Jeremy Meeks – also known as the “Hot Felon” and the “Handsome Felon” – knows firsthand the power of social media, after his arrest mugshot went viral and led to a modeling contract less than two weeks after his arrest.

The FBI glossary of Internet slang acronyms reads like a leet speak (l337 5p3@k) primer, albeit a massively over-inclusive one. Indeed, in the time it would take an FBI agent to skim through the Internet slang glossary looking for a particular term, one would hope they could have just inferred it from context. Put together by the FBI Intelligence Research Support Unit (IRSU) and starting with ADN (Any Day Now) and ending with ZOMG (“emphasized OMG”) and ZUP (“what’s up?”), and everything in between, the FBI primer on ‘net slang is a whopping 83 pages containing nearly 3000 terms, many of them, if not most of them, not even really a thing. Although we are fond of BOGSAT (bunch of guys sitting around talking) and are now using it every chance we get.

The social media campaign to help find the nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, hashtag BringBackOurGirls ( #BringBackOurGirls ) is now under a cloud because the pictures that the campaign is using are not only not of the kidnapped girls, but they aren’t even of Nigerian girls.

Efforts to ban texting while driving don’t work. Heartfelt pleas from heartbroken parents whose children have died while driving and texting while in traffic don’t work. So maybe putting up billboards with pictures of drivers who are caught driving while texting while in traffic will work. At least, that’s the hope of Brian Singer, the founder of the TWIT Spotting site.

Dumb Starbucks may already be gone, but clearly it’s not forgotten. Not only that, but the owner of Dumb Starbucks, which was set up as a “parody shop”, Nathan Fiedler, is said to have committed to opening another Dumb Starbucks in Brooklyn.

Here is why you must set up two-factor authentication (also called 2-step verification, or simply “2FA”) wherever you can. Many places now offer it, including Facebook, Paypal, Twitter, and, of course, Gmail (Google). You may in fact remember the story of how Naoki Hiroshima lost their Twitter account, valued at $50,000, to a hacker. Basically the hacker managed to get into and redirect Hiroshima’s email domain, allowing the hacker to do password resets on some of Hiroshima’s accounts, and intercept the password reset emails. It’s very easy for someone to do a password reset on an account if they have the email address, however with 2-factor authentication is becomes a lot harder.

With the holidays, you may not have heard about Justine Sacco, and her boneheaded Twitter tweet heard around the world. “Going to Africa,” she wrote, “hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” she tweeted. Yes, really.

Darth Vader has posted a selfie to Instagram. The Darth Vader selfie was the first image in the new Starwars Instagram account, and features Lord Vader with a few fallen bodies in the background.

The Vatican has announced that Catholics can receive indulgences in exchange for following Pope Francis on Twitter.

Relevant to the recent story of the teenager who was jailed for posting a sarcastic comment to Facebook, a French company has recently developed software which it claims will identify sarcastic comments posted online. No, this isn’t a joke, and isn’t an article from the Onion.

We’re all familiar with the movies and stories about jurors who skirt or even violate rules in the name of “real justice” (one of our favorites is the little-known movie Suspect, with Liam Neeson, Dennis Quaid, John Mahoney (best known as Frasier’s dad), and Cher). But it’s become a serious problem as the confluence of Google, social media, and smartphones in the pocket of every juror has led to a phenomenon known as the “Googling juror”, or “digital disobedience”. Put simply, jurors are taking matters into their own hands, doing extra-curricular (and extra-legal) research, and also sharing information on social media, which is throwing trials, and even causing mistrials.

A new category of reviews has been added to Yelp: correctional facilities. Yes, believe it or not, there are reviews for prisons and jails from coast to coast, including Rikers Island (New York) to the Los Angeles County Jail (California) and locations in-between.

Paul Kevin Curtis has learned the hard way how one’s social media profile can be used to create the impression that you are behind something less than above-board. Curtis, who is an Elvis impersonator and who uses the sign-off “This is KC and I approve this message” on social media, was the prime suspect in the three letters containing ricin that were mailed to President Obama, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, and Judge Sadie Holland, also of Mississippi, last week. It didn’t help that the letters included that signature sign-off, “This is KC and I approved this message.”

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.