satuon writes "Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. According to Auletta: "The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. 'The dirty little secret,' a former AOL executive says, 'is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"

theodp writes "With all signs for Facebook pointing up, author Douglas Rushkoff goes contra, arguing that Facebook hype will fade. 'Appearances can be deceiving,' says Rushkoff. 'In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.' Rushkoff, who made a similar argument about AOL eleven years ago in a quashed NY Times op-ed, reminds us that AOL was also once considered ubiquitous and invincible, and former AOL CEO Steve Case was deemed no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. 'So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won,' concludes Rushkoff. 'It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.'"

randall77 writes with an update to a story we discussed in August about a patent infringement suit filed by Interval Licensing, a firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, against many major tech companies over vague and broadly defined business methods. That patent suit has now been dismissed. Quoting Groklaw: "The court agreed with Google et al that it 'lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal and also 'fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18.' The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: 'The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18.' Go Google. That was their argument in their motion to dismiss, along with AOL's. Google said the complaint was too vague to meet the standard under Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009) and Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007). Then, after Interval Licensing brought up the lower patent form standard it thought should apply instead, AOL jumped in saying the complaint was too vague under even that standard, and the court agreed.

CWmike writes "Columbia law professor Tim Wu, who coined the term 'net neutrality,' now says that Apple is the company that most endangers the freedom of the Internet. Wu recently published the book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, in which he details what he calls 'information empires' such as AT&T, NBC, Facebook, and Google. He told The New York Times, 'It's largely a story of the American affection for information monopolists and the consequences of that fondness.' When asked whether the Internet could similarly be controlled by large companies, he told the Times: 'I know the Internet was designed to resist integration, designed to resist centralized control, and that design defeated firms like AOL and Time Warner. But firms today, like Apple, make it unclear if the Internet is something lasting or just another cycle.' Asked which companies he feared most, Wu replied: 'Right now, I'd have to say Apple.'" Wu has been in the news a bit lately.

An anonymous reader writes "A particularly nasty Wikipedia vandal has forced a discussion to take place over whether to block edits from an address range used by over 67 million Verizon customers. Verizon has not responded to abusive Wikipedia users on their network before, even though the abusive Verizon users have released private information (phone numbers, etc.) of numerous individuals, and made countless threats that have also been reported to law enforcement. Wikipedia has done something similar in the past with users on the AOL network, which used proxy servers and thus allowed vandals to continue disrupting the site. Discussion is also taking place on alternate solutions to deal with abuse from this Verizon user, named 'Zsfgseg' on Wikipedia. If a block of millions is enacted, Verizon could potentially change how they assign IP addresses, or be forced at least to address a PR nightmare."

Mike Zahalan writes with an update to last month's news that AOL and various private equity firms were exploring the possiblity of buying Yahoo. While talks between the companies have not officially gone much deeper, AOL has now hired financial advisers to analyze their options. Still, Kara Swisher writes at All Things Digital that the complexity of a deal between the two companies will be the biggest obstacle they have to overcome. "Among the issues being grappled with: Onerous tax implications around a variety of deals; a need for complete cooperation from too many players; and the realization that a hookup of AOL and Yahoo might cause more problems than it solves. 'It looks great conceptually and everyone gets all hot and bothered,' said one prominent investor who did his own strategizing about Yahoo and AOL. 'But when you actually do the numbers, you hit a pretty big wall of impossible.'"

Lucas123 writes "AOL recently completed the roll out of a 50TB SAN made entirely of NAND flash in order to address performance issues with its relational database. While the flash memory fixed the problem, it didn't come cheap, at about four times the cost of a typical Fibre Channel disk array with the same capacity, and it performs at about 250,000 IOPS. One reason the flash SAN is so fast is that it doesn't use a SAS or PCIe backbone, but instead has a proprietary interface that offers up 5 to 6Gb/s throughput. AOL's senior operations architect said the SAN cost about $20 per gigabyte of capacity, or about $1 million. But, as he puts it, 'It's very easy to fall in love with this stuff once you're on it.'"

mewshi_nya writes "A firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit alleging 11 technology companies are violating patents developed at a Silicon Valley lab that Allen financed more than a decade ago. Named in the lawsuit: Apple, Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google's YouTube subsidiary. The suit doesn't name Microsoft, Amazon.com or other tech companies in Seattle where Allen is based, and it doesn't estimate a damage amount. The suit lists violations of four patents (PDF) for technology that appear to be key components of the operations of the companies — and that of e-commerce and Internet search companies in general."

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton has written a piece on a new program called Collage that can circumvent censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The program demonstrates that a long-standing theoretical concept can be reduced to practice but Bennett wonders if anybody would actually need it, as long as they can exchange encrypted messages over Gmail and AIM. He begins "In a presentation delivered at USENIX, Georgia Tech grad student Sam Burnett and his colleagues described how their new program, "Collage," could circumvent Internet censorship by embedding messages in user-generated content on sites like Flickr. The short version is that a publisher uses the Collage system to break a message into pieces that are small enough to embed into a photograph using standard steganography, the photos are published according to some protocol (e.g. "all photos in the photostream of user xyz" or "all photos tagged with the 'xyz' tag"), and receivers who know the protocol for identifying the photos, can retrieve them and decode the message. According to the authors' paper, the system is general enough that it could be adapted to almost any site where user-generated content is published. (All of this can be done by hand using existing tools, but Collage automates the process to hide the individual steps from the user.)"

