Men, beware. Before you propose in order to ‘do the right thing’ after being presented with a positive pregnancy test, be sure that you take your intended to a doctor for a blood-based pregnancy test, and that you personally see the results. Or, at very least, buy a new pregnancy urine test, hand it to your girlfriend outside the bathroom door, and have her come out with that test in hand, to see the results. Because there is a new cottage industry of selling positive pregnancy tests online, in both Craigslist and eBay.

Posting pictures that include images of your keys can be a serious security risk, as it is possible to make copies of keys from pictures. Software that allows people to clone a key from an image has been around for several years.

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.

Proposed California law AB 242, introduced by Assemblyman Ed Chau, is creating quite a buzz due to its wording, or rather, proposed lack of wording. AB 242 would require that all commercial websites and services offered through the Internet which collect personal information about California consumers make its privacy policy be written at a level of 8th grade reading, and be no longer 100 words.

The government’s sponsored online petition site “We the People” promises a White House response for all petitions with more than 25,000 signatures, and sticking to that promise, they issued an official response to the online petition entitled “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” The petition received over 34,000 signatures.

The year is quickly coming to an end and we have written about several apps over the past year. While some weren’t the best, like the false sense of security provided by the Wickr app (link), there were several we loved. Here is a list of some of our favorite apps of 2012.

Good looking genius nerds are not only fictional characters on The Big Bang Theory, as proven by NASA flight director, Bobak Ferdowsi. Known as the “NASA Mohawk Guy,” Ferdowsi shot to fame for not only helping to successfully land the Curiosity rover on Mars, but for sporting a much-televised mohawk while doing so, spawning an Internet meme.

If you ever wanted to match the face to a name you just learned, or if you find yourself kicking yourself over missing a fabulous photo opportunity, then the tiny little Memoto clip-on camera may be just the device for you. Still in its concept phase, the device is promising to hold pubic interest, having already raised $245,000 on Kickstarter, far surpassing their goal of $50,000.

Google is yet again finding themselves in hot water as the Federal Trade Commission is poised to slap them with an antitrust lawsuit. The FTC staff recommendation for the antitrust lawsuit is not unexpected given the swift investigations of Google by California, New York, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas. On top of the U.S. investigation, there is also an antitrust investigation of Google taking place in Europe.

Google is again blaming technical glitches for violating privacy policies and collecting personal data, this time from those using Apple’s Safari web browser. Google has agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $22.5 million – the largest amount that the FTC has ever fined – because they sneakily undermined the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by using computer code to trick Safari into granting Google access to user activity through cookies.

Undergraduate students of California’s public college and university system will now be able to access many of their textbooks for free, online. Governor Jerry Brown signed senate bills 1052 and 1053 into law, which will establish online libraries that contain digital textbooks for the 50 most commonly taken lower-division courses.

An app as an essay, that is what is behind Robin Sloane’s, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hours Bookstore, app, Fish: a Tap Essay. It doesn’t do anything like allow you to play games or find friends. It is simply an essay with some thoughts on the Internet, and the way that we treat and view online content.

Bots generate at least 10% of all online traffic, according to data released today by Solve Media, a company that provides security authentication solutions through CAPTCHA-based advertising technology. Solve Media indicates that they have seen a 400% increase in what they term ‘aberrant’ traffic across web-based services such as commenting, voting, registration, contact and commenting.

Twitter has been ordered to turn over the deleted tweets of Occupy Wall Street protestor, Malcolm Harris, after he was charged with disorderly conduct during an Occupy protest. In a controversial move, presiding Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. demanded that Twitter turn over Harris’ records for the period of time during the incident because, Sciarrino believes, there are tweets that could be relevant to the case.

If you want insanely cheap flights while still being able to book flights online, you can now get cheap flight deals, and compare flights, through Google flights. And these are not cheapo flights from some sort of questionable airline that you have never heard of, these are discounted flights from well known airlines such as US Airways, United, JetBlue and Delta.