Internet | featured news

It’s almost as if President Obama wants the internet to make a meme out of him in the final week of the election. After dialing a wrong number while making calls from a campaign field office in Florida on Sunday, Obama turned to AP photographer Pablo Martinez Monsavis and made this sort-of-smug, sort-of-sassy face. And now, many bloggers and social media users are calling it the best photo of the president, ever.

A 43-year-old Department of Homeland Security worker allegedly used Facebook to solicit more than 70 area children for sexual acts, according to authorities. Robert B. Rennie Jr., a Loudoun County resident, was charged Oct. 24 with five counts of using a computer to solicit a child under the age of 15, after a school resource officer was tipped off to suspicious activity on a Mercer Middle School student's Facebook page.

Michael Rubin is lucky. And he’s also damned good. Lucky, because eBay approached him last year with a $2.4 billion offer to buy his moneylosing GSI Commerce–which provides Web design, customer service and shipping to big-brand retailers–a 51% premium over the share price. Damned, because Rubin has always played so loose and fast that he’s nearly brought on his own ruin–and stoked the wrath of shareholders. Good, because he has an uncanny eye for undervalued assets and a lifelong talent for turning them into gold.

Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.

A new study finds that teens who had access to the Internet on their cellphones were more than twice as likely to engage in sex with a person they met online compared with those without access to the Internet on their phones.

A father accused of binding his toddler daughter with painter’s tape and then posting a picture on Facebook was acquitted Tuesday of unlawful restraint but still faces a pair of domestic battery charges, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Electrons work for free, except, of course in major storms -- as several prominent websites discovered... Lost sites beginning [Monday] night included the Huffington Post, Gawker and the blog Mediaite. Huffington Post was back by Tuesday morning, but the site was a bit skimpier. According to a statement posted on a website of the more traditional kind, CBS News, the problem seemed to be flooding.

Imagine taking a university exam in your own home, under the watchful eye of a webcam or with software profiling your keystrokes or your syntax to see whether it really is you answering the questions.

You don't need to have evil motives for wanting to fake your identity or go incognito online; for many people, it's a matter of privacy and avoiding spammers and scammers. Thankfully, there are a great many tools for staying anonymous online.

Massachusetts fined Citigroup $2 million to settle charges that two bank analysts improperly released confidential information about Facebook's financials before the technology company went public.