The geniuses at Google, the world's most arrogantly clever ad sellers, have announced plans to target ads to Internet users based on their "interests." You can opt out — but there's a catch. Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president who's also the sister-in-law of cofounder Sergey Brin, announ...

Only lawyers and nerds get excited about debating a website's terms of service. And yet Facebook managed to turn a change in its legalese into a PR nightmare. Here's an anatomy of the debacle. The story broke on Sunday in Consumerist (a website recently sold by Gawker Media to the publisher of Consu...

Hope and change has come to Google Maps. The official residence of the vice president, obscured until Dick Cheney's last days in office and residence, now shines in satellite sunlight. A reader tipped us off that Google Maps now showed a clear overhead image of One Observatory Circle (above), the ad...

Alleged $50 billion swindler Bernie Madoff has been confined to his house between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. Ah, but which house? There's the apartment at 133 E. 64th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side. But there's also the beach house in Montauk, which VirtualGlobeTrotting spotted via Micros...

Is Google becoming the king of the Web? Well, duh — that happened about five years ago, before anyone really noticed. But activist groups, now and again, worry about whether Google knows too much about us. Yesterday, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson quizzes Google CEO Eric Schmidt about whethe...

newVideoPlayer("/boxer_fisa.flv", 494, 368,""); HR 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, cleared the U.S. Senate in a 69-28 vote today, including retroactive immunity for AT&T, Sprint, and other telecom carriers that helped the U.S. spy on people for five years. Is the fight over? No. Who voted for...

Do Floridians search more passionately for "bukkake" than "ethanol"?. Nobody thought to enter that data into the public record until Clinton McCowen, the proprietor of CumOnHerFace.com, was slapped with obscenity charges by the State of Florida, and his defense attorney turned to Google for aid. Las...

Internet libertarians and Texas-haters are eagerly piling on a new Texas law that they claim requires all PC repair techs to obtain a private investigator's license. Infurating? Yes. True? Not really. The bill's author has spent the day sighing to reporters that the law amends existing occupations c...

In order to prove ownership of a MySpace account, the company asks users to film themselves reading their account number to the camera. Brad Troemel assembled a number of these clips into Proof , a mesmerizing look into MySpace's user base. The clips were selected from a larger and more diverse coll...

An eBay seller going by the handle pseudopr415 is offering 10 Facebook profiles, each with a minimum of 200 friends, for sale in an eBay auction that closes June 14. The seller writes: "I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these." Facebook...