As is known by anyone who has either read Stieg Larsson's 2005 novel or seen one of the two film adaptations (and that seems to be just about everyone), the big break in the case comes when Mikael Blomkvist sees a photograph taken of spectators at a parade 36 years earlier. One of those spectators, a 16-year-old girl named Harriet Vanger, disappeared that day, and Blomkvist has been hired by her great uncle to find out what happened to her. Blomkvist notices that Harriet, unlike all the other people in the crowd on the sidewalk -- who are watching the parade and smiling -- is instead looking in another direction with an expression of great distress. After burying himself in the photo archives of the local newspaper for days, Blomkvist unearths a shot from a different angle, showing a woman taking yet another photo, over Harriet's shoulder. By tracking down that woman and her snapshot, he's able to see exactly who Harriet feared.

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We saw it in the epic bungling of mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Post. We saw it in the frenzy of Redditors and overeager tweeters. We saw it, most cruelly, in the story of a missing student, a young man whose body may have been pulled Tuesday night from the Providence harbor.

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Now, redditors along with the site's leadership, posted an apology to the family of  still-missing Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi.

"We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure," the statement said.

"We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil's quick and safe return home."

Reddit's "findthebostonbombers" thread drew a lot of criticism for jumping to conclusions after hearing fragments of information on a police scanner.

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From Glenn Beck to John King, a roundup of the very worst coverage on the tragedy in Boston:

Alex Jones and the "false flag" conspiracy 

As Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald previously reported, Alex Jones and others on the conservative fringe wasted no time in launching paranoid theories pinning the Boston tragedy to an elaborate government plot:

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And then I turned it off. The staccato bursts of information were too chaotic, too jumbled, too contradictory for me to make much sense of. I needed more filtered news. Sure, it's way cool and still kind of mind-blowing that I can sit at my desk in Berkeley, Calif., and listen to police officers in Boston warn each other about suspicious packages that might contain explosive devices, but it wasn't helping me understand what was happening.

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Yesterday, a Reddit user posted a new, startlingly clear image of the aftermath of the explosion, that shows, on the far left, what looks very much like one of the FBI's suspects fleeing the scene. After Philip Bump, an Atlantic Wire writer and Photoshop expert, explained why he believed the image was genuine the New York Times confirmed the photo's authenticity.

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Historically speaking, the FBI has long asked for the public's help in catching its "Most Wanted" criminals. From posters in the post office, to John Walsh's "America's Most Wanted," law enforcement has had little problem using any available media to enlist public attention. But it seems reasonable to surmise that we've never seen anything on  quite the scale of the operation that is unfolding right now. As I write these words, the photos of the two suspects are proliferating across the Web at phenomenal speed. And we're all networked now. We're all social media-enabled sharers now.  There's little question: The FBI has never had the means to mobilize as many eyeballs as quickly as it can now.

DesLaurier's comments are worth quoting in full:

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Reddit has a thin skin at the best of times. But in a moment of great national angst, tempers are especially prone to flaring. One Redditor even started a thread in the subreddit Find Boston Bombers begging "the media" to be more responsible: "Media Outlets, please stop making the images of potential suspects go viral, then blaming this small subreddit for it. And read the rules we've imposed before calling us 'vigilantes'."

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Representatives from the two groups took to Reddit Monday to answer questions about CISPA and their campaign to stop the bill's progression into law. EFF's Mark Jaycox explained the current state of CISPA bill H.R. 624:

CISPA is currently at the "markup" stage. This means that the bill has been introduced and will be discussed by the full committee at a meeting. The committee will vote on amendments, edit (ie, "markup") the bill, and vote on a final version of the bill. Once the final version is voted "out of committee," it will be ready for a full floor vote where the entire House can vote on it.

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Some of the highlights, below:

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The text of the takedown notice appeared to indicate that the use of GoPro trademarks in a review was a copyright violation. This is the kind of thing that a) raises hackles on the Web, and b) is completely ridiculous. If anything deserves fair use protection, it is product reviews. But the way the DMCA works, DigitalRev.com's Internet provider is required to shut down access to the offending website within 24 hours, no questions asked, unless the URL is taken down.

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While the White House has urged Congress to pass a cybersecurity bill, CISPA would give businesses and the federal government legal protection to share data on cyberthreats with each other and has garnered criticism for being overly broad and failing to protect user privacy. HuffPo's Gerry Smith reported on the online actions taken up by thousands of sites this week to fight the bill:

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The latest organization to join media companies like Amazon and Netflix in producing original video content, the site's first series takes discussions from its "Explain Like I'm Five" subreddit to explain in-depth concepts in an easily digestible format.

From THR:

The "Explain Like I'm Five" subreddit, which the company says gets an estimated 4 million page-views monthly, was chosen because its discussion concept seemed fit for a video series.

