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 ...

At 2:01 this afternoon, a bunch of journalism-related Twitter accounts suddenly started tweeting this cryptic message: "f gwenifill." If you search twitter for the phrase, you see that it's very widespread, and that no one really seems to know what's going on. 

Scientific American reports on a study that shows job applicants who know their prospective boss viewed their social media profiles are more likely to think that their hiring process was unfair. This is even true in cases where the applicant gets the job. 

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 ...

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 product actually called Mother, designed to stick its virtual nose into just about everything you do.

Anyone who can see your post can see a full history of its edits. All they have to do is click the gray text that reads "Edited" at the bottom of your comment, just to the left of the "Like" button.

See the picture that leads this article? It's pretty intense, right? Techdirt shared a story this morning from a couple weeks ago about an anti-immigrant conservative Florida political group that posted this image on its Facebook. The only problem is that the image was lifted from the video game Bioshock Infinite, ...

If you weren’t on the internet last week (apparently there were holidays) you might’ve missed this small story about Iron Maiden. A blog called citeworld wrote that the band was using data about where their music was most pirated in order to plan their tours.

If 2014 is the year we read a never-ending parade of stories about the Death of Facebook, you can probably safely ignore them. The first sign that Facebook’s actually in trouble will be when it's no longer popular enough to earn clickbait pieces about its imminent death.

Hello everyone! 

In September, after the Navy Yard shooting, a journalism professor at Kansas University posted the following tweet:

Yesterday, the Ottawa Citizen posted a link to a website that featured a scandal-tainted Canadian Senator named Mike Duffy doing a fundraising pitch. Given ongoing accusations that Duffy was misappropriating government funds, it was an interesting piece of web-arcana that the conservative party certainly wouldn't want to draw attention to. But what made ...

Apple has a new iPhone ad that's really an ad for the idea of smartphones. 

Kim sent the threatening emails using a Tor browser, which anonymizes your web browsing, paired with an anonymous email program called Guerilla Mail. That actually could have been enough to protect his identity, except that he did all of this on Harvard's wireless internet. 

Yesterday, blogger Matthew Keys published the kind of nerdy exclusive that excites a small percentage of geeks (present company included). Twitter, Keys wrote, was going to add an “edit” button in the near future.

The piece doesn't include any on camera interviews with critics of the NSA, and interviews with NSA employees were overseen by a team of minders.

Last Friday, I marveled at the news that an e-petition to the White House had actually created a policy change. 

NPR reported yesterday on a deal between the FCC and cell phone companies that will continue to allow consumers to legally unlock their cellphones. Unlocking had been legal, then briefly illegal, and now it's ok again. 

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how the trend in revenge porn prosecutions (there's been more of them) seems like a good sign in the overall war on revenge porn. 

Last night, Twitter abruptly changed the way its block function works. 

Marion Stokes was a hoarder. When she died last year, her family had to figure out what to do with 9 separate residences and 3 storage locations full of stuff. This is the story of how they found a home for the strangest artifact in her collection — 140,000 videocassettes ...

Randy Liedtke, the guy behind the Pace Picante hoax, has gone viral again. This time, it's because he's baked a bunch of cookies that look like iPhones so that he can get wrongly pulled over for driving while talking.

Kevin Bollaert was arrested yesterday in California.

If you still think funeral selfies need defending, at the very least this is no longer something you can blame on millennials. Also, someone needs to track down this actual selfie.

Someone went and created a fake Captcha generator. 

Last week, we threw up our hands in the face of the endless deluge of viral hoaxes. Then, we tried to make peace with living in a fake world and even found a lie that we liked. Well, it's Monday, and just like you and I, viral internet hoaxes are ...

The Guardian reported this morning that the NSA and their UK sister agency, the GCHQ, are spying on gamers.

This has been a crazy season for internet hoaxes. This week, we investigate one we actually deeply enjoyed being fooled by -- about a social media bot for Pace Picante Salsa going insane and inadvertently revealing an entire world of corporate conspiracy.

Facebook announced plans this week to tweak their news feed algorithm to serve users more high quality content and less of what Facebook called “the latest meme.”

So that Diane story, about a guy proudly live tweeting his bullying of an upset airline passenger, has turned out to be a fraud. 

