Additional reporting by Suzanne Choney

Read any story about Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who committed suicide after his roommate spied on his homosexual encounter via webcam, and you arrive immediately at an obvious conclusion: The Internet is to blame.

To put it more accurately, without the Internet, Clementi's roommate would not have been able to so easily do the damage that was done. Clementi discovered his roommate's indirect taunting because it was posted on Twitter, while the video itself was apparently shared via Apple's iChat. Clementi's own farewell appeared on Facebook.

Yet as malevolent as the Internet has become, there's evidence that it also may have provided Clementi with the assistance he needed at times.

During the period of harassment, Clementi apparently shared what was happening several times on a message board on a gay website called JustUsBoys, according to Gawker. In the posts, he revealed his roommate troubles, and received advice and encouragement from others on the message boards about how to resolve the situation.

Online communication was not hard for Clementi; he clearly stated his frustrations: "I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out ... and I'd probably just end up with somebody worse than him. ... The other thing is that I don't wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me."

In the end, the help Clementi got did not prevent his suicide, but that's not to say there aren't many resources that people in his situation could use.

Googling "suicide prevention" immediately pops up a phone number to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, followed by links to that service and others: SAVE.org, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Suicide.org to name just a few. Closer to home, every university has its own suicide prevention service, though trying to find Rutgers' own suicide help online is not very easy.

The stakes tend to be higher when trying to reach teens grappling with their sexual identities. According to a study in the journal Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, gay, bisexual or "unsure" teenagers are 3.4 times more likely than straight kids to attempt suicide (or at least report that they did).

But for this reason and others, turning to the Internet is almost an immediate reaction for kids dealing with these issues.

"I would argue that the Internet has been a lifeline for [gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender] kids," says C.J. Pascoe, assistant professor of sociology at Colorado College who teaches courses on sexuality, social psychology, deviance and gender, and who recently wrote a book about male sexuality in high school.

"They can find desperately needed community there that they often cannot find offline. When I talk to trans kids, they often say it's the first place they learned that there was a name for how they felt!"

Last month, in response to another suicide of a frustrated gay teenager, syndicated columnist and newspaper editorial director Dan Savage introduced a YouTube channel geared to providing hope for gay teens caught in the throes of their angst. The "It Gets Better" project features videos by gay individuals and couples who discuss coming out, dealing with family, or just how much better life gets as they got older.

In his own video, Savage says, he and his husband Terry "don't dwell on the past. We talk mostly about all the meaningful things that are in our lives now, our families, our friends who are gay and straight, the places we've gone the things we've experienced, all the stuff we would've missed out on if we'd killed ourselves back then."

But for every salve for troubled souls that the Internet can offer up, there are many razor-sharp technologies within even closer reach. And teens' sexuality — from nude photos to sexual preferences — and the volatility of youth can make a lethal combination, given the digital tools that are out there.

In 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meier was seduced by a boy — or so she thought — in an elaborate hoax conducted over MySpace by the mother of a former friend. When the "boy" dumped her, she hanged herself, never learning the truth.

In 2009, an 18-year-old girl named Jessica Logan committed suicide after an ex-boyfriend distributed naked pictures of her via cell phone to classmates who then harassed her.

Legally there's not a lot that can be done. If you kill someone with your car, intentionally or not, you can be charged with vehicular manslaughter or homicide. But there's no equivalent for driving someone to take their own lives using more recent technologies such as social networks and cell phones. Though Megan Meier's persecutor was tried, Wired reported that she was acquitted due to the lack of a coherent prosecution that could nab cyberbullies without also locking up a bunch of innocent people.

In this case, the use of Twitter and iChat that apparently resulted in someone's violent death gets the alleged perpetrators a maximum charge of "third degree invasion of privacy," which carries a prison term of up to five years.

Attorney and Internet safety expert Parry Aftab, speaking to Matt Lauer on The TODAY Show, said that part of the fault lies with the simplicity of carrying out such cruelty as the webcam spying. "It's easy, and that's the problem," she said. "You think about it, it seemed like a good idea at the time, there's technology that lets you do it, and it's done." She said that while criminal charges may not filed, civil rights violations could apply in the case.

Pascoe also laments how easy this type of harrassment has become: "I certainly would not blame technology itself for this type of harassment, but I would say that it poses risks for which we (as well as youth and young adults) are not yet fully prepared. The rapidity with which information can be diffused and the amount of people who have access to a given piece of information in a mediated environment mean that the consequences of technological based bullying and harassment might be much more grave than offline harassment whose audience is limited to those in the immediate vicinity."

The trouble is, when something is so easy to do, it's harder to convince kids that it's wrong. The record and film industries grapple with the fact that downloading music and movies takes so little effort, it doesn't feel like stealing. Harassing people online, taunting them, even surreptitiously filming them remotely, takes far less effort than saying something hurtful to their faces — perhaps, to teenagers, it's not the same thing.

