An IDC study has found sweeping changes in how mobile display advertisements are sold, with Facebook, Pandora and Twitter successfully wresting away control from advertising networks over the last year.

Twitter has implemented DMARC, a standard for preventing email spoofing, in order to make it harder for attackers to send phishing emails that appear to come from twitter.com addresses.

Intellectual property company I/P Engine has sued Microsoft for infringing two search patents it acquired from Lycos.

MacroSolve, an Oklahoma company focused on enforcing its patents, has added Sears to a growing list of companies it has targeted with patent infringement lawsuits, it said Wednesday.

The partnership AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft announced last week to sell each other's "tier 2" display ad inventory could yield great benefits, but they need to pull off a complex integration of business and technology to make it work.

Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have partnered to pool their display ad inventories and integrate their sales platforms so that they can offer each other's ads.

Ending a service it has offered for well over a decade, AOL is shutting down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company told mailing list administrators.

Users of NoSQL databases and data processing frameworks such as CouchDB and Hadoop are deploying these new technologies for their speed, scalability and flexibility, judging from a number of sessions at the NoSQL Now conference being held this week in San Jose, California.

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.