Jon Ronson is one of our favorite journalists -- he wrote a very good book about extremists called Them, one of his books was turned into the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and he's done some great radio stories for This American Life. He's working on an online documentary called Escape and Control, about people who try to control this internet. 

The motivations of hackers are often obscure. The motivations of the handlers at the Internet Storm Center—the people who stand ready to battle the latest internet malady—are a little easier to understand.  Bob spoke with Alan Paller, the Director of Research at Sans Institute, home to the Internet Storm Center.  Paller says they do it to feel like they're making a difference, for personal pride...and a for leather jacket.

This week has been hack week here at On The Media. We've written about the Paleolithic history of hacking: the jargon file and phone phreaking – but to round out the week, it’s time for some up-to-the-minute hacking news.

It's with no small amount of trepidation that I betray one of my most shameful internet browsing secrets: I find the talk pages and the history of Wikipedia articles far more interesting than the articles themselves. I can spend hours reading about a Wikipedia entry while completely ignoring the actual content of said entry.

Despite their bad reputation, it’s hard to imagine an internet without cookies. The small, suspicious looking files sitting in the bowels of your browser are what allow you to have a shopping cart when visiting Amazon, save your passwords on frequently visited websites and receive the kind of targeted advertising that helps underwrite much of the internet’s free content. Handled responsibly, cookies can be useful tools that respect your anonymity while offering you great services. And if you really don’t like them, well, that’s what your browser’s privacy settings are for.

On Tuesday a federal appeals court reached an interesting and important decision about free speech online. Split 2-1, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a racist and violent online screed threatening then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 was ‘repugnant’ but not criminal. 

This May, we weighed the merits of Apple's curated app store against the Android's big tent model, and what each meant for the future of free speech, but David-Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Awards, suspects that this dichotomy might be a moot point.  Instead, he offers a third option that has been hiding in plain sight.

Since its introduction last week as an invite only service, Google's new social networking service Google+ has added over 10 million users, and has been the subject of endless speculation by the press, techies, and social networkers alike. But just what is it? How does it work? What makes it any different from Facebook or Twitter? Former On the Media producer and unabashed Google fanboy Mark Phillips gives us the lowdown on Google's latest offering.

Last Tuesday a British student logged onto a message board and announced that he was going to burn down his school. Fifty minutes later he was arrested with a gas can and a knife after another member of the message board, on the other side of the world, ...

The basic architecture of the Internet hasn't changed since it was conceived 40 years ago. But what was once the playground of wonks is now the main staging area for the global economy and open to an array of security vulnerabilities. Brooke talks with Internet experts who ponder a vexing ...

Clay Shirky is author of the Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In this extended discussion he explains that complete anonymity on the Internet may be a thing of the past.

With an economy in turmoil and virtually every form of media facing disruptive new technology, many are looking for an alternative business model. Blogger and Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis has a simple answer: Do what Google does. In his new book he explains why Google's philosophy ...

Politicians are well-accustomed to the chorus of cat-calls emanating from the blogosphere. But a town councilman in Delaware couldn't take the heat, and went to court to "out" one of his online anonymous critics, so that he could sue for defamation. Earlier this month, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled against ...