Last week Amy Strickland joined a growing number of people who have lost face, if not their jobs, owing to stupid tweeting. The Booker T. Washington assistant principal had tweeted “Every white father’s nightmare – Or Nah?” above an image of seven interracial couples – white high school girls with their African American prom dates.

It seems like there is a new acronym on the Internet every week. Most recently, the acronym “GPO” has started cropping up online. Curiously (and perhaps frustratingly) to what it may refer won’t be clear from the GPO acronym itself, as it can refer to a couple of different things. (This is what happens when “professionals” start playing loosely with language.)

With all of the information, misinformation and, yes, hysteria about Ebola these days, you may be wondering which websites you can trust for factual information about Ebola. Here are a few online sites that are likely to be more reliable than most, some of which include an Ebola FAQ.

From the “Duh!” department, a new study of the personality of Internet trolls reveals that they possess the so-called “Dark Tetrad of personality”, meaning that they exhibit the personality disorders of psychopathy, narcissism, sadism and Machiavellianism, all rolled into one.

As a companion piece to our article on Bitcoin ATMs and Colorado’s new local currency, the COjack, here is a fantastic, plain English local currency definition and explanation of how local currency works, provided exclusively to the Internet Patrol by Dr. Stephen J. Schmidt, Professor of Economics at Union College in Schenectady. A huge thank you to Prof. Schmidt for this!

The United States now has 4 Bitcoin ATM locations: Seattle, Washington; Austin, Texas; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Denver, Colorado. Coincidentally, Colorado has also just launched its own local currency, called Colorado COjacks (pronounced “cojax”, or, if you prefer, in an homage to the Tootsie Roll popping detective, Kojacs).

Pedestrian smartphone lanes – also known as “e-lanes”, “talkways” and “mobile phone sidewalks” – are becoming a thing, as are other measures to protect texting pedestrians from themselves, as more and more people are injured in “distracted walking” accidents.

If you go just about anywhere online today, September 10th, 2014, you will find yourself encountering all sorts of banners and graphics of spinning disks (or spinning discs, take your pick), that exhort you to affix your name to a petition to support net neutrality.

Scientists in India and France have successfully transmitted a brain-to-brain thought, or communication, over the Internet. Using a non-invasive procedure, scientists in India wired a man’s head to capture and decode his brain impulses, had the man think the words “Hola” and “Ciao”, and then transmitted the impulses over the Internet to recipients that colleagues in France had wired similarly, who received the transmission as flashes of light, from which they were able to interpret the “Hola” and “Ciao”. The scientsts involved were Carles Grau, Romuald Ginhoux, Alejandro Riera, Thanh Lam Nguyen, Hubert Chauvat, Michel Berg, Julià L. Amengual, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, and Giulio Ruffini.

Do you take the time to fully read every Terms of Service (TOS) before you click your consent to them? If you said “No”, well, you’re not alone. In fact, if you said “Yes”, then studies suggest you are probably lying, as studies show that nobody reads those Terms of Service.

The New York Times recently did a comparison of Google searches originating in areas where, according to the NYT, people have life the easiest to areas where life is the hardest. Here’s what they found.

Black Twitter’s power has risen in public awareness with the proliferation of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, following the killing of unarmed teen Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. But while people are talking about it a lot now, #BlackTwitter has been around for a while.

Did you know that you can now find an online therapist, to have an online therapy or online counselling session, 24/7? Sites such as Pretty Padded Room, and 7 Cups of Tea, offer help and solace to those in need at the click of a button, some of them including free help!

“The Internet of Things”, often shortened to the “IoT”, is a phrase that is becoming more and more common. But just what is the Internet of Things? Who coined the IoT, and just what are these “things”? We explain.

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.