Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square. John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesJennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and...

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Gadgetwise Blog: How to Beat Some Facebook Scammers

You’ve probably seen those wildly popular Facebook postings that entice you to share something — like a photo of a bear sneaking up on a man — with the instructions, “Press Like and type the number 1 and see what happens.” These posts often list hundreds of thousands of responses.If you’ve tried it, here’s what you saw happen: nothing. Behind the scenes something is happening, though. With each click,...

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Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online.To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.”The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish...

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Bits Blog: Yahoo Issues a Statement on Work-at-Home Ban

In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo’s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about...

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: More Slide Show Apps

Last week in App Smart I talked about the many apps that promise to turn photos from your smartphone or tablet’s digital photo album into an attractive photo slide show. These apps make looking at digital photos of a vacation, or perhaps an event like a wedding, into the modern equivalent of flipping through a photo album.On iOS, one powerful app for creating dynamic photo slide shows is ProShow...

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HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON — More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday. The Federal Trade Commission charged...

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Bits: Online Gambling Heats Up

The two big casino states, Nevada and New Jersey, are racing into online gambling as a way of protecting their turf. They will in essence become laboratories for what is and is not feasible in Internet wagering.Nevada legislators, who previously authorized online poker, hurriedly passed a new bill this week that allows the state to enter into deals with other states to essentially pool their gambling...

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The Boss: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor is an Average Traveler

I WAS born in Hollywood, Calif. — truly a shocking notion if you know how unstruck I am by stars. Ken RichardsonStephen Kaufer is the president and C.E.O. of TripAdvisor in Needham, Mass. AGE 50 FAVORITE QUOTATION 'The harder you practice, the luckier you get' — Gary Player, golfer PREFERRED MODE OF TRANSPORTATION Tandem bicycle with his wife My father...

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Media Decoder: Nielsen Adjusts Its Ratings to Add Web-Linked TVs

9:04 p.m. | Updated For media executives, there may be nothing worse than a viewer or listener who is not counted.On Thursday, in a move that might help ease those concerns, Nielsen said that it would start considering Americans who have spurned cable, but who have a television set hooked up to the Internet, as “television households,” potentially adding to the sample of homes that are rated by the...

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Gadgetwise: A New Music Experience: Let Your Shower Head Sing to You

Kohler has brought a whole new meaning to “streaming audio.”The company, which makes bathroom fixtures, has introduced a shower head with a built-in wireless speaker system called the Moxie.Although it might seem simple to put a speaker in a shower head, there were a number of design challenges. The speaker displaces a lot of spray nozzles, and Kohler had to maintain a 2.5-gallon-a-minute water flow...

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Bits Blog: Marissa Mayer Puts Her Stamp on Yahoo.com

8:39 a.m. | Updated On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced a fresh new home page with Marissa Mayer’s stamp all over it.Yahoo’s home page has long been a sort of sad reflection of the company. A jazzed-up Craigslist of sorts, the site was often cluttered with low-quality ads and irrelevant content and in no way reflected the fact that Yahoo is one of the most visited sites on the Web. With more than 700...

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much...

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The Media Equation: In Omaha Manhole Fire Photo, Logging Off in Search of Some Clues

Stephanie SandsThis image, which was taken after an underground fire cut power in half of downtown Omaha, captivated the Web last month. When photographs of spontaneous events miraculously appear on the Web, it generally prompts two responses: wonder and skepticism. Matt Miller/Omaha World-HeraldMatthew Hansen, a columnist at The Omaha World-Herald, showed how to follow a trail. ...

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A Game Aims to Draw Attention to Women’s Issues

Social cause gaming, or the use of games to promote awareness of societal problems, has been growing as a result of online projects like Food Force, the United Nations World Food Program’s 2005 game about confronting famine, and Darfur Is Dying, MTV’s 2006 offering in which players navigate the terrors of a Sudanese refugee camp. Subsequent games have raised awareness of subjects like H.I.V.,...

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting...

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Amazon to Investigate Claims of Worker Intimidation at German Centers

BERLIN — The workers came from across Europe to pack boxes for the online retailer Amazon at distribution centers in Germany during the Christmas rush. They did not expect to be watched over — some say intimidated — by thugs in neo-Nazi-style clothing and jackboots. On Friday, Amazon said it was investigating claims made in a documentary that a subcontractor employed security guards with...

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Media Decoder Blog: Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant...

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App Smart: Apps Let You Take Karaoke With You

Singing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, partly because I love it and partly thanks to my Welsh heritage (we’re traditionally belting vocalists). But it’s been years since I last sang in a choir, and my singing is now confined to the shower and the occasional family game of SingStar on the PlayStation. If karaoke is your thing, though, you don’t need to own a game...

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Bits: Where the Singles Are: A Dating Guide by ZIP Code

At Trulia, a residential real estate Web site, the analysts are constantly crunching data — home and apartment listings, prices, school ratings, crime rates and other numbers.With Valentine’s Day coming this week, Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist and head of analytics, decided to sift through household, gender, city and neighborhood data in America. If you’re looking for someone single of the opposite...

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DealBook: Alternatives to Dell Deal Come With Too Little Certainty

Objectors to Michael S. Dell‘s $24.4 billion leveraged buyout of Dell are in a tight corner. The likes of Southeastern Asset Management are right that Mr. Dell, the company’s founder, and Silver Lake Partners have made a low-ball offer. Yet, it’s at a respectable 25 percent premium, and the company’s shares haven’t topped the $13.65-a-share deal price in months or Southeastern’s $23.72-a-share valuation...

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