In an ironic twist not lost on the media, this week is the kick-off for Rutgers university-wide "Project Civility." It will feature several forums on new technologies, including one slated for Nov. 3 entitled "Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior." While it's easy for a cynic to smirk grimly and say that the seminar is coming a few months too late, it's more important than ever to realize that it is better late than never. If Tyler Clementi's death can serve a greater purpose, it should be to bring lessons in online civility to universities in all 50 states, and corresponding discussions in homes, offices, hospitals and courtrooms as well.

Catch up with Wilson on Twitter at @wjrothman.

Not that Android needed another survey to validate its growing popularity, but there is yet another one out: ChangeWave Research, in its latest consumer survey, "shows another surge in Android momentum" among prospective buyers of smart phones.

That surge comes at the expense of Apple's iPhone. While the iPhone's operating system is still considered No. 1 by future buyers, with 38 percent saying they will choose an iPhone, it dropped from a 50 percent preference in June, "as expected in the aftermath of the huge spike we saw during June's iPhone 4 release," said Paul Carton, ChangeWave's vice president of research.

ChangeWave surveyed 4,000 consumers in recent weeks, and among those planning to buy a smart phone in the next 90 days — the crucial holiday retail season — 37 percent say they "prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone," up 7 percent from the last survey in June, and "a new all-time high for the Google operating system," said Carton.

"We’ve seen huge leaps forward for the Android OS in four of the last five ChangeWave surveys," he said. "All told, it’s a six-fold increase in consumer preference for the Google OS in a year’s time."

While the first Android phone came out about two years ago, it was only last fall when more phones became available. Among them, Motorola's Droid, now succeeded by the Droid 2 and the Droid X, and HTC's extensive lineup of Android phones.

Research In Motion's BlackBerry phones actually gained 1 percentage point — from 5 to 6 percent — as a buying preference, but the result is still not encouraging, Carton said.

"Preference for the RIM OS ... is up just 1 percent since June, a time when RIM had fallen to its lowest level since we began asking this question. The current 1 percent uptick is likely attributable to the recent launch of the new Torch smart phone."

In terms of mobile operating system satisfaction, Apple's iOS remains the leader, with 74 percent of iPhone customers saying they're "very satisfied" with the operating system; among Android users, 65 percent say they are "very satisfied." Next in line: the Palm OS/WebOS (32 percent), RIM OS (31 percent) and Windows Mobile (24 percent).

Men use technology to read the New York Times, Spin and grown-up books, watch "Star Trek," type important memos, update their calendars, play video games and run Google Earth recon. They don't want no pretty, digitally clueless beauty pageant queen of a gadget!

That's for ovulating girls who like chocolate, shop for bras, require technology to calculate their BMI and don't know how to use the Google.

That'd be my takeaway if I was a space alien attempting to grok earthlings from Jezebel's Ten Worst Tech Ads For Women.

I still want this Hello Kitty classic pink crystal iPhone case. Shut up.

via Jezebel

Follow Helen A.S. Popkin on Twitter or Friend her on Facebook, where she blathers about pugs, online privacy and other important junk. What are ya, chicken?

"Fallout New Vegas" takes you back to the end of the world in the city of sin. Msnbc.com's Todd Kenreck reports. Follow Todd Kenreck on Facebook.

Think those apps on your Android phone are just for your eyes only? Not so, according to a new study, which found that 15 of 30 popular apps downloaded from the Android Market shared consumers' private information with online advertisers.

Researchers from Intel Labs, Penn State University and Duke University developed a real-time monitoring service called "TaintDroid" that tracked the flow of "privacy-sensitive data" through third-party apps, or applications for smart phones using the Android operating system, increasingly popular among consumers and in the business world.

TaintDroid found that 15 of the 30 apps send users' "geographic location to remote advertisement servers. The study also found that seven of the 30 applications send a unique phone (hardware) identifier and, in some cases, the phone number and SIM card serial number to developers." The researchers said they identified 68 cases of "potentially misused private information" by 20 apps.

"Many of these applications access users' personal data such as location, phone information and usage history to enhance their experience," said Patrick McDaniel, Penn State associate professor, computer science and engineering, in a statement. "But users must trust that applications will only use their privacy-sensitive information in a desirable way."

The researchers said that apps rarely provide privacy policies that clearly state how users' sensitive information will be used, and users have no way of knowing where applications send the information given to them.

Android, developed by Google, is based on Linux, an open-source operating system. Other operating systems used for smart phones, such as Apple's, Research In Motion's BlackBerrys and Windows phones, are more closed in their architecture. There now are between 70,000 and 80,000 free and for-pay apps in the Android Market.

A Google spokesperson said the study should be put in perspective.

"On all computing devices, desktop or mobile, users necessarily entrust at least some of their information to the developer of the application. Android has taken steps to inform users of this trust relationship and to limit the amount of trust a user must grant to any given application developer. We also provide developers with best practices about how to handle user data."

