"Qworty" -- the Wikipedia editor unmasked as the writer Robert Clark Young in Salon one week ago -- played a leading role in instigating Brown's deletion. As Qworty, Young denounced Brown as a "self-appointed spiritual savior" who had styled himself "a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol." Young also resorted to his go-to critique for Wikipedia pages he found wanting: He accused Brown of repeatedly editing his own page in violation of Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest policies.

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Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make Magazine, calls the Faire "a magic space-time moment." I can't argue. The Maker Faire my son and I visited in San Mateo, Calif., on Saturday pulsated with a vibe so enthusiastic, so healthy, so creative, and so gosh-darn happy it was impossible not to get swept away. If the hands-on, funky robot, DIY delirious madness of the Maker Faire offers us a clue as to where the culture is headed this century, then guess what: Maybe things aren't going to be so bad, after all.

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I don't condone Apple's tax-avoidance schemes, but the company is hardly alone in taking advantage of loopholes in U.S and Irish tax law. The Wikipedia page that details the two key strategies employed by Apple, the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich, lists 12 other major U.S. corporations that are pulling the same flim-flam. Among them are Apple's tech sector colleagues -- Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook and Adobe Systems -- along with General Electric, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Starbucks.

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Qworty has been "blocked indefinitely" from editing for violating Wikipedia's policies on how to write biographies of living persons, " harassment and (frankly) repeatedly lying to the community." An investigation is also currently under way to determine whether Young was guilty of operating multiple "sock puppets" -- pseudonymous personas designed specifically to hide Young's true identity. The backlash has been so fierce that both Qworty's User page and Talk page have been "blanked as a courtesy," presumably to protect the pages from repeat vandalism by his angry editor colleagues.

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It's an understandable reaction. We don't know for sure yet, but Monday's tornado may turn out to be the worst ever on record. In the larger context of a world in which extreme weather events appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity, it's natural to look for a culprit when confronted with unthinkable carnage.

In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson reflected the same urge, while being careful not to make a direct connection between climate change and tornadoes.

Every extreme weather event these days provokes questions about climate change; that is because, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes in this week’s Comment, the climate has changed extremely. Tornadoes, as it happens, have been an area of some controversy: two years ago saw a spike, but then last year a low. We’ll see; it will be for scientists to sort out how currents and temperatures and other factors fed into this storm. Climate change means, more than all the lines on charts always going in one direction, that the weather rhythms we think we know by heart, and that we’ve built our cities and lives around, are all out of sync.

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Mayer was trying to be hip, trying to reassure Tumbler's young userbase in the same language that the blogging service's founder and CEO, David Karp, uses to communicates with his audience. Karp signed off his announcement of the deal with a gleeful "Fuck yeah." But note the difference: Karp exuded confidence while Mayer projected massive corporate low self-esteem.

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Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah's work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.

Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the phrase "and was regarded as a good mentor" from a sentence that started: "Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program ..." And he changed the cause of Hannah's death from "natural causes" to "alcoholism." But Hannah's obituaries stated that he had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death, while his role as a mentor was testified to in numerous memorials. (Another editor later removed the alcoholism edit.)

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Not so long ago, hackers often perceived themselves as standing in opposition to authority and governments. Moreover, the subcategory of hackers who specialized in discovering and publicizing security vulnerabilities -- referred to as "exploits" in the security trade -- did so out of a belief that the best way to improve the integrity of our communication systems was by publicizing dangerous security holes.

Times have changed. As Joseph Menn documented in a breakthough special report for Reuters last week, today's security-minded hackers often end up working directly for defense contractors, hand in hand with the U.S. government. Identifying exploits and selling them off to the highest bidder has become a lucrative business. Worst of all, the buyers of these exploits aren't interested in improving security, but instead often plan to deploy these vulnerabilities for their own purposes.

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But if you're not an ESPN addict, you might do well to look askance at the news. That's the take of Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest Washington-based public advocacy organization that quickly decried the possible ESPN deal as an obvious violation of the principle of "net neutrality."

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And then you feel a different kind of shame, a sense of environmental guilt at having wasted precious natural resources just to disguise the sound of something that everyone does, every single day.

I won't lie. This exact scenario has plagued me ever since I moved into my current rental, in which the only bathroom in the house opens up into both bedrooms. The acoustics are amazing! My son can hear everything. I know full well that my embarrassment is a product of some awful mix of repression and shame about my natural body that 25 years of living in Berkeley should have exorcised long ago, but I guess I was just scarred for life that one time my grandmother criticized me for farting in public when I was 6 years old. Even the bathroom hasn't been a safe refuge ever since!

