Seeking to exploit the Internet’s potential for prying open closed societies, the Obama administration will permit technology companies to export online services like instant messaging, chat and photo sharing to Iran, Cuba and Sudan, a senior administration official said Sunday. On Monday, he said, the Treasury Department will issue a general license for the export of free personal Internet services and software geared toward the populations in all three countries, allowing Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other providers to get around strict export restrictions.

To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things (Facial Attitude, Photo Context, Skin). We discovered much of the collective wisdom about profile pictures was wrong.

Andy Baio (Waxy) on the http://pleaserobme.com fear, and being careful doesn't mean getting blinded by paranoia.

Repetitive newspapers comics joke is repetitive…

Find music related to a chosen artist

The Rumpus: Do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?
Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment.
Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?
Employee: That’s right.

"In recent years an ongoing debate has brewed over advertisers and fashion magazines using photographs, particularly photographs of women, that have seemingly been altered, or "retouched," by airbrushing and photo editing software such as Photoshop. The latest such image to cause an uproar is one featured in a new Ralph Lauren advertisement that shows a model, Filippa Hamilton, so emaciated that her waist actually appears to be smaller than her head."

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.

The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. The commission also said advertisers featuring testimonials that claim dramatic results cannot hide behind disclaimers that the results aren't typical.

Recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserts that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

VLC, the open source, cross-platform media layer for Windows, OS X, and Linux, finally hit version 1.0. VLC 1.0 includes a number of new features including new HD video codecs, finer speed controls, instant pausing, frame-by-frame playback, and a ton of bug fixes and minor GUI enhancements.

First part of a series in which Christopher Breen explains how to turn a Mac mini into a media center.

Access your iTunes music library from anywhere, through a web browser. You want to access that music from the office, at a friend's party, or let other people hear it from anywhere in the world? Install pulpTunes and access your music from anywhere, through a web browser.

The CCP has hired thousands of freelance Internet propagandists whose job is to infiltrate chat rooms, message boards and comment areas on the Internet posing as ordinary users to voice support for the agenda and interest of the CCP. They praise China’s one-party system and condemn anyone who criticizes China’s policy on Tibet. They comment aggressively on news reports about China’s food-safety problems, relations with Taiwan, suppression of bird-flu and AIDS information, Internet censorship, jailing of dissidents, support of Sudan’s military in Darfur and other sensitive topics. Comments applaud the Chinese government and slam its critics, all using scripts and lines approved by the party.

Some estimates claim that the 50 Cent Army includes a whopping 300,000 people. If that’s accurate, China's freelance propagandists exceed in number the total populations of 47 countries.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal's reached by the deadline, then everyone's charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal's not reached, nobody's charged. It's all or nothing.

There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.