News

• AOL patents: What's in it for Microsoft?

  AOL announced that it has closed a deal to sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft. The deal is just north of a billion dollars, and it's easy to see why AOL might want to cash in on the intellectual property. What is less clear is why Microsoft is interested in the patent portfolio, or what Microsoft gains from the deal.

• AOL to license patents to Microsoft in over $1B deal

  AOL has entered into a definitive agreement to sell over 800 of its patents and their related patent applications to Microsoft, it said Monday.

• ACLU: Most US police don't seek warrants before tracking cell phones

  Many law enforcement agencies across the U.S. track mobile phones as part of investigations, but only a minority ask for court-ordered warrants, according to a new report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

• AOL unplugs 10,000 servers, saves $5 million

  AOL decommissioned almost 10,000 servers and saved itself US$5 million along the way to winning a contest that highlights the cost of running inefficient or underutilized IT equipment.

• E-commerce trade group: Mobile geolocation privacy bill is 'awful'

  U.S. Senate legislation that would require mobile apps to get permission to check the geolocation of a user is among the bills that make up trade group NetChoice's latest list of "awful" bills for e-commerce.

• AOL: No plans to kill off Instant Messenger

  Despite a report today that AOL is killing off its popular instant messaging service, the company says that's not true.

• Google restores interoperability with AOL AIM

  Google and AOL have restored the interoperability between their two instant messaging (IM) networks, a little over two weeks after it was temporarily suspended due to a spam flood originating in AOL's AIM that affected Gmail Chat and Google Talk users.

• Spam leads Google to disable interop of its IM network with AOL AIM

  AOL hopes to roll out a fix soon to a spam surge in its AIM service targeting Google IM users, a situation that prompted Google to temporarily shut down the interoperability between the two instant messaging networks.

• White House pushes for new privacy codes of conduct

  The U.S. White House will push for online businesses to adopt new privacy codes of conduct, including consumer rights to control what information websites collect about them and a right to see what data is being collected, officials there said.

• Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Bank of America team to wipe out phishing

  Can industry heavyweights Google, PayPal, Microsoft and AOL -- along with 11 others in high-tech such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the financial world's Bank of America and Fidelity Investments -- succeed in stopping phishing attacks right in their tracks? In uniting behind an effort called DMARC.org unveiled today, the group says it can through policy-based steps filter out spoofed email that attackers use for phishing.

• Industry group makes fresh push to eliminate phishing

  Companies such as Facebook, Google and PayPal are pushing for widespread use of a new technical specification, DMARC, that could make it harder for phishers to reach their victims.

• No blackout for SOPA/PIPA? We know who you are.

  Given the week that just was there's really only one topic I can write about: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

• AOL revamps AIM with Facebook, Google chat apps

  AIM, AOL's seminal instant messenger app, just received a preview update to pull it out of obscurity and compete with other more popular chat apps like Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Skype and a slew of others that aggregate disparate clients and boast features like video and picture-sharing.

• AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo ad deal: 'The devil is in the details'

  The partnership AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft announced last week to sell each other's "tier 2" display ad inventory could yield great benefits, but they need to pull off a complex integration of business and technology to make it work.

• AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft tie up for display advertising

  Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have partnered to pool their display ad inventories and integrate their sales platforms so that they can offer each other's ads.