Internet & Media

Cue deep, foreboding, slightly accusatory voice: "Do you or your friends text more than 120 messages per school day? You may be at greater risk for substance abuse, permissiveness, depression, poor sleep, and more. Don't wait until it's too late. Get help now. Hyper-networking is no joke."

That's the core message behind new research out of the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine Master of Public Health program, whose findings were presented today at the American Public Health Association's 138th Annual Meeting & Exposition in Denver.

The team set out to determine whether binging … Read more

Sex.com sells--for $13 million, that is.

Placed on the auction block in July, the potentially valuable domain name has been scooped up by Clover Holdings from Escom for a cool $13 million. Escom put Sex.com up for sale after declaring bankruptcy earlier this year.

Though it swooped in with the winning bid, Clover can't officially claim ownership until the sale is approved by the bankruptcy court overseeing Escom. This is expected to happen on Wednesday. Not much is known about Sex.com's new owner. BBC News describes it as an obscure company registered on the Caribbean … Read more

It's all over the Internet.

That's the phrase that is increasingly being used to describe when a matter has become one of importance.

This week, the matter of importance concerns a Duke University graduate who decided to create a compendium of her sexual experiences with various men while at Duke.

Who knows why she decided to do it in PowerPoint? Perhaps she thought that one day she might present it to a symposium of intellectuals. It was, indeed, entitled: "An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics."

Within it, she described her … Read more

I am always suspicious that those who design surveys are looking for particular, amusing answers.

So I am delighted that those who designed a gadget-conscious study for PC Tools chose to offer respondents some very cerebral choices.

Essentially, PC Tools was looking to see just how deeply the need to be plugged in online had penetrated human psyches. So they willfully probed into scenarios from which others might have shied, which, coincidentally made for a searing analysis into the state of the American nation.

Here is the state of society, neatly encapsulated in one single finding: more people believe that … Read more

A hundred organizations fighting sex trafficking have joined the chorus of voices asking Craigslist to remove its erotic services section worldwide as the company has in the U.S.

In a letter sent Tuesday (PDF) to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, human rights groups throughout the world thanked the company for bringing down its adult and erotic ads in the U.S. But the groups said that these services, where trafficked children and women are sold for sex, remain open in 250 cities worldwide. And in not making the same improvements globally, the groups told Craigslist that … Read more

Is this the final capitulation?

After the mysterious disappearance of its Adult Services section, Craigslist uttered a symbolic protest by replacing it with a black bar that read "censored" in white type.

Wednesday, however, even that black bar was gone. Any sense that Craigslist was protesting at its manhandling by the combined forces of 17 attorneys general has now been entirely removed, leaving only the memories of nights of promise and days of satisfaction.

Despite the protests of former sex workers and esteemed academics, it seems that Craigslist has, indeed, given up on its Adult Services section for … Read more

The strangest massage I ever had consisted of the spa masseuse waving her hands all over my body, supposedly sending positive energy its way, without ever touching it.

Some are speculating that Craigslist, having removed its Adult Services section without explanation, is performing a similar sort of energy transfer.

Craigslist has remained entirely tight-lipped about the insertion of the word "CENSORED" where its Adult Services used to be. Yet some wonder whether Craigslist might be trying to prove that closing the section will merely encourage those who place ads for prostitution to use another of Craigslist's sections- … Read more

Some who are at a loose end will find it odd to wake up to a Labor Day weekend and discover that the Adult Section on Craigslist has been removed and that the link to it on the site's home page has been replaced with a black bar reading "censored."

Craigslist has long been the whipping boy for attorneys general seeking to control prostitution within their purview and perhaps also seeking to win the favor of certain members of their constituencies.

However, why the section should suddenly have been removed in such a dramatic way (the censorship … Read more

Craigslist's adult services section is under fire once again.

Attorneys general from 17 states sent a joint letter (PDF) on Tuesday that asks the site to immediately remove the section because it promotes prostitution and child trafficking.

In the letter to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, the attorneys general state that ads for both adult and child prostitutes are "rampant" on the site. And because Craigslist cannot or will not adequately screen these ads, the attorneys general said, the section should be taken down.

Asserting that women and children are being exploited by the … Read more