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).

Verizon and Yahoo have been sleeping with each other in one way or another since at least 2005 (when the domain verizon.yahoo.com was launched), but now Verizon is finally going to make an honest woman of Yahoo. Yesterday it was announced that Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion. Now we just need to agree on what the Hollywood-style name for the new couple should be – should it be Veriz-hoo or Yahoozon?

As we reported earlier today, Verizon has acquired Yahoo for nearly 5 billion dollars. You can read more about that here. However here, below, is the full text of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s email letter to Yahoo employees announcing the acquisition.

Verizon Wireless has announced that it will be adding cookies to the web browser of anyone who visits the Verizon Wireless website, and then Verizon will track you across the web, and sell the data it collects on you to marketers. What’s more, they are selling the data to marketers to whom they are giving marketing access to your Verizon Wireless device!

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?

Apple unveiled the new iPhone 5 and their new connector cable, Lightening. What Apple today called “the biggest things to happen for iPhone since iCloud,” eager Apple fans are calling, “meh.” Apple unveiled the official iPhone 5, which does not appear to be much different from the iPhone 4S. The phone was introduced as being, “designed and built to an exacting level of standard unlike anything we, or anyone in our industry, have made before.” Except the last iPhone, apparently.

Be prepared for a series of virtual hand slaps if your ISP is saying that you downloaded copyrighted or infringing material or files. A “graduated response” program, aimed at cutting down on illegally downloaded files, was rolled out at the beginning of July and has drawn widespread criticism for both its intent, and execution. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) CEO, Cary Sherman, is at the helm of a new initiative that aims to punish those accused of illegal downloading.

Ok, first, yes, I admit it. In the form of the newish iPhone 4S, the iPhone finally had enough chops to lure me to try one out, to even consider abandoning my beloved Android. The voice control and dictation features blow Android’s away, for both accuracy and usability. And Siri’s ability to create location-based reminders, and generally how powerful it is, were pretty compelling. But, now there was a new dilemma: which is better? The ATT iPhone or the Verizon iPhone? Which has the better iPhone service – ATT or Verizon? Fewer dropped calls? Faster network?

By now it’s pretty well known that ATT iPhones drop as many as a third of all calls, and that even Apple themselves admits that. But how do the Verizon iPhones do in the dropped call department? Does they drop as many calls as their ATT counterparts? According to a new study, the Verizon iPhone does substantially better in the dropped calls department.

The iPhone 4 was unleashed on the Verizon network earlier this month, and despite some nice extras unavailable on the AT and T iPhone 4, including the ability to use your Verizon iPhone to create and share a wireless mobile hotspot, the sales of the Verizon iPhone have been, by most accounts, underwhelming at best.

The wait is over – at least, the wait to learn how long the wait is is over. As we mentioned earlier, today was the big day for Verizon’s announcement of the Verizon iPhone. And Verizon did not disappoint: this morning they announced the Verizon iPhone’s release date, along with a couple of interesting features, some of which that other iPhone doesn’t even have, including, most notably, wireless hotspot capability, allowing you to not only to connect your laptop wirelessly to the Internet through your iPhone, but to share that connection, wirelessly, with four additional people.

Tech news and forums this week have been overrun by chatter about the legislative proposal for net neutrality that Verizon and Google jointly released on Monday. The proposal, which both Google and Verizon posted to their blogs at 1:38 p.m. EST and 1:47 p.m. EST, respectively, was, they say, intended to spark discussion, and spark discussion it did. If your head is spinning with this week’s discussions of network neutrality, wireline, wireless, a private Internet, and “differentiated online services”, read on.

The Verizon Mifi 2200 (also known as the “Mifi wireless internet hub”) is a personal access point, or PWAP, and is a wonderful thing – a wifi hotspot in your pocket, wherever you are. And you can let up to 5 people connect to it wirelessly – unless you are charging it via your computer’s USB connection, in which case you can only use it as a USB modem for 1. Until now – here are directions for how to use USB to charge and connect with your Mifi, and still have up to 5 computers (including yours) connect to it wirelessly.

Take one part paranoia, one part zeal, two parts conspiracy theory, and someone with too much time on their hands, and what do you get? No, it’s not the sequel to Minority Report. It’s the allegation that Yahoo and other ISPs are spying on their users and selling their users’ information, with publication of the so-called “Yahoo Spying Guide”, and other ISP “Spying Guides” as “proof” that Yahoo and other ISPs have put a price on their own users’ heads.

In response to Verizon’s “There’s a map for that” ad campaign, which riffed on the iPhones “There’s an app for that” campaign, iPhone mothership AT and T sued Verizon. The primary legal basis for AT and T’s claims was that the Verizon “There’s a map for that” map showed Verizon’s 3G coverage compared to AT and T’s 3G coverage in the same area – AT and T’s 3G coverage in those areas was much more limited (naturally, otherwise Verizon wouldn’t be using it in an ad campaign), and AT and T was complaining that they still have voice and data services in those areas (just not 3G) and so viewers could be mislead into thinking that AT and T didn’t have any coverage (not just 3G coverage) in the regions depicted.