AOL has announced that they will be discontinuing AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) as of December 15, 2017 (that’s 10 weeks from today). As the iconic, and essentially first, widely deployed, widely used, and widely successful instant messenger, this has come as a shock to some, who are actively mourning AIM’s demise, and pretty unhappy about AOL getting rid of Instant Messenger.
Tag: AOL
If you use Verizon for your email, receiving email at or sending it from a verizon.net email address, have we got some news for you: Verizon is retiring their email service. This means you have two options: switching to a new system entirely and losing your @verizon.net email address, or switching to AOL (where you will still be able to send/receive using your Verizon email address).
Now that Yahoo and AOL are both stating through the DMARC p=reject that any email coming from a yahoo or aol address that isn’t sent from a yahoo or aol server should be rejected (bounced), problems are cropping up for Hotmail, Outlook, Live.com and MSN users, who are finding their own email addresses being removed from mailing lists for no apparent reason. But there is a reason.
AOL has just announced that they are following Yahoo’s suit in telling the email-receiving world to reject (bounce) any email that has an aol.com “from” address, but doesn’t actually come through an AOL mail server, using the now infamous “p=reject” DMARC policy.
The Internet, the country, and indeed the whole world is abuzz with the news of PRISM, the no-longer-secret program of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) first exposed by Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper The Guardian, through which the United States federal government is accessing and mining all sorts of user data from the major ISPs and possibly cell phone companies. Data which is potentially about just about anybody and everybody, even you. The list of companies and ISPs alleged to be involved with PRISM, by which we mean allowing the government to data mine their users’ data, is impressive (read as “scary”) indeed, although most of them are quick to deny it. However, we have evidence (see screenshots below) that even though they are denying it, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, and AOL are all involved. There are rumours of DropBox and Amazon joining. And Verizon is also giving the Feds access to their user data. But as 1984 as this all is, we really only have one question: why is anybody surprised?
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Rumors are flying about AOL being put up for sale, with some people wondering whether AOL is to close. While an AOL shutdown seems unlikely in the near term, it does seem to be the case that AOL is going to go up on the block. According to industry sources, AOL has been meeting with both legal and investment types about selling themselves off to the highest bidder.
Once considered two of the top ISPs, AOL and Yahoo have both been somewhat stagnant for years. While Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, has managed to stabalize Yahoo’s profits by cutting costs, they are far from out of the woods. Despite AOL’s market value – at just $2.7 billion – being only 13 percent of Yahoo’s, AOL is said to be exploring various arrangements that could see it buying Yahoo or, at least, merging with Yahoo.
AOL is going to be going it alone from now, following a decision by the Time-Warner board of directors to cut America Online loose and to have AOL go it alone.
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”.