Will Your Internet Addiction Be Covered by Insurance?
| It’s been a year since the American Journal of Psychiatry tried to have the internet committed — O.K., well, since it published an editorial arguing for the classification of internet addiction as a...
View ArticleVying for "Virtual Sex"
| A California pornography company that owns the trademark Virtual Sex lost its bid to take over ownership of the domain name virtualsex.com from another company. The World Intellectual Property...
View ArticleThe Cost of Shortening Your Link
| On the one hand, URL shorteners are handy tools that shrink long, clumsy internet addresses into cute linklets that can fit into a Twitter message. On the other hand, writes Joshua Schachter, they...
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Is It Time to Rename "Digital Piracy"?
In light of the recent spate of Somali pirate attacks (here’s one interesting long view, and here’s another), I wonder if it’s time to start calling “digital piracy” something else. It was a clever...
View ArticleLadies and Gentlemen, The Internet Sings
This may sound like a chorus of goblins, but it’s really the sound of the internet — of two thousand people, each paid to make just one tone, synthesized into a rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” Why...
View ArticleHow Is a Computer Worm Like a Pack of Cigarettes?
You’ve probably already forgotten about Conficker, the computer worm, since it declined to wreak havoc as feared on April 1. Rest assured, Conficker has not forgotten about you. It’s currently...
View ArticlePrecision Hacking
Take a look at the final vote tally in Time magazine’s online poll of the most influential people. It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that things didn’t turn out quite as one would expect;...
View ArticleLoJack for iPhones
A while back we wrote about Adeona, a free tracking program that could help police locate and recover a stolen laptop. As a bonus, we figured, thieves might be less inclined to steal any laptop, since...
View ArticleThe Next Financial Crisis: Virtual Banks
By now, the financial woes of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and the many other troubled banks is old news. But we may need to start preparing for another round of bank failures … in the...
View ArticleHow Much Is Your iPhone App?
The care and feeding of my iPhone is an interesting illustration of the role of competition and the ability of suppliers to price-discriminate. I wanted apps that would translate words (no need for...
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Puzzling Over the Invisible Economy
Photo: tanakawho Last week I did something that felt very 1990’s: I purchased a compact disc. The CD wasn’t for me; it was a Christmas present. As I wrapped the CD, I pondered the silliness of the...
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Year-End Clearance: All Medical Myths Must Go!
Sorry, moms: it turns out that reading in low light won’t make you go blind; going hatless in the winter won’t make you freeze to death; and you could eat poinsettias all day and not be poisoned. All...
View ArticleComment, Comment on the Wall, Are You Community or Not at All
One of the coolest things about posting at Freakonomics is the chance to be educated by your high-quality comments, which add to our posts and sometimes correct our mistakes. But to be honest, every...
View ArticleThe Poptropica Puzzle
The one question I ask most often about the internet is the following: why do people make such great stuff and then give it away for free? The website Poptropica is a perfect example. Poptropica is a...
View ArticleWhat's in a Name? Four Thousand and Fifty Dollars
It may be a gag, but from the looks of this eBay page, someone just sold the naming rights for her unborn baby — and two pairs of Nike Air baby booties — for $4,050. She doesn’t care what name the...
View ArticleLotto Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
The Powerball lottery jackpot, which now stands at $20 million, is tough to win — and sometimes, nobody wins it. It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game. To get an idea of just...
View ArticleA Menstrual Site for Men
That’s how PMSBuddy.com pitches itself. To wit: PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any...
View ArticleAwards Are Meaningless Except When They're Not
Despite charges that it simply wants to grab web traffic, Time.com has bravely gone ahead with its second annual list of the Top 25 blogs on the web. And guess who made the list? Yep. For the second...
View ArticleHow Many Twittering Politicians Does It Take to Threaten National Security?
Just one, as we learned a few weeks ago in Congressional Quarterly, which reported that Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, regularly...
View ArticleThe Domain-Name Shakedown
Here’s an e-mail I received the other day: I own a manufacturing company and have been a successful investor and equity trader for 20 years. I have an in-depth understanding of the current O.T.C....
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