When users install an Android Market app, the spokesperson said, "users see a screen that explains clearly what information the application has permission to access, such as a user's location or contacts. Users must explicitly approve this access in order to continue with the installation, and they may uninstall applications at any time. Any third party code included in an application is bound by these same permissions. We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust."

The researchers said they evaluated the accuracy of TaintDroid "using 30 randomly selected, popular Android applications that use location, camera, or microphone data. TaintDroid correctly flagged 105 instances in which these applications transmitted
tainted data; of the 105, we determined that 37 were clearly legitimate. TaintDroid also revealed that 15 of the 30 applications reported users’ locations to remote advertising servers. Seven applications collected the device ID and, in some cases, the phone number and the SIM card serial number. In all, two-thirds of the applications in our study used sensitive data suspiciously."

"This lack of transparency forces users to blindly trust that applications will properly handle private data."

Figure you'll save yourself a wad of cash and skip "The Social Network" because — hey — like "Titanic," you already know how it ends?

Pump your brakes, sport. There might be a few secrets you don't yet know about Facebook — the world's largest virtual time suck you're always complaining about in your status updates. Here's some super-secret twists that may or may not (pretty much, not) pop up in the plot:

* Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg quits Harvard for Palo Alto, Calif. to join lovely and talented Napster dude Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), only to learn that Timberlake — er — Parker … is a DUDE!

* Mark Zuckerberg takes the "red pill" and discovers he's latex-clad Jesus … and Cowboy Curtis sure has put on a lot of weight! You know, like Neo in "The Matrix."

* After six years of convoluted stories about how the nonstop Facebook redesigns are the results of ongoing research based solely on user needs, we learn that Mark Zuckerberg is totally making it up on the fly from the stuff on the bulletin board behind our heads!

* Disillusioned Harvard student Eduardo Saverin discovers that the obnoxious code monkey Mark Zuckerberg who screwed him out of his Facebook shares is actually the other half of Eduardo's split psyche and the only way he can stop him is to get author Ben Mezrich — the dude who wrote the book about the MIT students who made millions gaming Las Vegas — to write a one-sided exposé chronicling Eduardo's beefs in a book Hollywood snaps up before it's even written.

* Unable to silence the imaginary voice whispering, "If you build it, you'll get farm coins," millions of Facebook users willingly expose their personal information to a third party for the privilege of spending countless hours tiling virtual soil in a faux feudal system rather than, you know, having a life.

* Facebook users triumphantly shed their ambivalence about their relationship with the world's largest social network and enthusiastically jump on the metaphorical Facebook bus for what — on the surface — seems a fairy tale happy ending, but is actually a bleak commentary on our unpredictable, ambiguous future.

* After finding the origami unicorn Edward James Olmos fashioned out of one of of his "I'm CEO ... b-tch!" business cards, Mark Zuckerberg realizes he is no different from the "dumb f--ks" he's been targeting for years on his social science fiction network.

* Turns out, your online privacy has been dead the whole time!

Related: Facebook movie is all about the hoodies ... and shower shoes

Helen A.S. Popkin is always going "blah blah blah" about Facebook, then she asks you to Friend her or follow her on Twitter ...because that's how she rolls.

Can you say braaaaaaains?

Seems it's that time of the year again. That's right, it's zombie season.

With Halloween on the horizon and the scent of blood in the crisp fall air, video game developers and publishers know just what we need – hordes of undead shuffling toward our game machines.

So if you like your corpses hungry and your weapons bloody, here's what you have to look forward to:

Undead Nightmare — Players will need an extra dose of redemption when Rockstar Games' epic western "Red Dead Redemption" gets all zombiefied. Undead cowboys — and apparently even undead horses — will be unleashed on the game with the arrival of the "Undead Nightmare" downloadable content. The first screenshots from the expansion were released Wednesday (check them out here) and a trailer is scheduled to start freaking us out Thursday. A launch date for "Undead Nightmare" has not been announced, but Rockstar says it will include: a brand new single-player adventure, eight new multiplayer zombie characters and new animals unleashed upon the wild west world. It will cost $9.99 (PlayStation Network) or 800 Microsoft Points (Xbox LIVE).

Zombies ate my "Call of Duty" — Gamers loved the zombies in "Call of Duty: World at War" so much that developer Treyarch is bringing the dead back to life … again. On Wednesday, the company revealed that zombies will walk the earth in "Call of Duty: Black Ops," which hits stores Nov. 9. Players will be able to battle the undead in co-op gamplay with up to four players.

Zombies ate my iPhone — For those "Call of Duty" fans who can't wait until November to get their zombie fix, there's "Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies" for the iPhone and iPod Touch. On Thursday, a new zombie-fightin' map will be released for the game, which costs $4.99.

