Probably the last thing Craig Newmark ever imagined was that the little email list he started back in 1995 would one day be at the center of a controversy over prostitution, the First Amendment, and the future of the InterWebs. But 15 years later, Craigslist is in the thick of a dispute over whether its ad service is aiding and abetting prostitution, or merely an exercise in free speech.
Imagine wandering through Times Square and seeing a 60-foot-tall animation depicting you (yes, you) as a creepy child-baiting ice cream truck driver. How would you feel? That's probably the question Google's Eric Schmidt is being asked today.
Co-founder of Microsoft, early supporter of commercial space flight, and major world philanthropist Paul Allen has already left a pretty large footprint on the world. Now it seems he's determined to leave his muddy tracks over some of the biggest names in tech.
Facebook, the company many people don't trust to protect their status updates and personal information, is now in the business of collecting location information, thanks to the introduction of its Foursquare/Gowalla killer, Facebook Places.
Beloit College has published its Mindset List for the Class of 2014, an annual tradition designed to capture the "cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall" and to make the rest of us all feel extremely old and out of touch.
While it doesn't quite rank up there with dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean <a href="http://larrykinglive.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/20/as-the-oil-spill-continues-bp-ceo-tony-hayward-goes-yachting/">while your CEO goes yachting</a>, Google's huge Wi-Fi spying "oops" may become the search giant's BP moment.
It's like a Hollywood thriller. A military spy is arrested, betrayed by someone he thought to be a comrade in arms -- a brilliant yet mentally disabled hacker.
Today of course is the first day of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference -- another Steve Jobs love fest during which he trots out the latest life-altering technology for his fanboys to drool over.
Hyperbole seems to be an inevitable by product of new technology; you build a new gizmo, you end up getting a certain amount of hype all over your clothes. But lately the hype has been gushing out faster than an oil under the Gulf of Mexico.
They're like out-of-control teenagers - flouting authority, spewing abuse, wrecking the car, allowing 10 billion gallons of crude oil to slime up the planet. I am, of course, talking about the world's chief executive officers - and the bootlicking lackeys who do their dirty work.
I recently had an experience that epitomizes everything that's wrong with Microsoft and why it is rapidly being tossed into the Recycling Bin of history.
It appears that yet another Apple iPhone prototype has gone on a walkabout -- and this time not merely to a beer garden in Redwood City, but all the way to the South Pacific.
So Google finally made good on its promise to uncensor its Chinese search engine and/or leave the Chinese market. And China is now making good on its promise to make Google very sorry for ever bringing it up.
I just received an email from Wikileaks editor Julian Assange that's pretty wild. It accuses the U.S. government ofdeliberately trying to take down the whistle-blower site PDF two years ago.
Apple has lawyered up and is out for blood -- or at least, blood money. Its patent suit against Taiwanese handset maker HTC is further proof that the cold war between Cupertino and Mountain View is quickly escalating into a shooting match with live ammo.