Two self-described hackers say they’ve breached an AOL account belonging to CIA Director John Brennan, the New York Post reports. If their claim is true, this means a pair of teenagers has access to the personal files of one of the most powerful men in the world.

In May 2011, Tim Armstrong spent a day at work barefoot to raise awareness about barefoot children, instead of just donating money to barefoot children to buy them shoes. This is the kind of boss Tim Armstrong is: ineffectual, vapid and stupid.

Telecom giant Verizon will gobble up AOL for a cool $4.4 billion, at $50 a share, in a deal described by the Wall Street Journal as “aimed at advancing the telecom giant’s growth ambitions in mobile video and advertising.”

An 83-year-old Los Angeles man couldn’t believe the bills AT&T kept sending him for his simple landline phone account—more than $24,000 over two months. But the company insisted he had to pay it, even though it seemed impossible that dialing up to AOL—the only thing he really used the line for—could cost that much.

That little blue "verified" checkmark on Twitter means something. It's for stars, people the common folk aspire to emulate. People whose valuable Personal Brands™ are at stake. People like William Shatner. And definitely not those pissant "nobodies" in the media.

As a company, AOL has made some horrible decisions. Slightly worse than its merger with Time Warner—one of the biggest disasters in American business history—was its decision to let its incredibly popular messaging client, AIM, wither and die. This is why that happened.

When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong explained to his employers this week why he was undercutting their 401(k) plans, he used the example of two "distressed babies" whose care he says cost the company millions. Today, a mother of one of those babies has spoken out.

Patch, the hyperlocal news experiment that launched in 2007, laid off as many as two thirds of its staff on Wednesday, reports Jim Romenesko. The venture, which was bought by Hale Global earlier this month, has been plagued with problems for nearly its entire existence.

Fox Business reports that AOL tried to buy Business Insider late last year for "between $100 million and $150 million," but failed because BI wanted "a more lucrative offer." Wellll, how about if they threw in a Wikipedia page? Ehh?

Patch, AOL's national network of hyperlocal news sites, was born with a big idea: that local news can be profitable... somehow. That may be true. But Patch won't be the one to reap the rewards.

When Arianna Huffington's freelance empire found a new home at AOL, she walked away with $21 million dollars—on the unlikely expectation her unwieldy site would triple its revenue, exploding into profitability. The Smoking Gun got its hands on the full terms of the deal.

Patch, the AOL-owned collection of hyperlocal news sites, will reportedly be laying off as many as 500 people this week.

It turns out that AOL users are not only confusingly out of date regarding their email service, but also they are more likely to head to a strip club for bachelor party festivities. AOL users account for 25.7% of pre-booked entries to strip clubs. Yahoo users follow with 24.6% and Hotmail after with 21.8%.

AOL is shopping around TechCrunch and its other tech properties for around $70-100 million, according to PandoDaily. TechCrunch's history since AOL bought it in 2010 has been as turbulent as the private roller coasters many Facebook employees will likely install in their Silicon Valley mansions post-IPO. After Arianna Huffington was named ruler of AOL's editorial domain she squeezed out former TechCrunch boss Mike Arrington. But it seems she just couldn't be bothered with TechCrunch—after all, it's not even named after her. Now she's refocusing on the Huffington Post.

Following this afternoon's report on Arianna Huffington's AOL email account getting hacked, the new media mogul has confirmed the hack and revealed the culprits: Nigerian scam artists. Happens to the best of us.

Early yesterday morning, Arianna Huffington's AOL email address sent a spam hyperlink to numerous people in her address book. It was an email virus, the apparent product of a hack on the AOL News headmistress' personal account.

Yesterday we brought you the story of Glen Maxey, the gay former Texas legislator who wrote a book recounting his work with an unnamed reporter for an unnamed news outlet to document Rick Perry's homosexual dalliances. According to Politico, that news outlet was none other than the Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington pushed out TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington in September, cementing her role as AOL's one true blog master. Now the slow gutting of TechCrunch continues.

Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL just sealed a deal to sell premium display advertising space for one another and for any smaller companies that join the consortium. That sounds like an antitrust case in the making, but the parties have one accurate defense against charges of collusion: Google is bigger and scarier.

Arianna Huffington found the name "PopEater" tacky, so she threw everyone overboard and shut the AOL entertainment site down. That, at least, is the unauthorized message Huffington's former minions published to the world via Huffington's servers.