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Spoken by a young man in gamer mode -- wearing microphone-equipped headphones, his hands gripping his game controller, staring frownily into his console screen -- those gracious words are the first line spoken in the first episode of "The Clan" -- a comedy series that debuted in April on Machinima Prime, one of YouTube's most high-profile "channels." The opening dialogue is representative of what follows. It's no accident the show kicks off with an aggro verbal fusillade. It's a calculated statement of purpose.

I've watched three episodes of "The Clan" and I am still unsure as to whether the series is best understood as postmodern cynical satire lampooning gamer culture, or is it really a faithful reflection of the emerging worldview of the "lost boy" gamer demographic. Or maybe "The Clan" is just lousy. Does it even matter? Ultimately, such questions are not for me to decide, since I'm not a "lost boy" and therefore I am not of interest to the Machinima "network."

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On Wednesday, AT&T announced that it was dropping the price of the HTC First smartphone, which comes with Facebook Home built in, from $99 to 99 cents. Think about that: a new smartphone, priced to jump off the shelves at Dollar General. It's a great deal, but it is also hugely embarrassing for Zuckerberg.

A little over a month ago, I wrote that the only way I could see a Facebook phone making sense was if Facebook planned to cut deals with the phone carriers to give the phone away for free. But such a strategy doesn't seem to be what's in play here. Best guess, no one wants to buy a Facebook phone.

For confirmation we need only look at the Google Play store, where the Facebook Home app, which can be installed on select Android phones, has now fallen to the No. 338 ranking in the category of free apps. That's 200 spots lower than it ranked just two weeks ago.

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I learned these zeitgeist tidbits by spending about an hour perusing the latest neat thing from Google, the YouTube Trends Map. It's the video equivalent of Twitter's trending topics feature, with the added ability to break down categories by gender, age and geographic location. Want to know what 13-17-year-old girls in the East are watching compared to 55-64-year-old guys in California? The Trends Map will show you.

The world is watching around 6 billion hours of YouTube video every month, which suggests that the insights to be gained from spying on viewer habits should be culturally meaningful. For example, I did not realize quite how gendered love of Spock is. Right now the Audi ad featuring Leonard Nimoy (old Spock) battling it out with Zachary Quinto (new Spock) is the most watched video for men of all ages. But it doesn't even show up in the top five for women of all ages.

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Facebook posts, Skype calls, Google chats, Apple's iMessage -- under the new plan, every form of Internet communication would have to be accessible to law enforcement wiretapping. Civil libertarians, Internet companies and privacy activists are all understandably unenthused. A blogger at FireDogLake immediately labeled the news proof that Obama intended to support the "end of the 4th Amendment on the Internet."

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The opening two paragraphs deserve reprinting in full:

Plaintiffs have outmaneuvered the legal system. They’ve discovered the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs. And they exploit this anomaly by accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single pornographic video. Then they offer to settle -- for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense. For these individuals, resistance is futile; most reluctantly pay rather than have their names associated with illegally downloading porn. So now, copyright laws originally designed to compensate starving artists allow starving attorneys in this electronic-media era to plunder the citizenry.

Plaintiffs do have a right to assert their intellectual-property rights, so long as they do it right. But Plaintiffs filing of cases using the same boilerplate complaint against dozens of defendants raised the Courts alert. It was when the Court realized Plaintiffs engaged their cloak of shell companies and fraud that the Court went to battlestations.

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No wait, that's wrong -- that's the story I used to tell my kids when I wanted to scare the living daylights out of them right before bedtime. Today's real YouTube story, according to the Financial Times, is that YouTube plans to start charging subscriptions for as many as 50 "channels," possibly as early as this week. These new channels will compete with Hulu and Netflix to provide high-quality streaming content, for a price -- in YouTube's case, $1.99 a month per channel.

Cable and satellite channels, which traditionally rely on a dual revenue stream model, are eyeing YouTube’s subscription service to generate revenue from older shows and new programming, according to another person familiar with the project.

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At this stage of the game we probably don't need any more reminders that the last thing online services want to see happen is for their users to gain any meaningful control about how their personal information is exploited. Or, for that matter, about how lobbying money routinely skews public policy against the public interest. The new money of Silicon Valley is just the same as the old money of Wall Street or the fossil fuel industry.

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So I was delighted to hear the news this week that Google's "Siri-killer," Google Now, had finally been released for the iOS platform. Google has made it absolutely clear that one of the company's prime directives is to create a working Star Trek computer. Google seems as likely as anyone to get there first.

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So we chatted. The big news: Facebook promises that within just a couple of weeks mobile users will get new controls that will allow us to block specific advertisers. These controls will be similar to those that currently exist for the desktop Facebook experience. Individual Facebook users can decide for themselves how excited they are by this pledge. As I wrote on Wednesday, Facebook's track record on the desktop advertising experience leaves something to be desired. (To be fair, Facebook's spokeperson acknowledged that the company's ad-delivery algorithms are not "perfect.")

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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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