The Sacrifice — Valve's zombie fighting games –"Left 4 Dead" and "Left 4 Dead 2" – both get an expansion with the launch of "The Sacrifice" on Oct. 5. According to Kotaku.com, the expansion stars the heroes of the first game as they fight toward an encounter with the heroes of the second game. "The Sacrifice" works with both the original game and the sequel, and will let players choose which of the characters die. "The Passage" includes levels that are playable in campaign, versus and survival modes, and is free to PC gamers who own either game, though it will cost Xbox 360 owners $7.

Dead Rising 2 — Will you kill them with a fox? Will you kill them with a box? Will you kill them here or there? You will kill them everywhere! If you like to kill zombies in all sorts of unique and unusual ways, then "Dead Rising 2" is the game for you. This zombie-filled action-RPG takes place in a Las Vegas-like town overrun with skull-munchers. It's your job to use whatever object you can (hand grenades, chainsaws, giant stuffed teddy bears) to take out as many zombies as you can. The game launched Tuesday for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. For a look at the zombie-dicing mayhem, check out the below video from msnbc.com games editor Todd Kenreck.

Blood Drive – Hmmm. Yet another zombie game set in a Vegas-like city overrun with the undead. Ah well, the more the merrier. Activision's "Blood Drive" car combat game launches in November for the Xbox 360 and PS3. In this game, players take part in a televised game show in which they battle other drivers — as well as hordes of revolting flesh eaters — in a fight to the death. According to the press release and the trailer (which you can watch here), undead frat boys, cops, strippers and bachelorette partiers await you — each with their own special brand of death to deliver.

That's right, forget the brains. We'd rather have ... gaaaaaames!

For more bad zombie jokes, you can follow Winda Benedetti right here on Twitter.

Posting the details of a live execution on Twitter may seem problematic to those concerned about such things. But what about posting the details of a live execution you didn't even attend? That's what a Virginia-based political blogger did during his home state's execution of Teresa Lewis.

Following Virginia's execution protocol, Ben Tribbett tweeted real-time updates that corresponded with the tightly monitored schedule. The tweets were retweeted more than 1,000 times and Tribbett received more than 100 new followers, reports industry site The Next Web. "A lot of the retweets came from Virginia [Twitter users] and from people following this who were outraged by the case," Tribbett told The Next Web. "A bunch of my followers online were shocked. I got a lot of replies saying, 'are you really live tweeting the execution?'"

It wasn't Tribbett's intent to paint himself as an actual witness to the execution. His tweets readily reveal the source of his information: "Virginia Execution Protocol: 8:50: The condemned inmate is led in restraints to the execution chamber where she is seated on the execution gurney, then placed on her back,” his tweet countdown began. "Guards then strap the inmate down at various points."

Tribbett's objection to Lewis' execution, detailed on his blog, reveals his choice to share the cold facts via Twitter. As Tribbett writes, the 41-year-old inmate — who some say was borderline mentally retarded — received the death sentence for plotting to kill her husband and stepson for insurance money, while the two shooters in the case received life sentences. Further, Tribbett points out, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who refused to commute Lewis' sentence to life in prison — reportedly attended a cocktail party on the night of the execution.

In the midst of his Virginia Protocol countdown, Tribbett tweeted: "For the record, @BobMcDonnell still has 4 minutes to stop this, if he isn't too drunk from his 'cocktail party' earlier tonight." That, as the continuing countdown on Twitter details, did not occur.

More evidence that 7 inches is the new black of tablet screen sizes: Dell expects to release a tablet with a 7-inch screen display in the weeks ahead, joining the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook and Samsung Galaxy Tab as the mainstream competitors to Apple's 9.7-inch iPad.

"We'll be launching very, very soon — within the next few weeks," Dell Greater China President Amit Midha said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

In August, Dell introduced a 5-inch tablet, the Streak, which is also a smart phone, and, which so far has met with a tepid response. The Streak costs $550; with an AT&T two-year contract, the price is $300. It runs on Google's Android operating system, as will the new 7-inch tablet. Midha said Microsoft's Windows operating system will be used on some of the other smart phone and tablet devices Dell is planning. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The company is not stopping with the two tablet screen sizes, he said; in the next six months to a year, there will also be 3-inch, 4-inch and 10-inch devices.

Apple, as reported, is working on a thinner version of the 9.7-inch iPad, and may be looking at a 7-inch version as well.

And while size matters, so does price. And little pricing information is available on any of the new 7-inchers. Apple's least expensive iPad, a 16-gigabyte, Wi-Fi only version with, costs $499. Its top model, a 64-GB version with both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, is $829.

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry PlayBook was announced earlier this week, will not be out until after the holiday season. Samsung's Galaxy Tab will be sold by all four major wireless carriers in the U.S., but the cost will likely vary, depending on the subsidy carriers offer for those who sign up for two-year contracts.

PCWorld noted recently that a listing for the Galaxy Tab on Amazon's U.K. site "is setting some worrisome prospects. According to the listing, you can get a 16GB Samsung Galaxy Tab the equivalent of $1,067, and that's with a 15 percent discount."

