A recent article in Slate discusses the legal implications of sexting.  Sexting is the name for sending nude photos via a cell phone.  In a recent case in Greensburg, Pa. three teenage girls were arrested for sexting their boyfriends.  The girls were charged with child pornography ...

I used to have a (semi-crazy) uncle who typically began conversations with lame jokes or bad riddles. This sounds like one he might have used had he lived long enough: What do Thomas Jefferson, a moose, and cyberspace have in common? The answer to that question can be found in a new book, In Search ...

Today's WSJ article on Google's alleged backsliding on net neutrality has spawned a lot of controversy on the web. Google and its blogospheric defenders have articulately defended the practices at issue in the article. But the piece does focus internet policymakers on some basic truths: there are ma...

Everyone knows that hacking into an ex-employer’s computer network, shutting down the email system and deleting core files will land you in prison. Federal laws were designed to catch these types of hackers and put them away. But what about you? Have you every violated any of the dozens of fed...

In nations with strong Internet censorship policies, the government typically runs the effort to block unwanted Web content. China, for instance, uses its vast resources, both technological and human, to maintain its Great Firewall. But Saudi Arabia has followed a different path to acheive similar r...

I think Deven's advice is great, but for those who want to sample Zittrain's new book (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It) before buying it, it's excerpted in the Boston Review this month. (There's also an outline of its ideas in this Harvard Law Review article.) It's a very thoughtful an...

There's an excellent article in today's NY Times Magazine, The Moral Instinct, in which Steven Pinker summarizes recent neuroscience research on the human moral sense.  This bears directly on how we think about justice and morality in cyberspace. He covers the enormous progress (at least since ...

When Marketers Gets Lazy A friend of mine, who just happens to be my favorite author, John Shirley, tipped me onto something rather interesting. It appears that the marketing arm of a web company decided creating something on their own was just a waste of time. Why not just steal a design from someo...

Jill Whalen has just published an interesting Q&A in her well-known "High Rankings Advisor" newsletter entitled "Lost Rankings Due to Site Redesign or Spam?" This article, which I recommend you read in its entirety, contains some very interesting and provocative points worthy of discussion. Summary ...