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Has Ari Balogh arrived too late? That's the key question for Yahoo's new CTO, freshly hired away from VeriSign. Balogh will take charge of all of Yahoo's engineering functions, essentially leaderless since former CTO Farzad Nazem quit last May. The new blood could bring some much-needed shakeups. Presumably, current tech executives Usama Fayyad, Qi Lu, and Ash Patel will report to him. One wonders how long that situation will last. Patel, in particular, has been checked out for some time, according to sources at Yahoo, and Balogh's hire may be his cue to leave. Balogh will have another challenge: VeriSign's reputation.

While Balogh's erstwhile employer has won grudging admiration for running the Internet's domain-name system, it's the company everyone in the Valley loves to hate. Whether it's for the time it owned domain-name registrar Network Solutions, or its botched launch of SiteFinder, a service which redirected failed domain-name requests to a VeriSign search engine, everyone seems to have a reason to dislike VeriSign. At Yahoo, Balogh will have the opportunity to rise above that rap — or be sunk by it. (Photo by Leslie Walker/Washington Post)