It has taken more than a decade, but PayPal -- the coaster of the Internet that has had a downhill ride with the wind at its back pretty much since acquisition -- is finally under serious threat. It may not be showing up in PayPal's numbers yet. Indeed, by the time you start to see these things on…

A s your plane descends upon New Delhi, a soft orange haze engulfs you, drawing you in. A cascade of shanty towns drift below, clogged arteries of traffic dividing the landscape into innumerable scattered shards of populace. If you land in the evening, the haze throbs over the country with a dull…

Annals of Technology June 12, 2012 Editors’ Note: The introductory paragraphs of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal. We regret the duplication of material. Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and…

An audio version of this essay is available to subscribers, provided by curio.io. The deep infiltration of digital information into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding loss of logged-off real life. Each moment is oversaturated with digital potential: Texts, status…

Your support helps us to tell the story Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which…

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. . . A Million Years Ago I. Los Angeles Police Department detective Stephanie Lazarus has a very expressive, elastic face. At 51 she looks at least 10 years younger. Her straight brown hair is shoulder-length, with bangs that fall at an angle to either side of her forehead, and her manner is…

Gaming Defining Tetris: How courts judge gaming clones Legal battle lays out when copycats go too far. Kyle Orland – Jun 20, 2012 3:23 pm | 53 The fact that it's hard to tell which one is Tetris and which one is Mino bolstered the copyright infringement claim. The fact that it's hard to tell which…

Think of a seed buried in a pot. Like this one: It's dark down there in the potting soil. There's no light, no sunshine. So how does it know which way is up and which way is down? It does know. Seeds routinely send shoots up toward the sky, and roots the other way. Darkness doesn't confuse them.…

Weil Deutschland offensichtlich sein Neonazi-Problem alles andere als in den Griff bekommt, hier unsere große Neonazi-Umfrage. Eher nicht repräsentativ, aber dafür auch nicht pc. Hier sind die Lösungsansätze unserer Experten. Marcus Staiger Videos by VICE „Das gute Gewissen des deutschen Rap“ Manuel…

After decades of misguided hysteria, the War on Drugs may have an epidemic worth freaking out about, and it’s spreading across state and demographic lines at the speed of the Internet.

The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country's east, making...something

A few years ago, I came to the rather life-changing conclusion that God doesn’t exist. In the past couple of years, my friends and family have noticed me becoming more vocal about my skepticism of theism and my pointed disdain for religion. Many people in my family are fervently religious, and I…

When John Jeremiah Sullivan and his wife leveraged everything they had to buy a big brick neo-Colonial in Wilmington, North Carolina (the Hollywood of the South!), their realtor made an irresistible proposal: By allowing a popular teen TV show to film at the house a few days a month, they could…

Daily Comment May 23, 2012 I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have…

On the Café’s forums were men looking for men, men looking for women (the ideal: short, buxom, thin redheads) and women looking for men—very few posts, if any, were for women looking for women. There were people who wanted to be eaten and people who wanted to do the eating. There were stories,…

The Computer Lab's Beyond Cyberpunk Hypercard stack Beyond Cyberpunk! Update: It's Memorial Day weekend here in the US, and the Ars staff has a long weekend accordingly. Many will spend that time rela

The first time I heard a mother of girls talk about the teenage oral-sex craze, I made her cry. The story she told me—about a bar mitzvah dinner dance on the North Shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered bus from the temple to the reception hall—was so preposterous…

Linke Opposition in den USA: Wer besetzt Occupy? Nr. 21 – 24. Mai 2012 Das Label «Occupy» ist längst in Mode gekommen – so sehr, dass manche radikale AktivistInnen mittlerweile Exklusivität beanspruchen. Das jedoch verträgt sich schlecht mit den Grundsätzen einer offenen Bewegung. Von Occupy Wall…

Aus dem Maschinenraum : Und hinter tausend Masken kein Gesicht Von Constanze Kurz 24.05.2012, 16:45Lesezeit: 4 Min. „We are Legion“: Das Hacker-Kollektiv Anonymous schaffte es jüngst in die „Time“-Liste der 100 einflussreichsten Personen 2012dapd „Anonymous“ ist nicht nur eine Protestbewegung,…

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine. Illustration by Mark Matcho "Don't take anything that happens to you there personally," the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at…

Nate St. Pierre's web-friendly adventures with Honest Abe were literally too good to be true. Brian Fung It started with a headline I saw pinging around Twitter yesterday afternoon. Abraham Lincoln, my friends' tweets informed me, had invented a 19th-century version of Facebook. Yes! This previously…

T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet. lisaquinn565.wordpress A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead…

Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. This story is part of our July/August 2012 issue See the rest of the issue Subscribe Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, this assertion will sound exaggerated. But…

Science fiction has portrayed its fair share of glitchy and bumbling robots over the years, but none hold a candle to Invader Zim’s GIR. Quite possibly the most erratic and unhelpful robot to ever hit the screen, GIR has become one the most loved and oft-quoted characters to appear in a sci-fi…

Previous chapter « Assembling Ogg Soundtracks for an Ogg Video with Audacity, VLC, and Command Line Tools All chapters Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I've been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out,…

Once a secret project, Google’s self-driving cars are now out in the open, with the company test-driving them on public roads and, on one occasion, even inviting people to ride inside one of the robot vehicles as it raced around a closed course. Google’s fleet of robotic Toyota Priuses has now…

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). To start fleshing out ideas, I am doing a three-part series on this blog: part one was posted Tuesday (“Hipstamatic and…

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). I want to start fleshing out ideas and will do so with a three-part series on this blog: I posted part one yesterday…

I am working on a dissertation about self-documentation and social media and have decided to take on theorizing the rise of faux-vintage photography (e.g., Hipstamatic, Instagram). I want to start fleshing out ideas and will do so with a three-part series on this blog: I will post part two…

Yesterday, I was at the gym. ...Don't worry. This isn't a gym story. This is a story about a boy who needed to hear something important. But it happened at the gym. So that's why I started with the bit about being in the gym. If you were hoping for a gym story... Well, you could call this one if you…

26 April 2012 – Baldur Bjarnason A bit of an utopian fantasy but, I think, an essential one. We need visions of where we're heading with this. Everybody knows what it feels like. You’re thrown from crisis to crisis, locked into solving problems, resolving issues, keeping things from breaking down,…

When designing a secure service that stores user data, you might be temped to say “let’s make sure the data is encrypted.” That statement implies that you’re proposing adding goodness, without taking anything away. Something like “I’d like some of that delicious gravy on my roast turkey, please.”…

[Translations: Belarusian, Chinese, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a…

Meeko the calf stood nuzzling a pile of hay. He didn’t seem to have much appetite, and he looked a little bored. Every now and then, he glanced up, as though wondering why so many people with clipboar