Smart phones do many things these days: surf the Internet, send e-mail, take photos and video . But one thing they can do that phone companies don't advertise is spy on you. As long as you don't leave home without your phone, that handy gadget keeps a record of everywhere you go — a record the government can then get from your telephone company. The law is unclear about how easy it should be for the government to ...

How you feel about Kim Clijsters doing a split in a frilly orange skirt probably depends on your reaction to a well-oiled Caroline Wozniacki serving a tennis ball into a wind machine. Then again, these provocative scenarios, which form part of the Women's Tennis Association's new "Strong is Beautiful" advertising campaign, seem tame compared to the spot starring Belarusian tennis ace Victoria Azarenka. "I like to hit the ball hard. Crush it," the 2011 Wimbledon semi-finalist says ...

Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi kept his shame to himself until the world saw him stripped naked, his head in a hood, a nude fellow prisoner kneeling before him simulating oral sex. "That is me," he claims to a TIME reporter, as one of the lurid photographs of detained Iraqis suffering sexual humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers scrolls down a computer screen. "I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off ...

Unlike Anthony Weiner, I am completely familiar with all the photos ever taken of my penis. That's because there aren't any. Like any man, I would love to spend an afternoon lolling in a glade, taking pictures of my penis. But no one — not women I've dated, not a urologist, not the Museum of Modern Art — has ever said to me, "I'd love a few candids of your penis." Other men, though, sense a greater demand. ...

Jenny has not returned my calls in roughly a year. She has, however, sent me a poinsettia, poked me and placed a gift beneath my Christmas tree. She's done all this virtually, courtesy of Facebook, the social-networking site on which users create profiles, gather "friends" and join common-interest groups, not to mention send digital gifts. Although Jenny has three children, ages 4 to 14, and rarely finds time for visits, phone calls or even e-mail, the full-time ...

On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant. WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet ...

There were no banners hailing Osama bin Laden in Egypt's Tahrir Square; no photos of his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at anti-government protests in Tunisia, Libya or even Yemen, a key staging ground for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and bin Laden's ancestral home. An occasional image would appear, now and then, almost as an afterthought, say as a sticker on the rifle butt of a rebel in Benghazi, who really wanted to oust a dictator and establish ...

Sometimes a little space is all that's needed to make things grow. That's the principle behind New Delhi's aptly named Greenhouse gallery. "In a country still ruled by posh, high-value art," says 30-year-old founder Avinash Kumar, "everyone can put up what they want here for two weeks." To date, Greenhouse has mounted a show of miniature books and an exhibition of photos by freewheeling collective Blind Boys. It has also begun to host happenings, typography workshops, readings and ...

"It's the accuracy of the photos compared to real thing that's the biggest problem," says Power Li, a 32-year-old civil servant. "You see a girl on the website who you quite like the look of, but then when you ask her out you find they look nothing like their online photos." Ah, modern love. With a steady career and his own house and car, the 32-year-old Beijinger is settled, successful, upwardly mobile and part of a new craze sweeping china — ...

When it comes to the distribution of digital entertainment, the planet has only two superpowers. One, of course, is Apple. The other is Amazon.com, which made headlines in the tech world on March 29 with two new Web-based services. Amazon Cloud Drive is a "personal disk drive in the cloud" that lets you store up to 5 gigabytes of photos, music, documents and other files, with the option to pay for more capacity. And Amazon Cloud Player is ...