How J.C. Penney gamed Google and became the top result for searches on everything from “area rugs” to “skinny jeans.”

When Conan O’Brien left NBC, he agreed to stay off TV for months and stay quiet about the network and its executives. The agreement contained no mention of social media, however. On the origins of a digital renaissance.

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity; when will our minds meld with the machine?

A requiem for the ‘content portal’ era.

From the Greeks to George Lucas, 2,200 years of failure.

On the group of friends who came to rule the bizarre, decreasingly lucrative world of Internet porn.

“I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices. But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head…‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

How a legally dubious FBI sting lured a pair of Russian hackers stateside.

How YouTube went from ubiquitous to profitable; and where it goes next.

A remembrance of relationships formed when the author, at 13 and using a false identity, frequented hockey chat rooms.

Most military experts agree that robots, not people, will inevitably do the fighting in ground wars. In Tennessee, a high-end gunsmith is already there. The story of Jerry Baber and his robot army.

A profile of Jobs. The themes: immortality, relinquishing control, and how being adopted affected his choices for Apple. The lede: “One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.”

Fifteen years ago, Sherry Turkle developed a little crush on a robot named Cog. Since then, the MIT professor has been studying our ever-increasing emotional reliance on technology. She’s not optimistic about where we’re headed.

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: Why wasn't I consulted?

How Internet porn has altered the ways we think about, and engage in, sex.

The new purgatory; what becomes of digital identities after death.

How Zion, Ill., a fundamentalist Christian settlement with a population of 6,250, created one of the most popular stations in the country during the early days of radio.

A working definition of ‘net neutrality’, a bestiary of the major players, and why the issue isn’t a cut and dry case of good vs. evil.

On boot camps designed to break kids of their web addiction.

Where the actual online money is centralized, and where Google will have to go to continue chasing it.

What happened to the minds behind Napster, Gnutella, WinAmp, and BitTorrent after their creations irrevocably changed business and culture.

An interview with Douglas Hofstadter, who after winning the Pulitzer for Gödel, Escher, Bach retreated into the lab and published only sparingly in technical journals, on what it would mean if a program could generate humor and/or masterful compositions.

The prosecutor in the case of hacker turned F.B.I. informant (but still hacker) Albert Gonzales and his organization Shadowcrew : “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

New technology has historically been a friend to the porn industry, first VHS, then online DVD sales. But free streaming sites like YouPorn have sent the establishment into a tailspin, and due to anonymous domain registration, they don’t even know who their competition is. Will the internet kill porn?