AOL outages and service status in Mountain View, California

Problems in the last 24 hours in Mountain View, California

The chart below shows the number of AOL reports we have received in the last 24 hours from users in Mountain View, California and surrounding areas. An outage is declared when the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line.

Community Discussion

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AOL Issues Reports Near Mountain View, California

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in Mountain View and nearby locations:

• 
  Jeff LaMarche (@jeff_lamarche) reported 12 minutes ago from Cupertino, California

  @octothorpe PCPursuit wasn’t shenanigans. Totally legit service that let you use TeleNet (dial up backbone used by aol and compuserve) to make outbound calls in other regions. Was like $30/month. Now you could get to places to learn about shenanigans using it…

• 
  Jeff Meyer (@meyerjr) reported 48 minutes ago from Sunnyvale, California

  @harrymccracken Alas, my AOL CD just got scratched and I'm off line until they answer my support escalation call requesting a replacement.

• 
  John K. Lin (@johnklin) reported 57 minutes ago from Mountain View, California

  @ccwu I remember being a Quantum Link subscriber on my Commodore 64 and 300 baud modem and that service disappearing fairly quickly. I only learned later from Kara Swisher's book on AOL that Quantum Link was the precursor to AOL.

AOL Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  Brett (@hvacguy) reported 4 minutes ago

  Remember growing up, pre internet. You only interacted with bad people by accident or bad decisions The internet added the bad people to your kids bedrooms, your phone, and your mind. I miss the AOL dialup format of the internet.

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  T s (@Ts7705421096234) reported 5 minutes ago

  @harryjsisson Cool. Mapquest is a thing again. Maybe I will stop getting **** for using my aol email from 30 years ago. Every thing comes back into style?

• 
  Louis, Tencent Fan (@LouisaCommie) reported 8 minutes ago

  @IANdrewDiceClay I feel like the more interesting hypothetical would be if aol timer warner just never happened and wcw just went further into the 2000s same status quo, qoukd they eventually get a booker better then Eric and russo? I assume ny the time turner retires streaming era has started

• 
  Ryan Clark (@ryan_theprofit) reported 8 minutes ago

  My dad replied to news about my girlfriend with a green check mark. Honestly, appropriate. Our generation only writes well over text because we had to get good at it to date. AOL Instant Messenger, then years of practice with the stakes turned all the way up. His generation never needed the skill, so they never built it. The thumbs up isn't him being short with you. It's the whole sentence.

• 
  Ragh Pandragon (@RaghPandragon) reported 8 minutes ago

  The truth is stranger. Long ago in the 90's there was still magic in the world every time you wanted to get on the internet you had to electrocute one fairy. Just one. Unfortunately disconnects were an issue. Slowly, one connection at a time, we fed all of the magic creatures into the gaping maw of oblivion to power our ICQ chats and AOL instant messengers. At least until Human Energy Update 3.9 Service Pack 2. Now every time you log in you just lose a little bit of your own soul, no fairy deaths required.

