You may have heard that New York is banning Tiger Selfies after a spate of them on dating app Tinder. What, you may be asking yourself, is a tiger selfie (and for that matter, what is Tinder), and why would NY pass a law to ban them? We explain, and clear up some misconceptions.

Sick of scrounging change for the parking meter, or having to remember to feed the meter or parking station? Then you will love the mobile parking meter app ParkMobile. The ParkMobile app is a mobile parking payment app that lets you pay for parking – and reload your meter – from your smartphone.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) “Here I am” technology will be required in every car in the future, if the U.S. Government’s plans come to fruition. v2v technology is a wireless technology similar to 802.11, such as what you may be using to read this article, only it is a vehicle-to-vehicle intranet, rather than the Internet.

The Happy Hour Virus isn’t really a virus at all. It’s a pretend, fake “virus” that you can use to make your colleagues, boss or spouse think that your computer is broken, so that you can’t do any more work and may as well leave. And the Happy Hour Virus works with all computers, because it’s essentially just a web page that you load.

It’s amazing to us that even with the public knowing that agencies such as the NSA are accessing cell phone records, and with cautions against using location-based services or revealing your location on Twitter, people seem to choose to ignore the cautions. Well, perhaps this will convince you. Even before all of this came to light, way back in 2009, a German politician named Malte Spitz, in an effort to demonsrate just how much we have given up our privacy – just how insidious it is – decided to make public six-months’ worth of his cell phone records. And the German newspaper Die Zeit created an animation – really an animated visualization – of where Spitz went, and what he was doing, every day of that six months, with stunning accuracy.

Lots of people were really excited to learn about the “Watch ABC” ABC Player app, which lets you watch ABC broadcast shows – live streaming – on your iPhone or iPad, or a Windows 8 computer (no word on an ABC Player for Android yet). And it’s free! The first two markets, New York and Philadelphia, went live today. However, there is a catch. You must be a cable customer, and they enforce it by requiring you to log in with the username and password for your cable subscription.

The moment I heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, I did what many people did: I immediately sought out as much information as possible online. I watched the now widely dispersed videos of the bomb exploding, I looked at the gruesome pictures of victims of the attacks, and I read countless articles about the unfolding tragedy. It is of course trite to observe that the internet has fundamentally altered the way people consume news, breaking or otherwise, but the importance of this fact, however obvious it may be, was made especially vivid to me as I watched the story of the Boston Marathon bombing unfold over the last few days from England, where I am currently in graduate school.

The Boston Marathon bombing, like most tragedies, has prompted countless reflections and questions; some of this soul-searching has been quite general – how is humanity capable of both ruinous evil and heroic good? – and some of it is quite specific – how many people where injured, who are they, exactly how did they get hurt? The much-discussed topic of how technology and social media have impacted the response to the Boston Marathon killings is both general and specific. It is general in that people are asking expansive questions about what role, if any, amateurs armed with computers and an internet connection should play in an active terrorist investigation, and it is specific in that, regardless of how you answer the first question, amateurs are playing a role in an active terrorist investigation, zeroing in on the minutest details of the thousands of photos of the crime scene floating around the internet. We’ll attempt to navigate between the two poles, exploring the intersection of technology, social media, and the Boston Marathon bombing details that have emerged so far.

Amazon has just launched its autorip service – Amazon Auto Rip. So just what is Amazon Auto Rip? It’s a bit of a misnomer, as you don’t have to rip anything – the CD is automatically ‘ripped’ for you, which is why it’s called Auto Rip, and added to your Amazon Cloud Player (you can also play it on your iPod or other MP3 player). And it’s retroactive back to 1998!

Wondering where to recycle electronics, or how to recycle electronics? Electronics recycling has never been easier than with the Amazon Electronics Trade In service! It’s the perfect place to dispose of electronics and other gadgets you no longer use! Cell phone disposal (well, cell phone recycling), calculators, digital cameras, iPods and other MP3 players, Amazon takes recycling electronics seriously! That’s because disposal of electronics is a serious issue, particularly in today’s disposable electronics culture, so being able to not only dispose of your gadgets, but to get Amazon credit for them – and to have Amazon pick up the shipping tab, to boot – is awesome!

A new batch of scam emails purporting to confirm your order with Yes Asia (YesAsia.com) and Play.com went out this week. The scam relies on your freaking out when you see confirmation for an order you did not place, so that you will click the link to see “the order”, but of course, the link really goes somewhere else – in this case to some bad stuff being hosted on the iafrica.com website (in the case of our sample, it goes to “http://newsletters.iafrica.com/servlet/link/33/1082/140693/41003”).

In yet one more bid to ensure that Facebook users never leave Facebook’s site (and, of course, if they do, Facebook will be following them), Facebook has announced the launch of their Facebook Movies service. The Facebook movie service, which is a movie rental service, allows users to trade Facebook credits to rent and stream a movie for up to 48 hours. First up: the Batman movie, The Dark Knight. That said, the Facebook movie rental service isn’t actually being offered by Facebook itself, so much as being permitted by Facebook, for a cut of the action.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to shuffle your music on your iPad, well, you’re not alone. Apple could hardly have made it more confusing. First, you can’t shuffle your music on your iPad in iTunes, because iTunes isn’t even where your music is on the iPad! Your music is in the iPod app on your iPad, and you can shuffle your music on the iPod on the iPad, but you have to know the secret. So, here’s the secret.

Not content with sending fake Amazon confirmation emails, the outfit sending out the Canadian pharmacy spam is now sending out fake Amazon.com order cancellation emails, too, claiming that your Amazon order has been cancelled. “Amazon.com – Your Cancellation (0046-68878-96071)” says the email’s subject (although the “order number” may change) – but of course the link to check “ORDER INFORMATION” really takes you to a Canadian pharmacy spam site, hawking Viagra, Cialis and the like. In the example below, the fake cancellation contains links to https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, which redirects to https://web.archive.org/web/20211230152715/http://weightbreezy.com/, which is a Canadian pharmacy spam site.

Google news has started mining Twitter to flesh out their latest news headline results, including displaying your tweets as “latest news” mixed in with the news headlines, in a rolling marquee that does an auto-refresh much like a Facebook page does. A perfect, albeit sad, example is today’s news that actor Andrew Koenig – son of Walter Koenig, who played Checkov in the original Star Trek – was found dead of an apparent suicide, in a park in Vancouver. As thousands tweeted about the sad event, their tweets started showing up in Google News along with news headlines about Koenig.