Owners of Apple's iPad tend to "skew younger and more male," while those who have Amazon's Kindle e-reader "tend to be wealthier" and more educated, according to a new study from The Nielsen Co.

Nielsen's first-ever "Connected Devices Playbook" report surveyed more than 5,000 consumers who already have tablet devices, e-readers, smart phones, netbooks and media players, and included 400 iPad owners.

Among the findings:

• iPad owners "skew younger and more male. Sixty-five percent of them are male and 63 percent of them are under the age of 35."

• Kindle owners "tend to be wealthier," with 44 percent of them making "more than $80,000/year compared to 39 percent of iPad owners and 37 percent of iPhone owners. They also tend to have more education: 27 percent of Kindle owners have Master’s degrees or doctorates."

• iPad owners "are more receptive to advertising on their touchscreen tablet than owners of other devices. Thirty-nine percent of iPad owners say ads on their connected device are new and interesting, compared to 19 percent of all connected device owners. And 46 percent say they enjoy ads with interactive features compared to 27 percent of all connected device owners."

Also, Nielsen noted, "Perhaps most important to advertisers, iPad owners are also the most likely to have made a purchase as a result of seeing an ad on their connected device."

The least expensive model of the iPad is $499 for a Wi-Fi only version. The latest version of the Kindle, also Wi-Fi only, costs $139.

Facebook and Skype are getting ready to announce a "significant and wide-ranging" partnership that would integrate text messaging, voice chat and Facebook Connect, according to a report.

Citing "sources close to the situation," AllThingsD said Wednesday that the two companies have been working on a deal.

"The move by the pair — which have tested small contact importer integrations before — is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media," AllThingsD said.

"Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.

"Since it was not going to create an Internet telephony service of its own — kind of like not creating a mobile operating system — Facebook has apparently turned to the Web’s Internet telephony leader."

For those who already use Facebook's instant messaging system within the program, incorporating Skype's video chat would be yet another reason to spend more time within the walled world of 500 million users.

A recent comScore report noted that in the United States, we're spending more time on Facebook than searching with Google or its related sites.

In August, Americans spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month, compared to the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, spent on all of Google's sites combined, including YouTube, Gmail and Google news.

Much is made of Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg's ubiquitous grey hoodie. Not so much the Adidas shower shoes that — if "The Social Network" isn't the complete work of fiction Facebook reps claim it to be — Zuck wore with and without socks throughout his time at Harvard and Facebook's meteoric rise.

Having just seen a screening of the movie (which hits theaters Oct. 1), I'm inclined to side with the Facebook reps on the colorful liberties taken with events, certainly dialog, and possibly wardrobe. In his portrayal of Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg (aka the rich man's Michael Cera) wears at least six different colored hoodies.

Don't get me wrong. "The Social Network" is worth seeing — fast paced and engaging — an achievement all the more impressive considering this is a movie pretty much about coding and legal documents. One wonders what director David Fincher ("Fight Club") and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing") could've done with 2008 dud "Valkyrie"— another movie about paperwork.

Where "The Social Network" fails in historical accuracy — and all movies based on "actual events" do — it succeeds in hitting key points in the Horatio Alger narrative, revealed through the color of hoodie fictional "Zuckerberg" wears in any particular scene. As far as I'm concerned, anyway. Check it out!

Gray hoodie with obnoxious "GAP" logo: Worn opening scene in restaurant in which Zuckerberg's conscious lack of social filter drives his girlfriend to end their relationship. Here, Zuck is a young man largely defined by someone or something else. That is all about to change. Anxious to distract himself from the breakup, Zuck embarks on the all-night coding that will eventually set him apart — though at the time he's just looking to trash women and crash the Harvard server.

Navy prep school hoodie: Zuck's Jewish frat friends wear Hawaiian shirts for "Caribbean Night" event, but Zuck — too adult for such nonsense – wears his Phillips Exeter prep school hoodie. He is hyperfocused, sarcastic and cutting even to his best friend, Facebook financier Eduardo Saverin. He may claim "I don't want friends" (irony alert), but his prep school labeling shows he still wants to belong. We'll also see Zuck wearing a T-shirt from Ardsley High School, which he attended before his junior and senior years at Phillips Exeter. (Shout out to BFF Artemis who totally attended Ardsley too! w00t!)

Navy hoodie: There's no prep school logo visible on the plain navy hoodie Zuck wears when he officially registers TheFacebook.com site with Network Solutions. He is now a man. Time for the lawsuits and other grownup problems to kick in!

Gray hoodie: Relationship status! Like on "House" when the brilliant doctor finally diagnoses an elusive illness via some random conversation snippet, Zuckerberg realizes the final touch needed on "TheFacebook." Zuck flaps his Adidas shower shoes straight back to his dorm where, wearing the plain gray hoodie that will come to define him, Zuck adds relationship status and TheFacebook.com goes live.

