YouTube has been the birthplace of many Internet stars, but few of them have had the business savvy to turn video views into paychecks. Take Sam Tsui, the site's latest crowd pleaser. A fresh-faced a cappella singer at Yale, Tsui has an impressive voice, but the real draw is the electronic wizardry that allows him to harmonize onstage with five digital versions of himself. Glee, meet Attack of the Clones. Since July, Tsui's medley of Michael Jackson hits has been ...

Old Zhao is one unhappy Beijinger. His father needs surgery, but the doctor tells him that all operations have been postponed until after the Olympics. Unable to drive because 90% of vehicles have been banned from the roads, Zhao bicycles slowly home through the August heat; guards at every intersection force him to dismount for security inspections. When he finally does get home, his favorite dish of kidney and beans tastes awful. Because of endless delays caused ...

The arrests came as fast as drops of monsoon rain. On Feb. 22, more than 100 Indonesian special police raided a terrorist training camp deep in the jungles of Sumatra island. Within days they captured 14 suspected Islamic militants from a shadowy group called al-Qaeda in Aceh that was believed to have been planning an imminent attack. Then, on March 9, the police converged on an Internet caf near the Indonesian capital Jakarta and engaged in a firefight that killed ...

Millions of viewers have been transfixed by the parade of forensic experts presented by the prosecution over the last few weeks in the trial of Casey Anthony, a 25 year-old mother who stands accused of killing her two year-old daughter Caylee and dumping the child's body near their Orange County, Florida home in 2008. The ubiquitous broadcasts of the trial are as compelling as anything that fans of the fictional forensics drama, CSI: Miami, might encounter. But ...

Google makes one of the world's leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It's even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn't synonymous with many things. It's synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all. At a press conference in San ...

You may have used audio guides when visiting a foreign city, or downloaded sightseeing and dining tips to your Web-enabled phone. But travelers to Hong Kong can now take advantage of a device that not only introduces the city in over 80 preloaded video clips, but also offers free local calls and a host of other visitor-friendly features. Malaysian actress Sarah Lian hosts the video component of Ask Ting Ting, as the first-of-its-kind device is named. She'll walk ...

Is the federal government reading your email? That may sound outrageous, but it may well be perfectly legal. The Constitution protects your home, your car, and your body from unreasonable searches. But the courts have been much less clear about whether it protects your Gmail or Yahoo Mail account. So while the courts continue to deliberate, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont is now trying to give email new protections by upgrading the main federal Internet ...

With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites. At New York University, assignments for Anthropology of the Unconscious include discussing X-rated Japanese comic books. And in Cinema and the Sex Act at the University of California, Berkeley, undergrads are required to view clips from Hollywood NC-17 releases like Showgirls and underground stag reels. It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking ...

These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial. So Bono spends several thousand dollars at a restaurant for a nice Pinot Noir, and Bill Gates, the great predator of the Internet age, has a trampoline room ...

At the global headquarters of eHarmony in Pasadena, Calif., one blue wall is papered with testimonies of love: snapshots of couples who met on the Internet matchmaking site and subsequently got hitched. There are older couples, military couples, kissing couples, couples with physical disabilities, couples dressed in wedding whites. Soon, if all goes as planned, there will be Chinese couples, Indian couples, European couples, many dressed in the brilliant matrimonial hues of their cultures. They're going to need a new ...