AOL // Current

Top 6 From Web 2.0 Summit [Video] – A Must Watch | TechDusts

Are you thrilled by the developments taking place in Web 2.0? If Yes then you have... more

ksantani
added this
1 month ago
|
1 comment

New Weather Satellite Launched for military defense: DMSP satellite

The Air Force's newest polar-orbiting weather satellite has undergone several years of... more

stormchaser4850
added this
1 month ago
|
1 comment

Email password leak update: Gmail, Yahoo, AOL (and Hotmail) hit too

After the leak of 10,000 Hotmail and Windows live email passwords and details... more

barnopolis89
added this
1 month ago
|
17 comments

Bosses Can Now Monitor You From Their Cell Phones

In this day and age, most large companies monitor your tweets, email, IM and voip... more

ninthstate
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

Mastermind Team's Robcast

Robcast is a humorous discussion of your world today from a group of friends.Give it a... more

Rob_Lee
added this
3 months ago
|
0 comments

Press Release 2.0 T.E.A.M. Commercial

I. Write unveils the second commercial in the series for his upcoming album Press... more

iwrite
added this
3 months ago
|
0 comments

Gmail Grabs Number Three Email Spot from AOL

Gmail shed its beta tag in July, after having been around for five years. However,... more

Ajoyshop
added this
3 months ago
|
0 comments

Will You Pay A Penny For Every Email You Send?

Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatts of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?

The idea behind CentMail is that paying to send e-mail — even a single cent — differentiates a real e-mail from spam blasts, and thus, spam filters can be adjusted to let the stamped mail sail right through, according to a report from New Scientist. Users would get to choose which charity benefits from their penny missives, which the researchers hope will convince people to pay CentMail for something that’s currently free.

Anti-spam companies estimate that spam comprises more than 90 percentof e-mail, a situation explained, in part, by the lack of real expense in sending e-mails. The idea is to create a class of certified e-mail which will allow spam filters to concentrate on, well, messages touting “Rolexes”, Viagra and very cheap copies of expensive software.

Users would pre-pay, and then a stamp would be automatically added to each outgoing e-mail (presumably, no licking is necessary) and the proceeds would go to the approved charity of the user’s choice. Centmail is currently in a private beta, but you can add your e-mail address (for free!) to be notified when it launches.

This is not the first attempt to add certification and/or money to the e-mail environment to cut down on spam. Microsoft has its own research project, while AOL’s Goodmail successfully offers anti-spam protection to large marketers.

But perhaps the most widespread authentication solution is the Sender Policy Framework, which helps prevent spammers from pretending to send e-mails from a company’s domain name — but is largely invisible to every day users, even if, as customers of services such as Gmail, they use it every day.

It’s also not clear how the system will prevent spammers from sticking stamp codes in their e-mails to pretend they paid the tax. That same problem doomed a company called Habeas, which in 2004 offered legitimate users a copyrighted haiku to stick in their e-mail headers, with the threat to use the heavy penalties of copyright law to crack down on abusers.

That didn’t stop the spammers.

It’s not clear how much the proposal would help, however, since so much of the spam is now sent using botnets, which are networks of zombie PCs whose owners have no idea their computers are part of a massive spamming organization.

Considering how much legitimate e-mail ends up in the “dead letter office” of today’s spam filters, consumers’ tendency to prefer free stuff, and the vastness of the spam problem, perhaps this is better thought of as anti-anti-spam filter protection for real people, rather than as a true anti-spam solution.Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing... more

sespian
added this
3 months ago
|
59 comments

AOL Tells Employees Job Cuts Possible After Review

AOL’s new Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong told employees today that job cuts... more

Kepano
added this
4 months ago
|
0 comments

The Party of the year is going down this July 2 2009 9:30p

The Party of the year is going down this July 2 2009 9:30p we meeting at Jansen... more

birthrightx
added this
5 months ago
|
0 comments

Time Warner dumping AOL

Time Warner Inc. is dumping AOL after spending nearly a decade trying to build a... more

ebindelglass
added this
6 months ago
|
22 comments

Snubbed AOL chat buddy charged in stabbing

A man has been arrested on suspicion of fatally stabbing his AOL chat buddy after she... more

ClipsFC
added this
6 months ago
|
0 comments

Time Warner profit beats Street, eyes AOL spinoff

NEW YORK, April 29 (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc (TWX.N) posted a stronger-than-expected... more

ClipsFC
added this
7 months ago
|
0 comments

Commentary: 20 Years of AOL Annoyances and Foul-Ups

Harry McCracken, PC World
AOL floppies and CDs. Sharon Stone's fling with the Running Man icon. The death of Netscape. It's all part of AOL history we'd like to forget.

Once upon a time--two decades ago this year, actually--a startup called Quantum Computer Services changed the name of its moderately popular online service to America Online and added a cheery e-mail notification recorded by an employee's husband: "You've got mail!"

As the 1990s progressed, the company lived up to the promise of its new moniker, doing more than any other to introduce the country to the online world. As the Internet took off, it served as the most important on-ramp to what was often called the Information Highway. And although today's AOL is no longer the country's dominant ISP, its services and sites add up to the fourth most popular property on the Web, from instant-messaging kingpin AIM to muckraker TMZ.com to video engine Truveo.

Over the years, it's also found a remarkable number of ways to drive both loyal customers and random bystanders bonkers, shooting itself in its corporate foot again and again through everything from monumental technical glitches to willful strategic decisions. Herewith, a 20th-anniversary retrospective.

It's hard to fathom today, but in 1993, most people had never heard of AOL--it only had 250,000 subscribers. And even if they had heard of it, they didn't know how to get it. Then direct-marketing maven Jan Brandt convinced a skeptical CEO Steve Case to spend a quarter-million dollars sending out floppy disks with AOL software and a free trial offer. It worked. So they mailed out more. And more.

The company ended up distributing millions of floppies and CD-ROMs; just how many has never been disclosed. They showed up in your mailbox. They were bound into your favorite computer magazines. They were stacked up at retail-store checkouts, doled out in high-school cafeterias, and inserted into cereal boxes. In short, they were like pop-up ads--except that they intruded on your real life, and there was no way to block them.Harry McCracken, PC World AOL floppies and CDs. Sharon Stone's fling with the Running... more