The gray hoodie reemerges in a meeting with a potential Facebook advertiser that Zuck totally blows by making successive "glottal stop" noises. "This is who I am" the hoodie shouts. "Also, I don't want advertising on the site. And another thing, I'm as as brilliant and unstoppable as any early twenty-something ever imagined himself to be. Therefore, I shall behave like a child to prove my point and get my way."

Brown hoodie: Zuck and Eduardo attend a Harvard lecture by Bill Gates. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Leaving, Zuck is recognized by some dude Facebook fans who note that Gates blathered something about how "the next Bill Gates" could be sitting in the audience. Eduardo and Zuck then meet for drinks with some lady Facebook fans and have sex with them in the bathroom.

All the while, Zuck never removes his brown hoodie, that represents … um … "Business Zuck?" "Dirt" and "poop" are both associated with brown, but neither seems to fit what's going on here. I got nothin'.

Oatmeal hoodie: Tabula Rasa! Zuck is a blank slate ready to absorb the fabulousness of Justin Timberlake's Sean Parker (the Napster dude/first Facebook president) who he and Eduardo meet in a chichi sushi restaurant in New York City, along with Eduardo's crazy girlfriend — the one from the bathroom. Wearing all-black designer duds, Parker wows Zuck with rapid-fire rhetoric of changing the world — and also, the part about how "you know what's cool? A billion dollars!")

Zuck, bland in Parker's shadow, allows Parker to color his world, much to Eduardo's concern. Parker — who we later learn can't snort cocaine off an intern's naked boobies or something on account of he carries an inhaler and an EpiPen — eventually starts to wear a designer version of Zuck's look. Natch, Zuck comes to question how much Parker contributed — aside from telling Zuck to remove the "The" from Facebook.com. Oh! Also that thing about getting Facebook to go international.

North Face fleece jacket: An odd wardrobe choice for Zuck in the scene in which Eduardo learns he's been screwed out of his Facebook shares, screaming at Zuck and Parker, "Sorry my Prada is at the cleaners … along with my hoodie and f--k-you flip flops!" (Aka shower shoes.)

This is the same (or similar) fleece jacket Zuck wears in the legal deposition meetings that act as the narrative device to anchor the flashbacks through which this story is told. So in that way, the fleece jacket acts as foreshadowing.

Either that, or Zuck's hoodie (and shower shoes) is at the cleaners.

Helen A.S. Popkin is always going "blah blah blah" about Facebook, then she asks you to Friend her or follow her on Twitter ...because that's how she rolls.

"Killzone 3" is a shooter that both hardcore gamers and casual players will like.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Todd Kenreck is the Game Editor at msnbc.com. You can follow him on Facebook.

A high-tech tool used to alert police to where and when gunshots are fired was one of the first alarms for Boston police about the shooting that resulted in the death of a toddler and three adults Tuesday.

The city's police chief told The Boston Herald that it was the department's ShotSpotter system that detected shots had been fired on the neighborhood street at about 1 a.m.

ShotSpotter, a private company whose system is being used by more than two dozen police departments around the country, employs GPS and an acoustic locating system to triangulate and find where shots have been fired from. "Alert data includes the incident type, audio clips of the incident, an exact location marked onto a map image and cross-referenced to the nearest street address, and the duration of the incident," the company says on its site.

Nassau County, N.Y. police commissioner Lawrence Mulvey recently credited its use with saving the life of a young man shot at a house party last year, the Long Island Press reported. The police department plans to expand ShotSpotter into a third high-crime neighborhood.

Not everyone believes ShotSpotter is a good fit for every situation. According to the Long Island Press, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said in a statement that he will keep an open mind, but is not convinced about its widespread use.

"Initial analysis indicates that the technology is not as effective in suburban areas as it is in more urbanized, condensed areas," he said in the statement. "There is no empirical evidence to suggest that it is effective as a deterrent or that it has helped lead to faster apprehension of suspects. To expend financial resources on a technology that doesn’t deter gun violence is taking money away (from) other methods."

Mulvey told the newspaper that ShotSpotter is "not designed to make arrests, it's designed to change behavior," adding, he said that gang members are aware that the system is in place. And, he said, installation of ShotSpotter doesn't mean a crime can be solved "if you don’t have assets on the ground who can get there in a minute or less."

A thinner 9.7-inch iPad — with the same screen size as the current, original model — may be in the works, according to analysts.

While the iPad is hardly a behemoth at a half-inch thick and weighing 1-1/2 pounds, RIM, in announcing the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet Monday, made it a point to note its 7-inch screen will be less than a half-inch thick, and would weigh less than a pound. The PlayBook, with front and back cameras, will be available in early 2011, with an international rollout later in the year, the company said.

AppleInsider reports investment bank Goldman Sachs analysts Henry King and Kevin Lu said their sources "lead them to believe Apple will introduce a second-generation (9.7-inch) iPad during the spring of 2011 that will feature a camera, mini USB and a lighter design."

