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CNET News senior writer Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.

Time Warner has taken a step closer to splitting up AOL's business, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Time Warner is expected to announce Wednesday that it has completed the internal process of separating AOL's dial-up Internet access business from its advertising business, the newspaper said.

Time Warner has been talking about splitting the company into two different entities for a while now. And it's been a main focus of Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes, who took over as CEO seven months ago. AOL has long … Read more

If you have a short memory or didn't have time to catch up on Crave this week (editor's note: for shame!), no worries, we've got you covered. Here's a look back at the truly interesting, strange, and wonderfully silly gadgets we checked out.

• Dell was able to whip up a lot of press coverage--us included--this week with mere mention that it might enter the smartphone market and revisit its past life as a seller of MP3 players. But the guys in Round Rock, Texas, actually did release some real, live products this week, most notably … Read more

Yahoo has begun using its SearchMonkey technology by default to give more prominence and potentially usefulness to search results involving LinkedIn contacts, Yelp reviews of businesses, and local companies.

Most of Yahoo's search results are a plain, textual list of Web sites. SearchMonkey, though, lets Yahoo's servers present some results with richer accompanying information, such as product prices at Amazon.com or movie critic ratings. If it works out as promised, that could make search results more useful, keep searchers coming back for more, drive more traffic to those sites that take advantage of SearchMonkey technology, and help … Read more

Internet service provider EarthLink could be interested in buying AOL's dial-up business, its CEO told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Wednesday.

EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff first brought up the idea of EarthLink buying AOL and other dial-up providers during the company's quarterly conference call Tuesday.

"We believe we're best-positioned to be the consolidator in this industry," Huff said during a conference call with analysts.

The news has spurred a flurry of speculation that EarthLink is looking to buy Time Warner's AOL. Huff wouldn't comment specifically on whether his company has … Read more

D-Link claimed today to be the first company to offer green Wi-Fi home networking. While the "first" notion of the claim is debatable--I've seen routers from other vendors with an eco-friendly design--the green aspect is more than welcome.

The company said its green initiative that adds eco-friendly features to the Xtreme NT line of wireless routers could reduce the devices' power consumption by 40 percent without sacrificing performance.

These new features cut down the power usage by automatically detecting link status and network cable length then adjusting the power accordingly. The new routers also feature Wi-Fi … Read more

The New York Times has inked a deal with LinkedIn to deliver targeted headlines to members of the networking site.

A LinkedIn user who works in the energy industry would, for example, be shown articles relevant to that area.

Times readers will also be able to share and comment on stories with LinkedIn members in their networks through a tool on article pages of the newspaper's Web site.

The deal, announced Monday night, will also enable advertisers to target "more Times readers than currently available through the NYTimes.com registration process," the companies said, though they did … Read more

One of the problems with social networking sites is that they tend to be ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Seriously ugly.

MySpace has upgraded its UI, but it's still noisy, long (you have to scroll way down on some pages to get where you want to go), and cluttered. Facebook? It looks like a dingy and, like MySpace, is overly noisy (It's also shockingly slow. I've been trying to change my account settings and it keeps hanging on me). Not only that, but my home page on Facebook doesn't seem to want to let … Read more

On Thursday, Webmasters around the world noticed unusual spikes in traffic. For some smaller sites the sudden surge of Web traffic toward their sites appeared to be almost a denial-of-service attack.

Turns out it was the free version of AVG Antivirus 8.0 just doing its job.

In a statement on Saturday, Grisoft said "We have actively listened to the Webmasters who have brought this to our attention, and as a company we have reacted quickly to solve them." What it did was issue a new build of the popular free program.

What's different in version 8 … Read more

Not content to just sit around recovering from Independence Day shenanigans this past weekend, TinyURL released a much-needed feature to its URL-shortening service that others have had for ages: vanity URLs. This means the nonsensical shortened URLs it spits out from your 1,000 character-plus links can now be changed to whatever name you want after the forward slash--that is as long as it hasn't been taken by someone else.

With the popularity of TinyURL and it's automatic integration with services like Twitter, most of the good ones have already been snatched up, so if you're looking … Read more