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Teen charged in AOL hacking

A 17-year-old New Yorker is getting a different kind of education. One of hard knocks.

The district attorney for the city of New York filed criminal charges this week against Mike Nieves, alleging he engaged in computer tampering and trepass, possession of illegally obtained computer-related material, and criminal mischief, according to a report in the New York Post.

The teen allegedly infected AOL's network with viruses, in a move to steal employee and customer information. Nieves allegedly scooped up sensitive personal information, including credit card data, from AOL's databases in Manhattan and India, resulting in an estimated $500,… Read more

AOL Beta launches, blatant rip-off of Yahoo [UPDATE]

So we've seen copycats and similarities floating around the internets before. Missing vowels in site names (understandable, domain names are getting pricey), reflections, gradient backgrounds, rounded corners. You name it we've seen it. What we haven't seen in a while is a copycat page design on this scale. AOL's new Beta page looks mighty familiar. So familiar, one of our readers sent us a tip, pointing out that it looks dangerously like Yahoo's home page. The real question here, is how does a company with so much money to throw around skimp on something as … Read more

AOL to offer free downloads of new film

Don't want to pay $10 to see the new John Travolta, Salma Hayek film Lonely Hearts? Just go to AOL's video portal beginning Friday and download a copy for free. The movie opened in theaters two weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles, and is distributed by Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films. A "limited supply" of downloads of the full-length feature will be available at AOL Video and a high-definition version will be for sale on ClickStar, a broadband entertainment venture founded by Revelations Entertainment, the production company co-headed by Morgan Freeman.

ClickStar and … Read more

Yahoo's unlimited storage still not enough

Yesterday Yahoo announced they would begin offering Yahoo Mail users unlimited storage. The company will start with U.S. accounts and continue to roll out the upgrade to most of the world by the end of June. The only other major company to offer unlimited Web e-mail storage is AOL, starting in 2005 for paid members.

Despite the big upgrade, something that bugs me is that attachment sizes are still limited to 10MB for free accounts. Both MSN and Yahoo have premium e-mail services that double the mostly standard 10MB attachment size (at a price). This can be really handy … Read more

News from AOL: Small, snackable AIM updates

AOL released a new press release about its AIM instant messenger service this afternoon, and while there aren't any massive overhauls (unless you count Vista compatibility), you can expect a few new little perks. And maybe a few new little bugs. Yum.

The new release of AIM 6.1, which will be available later this week, is most notably the first version of AIM to be compatible with Windows Vista. Prior versions of the instant-messaging software had not been optimized for use with Microsoft's new operating system. (It wasn't the only popular download that needed to be … Read more

News roundup: YouTube rival cometh, Tabblo purchased, Kongregator goes public

NBC and News Corp. push new Web rival to YouTube. If you can't beat 'em join 'em, which is what AOL, MSN, Yahoo and MySpace are doing to combat media juggernaut YouTube. The companies have combined forces and are gearing up to launch a new online video service this summer. Besides user-submitted clips, expect to find full-length TV shows and paid-for movies from two major studios. ( CNET News.com)

HP to acquire photo start-up Tabblo. Photo sharing and printing service Tabblo is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard. In our hands-on we noted the ease and simplicity of its built-in printing … Read more

Surprise, surprise: AIM plugin adds location-sharing feature

We knew it was going to happen one of these days; with all this talk about telling everyone where you are, from Twitter maps to Dodgeball, it was only a matter of time before a mainstream instant-messaging service decided to integrate location-based features. Well, now we have it. Sort of.

A company called Skyhook Wireless, which appears to specialize in location-based Wi-Fi data services, has built a plugin for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) that will allow you to share your location through Skyhook's Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) -- kind of an alternative to GPS. (Skyhook also created the Loki … Read more

AOL tweaks Webmail features

AOL released a couple of upgrades to its Webmail app today--they're not in the regular program yet, but if you're a desperate AOL junkie who wants to check them out, the new features can be tested on its beta site.

I gave the beta a brief spin, though I must say I haven't used AOL Webmail enough to really be able to compare it to anything. (I had to use my leftover screenname from AOL's early days to access it, and let's just say I haven't used AOL mail much since 2001.) The updates … Read more

Andreessen's Ning.com takes on MySpace

In Marc Andreessen's vision of the future, MySpace is going to face stiff competition from a million mini MySpaces.

One of the cofounders of Netscape and a symbol of the technology revolution of a decade ago, Andreessen is now backing a company called Ning, which launched a set of new tools on Tuesday designed to help even the most tech-challenged person build a social-networking site.

"(Ning) is essentially MySpace version 2," Andreessen said last week, adding that he is placing a bet that social-networking sites will follow a similar development path to that of Internet service providers … Read more