Alex Goldman

Last week brought us two patent troll stories.

Do you remember Lycos? It was sort of the proto-Google, and was, for a time in the late 90's, the most visited site on the web. Those days are now long gone, but patents that were once owned by Lycos are now being used to force Google to fork over a hefty chunk  of its revenue.

Slender Man - The Internet's Monster

Prince is suing 22 fans, for $1 million a piece, for posting links to bootlegs of his concerts on filesharing sites. This is just the latest volley in Prince's long standing love/hate (well, mostly hate/hate) relationship with the internet.

Hunting For YouTube's Saddest Comments

Yesterday, revenge porn pioneer and all around gross dude Hunter Moore was indicted by the United States District Court for the Central District of California. But even though California has revenge porn statutes on the books, the bulk of the charges were made under what is known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or, more colloquially, The Hacker Law.

UPDATE: read indictment below.

Time Magazine is reporting that Hunter Moore has been indicted by a grand jury for conspiracy to “access a protected computer without authorization to obtain information for private financial gain.” There aren't many details available and I haven't seen a copy of the indictment online, but will update the story as that information comes in. In the meantime, I've embedded Bob's interview with Moore from December of 2011 below:

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Will internet users be interested in a service that allows them to do a search 40,000 radio stations throughout the world? One entrepreneur thinks so.

If there is one idea that PJ and I drive towards both on the TLDR blog and on the podcast, it's that the internet can be a beautiful, magical place. It is the staging ground for so much cleverness and creativity and humanity. So, imagine my delight this morning when I stumbled upon a Reddit subreddit called "internet is beautiful."

Another day, another hysterical report on the demise of Facebook.

Sean Smith was an IT manager in the real world, but online, he was Vile Rat, a hugely influential diplomat in the video game Eve Online

Making Money the 100-Songs-a-Day Way

Ther have been two wholly unrelated truths about Twitter almost since the service premiered. The first is that it has a black and Hispanic userbase that is much larger than the internet as a whole. The second is the service remains unprofitable. Twitter is hoping to seize on the first point to rectify the second.

It's has simply become a fact of life now that personal information is going to be compromised by hackers. Both private and public entities are routinely having information stolen because they are either unable or unwilling to properly inoculate against these kinds of attacks. So if you can't rely on third parties to safeguard your data, there should at least be a way to know if it has fallen into the hands of hackers. Now there is.

Back in October, Daniel Drucker told the TLDR podcast he was looking through his recently deceased dad's computer when he found a document that contained only joke punchlines. It on...

Yesterday, the US District Attorney's Office for the Souther District of New York announced the forfeiture of 29,655 bitcoins from the servers it seized from Ross Ulbricht, the owner of defunct internet drug marketplace Silk Road. According to this bitcoin converter, that is about $24.5 million dollars worth of bitcoins. But since the US doesn't legally allow bitcoin exchanges, what can the feds do with it?

At 11:00 AM, President Obama will be giving a press conference to announce reforms to the current NSA data storage regime. Watch the conference live on the embedded player below. Be sure to tune in to this week's On the Media for a special comment on the NSA surveillance story by Brooke.

There was a time when leaving negative reviews of a business on the internet was a no risk proposition. If a company burned you, or even if you were a competitor leaving a fake review, the business couldn't really do anything about it. That appears, however slowly, to be changing.

I am generally not a fan of advertising of any kind. Print, billboards, TV - no matter how creative you are, I find it an annoying distraction that I try to tune out. But there have been a couple of smart attempts at online advertising recently that were great not so much for their content, but for their rollout. They spoke to me because is was clear that the folks behind the campaigns have a pretty good grip on the internet.

With all the alerts and tracking your cell phone does, it can feel a bit like an overbearing mother. At this year's Consumer Electronic Expo, a company called Sense is exhibiting a pr...

One of yesterday's big viral stories was by Cracked reporter Alli Reed, who used OkCupid to create the self-described "Worst Online Dating Profile Ever." Reed used pictures of a model friend of hers, and then loaded the profile with nods to the fictional woman being manipulative, narcissistic, and a little crazy.