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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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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"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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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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I started writing my review of Twitter Music while listening to a George Jones country song I'd never heard before: "The King Is Gone (and so are you.)" I listened to a lot of George Jones on the day I learned he died. It seemed appropriate, if a bit macabre, to follow him on Twitter Music and see what sort of songs might pop up as a result.

I'm not going to list "The King Is Gone" in my top ten George Jones pantheon (frankly, any chorus with the words "yabba dabba doo" is right out) but I'm glad I heard it. I love being exposed to new music (even if, and sometimes especially if, it's old music).

Twitter Music is all about the social discovery of new music. It suggests for your listening pleasure songs that are already popular on Twitter, songs that the people you follow are tweeting about and listening to, and songs from artists who are in mysterious ways connected to the musicians that you choose to follow. It's confusing in a good, serendipitous, jumbled up kind of way. You're never quite sure how exactly the algorithm works that is generating the tunes, but that's OK. The whole point is discovery, hearing something new that you might like, generated through a fortuitous crunching of your social relationships. If you have a Spotify or Rdio premium account you can listen to the entirety of the songs; if you have iTunes you get a 30-second clip and the option to buy.

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1) I hate that Marche makes no mention of his January profile of Megan Fox, a dazzlingly hyperbolic spasm of drool roundly mocked by Internet haters for, among other things, kicking off with a ludicrous Aztec sacrifice parable. ("Megan Fox will not go willingly to have her heart cut out.") It is annoying to get lessons in civility from someone whose current claim to fame is authorship of a terribly written profile about a not particularly interesting sex symbol that was illustrated with titillating photographs of a half-dressed actress.

2) I hate the title: "There Are No Saints Online ... but the Internet will be cleaned up yet." This is incorrect. At least one episode of Roger Moore's classic "The Saint" television series is available on YouTube. Plus, my daughter and mother are both online, and they're very nice people.

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Except the magic didn't work in the case of the Boston bombers, according to the Boston law enforcement authorities. The surveillance society did a face plant.

What happened? I called up Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Alessandro Acquisti, an expert in online privacy who has conducted some provocative research involving facial recognition. In a series of experiments, Acqusti and his fellow researchers were able to use "off-the-shelf" facial recognition software to identify individuals by comparing photos from a dating site, or taken offline with camera phones, with photos uploaded to Facebook. The researchers were also able to figure out a startlingly large amount of personal information about the people they managed to identify. But if Acquisti could do it, why couldn't the FBI?

Acquisti explained to Salon what he thinks might be happening on Monday morning.

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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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CISPA is designed to create a structure in which private companies can seamlessly share information about their users with the government in cases involving threats to "cybersecurity." The House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday, but the Obama administration has threatened to veto it in its current form.

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(Politico's Glenn Thrush found the email. Conservative political blogger Justin Hart found the Amazon registry.)

From beginning to end, the wish list spans a period of just 18 months. The most recent entry dates back to July 8, 2007: "Voice Power: Using Your Voice to Captivate, Persuade and Communicate." There are also five different books relating to fake ID creation and document fraud -- all dated Aug. 27, 2006. And then there's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

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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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Get used to it. This is the future. It's not pretty, but it's also not going away.

I won't deny it: The notion that we might be able to mobilize the awesome power of our social media networked hive mind to find the Boston bomber is seductive and compelling. It gets at the heart of one of the truths  we think we know about our networked age: Many eyes are better than one. Together we are strong. This is especially true in the Age of Ubiquitous Surveillance. The only machine capable of intelligently processing all the available photographs and video footage of any major public event these days is the networked human machine.

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Remember the "Obama phone" -- the completely ridiculous right-wing obsession on the idea that the Obama administration was handing out free phones to welfare recipients? Which turned out actually to be a Reagan-era program that provided discounts to low-income phone users?

Well, now there's a "Marco phone" -- as in Sen. Marco Rubio, proponent of a new immigration bill filed this week.

The Florida politics website the Shark Tank "reports":

According to the newly filed bill, immigrants who are allowed to enter the United States under a work visa, will be "granted" a taxpayer funded cellular phone. Move over “Obama phone,” we present the new ‘Hola, Como Estas?!’ MarcoPhone.

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I filed his advice away in the recesses of my brain but didn't do anything about it. I'm frightened of addictive mobile gaming -- I spend too much time with my iPhone as it is.

But today, courtesy of a Forbes interview with Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of mobile gaming start-up Supercell, I learned that "Clash of Clans" is an astonishing cash cow. The company is minting money on the one quality that almost every teenage boy possesses in unlimited abundance: impatience.

Supercell has just two games in Apple's App Store, "Hay Farm" and "Clash of Clans," but is raking in $2.4 million per day. According to Forbes, the company "grossed $100 million last year and $179 million in the first quarter of 2013 alone."

Those are huge numbers for a mobile gaming company. As Forbes' Karsten Strauss notes, if the company keeps the cash rolling in all year at the same rate, Supercell could get close to a billion-dollar year, which "would make it more than twice the size of Electronic Arts’ mobile games division, which has 900-plus iOS apps."

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Ricin is scary stuff, for a number of reasons. First, it is reputedly relatively easy to manufacture, by chemically processing the waste "mash" left over from making castor oil out of castor beans. Second, it's extremely potent: A dose the size of a grain of salt is lethal. Third, it seems inordinately popular with anti-government groups. Most recently, in 2011, the FBI arrested four members of a domestic militia group in the state of Georgia on charges of plotting to deploy biological weapons. The men had discussed manufacturing ricin and using it to target federal employees.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are rapid detection tests for ricin that can determine its existence in environmental samples. The Wall Street Journal reports that all mail sent to members of Congress is tested offsite for a variety of toxins.

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CISPA is designed to make it easier for private companies to share information about "cybersecurity" issues -- hacker attacks, Chinese sabotage, etc. --  with government agencies. Under CISPA companies such as Facebook or Microsoft could freely hand over personal information -- emails, texts, news feed postings -- without having to worry about potential negative consequences, including litigation from outraged users. Naturally, CISPA enjoys wide support from by the tech lobby; IBM sent more than 200 executives to Washington this week to push for its passage. The bill also enjoys bipartisan backing. The House of Representatives is set to vote on the bill either Wednesday or Thursday.

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"We will go to ends of the earth to find those responsible for this despicable crime,'' said FBI special agent Richard Deslauriers at a press conference in Boston on Tuesday morning. But what he really meant was we will leave no digital stone unturned. Every one and zero will be interrogated.

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