To the decorating-obsessed among us, John and Sherry Petersik have a gig we dream about: They fix up their home, blog about it and get paid. In the past weeks, they furnished and accessorized an empty guest room and adjoining bathroom, painted wooden ceiling beams in their living room, scored a pair...

For most entrepreneurs, running a Web site that is rife with pornography and frequently criticized as a menace to society would not be considered a résumé booster. Many venture capitalists would head in the opposite direction. But Christopher Poole, the 23-year-old founder of 4chan, one of the ...

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough? Certainly not Vint Cerf. In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting...

The Syrian government began allowing its citizens Wednesday to openly use Facebook and YouTube, three years after blocking access to Facebook and other sites as part of a crackdown on political activism. Human rights advocates greeted the news guardedly, warning that the government might have lifted...

Our Father, who art in pixels, linked be Thy name, Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done, on Explorer as it is on Firefox. Give us this day our daily app, and forgive us our spam, as we forgive those who spam against us, and lead us not into aggregation, but deliver us from e-vil. Amen. Nothing is sacred...

EBay was growing so fast early in its history that Meg Whitman, its former chief executive, liked to joke that “a monkey could drive this train.” John Donahoe, her successor, still has the company on the track, but eBay’s competitors are moving a whole lot faster. Three years into the job, Mr....

These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it’s organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we’ve seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you’re trying to check...

IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that...

In an age of commemorating birthdays, weddings and anniversaries on Facebook and Twitter, it was perhaps inevitable that live Web-streaming funerals for friends and loved ones would be next. It is no surprise that the deaths of celebrities, like Michael Jackson, or honored political figures, like the...

ALGORITHMS, as you probably know, are the computer programs that infer from your profile (in the case of Facebook) and from the content of your e-mails (in the case of Gmail) your interests and preferences, enabling ads to be displayed to the customers most likely to be interested in specific products....