The Year in Interviews: People from the Internet!

Motherboard spent much of 2011 talking to the smartest, coolest, and craziest people in tech, culture, and the web. It made for a mountain of interviews filled with knowledge direct from the source, the best of which we've collected here in the second of three parts. Our first part focused on the artists we met this year, while the second corralled all of the scientists, health gurus and robo-sex enthusiasts we chatted with. Peruse the names and quick bios, and click through for the full Q+A with those who pique your interest.

We all know that as technology empowers us to do more, it carries with it all manner of problems. But one of our biggest pickles tends to slip right by us: We're not free. So argues Tim Wu, law professor, author of The Master Switch and recent appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. In the face of corporate control of the Internet, Wu's concept of "network neutrality" – the notion that networks should be equally accessible by the people using them, and that the people who own the pipes can't place restrictions on access to it or on the content that passes through it – has sparked nothing less than a philosophical war over the future of how we communicate. By Alex Pasternack

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Mike Pepper, a self-taught programming child prodigy, reverse engineered AOL's instant messenger system, wrote a list-serve program that was a precursor to Napster, and earned boat loads of cash from the sale of software he developed himself – all by the age of 13. By 16 he had parlayed his skills into a lucrative and luxurious lifestyle spamming for the porn industry, a gig he invented that earned him more money than both of his parents combined. Later he would lose his virginity to a porn star during a drug-addled jaunt to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas.His twisted ride through the dingy jungle of the porn industry had reached a fever pitch – at a rate of tens of thousands of spambot-infected computers a day – when the FBI's identity theft squad showed up, mistaking his dad for their suspect. By Kelly Bourdet

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Alwyn Collinson is the man behind @RealTimeWWII, a Twitter account with the absurdly ambitious goal of live-Tweeting the entirety of World War II. How does that work? Collinson started in August of this year, tweeting the beginning of the war as if it were 1939. Over the next six years, he plans to continue live-Tweeting World War II until its conclusion like a long-lost correspondent who somehow jumped forward seventy years in time. By Derek Mead

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Tao Lin's experimentation with narrative, medium and self-promotion (his famous novella Shoplifting From American Apparel, a cover story about himself for Seattle's The Stranger) doesn't end on paper: he's also playing around with film, through a new production house he started with his wife and a movie he's making in the virtual world Second Life. The idea began with the digital artists Jon Rafman and SEECOY, who received a Rhizome commission for it, then asked Lin to write the script. Titled Small Crowd Gathers to Watch Me Cry, the film is based entirely in Second Life, with Tao providing the voice over. By Kelly Bourdet

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Yury Lifshits, a young scientist at the data den Yahoo! Labs, published the Like Log Study, one of the most in-depth statistical examinations of the ways our media diet has been shaped by that peculiar and ubiquitous little "Like" blue button you see above and on nearly every web page. We caught up with him over the phone to get a better understanding of what he found, what he likes, and – hold your horses, all you social media wizard-wannabes – what the secret is to total viral internet domination. By Jordan Keenan

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We found a system administrator at a college in the New York area who turned his school's computers into a server farm that auto-mined for Bitcoins. Because of the nebulous legal and ethical nature of his scheme, he asked to remain anonymous, but he offered some grand insight into the heyday of the Bitcoin boom. By Ryan Broderick

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Envoy takes our regard for the afterlife and gives it a run for its money by proposing that social networking may have the ability to make us immortal. By Sean Yeaton

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