Sneak attacks like Snapchat's -- the app was launched in September 2011, and exploded in popularity this past fall -- are most likely to happen when the target demographic is younger than the journalistic cohort that covers new technology. Smartphone-equipped high schoolers and college kids are the big Snapchat users, so the rest of us weren't paying much attention until the app blew up.

Or maybe you're just a jaded cynic like me, and responded to seeing the name Snapchat pop up with increasing frequency on Twitter by wondering why the heck the world needed yet another piece of software to help people share digital content. Haven't we shared enough, already?

Yes, probably. But the answer to why Snapchat is worth pondering is a couple of orders of magnitude more profound than I expected. Snapchat is the anti-Panopticon, an indigenous rebellion against the know-it-all, see-it-all, never-forget-anything networked world.

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The announcement sent shock waves through Twitter. It's a risky, bold move. Very few people have figured out how to get readers to pay for content on the Web. Sullivan's model is innovative: He plans to eschew advertising altogether. Instead, we get what he has dubbed "freemium-based metering."

Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a "Read on" button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You'll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter - so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won't. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We've tried to maximize what's freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside. The only tough love we're offering is the answer to the View From Your Window Contest. You'll have to become a member to find where the place is. Ha!

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A simple story, maybe, but in that personal shift you can hear the echo of 2012's biggest technological transformation. Call it the year of the great untethering: In 2012 "mobile" triumphed. We've seen this paradigm shift rolling down the pike for a long time. Now it's here. The decline of the PC is no longer subject to debate.

And that's a big deal. The changing sales figures for desktops and laptops versus tablets and smartphones signify more than just an interesting tech business trend. This is a story about the reconfiguration of society around the small screen, a development that has implications for the media, entertainment, and advertising industries; for our privacy and our economy; for business and politics. If you're not figuring out how to play in what the tech industry likes to call the "smart connected device space" then you have already lost. And if you are not paying attention to what these devices will do to us as well as for us, then you are criminally negligent. Society is changing fast as we get more mobile. Can we keep up?

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The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

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"Aesthetically pleasing" is very subjective.

I was deep into the fifth page of the reader comments of the first installment of Ars Technica's excellent "The State of Smartphones in 2012," when I encountered this observation, which is simultaneously the most illuminating and worthless Internet comment of all time. It was a response to the declaration by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that the "Live Tiles" user interface in the brand-spanking-new Windows Phone 8 operating system was more "aesthetically striking" than the icons of Apple's iOS or the widgets of Google's Android.

(With Live Tiles, the restless smartphone user can expand or shrink the on-screen real estate devoted to a particular app or function, providing a level of configurability alien to the straitlaced universe that iPhone lovers, in particular, are accustomed to. Remember this, for future reference: Windows: freedom! Apple: tyranny!)

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Here's how it begins:

With the "fiscal cliff" looming, taxpayers are wringing their hands about all sorts of things. Income taxes might rise, dividends might get walloped, lifetime gift-tax exemptions might get slashed.

But when it comes to immediate impact on their wallets, maybe they should be thinking about something else entirely: The Apple tax.

Americans are shelling out big bucks annually to outfit the entire household with Apple products.

But about halfway down the column, Taylor notes, "Remember, this is not something that consumers are being forced to pay. They are dipping willingly into their own pockets, because they're essentially slaves to the devices."

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Those coat hangers of yore were brought to mind by the news this week that Nokia is trying to sell its headquarters. The plan is to save cash by leasing the building back as a tenant. It's not the kind of news that bumps up the stock price. Ozymandias has got nothing on Nokia. Twelve years ago, the company utterly dominated the global market for cellphones. It was hiring employees at a rate of 1,000 a month. In an article I wrote about Finland and open-source software that spring, I described Nokia as "an aggressive, fast-growing, fully global company that makes Microsoft look like an old fuddy-duddy."

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The timing was perfect for a growing cohort of economy-watchers eager to make the argument that globalization's malign impact on the American worker has hit high tide and is finally beginning to ebb. Just a week ago, the Atlantic presciently published "The Insourcing Boom," a fascinating in-depth story by Charles Fishman investigating General Electric's decision to start up new appliance assembly lines in the U.S. And "GE is not alone," writes Fishman,  arguing that an increasing number of American corporations are discovering it makes economic sense to bring the factories back home. Apple's news was the exclamation point at the end of the Atlantic's sentence.

