If you must have free email, we strongly recommend switching from Hotmail to another free email service provider such as Yahoo, AOL, or Gmail. We personally recommend either Yahoo or AOL.

A Federal court ruled last week that online contracts cannot be unilaterally changed – that is changed by one party without the consent of the other party – in the matter of Joseph Douglas versus Talk America, which purchased the service to which Joe Douglas was subscribed from America Online (AOL).

Recently I started getting invitations to join Flixster from complete strangers. Obviously, this was spam, but why were these complete strangers sending it to me? And why were they always from AOL and Hotmail? Now people are asking – is Flixstr accessing your AOL and Hotmail contacts list and spamming them in your name?

A new service announced by AOL, called Skyhook, adds a new “Near Me” buddy group to your AIM buddies. This is intended to show you your nearby buddies or local buddies. Based on where you and your AIM buddies are located, those who are within a certain number of miles of you will show up in your “Near Me” buddy group.

Are you one of those people for whom iChat audio and video chatting used to work, but suddenly it has stopped working, for no apparent reason? Are you getting “user has declined your invitation” or “communications error” errors, or maybe even the dreaded “error -8”? Have you changed nothing at all on your end, but suddenly you simply can’t audio chat or video chat with some people – or maybe anybody?

Well, you’re not alone.

Musician and parodiest Weird Al was scheduled to have his new video, “White and Nerdy” enjoy a world premiere through AOL. Unfortunately, somebody found and leaked the video on the popular YouTube site, and enough people had already viewed it that AOL decided to pull the plug on the premiere.

Just about a year ago we told you that AOL had announced they had purchased Music Now and its entire catalog of music. Now AOL has announced that they have revamped the Music Now music service, and it is open for business as “AOL Music Now”.

What is “net neutrality”? We’ve been getting a lot of questions asking us to explain what this new term, “net neutrality” means. So we will. It all started with the introduction of the “Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2006”.

There has been a great deal written about AOL’s supposed “email tax” since they announced their intent to implement GoodMail a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the first articles had a great deal of misinformation in them. There is no “email tax”, and that non email tax is not being required of anybody.

The Feds want your search records from Google, in a lawsuit designed to prove how much searching there is being done for child pornography. Should you be worried? You bet you should. And guess what. AOL, MSN and Yahoo have already given those records up.

By automatically adding commercial buddies to users’ AOL Instant Messanger (a/k/a AOL IM, AOL Chat, and AOL Message) buddy list, AOL has alienated the affections of their AOL Instant Messanger users.

AOL’s new IN2TV free Internet television service will be serving up a heaping helping of vintage television shows on six channels, including LOL TV, DramaRama TV, ToonTopia TV, Heros and Horrors TV, Rush TV, and Vintage TV.

AOL has purchased online music portal MusicNow, giving AOL and its users access to a catalog of over a million songs, and relationships with all of the major record labels.

A new AOL Instant Messenger worm, SDBot.add, installs the rootkit Lockx.exe on your computer. In addition to the root kit, the AIM worm changes your searchpage to https://web.archive.org/web/20070525203505/http://www.eza1netsearch.com:80/sp2.php at eza1netsearch.com.

Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail access is being denied to military personnel in the Navy and the Marines who are stationed overseas. The military has blocked access from all government-owned computers, citing concerns about computer security and viruses.