Social networking

You may have occasionally encountered a certain dead-eyed stare from a Transportation Security Administration operative.

He might not like your name, your shorts, or the odd bulge in your jaw. So he stops you and asks deep questions, such as: "What do you have in your pockets, sir?"

Peter Mayhew, the 7-foot-tall gentleman who played Chewbacca in "Star Wars," discovered the boys from TSA had a different preoccupation -- whether his lightsaber cane was a dangerous weapon.… Read more

I hate to bring up the subject of people spying on people, but it seems to be entering the realms of an epidemic.

Many no doubt nice human beings are installing closed circuit TV systems in order to protect their properties from marauding anarchists or burglars who want to enter their houses to browse Facebook.

Once they have these systems, they begin to realize that they can use them to snoop on their neighbors -- especially the ones where the husband wears a skirt to greet the mailman.

Now the place that has more cameras than steak and kidney pies, … Read more

How can you get a tipsy man in bar not to drive his car home?

One thought might be to shock him so much when he goes to the bathroom that he has to rush (on foot) in the direction of the nearest ER to have his heart-rate reduced.

This highly entertaining PSA shows a bathroom in an unnamed British bar. It was created on behalf of the U.K's Department of Transportation.

Many Brits like to drink more than they eat. And with many bars still having very limited opening hours many men (and an increasing number of … Read more

I hear wailing.

I think it's coming from all those who believed, in some sweet corner of their minds, that they were changing the world. You know, for the better.

The generation that believed technology was heralding a new togetherness, a new openness, a new freedom, a new transparency is suddenly confronted by the idea that its idols might be something terrible -- yes, pragmatic.

Suddenly, they hear that Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and all the other immature brand names might have been offering information to the government when the government asked nicely -- which hardly seems something new, given … Read more

In order to get a conviction, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Except if what you gotta do is something that your boss in the County Prosecutor's Office thinks you don't gotta do at all.

This seems to be the lesson in the case of the Ohio County Prosecutor who felt that Facebook was the perfect place to get alibi witnesses in a murder trial to admit that, perhaps, their recollections might have been hazy.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, County Prosecutor Aaron Brockler plainly thought he was doing the right thing by posing as an … Read more

Spy on Ask.fm's public stream and you'll feel like you've been transported back to middle school, dumped in the center of he-said, she-said dramas -- sometimes innocuous, sometimes not. Here, hormone-crazed young boys and girls banter about their after-school plans, tease their peers, boast about their most recent hookups, and try to appear cool with expletives and graphic language.

Ask.fm is a 3-year-old question-and-answer app that's wracked up 57 million users and is adding members at a rate of 200,000 a day. It's spreading from kid to kid, infiltrating middle schools and … Read more

Snapchat is finishing a financing round that will net it around $100 million in fresh funds and a valuation of nearly $500 million, according to GigaOm.

The 2-year-old mobile app, extremely popular with youngsters, offers people an impermanent way to send text, pictures, and videos to friends that disappear after a few seconds. Members upload more than 150 million images every day, CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said in April.

Just a few months ago, the Los Angeles-based company behind the app picked up $13.5 million in funding in a round led by Benchmark Capital. The deal reportedly valued … Read more

You may not have slept lately for worrying what Sean Parker has done for our environment.

Yes, in being one of the originals at Facebook, he helped create a world in which our noses permanently point downward, our friends are permanently virtual and our eyes must watch carefully over every word written by the company in small letters.

But I wasn't thinking about that.

I was thinking about the mounds of kerfuffle created after details were revealed about his wedding.

It was bad enough that he was said to be spending vast numbers on his nuptials. But then the Atlantic suggested … Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Facebook wants to make it less confusing for marketers to advertise on the social network, so it's killing some ad units and consolidating others, the company announced Thursday.

"What we want to do is take the guesswork out of the process," Fidji Simo, a product manager for ads, said during a press event at Facebook's headquarters. The company is rolling out several changes in the next couple of months to its 27 types of advertising, including the elimination of Facebook questions, online local offers, and the individual page posts ads.

The simplified … Read more