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And not just any kind of history. Epic was specifically looking for people who had visited websites searching for information on "fertility issues, impotence, menopause, incontinence, disability insurance, credit repair, debt relief, and personal bankruptcy." Epic divided these people up into "interest groups" and targeted advertisements to them. So if, for example, you Googled "impotence" and visited a few Web pages with relevant information, the next time you checked out CNN.com you might suddenly be assaulted by a slew of Viagra and Cialis advertisements.

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He was playing Logos Quiz, a game that is based primarily on the ability to identify corporate logos.

I was appalled and amazed. We've all become quite used to product placement in our entertainment, to living in a world in which TV shows like, say, "Hawaii 5-0" don't even try to hide their primary function as vehicles for Victoria's Secret and Microsoft Surface marketing campaigns. But to make the ability to recognize a brand into the product itself -- that's pure genius. A 15-year-old's attention span in 2012 is perhaps the most fickle thing to ever exist on this planet -- to see my son trying to guess whether a certain squiggle signified BMW or Mercedes Benz was astonishing.

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The link in question was one that might have given many Facebook users pause. According to an affidavit filed by N. T. Elias, a special agent with the FBI, the video, titled "Dua of Sheikh Muhammad al Mohaisany masjid al haram makkah," appeared "to be a prayer for the success of the mujahideen and features various photos including Al-Qa'ida leaders Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, 9/11 attacks, bloodied adults and children, and Islamic fighters."

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In the beginning, Google preached, "Don't Be Evil" -- but that changed ... when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads ...

... We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search result, try Bing.

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But first, some background. Officials in San Antonio's Northside school district are claiming that the ability to locate the exact whereabouts of students via RFID chips will boost attendance and enhance safety. A number of different schools have attempted similar schemes in recent years, provoking strong condemnation from groups across the political spectrum who argue that forcing human beings to carry electronic tracking devices constitutes a profound invasion of privacy.

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Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy's doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

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It feels a trifle spoiler-ish to steal from the end of Madrigal's magisterial article, but the closing stretch, a glimpse at how acutely the nerds started to feel the huge consequences of their potential success or failure, is moving.

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But if they thought they were being smart, they were wrong. Broadwell and Petraeus were undone, says ACLU privacy and technology expert Christopher Soghoian, by their "lack of knowledge of operational security" and "poor tradecraft." "Draft" messages are stored in Gmail's server cloud just like all other sent and received messages. And the FBI turned out to be more than capable of correlating the Internet Protocol addresses that identified the origin of Broadwell's supposedly "anonymous" emails with hotel records that showed Broadwell as a guest at the same time the messages were sent.

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Remember, there are always going to be trade-offs for increased security , the more you encrypt your data to make it impossible for snoops to access, the more inconvenient it will be to get at your own information yourself. So be forewarned -- you can find an astonishing plenitude of information on the Web about how to secure your information, but complete privacy is never going to be hassle-free.

1) Your smartphone

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You don't have to read too far between the lines of a statement from Gallup's editor in chief, Frank Newport, published on Friday, to get that impression.

Newport first attempts the formidable task of defending Gallup's polling accuracy during the 2012 campaign. Perhaps he was anticipating Silver's Saturday column, which labeled Gallup the most inaccurate pollster of all the firms that measured voter sentiment this year. But Silver was hardly alone in wondering why Gallup regularly reported numbers much more favorable to Romney than anyone else in 2012. We deserve an explanation a little less lame than Newport's: what's the big fuss? Gallup wasn't really off by that much.

But then it gets interesting:

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A couple of seconds later  you realize you've been hornswoggled by yet another commercial for a new first-person-shooter combat game. You were fooled because the graphics were so goddamned realistic.

But I'll bet you didn't know just how realistic modern video games strive to be. Or what a chore it is to keep up with the ever-changing military state-of-the-art.

In the latest installment in Activision's hugely successful "Call of Duty" video game series, "Black Ops 2," released on Monday at midnight, the secretary of defense is a guy named David Petraeus. That might have been a reasonable assumption, as recently as a week ago. But now it's ancient history. Might as well have Ulysses S. Grant running the show.

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