And while the PlayBook is now the second major 7-inch tablet to be announced —Samsung recently unveiled its Galaxy Tab — Apple, too may be developing an iPad with the same screen size. More and more, it seems that 7 inches is the new "black" of tablet screen sizes.

The Goldman Sachs analysts, however, said "their checks found that "the 7-inch iPad project has not yet been finalized," and that it's "unlikely to be launched ahead of the new 9.7-inch iPad," AppleInsider said.

Pricing on the PlayBook, as well as the Galaxy Tab, has not been announced yet. Apple's least expensive iPad is $499.

Technology news website TechCrunch and its related sites are being bought by AOL, it was announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Reuters reported the purchase price may be $30 million. CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin said she has heard "estimates" ranging from $30 million to $50 million, but sources tell her it is in the "ballpark of $40 million."

TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who will stay on with the site for at least three years, according to an Associated Press report. The announcement was made at TechCrunch's "Disrupt" conference in San Francisco.

"TechCrunch and its associated properties and conferences will join the AOL Technology Network while retaining their editorial independence," said Tim Armstrong, chairman and CEO of AOL in a press release.

Arrington, in the same release, said he looks "forward to working with everyone at AOL as we build on our reputation for independent tech journalism and continue to set the agenda for insight, reviews and collaborative discussion about the future of the technology industry.”

Heather Harde, TechCrunch's CEO, said that the sale "represents a compelling opportunity to extend the TechCrunch brand while complementing the great work of sites like Engadget and Switched," which are also owned by AOL. Engadget, in particular, is considered a competitor to TechCrunch.

TechCrunch's related sites include MobileCrunch, CrunchGear, TechCrunchIT, GreenTech, TechCrunchTV and CrunchBase.

In addition to Engadget and Switched, AOL also owns TUAW, an unofficial Apple weblog, and DownloadSquad, a weblog about downloadable software.

The acquisition is the second in announced by AOL. Also on Tuesday, it said it is buying 5min Media, a Web video syndication company.

"Our acquisition of 5min Media is the latest in a number of steps we have taken this year to better position AOL to capture the growing video opportunity on the Web," Armstrong said.

Terms of that deal weren't disclosed, either, but as The Wall Street Journal notes, both purchases by AOL "come amid a series of hookups between content and Internet companies, which are seeking to draw more users and advertisers by pumping out inexpensive articles on popular topics like fashion, news and sports."

AOL, the Journal said, "has lately increased its appetite for media business — it also recently has hired hundreds of writers to create more original news and local and entertainment content."

Reuters said AOL, "spun off from Time Warner Inc last year after a disastrous decade-long marriage," publishes "approximately 80 sites," and that Engadget had "about 7.5 million unique users in August while TechCrunch had about 3.8 million during the same month according to comScore."

Text messaging-while-driving bans have not resulted in a reduction in crashes, and may even be "ineffective," according to a new report from the Highway Loss Data Institute.

If anything, the institute said, in states where texting while driving is illegal, there appears to be a "slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes." The finding is based on the institute's comparisons of claims in four states — California, Washington, Minnesota and Louisiana — before and after texting bans took effect, compared with patterns of claims in nearby states.

It could be that drivers who continue to text while driving are doing it more surreptitiously, hiding their phones from view of other drivers and law enforcement, increasing the risk of an accident even more, the institute says.

Text messaging while driving has been banned in 30 states now, with 11 of those bans enacted this year.

"Texting bans haven't reduced crashes at all. In a perverse twist, crashes increased in three of the four states we studied after bans were enacted," said Adrian Lund, president of both the Highway Loss Data Institute and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in a statement. Both institutes are funded by insurance companies, and the information was shared Tuesday with the Governors Highway Safety Association annual meeting.

"It's an indication that texting bans might even increase the risk of texting for drivers who continue to do so despite the laws," Lund said.

The institute's findings about texting while driving bans, Lund said, is the same as its previous finding about bans on cell phone use while driving not reducing accidents, calling "into question the way policymakers are trying to address the problem of distracted driving crashes."

Younger drivers are more likely than older ones to text-while-driving — although that's not always the case — the institute said, finding in all four states, "crashes increased among drivers younger than 25 after the all-driver bans took effect ... The largest crash increase of all (12 percent) following enactment of a texting ban was among young drivers in California."

"The point of texting bans is to reduce crashes, and by this essential measure the laws are ineffective," Lund said.

A lack of enforcement is "a likely reason texting bans aren't reducing crashes," the institute found, saying that survey results indicate many drivers, "especially younger ones, shrug off these bans. Among 18-24 year-olds, the group most likely to text, 45 percent reported doing so anyway in states that bar all drivers from texting. This is just shy of the 48 percent of drivers who reported texting in states without bans. Many respondents who knew it was illegal to text said they didn't think police were strongly enforcing the bans."