The series features actors Michael Kayne and Langan Kingsley explaining broad topics to children in a classroom. The series covers diverse subject matter: "The Crisis in Syria," "Existentialism and Friedrich Nietzsche" and "The Volatility of the Stock Market" are the titles of the three episodes.

The ELIF series is produced by Jared Neumark, the founder of Landline TV and former co-director of content at College Humor. Each clip ends with a message pointing viewers to DonorsChoose.org, a online charity that helps provide teachers with classroom resources.

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The massive online community whiplashed between public-relations extremes in 2012, from a presidential visit to a series of high-profile controversies that culminated with the outing and shaming of one its most notorious users. The social news site became an Internet behemoth, leading and beating the news, and directing jaw-dropping traffic to any site lucky enough to get a link on its front page. By the end of 2012, about 50 million people were visiting the site every month.

For every admirable deed, redditors had an equal or greater negative action. They helped raise nearly a million dollars to support a bullied bus monitor in upstate New York, even as others were gleefully sharing sexually suggestive photos of women taken without their permission.

What has Reddit learned from the highs and lows of the past year? According to cofounder Alexis Ohanian and general manager Erik Martin, in the realm of Reddit, the best way to keep moving forward is to keep your hands off the steering wheel.

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Maxwell was on Fox's "Hannity" this week to discuss guns, rape and college students. The issues have been especially hot button in recent days, after Democratic Colorado state Sen. Evie Hudak delivered a tone-deaf response to a rape survivor, saying that "Statistics are not on your side even if you had a gun. And, chances are that if you would have had a gun, then he would have been able to get that from you and possibly use it against you."

As Maxwell, a rape survivor herself, told Salon on Friday, "I don't think we need to be telling a rape survivor that statistics are not on your side. That's insensitive." But where she drew outrage was in her suggestion to Hannity that "I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there." She told Hannity, "You're talking about this as if it's some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it's someone you know and trust," adding, "If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape."

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In January, William Shatner joined Reddit, and soon after posted a fairly innocuous question about turning off private messaging, the better to filter out those "I can choose to ignore." What followed has been a lively and often contentious conversation about the nature of Reddit itself, and the line between freedom of expression and being a plain old jackass.

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[embedtweet id="292360663492329472"]

"Diamond" Joe Biden wrote on Reddit:

You are welcome to ask me anything about the book, how to round up tail and make them wail, my Trans Am, things you can make into a pipe, Barack, or where we can hook up later if you're a smokin' hot mamacita.

I'm fairly hammered right now so I'll try to answer as many of your questions as I can before I pass out. I don't know what other crap I'm supposed to type here. Please buy this book or some real rough dudes are gonna hurt Joe real bad. Until then, grab a brewski and enjoy the ride.

To verify that I am real person, a tweet from my publisher @TheOnion

And then real magic happened. Moments after The Onion went live with the Q&A session, the real Joe Biden upstaged "Diamond," asking him to check out Biden's corvette, rendering the Internet speechless:

[embedtweet id="292361945170989056"]

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At the funeral, Swartz's father, Robert Swartz, said, “Aaron did not commit suicide — he was killed by the government. And [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] betrayed all its basic principles,” and the family has called the death "The product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing 13 felony charges stemming from his use of an MIT network to download thousands of articles from the nonprofit digital academic library JSTOR. The charges had increased from an original four charges: Wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a computer and recklessly damaging a computer, according to Techdirt.

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At age 14, Swartz co-wrote the RSS specification that turbo-boosted the art of blogging into the lingua franca of the Web. He was instrumental in the creation of Reddit -- the so-called "front page of the Internet." He was renowned -- and drew considerable negative legal attention for -- his efforts to increase public access to case law and scholarly journals. He was an information-wants-to-free hacker in the purest sense, but he was arrested in July 2011 on charges of illegally stealing 4 million documents from M.I.T. and the online scholarly archive JSTOR.

For the full story, Cory Doctorow's obituary at Boing Boing is the essential read, a memorial drenched in sadness and love.

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Silver admitted he is sometimes tempted by, but wouldn't act on, the desire to use his prediction methods to profit from election betting markets (which are heavily influenced by his predictions):

Tempted, yes, but sometimes resisting temptation is a good thing.

He explained that he would like to make his methodology more open to readers of his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog:

I’d certainly like to aim to increase the level of disclosure at 538 going forward. Sometimes what happens is that I have best intentions to write a super detailed, 5000-word methodology post, and then some senate candidate does or says something stupid, and I get caught up in the news cycle and it gets forgotten about. Which is a pretty lame excuse, I know.

He told questioners that his statistical analysis is particularly well suited to certain aspects of politics -- notably presidential elections -- but cannot be used to predict the outcome of many political debates, such as gun control. When asked if he could predict whether gun control would make America safer or not, he answered:

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