microsoft had offered. In 2021, Verizon sold it again, this time to a Wall Street firm called Apollo for $5 billion, bundled with AOL. Verizon had paid almost $9 billion combined for those two companies.
Yahoo Japan went the other way, with Son steadily buying up more of it. By 2018, US Yahoo had sold off its last Japan stake for $4.3 billion. In 2021, Yahoo Japan merged with LINE, the WhatsApp of Japan, with Korea's biggest tech company Naver coming in as co-owner of the combined business. In 2023 the whole thing was renamed LY Corporation.
Today, Yahoo Japan pulls in 3.1 billion visits a month and ranks as the 12th most-visited website on the planet. In May 2025, Yahoo News Japan logged 921 million visits, putting it ahead of the New York Times and the BBC as the most-visited news site in the world.
The US version still exists. Yahoo Finance gets about 93 million US visitors a month, Yahoo News about 180 million. But the Yahoo that was once the homepage of the internet, the one with the purple logo on every browser, mostly lives in Japan today. SoftBank just ended up with the better side of that 1996 deal.
This is a textbook case of how the same brand can have two completely different destinies depending on who runs it locally.
The US Yahoo’s decline wasn’t just bad luck — it was a series of catastrophic strategic decisions at the highest level. Turning down Microsoft’s $44.6 billion offer in 2008 (when the company was still worth something) was the most visible one, but it was part of a broader pattern. Yahoo had multiple chances to buy or deeply partner with emerging giants — Google in 2002 and Facebook in 2006 — and passed on both. By the time they realized the internet had moved on, they were already too late.
What makes the Japan story so striking is the contrast in execution. From day one in 1996, Masayoshi Son and SoftBank treated Yahoo Japan as a Japanese company, not an American one with a Japanese URL. They adapted the product, the partnerships, and the strategy to local realities. While the US version was busy missing every major shift in tech, Yahoo Japan quietly became one of the most dominant internet properties in the country — and eventually evolved into LY Corporation after merging with LINE.
The bigger lesson here is that in tech, brand alone is rarely enough. Distribution, local adaptation, and long-term capital matter more. SoftBank played the long game with Yahoo Japan. The US Yahoo board, by contrast, seemed more interested in short-term valuation games and missed almost every generational shift after 2005.
Sometimes the difference between a company becoming a footnote and becoming a national institution isn’t the product — it’s who’s actually in charge of it.
My cousin studying biotechnology asked me why it took only months to make a COVID vaccine… but after 43 years, we still don’t have a fully effective HIV vaccine.
The answer is one of the most terrifying examples of how intelligent a virus can become.
After 43 years and over 100 failed HIV vaccine candidates, we still don’t have a single one that works.
That’s not for lack of effort or funding. HIV has simply proven to be one of the most formidable opponents vaccine science has ever faced.
Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which has a relatively stable spike protein that doesn’t change dramatically, HIV mutates at an extraordinary rate — roughly a million times faster than human DNA. This constant change allows it to continuously alter the proteins that vaccines would need to target. On top of that, HIV directly destroys the CD4 T-cells that coordinate immune responses and can hide inside human DNA by integrating into the host genome, forming latent reservoirs that remain invisible to both drugs and the immune system for years.
This combination of rapid mutation, immune destruction, and latency has led to repeated failures in large-scale human trials. The 2007 STEP trial, which used an adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) vector vaccine developed by Merck, was stopped early after it showed increased risk of HIV infection in some participants. Similar issues appeared in the Phambili trial in South Africa. Multiple other candidates over the decades also failed to generate meaningful protection.
The only trial that ever showed any level of success was the RV144 trial in Thailand (2009). Using a combination of ALVAC and AIDSVAX vaccines, it demonstrated a modest 31.2% reduction in HIV infection risk. While far from sufficient for a licensed vaccine, it remains the only human trial to show any protective effect and has guided much of the research that followed.
Today, newer approaches — including mRNA platforms, mosaic vaccines, and strategies using broadly neutralizing antibodies — are being tested. Some have shown promise in early-stage trials by generating stronger or broader immune responses than older candidates. However, as of 2026, none have yet achieved the level of consistent, durable protection needed for a licensed preventive HIV vaccine.
HIV didn’t just challenge vaccine development. It exposed the limits of our current understanding of how to generate lasting immunity against a virus that actively dismantles the immune system while constantly changing its appearance.
My cousin studying biotechnology asked me why it took only months to make a COVID vaccine… but after 43 years, we still don’t have a fully effective HIV vaccine.
The answer is one of the most terrifying examples of how intelligent a virus can become.
Modern science has now confirmed what the Qur’an revealed over 1,400 years ago — that every human being alive today descends from the same woman: Hauwa (Eve)
When a child is conceived, we usually think of DNA as a 50/50 split between both parents. But there’s one crucial exception: mitochondrial DNA. Unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively through the mother. The sperm contributes almost nothing to the mitochondria that power our cells.
This creates something extraordinary — an unbroken chain of inheritance that runs only through women, from mother to child, across thousands of generations.
In 1987, a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature changed how we understand our origins. Geneticists Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 147 people representing different populations around the world. By comparing the genetic variations and using what’s known as a molecular clock, they reached a remarkable conclusion: all modern humans alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to a single woman who lived in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago.
She became known as Mitochondrial Eve.
It’s important to understand what this actually means. She was not the first woman on Earth, nor was she the only woman alive during her lifetime. She was simply the most recent common ancestor through the maternal line whose descendants — through an unbroken chain of daughters — survived to the present day. All other maternal lineages from that era eventually died out.
Later studies have refined the timeline, placing her existence somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, with strong genetic evidence pointing to an African origin. This discovery became one of the key pillars supporting the “Out of Africa” theory of human migration.
What makes this fact so powerful is its quiet universality. Every single human being on the planet — no matter where we come from or what we look like — carries within us the mitochondrial DNA of the same woman. We are all, quite literally, connected through an ancient and unbroken thread of motherhood.
Well, when a child is conceived, the DNA split is 50/50 from both parents. Except for one small detail: mitochondrial DNA. It’s passed down only through the mother and never through sperm.
Which means something interesting: all living humans can trace their mitochondrial line back to one woman, not one man.
And every daughter born continues passing that same line forward.
Happy Mother’s day
Deleted SofaScore.
Deleted FotMob.
Deleted The Premier League app.
Muted every word that is Premier-League related to avoid such content on my timeline.
Muting every Premier League account.
Cancelled my Sky Sports subscription.
Cancelled my TNT Sport subscription.
On the verge of cancelling both of my nephew and mine season ticket.
I am no longer contributing to the absolute dogshit product The FA puts out. Fucking hypocrisy, lack of consistency, and just incompetence.
No joy in this league.
You are dating a man and you are complaining about him billing you? Who will take care of him then? He should be taken care of perfectly fine because he is the price.
Leave your girlfriend if she is not spending on you guys.
Let’s talk about this new trend of men boldly asking their girlfriends for money without an ounce of shame, Haba malam Audu🤌
Since when did it become normal for a man to sit back comfortably, stretch his hand out, and treat his woman like an ATM? What a shame
Donatus Mathew, an ex-Okada rider who won a House of Rep seat for the Kaura Federal Constituency of Kaduna State, was elected on the platform of the Labour Party in 2023.
In December 2024, he officially defected to APC. Unfortunately, APC has denied him a ticket
Nigerians must never give him a chance in NDC.
We will keep posting them.