• 
  Paul Walsh (@Paul__Walsh) reported 16 minutes ago

  People keep asking why Apple allowed OpenAI to build a ChatGPT integration for Messages. Do get to the point, I don’t think Apple anticipated a company using the permissions required by ChatGPT specifically to read, analyse and store people’s Messages when the Messages app includes iMessage and not just SMS. The entire point of iMessage is that it’s rich media *and* end to end encrypted. The permissions OpenAI needs exist for legitimate software, and Apple warns people before granting them. Backup software needs Full Disk Access to back up protected files. Security software needs it to inspect files for malicious activity. Disk utilities need it to search, recover and manage protected files. It’s similar to WebView. It gave developers a way to display parts of an app that could change without requiring a new app release and App Store review, such as terms of service, privacy policies and other remotely hosted content. In 2014, I predicted developers would eventually use WebView across every major app, with some apps built almost entirely inside it. I also warned this would create a security problem because WebView had no protection against dangerous links or malicious code typically found on webpages. Developers could make a WebView look identical to the native app, so people wouldn’t know whether they were using the app itself or interacting with a website. Today, in-app security is a multibillion dollar industry because it’s obvious that opening links inside an app might not be as safe as it should be. Most predictions, especially in the context of digital risk, are not believed by a lot of people. But they become obvious eventually. Today, I’m saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT integration with Apple Messages is more dangerous for some people than almost anything else on the market. Of course someone can take screenshots and send them to the FBI, repeat something they were told, or deliberately share a private conversation. That completely misses the point. None of those things is equivalent to giving an AI service automated access to read, analyse and store entire message histories involving everyone someone communicates with. Comparing deliberate human disclosure with automated access at scale ignores the capability that makes this fundamentally different. And why it removes the main benefit of end to end encryption. I can’t comprehend how security professionals can defend anything that undermines the purpose of end to end encryption by saying "but encryption isn’t broken". Protecting messages while they’re being transmitted means very little if an agent can systematically read, analyse and store them before they’re sent or after they’re received. Apple permissions have legitimate purposes. This particular use of them is the problem. During the early 2000s, I advocated for browser extensions. During the mid to late 2000s, before the first iPhone when mobile web didn't exist, I advocated for mobile web instead of WAP. In 2015, I advocated for chatbot integrations across messaging platforms and business tools. I’m a developer advocate, an open standards advocate, child safety advocate, and privacy advocate. I co-founded 2 W3C initiatives, including the Mobile Web Initiative, where I was tasked with rewriting Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of "One Web". And was a significant contributor to 8 technical specifications, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. I care about humanity. I don’t advocate for one thing in isolation from everything else. I’m a technical expert in specific areas with OSINT skills and 30 years across web, telecom, and mobile. 💡 I consider every stakeholder affected by open standards, technology, and legislation. Sometimes convenience justifies a privacy tradeoff. Sometimes privacy should take priority over security, and sometimes security should take priority over privacy. None of these should be treated as an absolute regardless of the consequences. In 2017, the PKI Consortium asked me to advise them privately and write about the impact DV SSL certificates and HTTPS Everywhere were having on anti phishing security. I faced fierce criticism from privacy advocates who argued that the connection should be encrypted even if the person on the other end was an impersonator. Those were their words. If you care, search for "Insecure Elephant in the Room". The fundamental reasons phishing works were the same when I was impersonated in 1996 when phishing was first discovered on the AOL network, the same when I wrote about it in 2017, and the same today. Now I have to argue with some security professionals defending something that undermines the purpose of end to end encryption. They need to look beyond the mechanics of software and encryption. Technology is an enabler. We need to consider human behaviour, how people will actually use a capability, and what happens when that behaviour occurs at scale. Also, the potential intent that goes beyond a website or privacy statement. I’ve faced this repeatedly over the years. Today, when I argue that government policies and age verification introduced in the name of online child safety and preventing child exploitation are actually surveillance measures, child safety advocates accuse me of not caring about children. This isn’t rocket science. Add AI to everything, even if you’re willing to accept the risks to yourself. But please don’t add AI in ways that undermine another person’s right to privacy or, depending on the context, their personal safety. Some people's lives depend on their ability to rely on end to end encryption. We're not talking about SMS. 💡Criticising the technology used to pursue an objective doesn’t mean opposing the objective.

• 
  JP (@SorceryPelvic) reported 19 minutes ago

  @byoanarchy I will admit I was a "bad" student but they locked me in the server(aol dial up) closet for a month until my mom found out and almost burned the place down.

• 
  Ian Jacobs (@WSoxPovertyFran) reported 20 minutes ago

  @chisportsross He’s on the spectrum, ain’t nothing going on in that head of his, but put basketball through hoop. Listening to AOL dial up noises as his hype track. All that to say it’s entirely not just believable, but likely that he was too stupid to understand a single thing going on.

• 
  Lobster Thermidor (@scenicresorts) reported 21 minutes ago

  There was an Internet before the internet. My parents bought an IBM PS1 from sears as our first modern computer when I was in elementary school. It came with Prodigy which was like a big BBS and a free trial of Compuserve, which I think was the predecessor to AOL, both ran on dial up. I liked compuserve better because it had chat rooms but it had some heinous bill by the minute rate once you exhausted the free trial. At 8 years old the only thing that occurred to me to do with this technology was to relentlessly and nonsensically troll the chat rooms until I ultimately got banned from the entire platform. Well, a month later my mom gets a $200 bill from compuserve (I blew well past the free trial) and she calls them irate. Apparently in this call she was told I ran up the charges and btw I was also banned. She couldn’t believe this so I guess she asked why I was banned and the rep told her I was spamming their chat rooms saying “I like big breasted women” which was apparently against their terms of service and they would not be refunding anything given my behaviour. Got home from 3rd grade that day to get quite an ear full about this. But I guess I get bonus points for being banned from the internet before there even was an internet. I still like big breasted women tho you can’t hold me down.

• 
  Michael (@Mikehb1989) reported 21 minutes ago

  Aol Mail is so bad it won't even let you log out 👎👎👎#Aolmail