LGBTQI groups found rare freedoms online, but this year, many were shut by censors. It feels like slowly being sanded down, said one member.

Finding the author of Pictures for Sad Children.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

An oral history of Wikipedia.

People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it’s a beacon of so much that’s right.

Children with internet implants.

Surviving sexual assault in a rapidly digitized world.

Elizabeth Pierce impressed investors with hefty contracts for fiber—until they learned she was the only one who’d signed them.

On what it’s like to go viral and the moral complications of laughing along.

The people who run these platforms have to make decisions about the greater good—whether they want to or not.

For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

A Washington family’s nightmare year.

Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs.

When Swedish teenagers hacked the phone system and turned a state-owned telecom system into a proto-Internet.

A new kind of late capitalism.

Exploring the crime-ridden depths of the internet with Opsec, a former professional hacker.

What the internet looks like to someone who spent the past six years in an Iranian prison.

Can the Internet be archived?

A Profile Auditor goes sniffing after anomalies in the consumption habits and personal data of an unsuspecting hotel clerk.

"Through the Demosphere we fly, we men of the Database Maintenance Division, and although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it - every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo's paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too - the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there's a correlation."

An online mystery surrounding animal abuse and porn.

"A different room, a different couch, but the rest of the room just as bare as the other. The couch is a futon, in couch form for now; it will be in its bed form but only much later. The camera's pushed far back enough that you can see the couch entire and you can see part of a window above it, the thick pebbly glass of the plastic-lipped pane. The Porn Star sits upon the couch. He is reading a magazine, right leg propped, wagging. The shoes he wears have fat black tongues and the laces that keep them on tight are bright orange. His pants are riding low on him, the chain on his wallet cascading the fabric. He's wearing a hoodie, the hood cinched in close and the sleeves of the sweatshirt tube down past his hands. He's reading the magazine, foot faintly wagging. There's a look on his face but it cannot be seen."

On the volunteer “Wikipedians” who devote their free time to editing Wikipedia.

On being stalked in the age of the Internet.

An internet pioneer loses hope in the promise of web culture.

On the internet dating pool.

On an affliction for the digital age, “Munchausen by internet.”