AOL announced that it has closed a deal to sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft. The deal is just north of a billion dollars, and it's easy to see why AOL might want to cash in on the intellectual property. What is less clear is why Microsoft is interested in the patent portfolio, or what Microsoft gains from the deal.

AOL has entered into a definitive agreement to sell over 800 of its patents and their related patent applications to Microsoft, it said Monday.

Many law enforcement agencies across the U.S. track mobile phones as part of investigations, but only a minority ask for court-ordered warrants, according to a new report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

AOL decommissioned almost 10,000 servers and saved itself US$5 million along the way to winning a contest that highlights the cost of running inefficient or underutilized IT equipment.

U.S. Senate legislation that would require mobile apps to get permission to check the geolocation of a user is among the bills that make up trade group NetChoice's latest list of "awful" bills for e-commerce.

Despite a report today that AOL is killing off its popular instant messaging service, the company says that's not true.

Google and AOL have restored the interoperability between their two instant messaging (IM) networks, a little over two weeks after it was temporarily suspended due to a spam flood originating in AOL's AIM that affected Gmail Chat and Google Talk users.

AOL hopes to roll out a fix soon to a spam surge in its AIM service targeting Google IM users, a situation that prompted Google to temporarily shut down the interoperability between the two instant messaging networks.

Ah, AOL -- just when it looked like you were about to slip into boring mediocrity, you surprise us yet again with your antics.

What do you get when you mix a tottering giant from the InterWebs' formative years with the new breed of post-first-ask-questions-later news blogs? We're about to find out, now that AOL has swallowed up TechCrunch.