The line that tech journalism should never have crossed? Mocking Napster co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker's $4.5 million wedding in a redwood grove on the Monterey Peninsula.

If you've been following this story, you are probably familiar with Alexis Madrigal's initial rant condemning the wedding, based on a report by the California Coastal Commission, and the undeniable fact that Parker will shell out an additional $2.5 million from his own pocket to deal with permit violations and excise the ghost of any possible impropriety. You may also have found time to wade through Sean Parker's 10,000 word defense, in TechCrunch, of the sacredness of weddings, his own credentials as an environmentalist, and the pitiable state of Internet journalism.

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So much drama! So much scrambling for alternatives at the last minute! So much nostalgia for those days when everyone had a blog and every post was brilliant and the future seemed so bright ... Wait, did that actually happen? Maybe I'm getting carried away.

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The new app is an odd bird. It includes the basic search functionality that we require from a search engine, but then layers a rudimentary story recommendation service on top. Just now, Duck Duck Go suggested a short news squib about a two-headed turtle named Thelma and Louise, a Wall Street Journal article warning against letting your children grow up to be tennis pros, and a story about Indiana basketball player Victor Oladipo wearing Google Glass to the NBA draft.

In an announcement of the new app, Duck Duck Go declared that the stories had "proven social value" and were generated by "by leveraging hand-selected, crowd-sourced, curated feeds." As explained by Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg, what that basically means is that Duck Duck Go scoops up stories that reach the top of "most emailed" or "most shared" lists at sites like Reddit or the WSJ or Business Insider.

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But Vi Hart's ambitions do not always fit into small sizes. On Thursday, she dropped her latest effort, and there's simply no other way to describe it than as a masterpiece of mad genius. At one point during the 30-minute video she observes that she wouldn't presume to tell you what her creation is "about," but that's not going to stop me.

Here are a few things I think Vi Hart's "Twelve Tones" video is about:

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"One of the gravest crises in the history of American cryptanalysis," writes historian Colin Burke, led directly to the 1949 mergingof the SIS and OP-20-G into the Armed Forces Security Agency. Three years later, another bureaucratic shuffle transformed the AFSA into the National Security Agency. A sense of panic induced by the "Soviets' A-Bomb, the Berlin Blockade, the forming of the satellite bloc in Eastern Europe, the fall of China, and the Korean War" -- all of which "were not predicted" by the intelligence agencies -- encouraged the U.S. government to authorize the NSA to spend tens of millions of dollars on computer research, in the hope that technological advances would help crack the new Soviet codes.

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Of course, I should be clear: This was my world of social media. We are filtered by whom we follow and friend. If I associated with a different motley crew, the cries of joy and rage could easily flip places. Social conservatives believe that what happened in Texas Wednesday night was a travesty of democracy and that Jesus is weeping in dismay over the prospect of a flood of gay marriage in California. And they're on Twitter too.

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As were, it turns out, groups that labeled themselves "open source software."

Geek alert! Why would the IRS care that software programming organizations producing code free for all to share or modify as they see fit might want to seek nonprofit, tax exempt status? What part of "free" doesn't the tax man understand? Other branches of the U.S. government actually contribute to open source projects.

In the 2010 internal IRS document listing keywords for examiners to watch out for, the explanation is simple. Open source isn't always what it seems:

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While hastening to state that he was not saying he believed the crash was a purposeful attack, Clarke did observe, reported the Huffington Post, that "'There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers' -- including the United States -- know how to remotely seize control of a car."

Clarke served during both Bush presidencies and under Bill Clinton, so presumably he wasn't speaking completely off the cuff. But just what is a "car cyber attack"?

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But stick the name "Koch" on the outside of the package, and even in Silicon Valley, a region so often described as a hotbed of libertarian values, and you have yourself a controversy.

Last Thursday, BuzzFeed's Justine Sharrock reported that intramural political warfare broke out at one Silicon Valley start-up after employees learned about plans to host a Koch-funded "Liberty Hackathon" in the company's offices.

The goal of the hackathon: "promoting liberty with the use of technology ... Whether promoting individual privacy or protecting economic freedom, this event will be the first of its kind to hack on various sources of data for a chance to win $5000 in cash."

That kind of talk might play well in Texas, but in Silicon Valley, where voter registration overwhelmingly skews Democratic, just the announcement of the event proved toxic.

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That's just one of the questions my mind wandered to after reading Noah Shachtman's terrific new Wired story on meditation, enlightenment and Silicon Valley: "Enlightenment Engineers: Meditation and mindfulness are the new rage in Silicon Valley. And it's not just about inner peace -- it's about getting ahead."

A few selected gems:

• "The technology community of Northern California wants return on its investment in meditation. 'All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,' says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. 'This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.'”
• "Buddhists have been preaching for centuries that we are all fundamentally interconnected, that the differences between us literally do not exist. That is the basis of Buddhist compassion. And there is no place where this interconnectedness is more obviously revealed than on Facebook."
• "The source code for spiritual awakening is open to anyone."
• "Steve Jobs spent lots of time in a lotus position; he still paid slave wages to his contract laborers, berated subordinates, and parked his car in handicapped stalls."