An anonymous reader writes "AOL's disastrous quarterly report showed cash from continuing operations was down 44% from a year ago (adjusted operating income was down 37%), as it continues a rocky transition from monthly subscription fees to advertising. (Their quarterly report also notes 'the cessation of large-scale access subscriber acquisition campaigns' — investor-speak for the fact that AOL will finally stop mass mailings of free trial accounts.) Unfortunately, AOL's advertising business 'did even worse. Its revenues declined by $110 million... every single segment is down.' AOL has already lost 86% of the 30 million subscribers it reported in 2001 — down to just 4.3 million — but advertising hasn't yet filled the gap (possibly because many AOL ads had been displayed to the users AOL no longer has). But at least, as one technology blogger notes, AOL has finally released a mobile application, 'in the new definition of "late to the party."'"

joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."

pspahn writes "I am currently enrolled at a very well-known online school. I was hesitant when I enrolled; now more than a year has gone by, and I am regretting my decision. The main problem is that I am not learning anything. I have several years' experience with Web design, yet I was not allowed to bypass Intro to Web Design 1. Similarly, there are other classes on my list that will teach me very little I don't already know, yet will cost me money all the same. Now, I do have a great desire to learn and to further myself academically, but I just don't see much value in continuing to take classes I could have aced in ninth grade. It is also difficult when fellow classmates clearly have very little intelligent input to offer and our online discussions are reminiscent of an AOL chat room. While it is possible simply to attend a local school in person, I would much prefer an online environment as it seems to be a more natural medium considering the content of my studies. I am interested specifically in Information Security programs. What online education programs have Slashdot readers been happy with and considered successful?"

EvilAlphonso notes news of a "Texas" IP holding company suing 36 actual companies for violating its claimed patent on spam filtering. Techdirt deconstructs the patent itself, No. 6,018,761, which seems to amount to little more than a database lookup. It was filed in 1996 and issued in 2000 (despite the lawyers' press release claiming that it "was awarded... nearly 15 years ago"). Among the companies being sued are 3Com, Apple, Google, AOL, Yahoo, J.C.Penney, IBM, Dell, Citigroup, and RIM. Not Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, or Microsoft, oddly enough.

eldavojohn writes "The latest versions of Microsoft Windows have some good security options available — now if only they could get their most popular third-party applications to use them. A report from Secunia takes a look at two such options — DEP and ASLR — and Brian Krebs breaks down who is using them and who is not. A security specialist noted, 'If both DEP and ASLR are correctly deployed, the ease of exploit development decreases significantly. While most Microsoft applications take full advantage of DEP and ASLR, third-party applications have yet to fully adapt to the requirements of the two mechanisms (PDF). If we also consider the increasing number of vulnerabilities discovered in third-party applications, an attacker's choice for targeting a popular third-party application rather than a Microsoft product becomes very understandable.' Among those with neither DEP or ASLR: Apple Quicktime, Foxit Reader, Google Picasa, Java, OpenOffice.org, RealPlayer, and AOL's Winamp. While Flash player can't implement DEP, it does have ASLR. Google Chrome is the only popular third-party application listed with stars across the board." It's worth noting that several apps highlighted in the Secunia research paper have added support for those security options in recent patches, or are in the process of doing so. Examples include Firefox, VLC, and Foxit Reader.

AHuxley writes "US law enforcement bodies view the sale of instant messaging service ICQ to a Russian company as a threat to homeland security. In spring 2010, Russia's largest Internet investment company, Digital Sky Technologies, agreed to purchase the service for $187 million from AOL. The US is sure that most criminals use ICQ and, therefore, constant access to the ICQ servers is needed to track them down. As the system is based in Israel, American security service have had access. The article concludes, 'Lawyers [of unspecified nationality] say that to block the deal the US Committee on Foreign Investment needed to cancel it no later than within 30 days after the deal has been announced — so unless the rules are broken, nothing can be changed.'"

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

destinyland writes "The social networking site Bebo is being sold for just 'a small fraction of the $850 million AOL paid for the site two years ago,' according to the Wall Street Journal. Since its acquisition, 'the site has been shedding users as fast as Facebook and Twitter have been gaining them,' according to one industry observer, quoting an April memo reportedly sent by an AOL executive arguing that Bebo 'has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space.' Bebo's traffic is already down 44% from last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, attracting just 5 million unique US visitors in May (versus 130.4 million for Facebook). And earlier this month, AOL shed the instant messaging service ICQ for $187.5 million — which it had acquired in 1998 for over $408 million."

An anonymous reader writes "AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million. DST's offer was apparently more attractive than those of Russia's ProfMedia and China's Tencent. ICQ, originally released in 1996 and bought by AOL in 1998 for US$407 million, was one of the world's first major instant messaging systems. Although largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. Moscow News has additional coverage of the deal."

theodp writes "Valleywag is stupefied that 'an annoying, unprofitable social network like Foursquare would turn down $100 million,' a move inspired in part by Twitter's 2008 rejection of a $500 million offer from Facebook, which in turn once rejected a $900 million bid from Yahoo. Time will tell whether the move by Foursquare was a prescient one, but it's certainly gutsy. After all, today's $850 million company can prove to be tomorrow's worthless one, right AOL?"

ganjadude writes "So I am moving to a location where the cell signal is very poor (I don't get signal inside my house), and I have been looking at wireless extenders such as the ones that Sprint and Verizon have. I am brought down by the cost (Sprint charges monthly, Verizon $250 up front, AT&T.... well they are AT&T). Being that this is Slashdot, and a lot of us live in basements (I kid!), I assume that some of the crowd has had this issue in the past. What have you done, or what alternatives are available to someone in such a situation?"