If you have cats, you may not realize that you are living with cold-blooded killers, at least you are according to New Zealand man Gareth Morgan. According to him, the country of New Zealand must eradicate cats, and then ban cats, in order to save the birds. Garrett Morgan has launched an online petition to completely get rid of cats in New Zealand, and even suggests euthanasia as an option for current cat owners.

Notre Dame athletic director, Jack Swarbrick has confirmed that the school’s star football player, Manti Te’o, is a victim of an Internet hoax. Te’o’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was a complete fabrication and reports that she died from leukemia during the 2012 football season are a lie. Initial reports had Te’o as part of the hoax, but Te’o and his family are flatly denying this, saying that Te’o is profoundly hurt and embarrassed by the entire situation.

Hailed as a rapist and stalker’s haven, “Girls Around Me” is not only a creepy app in its concept, it enables iPhone and android users to track nearby women based on their geographic location. The information is aggregated from check-ins through Facebook and Four Square, and perhaps what makes it the creepiest app, and why it is being called the “stalking app,” is because if a user of the app likes what he initially sees about the girl, he can see more information about her as pulled from her Four Square account and Facebook link, including more photos of her.

Update: We have just learned that Senator Leahy has withdrawn his support for the amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). He received resounding criticism from many groups and private citizens who felt that the revisions are unconstitutional and a gross invasion of privacy. In a series of tweets, below, Senator Leahy said that he did not support the bill amendments, and seems to deny that he ever did.

Facebook has found yet another way to monetize their product users. Their Promoted Posts feature, coming to the U.S. allows users to butt their way to the front of the line, gaining posts that they feel are important more visibility in their friends’ news feeds, for a $7 per post fee.

College professor Timothy Messer-Kruse didn’t think that something as small as making a tiny edit a Wikipedia page would spark national headlines, but it has. After finding proof that a historical event, the Haymarket Square riot, did not quite happen the way historians have long believed, Messer-Kruse decided to update the Wikipedia page of the event to reflect his findings. What he found was that it was going to be an uphill battle to make that change.

DC resident, Seth Horvitz, had quite a surprise when he got the Amazon.com package for which he had been waiting. It’s not every day that you open your door to find a military-grade semiautomatic rifle sitting there, but that is exactly what happened when musician Horvitz retrieved the package that UPS left for him.

A Craigslist job posting experiment by recent grad, Eric Auld, highlighted just how dire the job market is for many. For those who are freshly out of school, such as Master’s graduate Auld, finding a job should be a fun prospect, full of possibilities of the dream career after the fruits of one’s academic labors. The higher one’s education, the better it would seem their chances of getting their foot in the door with the desired employer and climbing that corporate ladder.

The massive NBCFail heard around the world has now turned into the massive #NBCFail on Twitter. If we were to be keeping track of NBC’s colossal Olympic coverage failures, it would look like this: 1) NBC assumed that Americans don’t relate to mourning London’s 7/7 terrorist attack victims and chose to not air the victim tribute section of the opening ceremonies, 2) NBC is airing Olympic games results before they actually air the games, 3) NBC has ensured that anyone with a US-based IP address cannot access live Olympic event coverage through other online venues, such as the BBC.

In a move that is not unheard of, but completely reprehensible, defeated Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is selling off his campaign’s donor and activist email list as the campaign attempts to crawl out of their $4 million hole of debt. And perhaps “slithering” is a better word as Newt is slapping his donors right in the face by not just selling their email addresses to other political campaigns, but to any unscrupulous company with equally slippery ethics.

With Facebook’s upcoming $5 billion dollar IPO, they must figure that they can do anything they want (like they didn’t before?). Of course, now that they will have stockholders they are going to have to focus even more on earning money, more than anything else, and of course they do that on the backs of their users.

We’ll bet that you thought that the posting of Yelp reviews on Yelp was an open system, allowing legitimate users to post a Yelp review – whether good or bad – without being censored. Well, if you thought that, you were wrong, as we ourselves learned, all too frustratingly, this week. It turns out that while Yelp claims to only filter out reviews “to protect consumers and business owners from fake, shill or malicious reviews”, in fact they filter Yelp reviews with no apparent rhyme or reason, based on a criteria which they coyly demur to explain, saying “It’s a bit of a Catch-22, but the more we describe how the system works, the easier it is for people to game the system and write fake reviews.” Moreover, this is exactly the sort of shenanigans that got them in hot water just a year ago, resulting in a class action Yelp lawsuit last year. The Yelp lawsuits last year claimed that Yelp would only remove a bad (and demonstrably fake, shill or malicious) review if the place that received the bad review paid for advertising on Yelp. In otherwords, Yelp was accused of extortion.

If you find the term “PTHC” anywhere in a computer message, text message, web search, or any other Internet communication, you may have cause for concern. PTHC typically stands for one of two things: either “Percutaneous Transhepatic Cholangiography” or (and more likely), “preteen hardcore”.

We’re not sure what Miss Manners would have to say about the correct way to apologize to someone whom you’ve just shot, but we’re pretty sure that she would not say that it’s ok to apologize by text message. Then again, given that the victim might not want to see your mug – except on a ‘wanted’ posted with “apprehended” stamped over it – maybe she would. While this may sound like an “only in the movies” scenario, it actually played out in real life in Orange County, California.

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania is being sued by Holly and Michael Robbins, along with their son Blake Robbins, over the discovery that the school district was spying on their son via the webcam in the school-issued laptop which their son received from the school district. The Robbins and others discovered that school administrators were remotely accessing the webcams in the students’ laptops when a student was disciplined by the school for “improper behaviour in this home”, with the school’s assistant principal producing as evidence a photo taken with the webcam, of a scene in the student’s home!