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Never mind the philosophical quandary one confronts when grappling with the notion that just because something is "digital" it is not "real." If we are sent mean texts, do we not bleed? If that Facebook status update tickles us, do we not laugh?

More to the point, Pause is an app designed to make you use your smartphone less. Which leads us straight into the jaws of paradox. By using Pause, we acknowledge that we are spending too much time on our phones. But our mechanism for controlling this character flaw is another app that we must download onto our phone? Pause's purpose is to get you to spend less time on such things as Pause. This is discombobulating.

Pause is painfully simple. Load the app, pick a set amount of minutes in which you will do something "real" (like go for a bike ride, or write a blog post about an app) and then switch your phone to Airplane Mode. An alarm will ring when your time is up and you can rejoin the wireless world.

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Within minutes of the release of two new documents describing the NSA's policies on what communications data can be gathered without a warrant, privacy geeks seized upon one particular passage:

In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis....

In other words, as Cato fellow Julian Sanchez tweeted, if you use encryption to make your communications private, and the NSA discovers that, it can grab your data and hold on to it until it cracks the code.

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Look at the data, and one thing jumps out: A massive generational shift. Millennials just aren't as in love with their wheels as were their forebears. Between 2001 and 2009, the average number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds dropped by 23 percent.

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Don't worry -- if you've got piles of gold accumulating in your "WoW" account, you don't need to declare it. Although, if you find a way to sell that gold to some other party in exchange for legal tender, that's a different story. That's income, and it's probably taxable.

But "WoW," and "Second Life," are sideshows. The specter of the IRS casting a shadow over Bitcoin, which the GAO concludes is "the most widely circulated virtual currency available," is the meat of the report. Just the fact that the U.S. government is starting to pay serious attention to the cryptocurrency surely has libertarians getting nervous.

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"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50. Apple II is obsolete now. Apple I was obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years. This is not a field in which one writes a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries, or builds a church that will be admired and looked at with astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in ten years it's obsolete, and really will not be usable within 10 or 20 years."

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Hey, look, Google not being evil! Kind of. The news sent an electric shock through a community of privacy activists and advocates who had already spent a busy morning being exasperated by a vigorous government defense of the NSA's surveillance activities mounted during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing.

Questions of morality aside, what Google is really trying to do is protect its reputation. The legal filing asserts that on June 6, the Guardian newspaper "published a story mischaracterizing the scope and nature of Google's receipt of and compliance with foreign intelligence surveillance requests. In particular, the story falsely alleged that Google provides the U.S. government with "direct access" to its systems, allowing the government unfettered access to the records and communications of millions of user (sic)."

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...AT&T, solar kit manufacturer Goal Zero, and Brooklyn’s Pensa Design have unveiled Street Charge, a solar-based charging unit that debuts today at Fort Green park and will be rolled out across numerous city parks and public destinations throughout the summer.

Similar recharging stations were all the rage at SXSW Interactive this spring, which made sense, given how heavily the attendees relied on their mobile devices, and how concentrated we all were in one physical location. Whether or not busy New Yorkers -- the kind of always-on, permanently-stressed go-getters who tend to view their phones dying as a profound existential challenge -- will be willing to spare the time to hang out near a recharging station while getting juiced up remains to be seen.

What does AT&T get out of this charitable enterprise, aside from a branding boost? Phones with dead batteries are phones that aren't racking up data charges, so one explanation for AT&T's beneficence is the possibility that bringing free power to the smartphone masses will result in increased data consumption.

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Such news, by itself, isn't particularly amazing. It's not even the first time a Chinese supercomputer has held the top ranking. The Tianhe-1 grabbed the pole position in November 2010 and held it until June 2011. Previously, Japan and the United States had traded places since 1993. Supercomputing speed follows roughly the same trajectory as Moore's Law -- it doubles about every 14 months. There will always be new contenders for the throne.

But this month, there's a new context for news about the debut of ever more powerful supercomputers. Consider the first comment left on Reddit to a thread announcing the exploits of Tianhe-2:

This would be a pretty awesome tool for churning through millions of phone records and digital copies of people's online data.

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Here is an alternate suggestion:

"Why the Defense of Government Surveillance by my Cato Colleagues is Misinformed, Dangerous, and Completely Misses The Point."

Sanchez also buries his most powerful analysis. The majority of his piece reads like a compelling legal brief, a point-by-point demolition of the argument that the government's ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about millions of Americans is properly constrained and legally justified. But then, near the end, he explains why this is such an important debate to have right now. Society will always struggle with the challenge of finding the proper balance between "state control and citizen autonomy," he writes. But...

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And then I said, please, can I have another?

"The Sonnet Project" is an app released in May by the Shakespeare Exchange. It is simple in concept, but absolutely exquisite in execution. Actors in various urban New York settings recite one of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. Ten are already accessible via the app, about 70 are supposed to be in the can, and the plan is to release every single sonnet as an Internet video over the year leading up to Shakespeare's 450th birthday.

The cinematography is creative, the musical accompaniment is sublime and the readings scratch handfuls of pain and beauty out of your very soul. Love, lust, betrayal -- that guy Will Shakespeare, he was the real deal.

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