The process works like this: for a fee ($200 for a work on paper, $500 for an oil on canvas), the exhibitionistically inclined can arrange brief private sittings with Finley. They'll be given the artist's private phone number and can snap away. Once Finley has received the photos, she'll translate them into a series of paintings to be publicly displayed in the New Museum lobby. After the exhibition closes on May 26, the subjects can take home their work to be stored as a memento of free-spirited youth, or hung in the living room to the chagrin of friends and family.

Finley, a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, has never shied away from controversy. In 1990, she was one of four artists whose NEA grants were revoked on the grounds that their work was obscene. "Sext Me If You Can" is presented by NE 4 In Residence, which revisits the four grant recipients' work.

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According to a report published by nonprofit online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon, the hacker, possibly using stolen username and password credentials, accessed the National Inventory of Dams (NID) and siezed information not normally available to the public.

The NID database contains comprehensive information about 79,000 dams throughout the US, including the estimated number of deaths there would be if a given dam failed.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Pete Pierce told the Washington Free Beacon.

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CTIA - The Wireless Association said Thursday that Americans sent 2.2 trillion text messages last year, down 5 percent from 2011. That's still 19 text messages per person per day.

Text messages vaulted into the U.S. mainstream in 2007, despite often costing 10 cents each. Costs came down quickly as phone companies started selling monthly "bundles" of texts. Now, many phone companies give text messaging away for free as part of a plan that mainly meters the amount of data used. That has helped stave off mass migration to Internet chat applications and Facebook messaging in the U.S., making the decline somewhat surprising, said Pamela Clark-Dickson, an analyst with Informa Telecoms & Media in Britain.

In countries where phone companies have kept the cost of text messaging high, the use of chat applications that avoid those fees has exploded. Those apps include WhatsApp and allow people to text other users of the same service for free, using the Internet and bypassing the phone companies' text systems. Informa estimates that the number of messages sent through such services worldwide exceeded those sent by text last year.

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Under a new bill, investigators would be able to hack into computers, install spyware, read emails and destroy files.

They could also break into servers located abroad, if they were being used to block services.

Critics say the proposed measures are unnecessary and could set a dangerous precedent for people living under oppressive governments.

Use of the powers would be subject to the approval of a judge, the government stresses.

The bill would also make it a crime for a suspect to refuse to decipher encrypted files during a police investigation.

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OAK PARK, Illinois — You’re driving to a suburb that you don’t know well, and you whip out your iPhone to quickly punch an address into Google Maps. In this case, that address is 704 Highland Avenue, home of Sabina Ott and John Paulett, who run Terrain Exhibitions, a once-a-month-ish, home-turned-cozy gallery experience. Every artist who shows work here must wrap it around the concept of the artist-writer couple’s home.

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From Los Angeles to Philadelphia, efforts include trying to gain police access to cameras used to monitor traffic, expanding surveillance networks in some major cities and enabling officers to get regular access to security footage at businesses.

Some in law enforcement, however, acknowledge that their plans may face an age-old obstacle: Americans' traditional reluctance to give the government more law enforcement powers out of fear that they will live in a society where there is little privacy.

"Look, we don't want an occupied state. We want to be able to walk the good balance between freedom and security," Los Angeles police Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who heads the department's counter-terrorism and special operations bureau.

"If this helps prevent, deter, but also detect and create clues to who did (a crime), I guess the question is can the American public tolerate that type of security," he said.

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Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. and Comcast Corp. all saw growth in their cable network businesses, thanks to distribution fees they charge cable and satellite TV service providers for rights to carry their channels on subscribers' lineups. Those fees get passed on to customers of cable and satellite service.

The boost in television helped make up for weakness at two of the three movie studios that reported results Wednesday.

The trends show how important such fees have become to the television industry. Revenue at Time Warner's television business grew, even with a decrease in ad revenue. Even broadcast networks such as CBS are increasingly relying on distribution fees to ride out fluctuations in the ad market.

The fees have become so vital that broadcasters are worried about the threat posed by a Barry Diller-backed startup called Aereo. The company sends over-the-air broadcasts over the Internet and bypasses traditional cable and satellite operators. Disputes over the fees have also led to high-profile blackouts of channels on cable and satellite lineups.

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I know she's not real. I know she's just an advertisement. But I'm still terrified of that woman. I have nightmares of getting crushed by her mammary glands, squeezed to death like a boa constrictor kills a wild pig. I don't ever want to see her again, but no matter how I try, I just can't quit her.

When first we met, in my pre-smartphone days, she flashed her soulless come-hither eyes at me from Facebook's right-hand column. I swiftly learned how to click "hide this ad" and "hide all from Mate1.com." I'm a social media take-charge kind of guy -- tweaking privacy and ad settings comes naturally to me. But then, a couple of years later, not long (and not uncoincidentally) after Facebook's IPO, she invaded my News Feed. Once again, I dutifully clicked "hide this ad" and "hide all," albeit this time with a little less faith in the honorable intentions of Facebook's ad-targeting algorithms.

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IBM says it has made the tiniest stop-motion movie ever - a one-minute video of individual carbon monoxide molecules repeatedly rearranged to show a boy dancing, throwing a ball and bouncing on a trampoline.

Each frame measures 45 by 25 nanometers - there are 25 million nanometers in an inch - but hugely magnified, the movie is reminiscent of early video games, particularly when the boy bounces the ball off the side of the frame accompanied by simple music and sound effects.

The movie is titled, "A Boy and His Atom."

Videos showing atoms in motion have been seen before but Andreas Heinrich, IBM's principal scientist for the project, said Tuesday this is the first time anything so small has been maneuvered to tell a story.

"This movie is a fun way to share the atomic-scale world," Heinrich said. "The reason we made this was not to convey a scientific message directly, but to engage with students, to prompt them to ask questions."