Like a lot of people, I’ve loved JD Salinger since junior high. I grew up hanging out on a street corner in Wayne, Pennsylvania, down the street from Salinger’s old high school, Valley Forge Military Academy, which he seems to have based Catcher in the Rye’s Pencey Prep ...

There's an Infowars story that's beginning to circulate widely about a seemingly very Orwellian move by Facebook. 

Today, Goldieblox wrote an open letter response to the Beastie Boys open letter (relatedly, everyone knows you can privately mail a letter too, right?) saying that they have taken that "Girls" parody ad down.

Glenn Greenwald pops up in The Huffington Post today, with a new Snowden leak story. This one is about how the NSA has spied on the porn viewing habits of six unidentified Muslim targets. 

You’ve probably seen this by now. Goldieblox, a company that makes toys designed to get young girls excited about engineering , is suing the Beastie Boys for the right to use a parody of the song “Girls” in a YouTube ad for their toys. 

On Wednesday, AOL announced plans to shut down Winamp, which was the first decent MP3 player for many early adopters of online music. 

One of my favorite OTM interviews is one from a few years ago between Brooke and a Queens historian named Joseph De May. 

Ross Ulbricht, the alleged creator of the Silk Road, was denied bail yesterday. Prosecutors also released additional evidence against Ulbricht. The big headline was the allegation that Ulbricht has ordered as many as 6 murders, up from the previously alleged 2.

The JFK library has been running a project this year where they tweet Kennedy's last year alive, 1963. 

Producer Alex Goldman on why last week's ruling on the Google Books project is important.

Over the weekend, New York comedian Kyle Ayers livetweeted the conversation of a couple as they broke up on the roof next to him. 

Trey Radel is a Florida Congressman who was charged with cocaine possession today. 

Smile! It’s The Year of the Selfie.

Rather is a new Chrome extension that promises to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams for you, replacing content you hate with content you like.

Business Insider reports that, as of this month, Snapchat users are sharing more Snaps than Facebook users are sharing photos. 

Over at ATD, Peter Kafka reports that Rap Genius, the website that applies Talmudic analysis to hip hop lyrics, has made a licensing deal with Sony/ATV, the world's biggest music publisher.

Forbes' Andy Greenberg has a piece today profiling someone who calls themself Kuwabatake Sanjuro, the founder of the website Assassination Market. 

This is cute. Happy Hour Virus is a website that'll let you choose a fake virus for your computer to be afflicted with, so that you can sigh exasperatedly and leave work early. 

If your Facebook feed is anything like my Facebook feed, the most ubiquitous story right now is about an invisible bike helmet invented by Swedish university students.

One of the things that people who loved the Twitter account horse_ebooks loved about it was that it took the language of internet spam and created something that sometimes felt like a poetic artifact.

The Daily Dot reports that the National Music Publishers Association is going after lyrics websites for copyright infringement.

Kickstarter's based on trust. You give someone money, and you hope that they'll build the thing they said they would, and not just steal your money. Stories about scams are rarer than you'd think.

Before the Internet as we know it today, there were text-based bulletin board systems all over the country that people could dial into. Producer Alex Goldman revisits the BBS he used to log into more than 20 years ago and finds out it's still up and running.

AllThingsVice reports today that an anonymous group has started the Silk Road 2.0. They've even adopted the Dread Pirate Roberts moniker. 

You know you’re old, or at least a little old, when you start to love obsolete things for their uselessness.

Amazon announced a new program this week for independent booksellers. The deal: bookstores sell Kindles, and Amazon gives them a small cut of the sale plus commission on the buyers' first two years of eBook purchases.

“At least I saw the movie Gattaca.”

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has finally admitted that he has smoked crack. Back in May, Gawker broke the story of a video that allegedly (can we stop saying allegedly yet?) showed the mayor smoking crack, but those reports had done little to damage his credibility.

Welcome back to /r/ politics, Mother Jones. 

Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, would like some more money. Levison became a hero online after shutting down Lavabit in the face of government pressure to allow snooping on his users.

Tomorrow is Anonymous’s Million Mask March. It’s designed as a global series of multi-city demonstrations, although it’s not clear what’s being demonstrated.

Up until this fall, there was a secret internet. You probably heard about one part of it, the Silk Road, but that was just one secret website among many. On the latest episode of TLDR, we talk to Gawker's Adrian Chen about the rest of the dark part of the ...