Jamie Panas of Guinness World Records said Guinness certified the movie as "Smallest Stop-Motion Film."

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What he actually said, in a debate with Mark Andreessen at the Milken Institute Global Conference, according to CNN, was that "Twitter's roughly 1,000 employees will have jobs a decade from now," because "the business case for Twitter is solid," while employees of the New York Times "should be worried about the longevity of their jobs" because the newspaper "is not guaranteed a future in the digital age."

Please. No one is guaranteed a future in the digital age. But if I had to pick one paper that had the best chance of surviving and thriving, I'd probably choose the New York Times, a newspaper that continues to provide indispensable, in-depth reporting on topics of great social importance. And if I had to pick one social media network that was most likely to survive, I'd pick ... well, who the hell knows? Social media networks, so far, have the lifespan of butterflies. They look nice for a few minutes, and then they're gone. Poof! Friendster, MySpace, et cetera.

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Apple is selling the bonds in its first debt issue since the 1990s. The company is raising the money to give to shareholders through dividend payments and stock buybacks.

The company has $145 billion in cash, more than enough for the $100 billion cash return program it announced last week. However, most of its money sits in overseas accounts, and the company doesn't plan to bring it to the U.S. until the federal corporate tax rate is lowered.

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A Las Vegas-based casino subsidiary launched the first fully legal poker website in the United States on Tuesday morning.

The site, run by Ultimate Gaming, is only accepting wagers from players in Nevada for now, but likely represents the next chapter in gambling nationwide.

Internet poker, never fully legal, has been strictly outlawed since 2011, when the Department of Justice seized the domain names of the largest offshore sites catering to U.S. customers and blacked them out.

This crackdown, dubbed "black Friday," left poker fanatics with two options: They could either get dressed and visit a card room, or break the law and log into an offshore site.

More recently, the federal government softened its stance on Internet betting, and three states - New Jersey, Delaware and Nevada- have legalized some form of online wagering within their borders.

With Tuesday's launch, Nevada wins the race to bring Texas Hold `em back to the Internet.

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There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders. While the companies argue that they have no means to facilitate the wiretap, the government, in turn, has no desire to enter into what could be a drawn-out contempt proceeding.

Under the draft proposal, a court could levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, on firms that fail to comply with wiretap orders, according to persons who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. A company that does not comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, which could lead to fines. After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily.

... The proposal, however, is likely to encounter resistance, said industry officials and privacy advocates.

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"It's a wide investigation that is multi-state. We are looking at whole industry spectrum of repair shops that are using substandard products," said Gerard O'Neill, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of Miami Field Office for Homeland Security.

O'Neill says it's a public safety issue and that is how Homeland Security is involved.

He says consumers have be hurt by overheating phones that were repaired using counterfeit parts.

"There are trademark and licensing violations as well," he added.

According to Abel Abella, the proprietor of one of the raided repair shops, "20 ICE agents and two people from Apple came to his store."

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The stock market has recovered all the ground it lost over the previous two weeks, when worries over slower economic growth, falling commodity prices and disappointing quarterly earnings battered financial markets.

The S&P 500 index rose 11.37 points to close at 1,593.61. The 0.7 percent increase nudged the index above its previous closing high of 1,593.36, reached on April 11.

"The market has had a terrific run," said Philip Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors, noting that the S&P 500 is up 12 percent since the start of 2013. "At the beginning of the year, I thought we were going to 1,660 (for the whole year). We're only about 5 percent from that."

A pair of better economic reports gave investors some encouragement. Wages and spending rose in the U.S. last month, and pending home sales hit their highest level in three years.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 106.20 points to 14,818.75, up 0.7 percent. Microsoft and IBM were among the Dow's best performers, rising more than 2 percent each.

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The duel began Monday with the release of a free iPhone and iPad app that features Google Now, a technology that performs many of the same functions as Siri.

It's the first time that Google Now has been available on smartphones and tablet computers that aren't running on the latest version of Google's Android software. The technology, which debuted nine months ago, is being included in an upgrade to Google's search application for iOS, the Apple Inc. software that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. It's up to each user to decide whether to activate Google Now within the redesigned Google Search app, which is available through Apple's app store.

Siri tried to dismiss the competitive threat. When asked for an opinion about Google Now, Siri responded: "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather Google later."

Mike Allton, a St. Charles, Mo., resident who has owned an iPhone for four years, could hardly wait to check out Google Now, even if Siri might interpret it as a betrayal.

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But hang on there just a sec. The ThinkProgress headline is misleading. Zuckerberg's PAC -- or rather, the two subsidiary PACs it has launched, one leaning Democratic, and one leaning Republican -- are not spending big pushing drilling in Alaska and the Keystone pipeline. They are spending big supporting senators up for reelection who just happen to support the Keystone pipeline and drilling in ANWR. Yes, the ads cite those positions as points in favor of those politicians, but that's not quite the same thing as a big political ad campaign pushing a specifically pro-drilling agenda.

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Last Wednesday, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published an Op-Ed in the New York Times recounting her discovery that Wikipedia editors were culling women authors from Wikipedia's list of "American Novelists" and relegating them into their own subcategory: "American Women Novelists."

"The intention appears to be to create a list of 'American Novelists' on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men," she wrote, noting that there was no "American Men Novelists" subcategory. (Although, amusingly, just such a category was created shortly after the Op-Ed appeared.)

In the furor that erupted on Wikipedia in response to Filipacchi's article, it was quickly determined that the bad behavior she noticed appeared to be the work of a single misguided Wikipedia editor. One could argue that, if true, this made the Times' headline "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists" unfair and inaccurate. All of Wikipedia was being tarred by the unthinking stupidity of one bad editor.

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