Still, Lund said, that finding doesn't explain why crashes have increased after texting messaging bans. "If drivers were disregarding the bans, then the crash patterns should have remained steady. So clearly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers' eyes further from the road and for a longer time."

cfdfire: Needs more cow bell.

Related: Tosh is the new king of Comedy

You don't expect Twitter to survive on just tweets alone, do you? No, of course not. Tweets — 140-character postings — are free, but running Twitter is not. Ads now appearing on the microblogging site are helping create some bird feed. But the site, which recently announced a major revamp, is looking to up its income and plans to introduce "promoted accounts" to help do so.

AdAge reported Monday that Twitter will make an announcement about the program Tuesday, taking its ads beyond the site itself to "extend them to the rest of the user base through apps such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite," third-party Twitter programs.

"For all the (Twitter) campaigns so far, from Coca-Cola to AT&T and all the major film studios, the interaction rate with a promoted tweet — defined as a retweet, a new follower or a click-through — is 5 percent, significantly higher than a standard Web display ad, where click-throughs are well below 1 percent," AdAge said.

"We now feel pretty confident we are cracking the code on a new kind of advertising, one that is more engaging ... but also more participatory," Twitter Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo told AdAge.

The idea behind "promoted accounts" is simple, writes Peter Kafka of AllThingsD. "Twitter will try to help corporations and brands increase their Twitter following by inserting them alongside other Twitter users it suggests in its 'Who to Follow' feature ... And Twitter will try to make the promotions palatable to users by only serving up 'relevant' accounts, using the same algorithm that Twitter already uses when it suggests 'Who to Follow.' "

And there are millions of users to be palatable to — Twitter has more than 160 million accounts, with 370,000 new sign-ups a day, and nearly 100 million tweets a day now — double the number from last February.

Twitter improvements for advertisers "can't come soon enough for Coke, which has run more than 50 campaigns on Twitter since June, and says its campaigns have had much higher interaction rates than Mr. Costolo is reporting," AdAge said.

"Since June, Coke's follower count has grown from about 50,000 to 122,000. Nice, but hardly the kind of scale Coke needs. 'My job is not to play around with tens of thousands of people; it's to play around with millions of people,' said Michael Donnelly, Coke director-worldwide interactive marketing."

Call it "Return of Motorola: The wireless phone maker strikes back"— on Sept. 30, the previously promised "Droid R2-D2" phone celebrating all things "Star Wars," is available from Verizon Wireless online and from "select" Verizon Wireless Communication Stores.

The phone, a Droided-up Motorola Droid 2, costs $249, after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. The R2-D2 phone was announced over the summer, when Motorola's popular Android phone lineup was updated with the Droid 2. The phone manufacturer has had a string of hits in the past year with its original Droid, Droid X and the Droid 2.

Verizon promised the phone's external hardware would be "designed to look like the trusty Droid from the film saga," and it appears to be the case. Speaking of the case, the R2-D2 will be packaged in a "custom box resembling carbonite and come with a Star Wars' media dock and wired stereo headset," Motorola says.

"Exclusive content" that comes pre-loaded on the phone, the company says, includes R2-D2 notification sounds and ringtones, an R2-D2 Clock Widget, "The Best of R2-D2 video with the original Cantina music" and an "exclusive binoculars app."

Information Week noted that on launch day, "each participating store will only sell 200 units and customers will be limited to two per person." Motorola calls the phone a "limited edition" but is not specifying how long the device will be available.

For those who don't get their hands on this Droid, Verizon customers using Android phones with operating system version 2.1 will be able to buy a "Star Wars" mobile app for $2.99 from the Android Market. According to Motorola, the app "allows Jedi Masters to browse, preview and download Star Wars content related to 'Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back.' "

We are all slaves to temptation. Let's face it, when something even remotely piques our interest, we have to touch it, or in modern times, click on the WTF link.

Because we're children, you see, and we have to know what that's about. On Twitter yesterday, clicking on that link yielded retweets stating, "I like anal sex with goats." (Today, it's become elevated to "love," but I think it's just some people having fun with it now.) Even if you happen to indulge in that particular fetish, you probably don't want the whole world knowing about it. But too many people were tweeting it out for it to be some kind of dramatic, en-masse pro-goat-sex demonstration.

It didn't have the meltdown effect of last week's "Twitter OnMouseOver Incident," but it did highlight, once again, the vulnerabilities in the Twitterverse.

This particular worm had a few different layers to it.

TechCrunch broke it down:

Either a lot of Techies are into really kinky things, or there is a Twitter worm going around. It looks like a ton of people just started sending out Tweets saying “I Like Anal Sex With Goats.” This Tweet is followed by another one that says “WTF” and includes a link. Do NOT click on this link; it appears that it will cause you to send out the same series of Tweets from your account.

Warnings started piping in, such as this one from @pranger: "Don’t Click The WTF Link On Twitter Unless You DO Like Sex With Goats." (I do appreciate the open-mindedness of the choice.)

Others couldn't resist making some wry commentary, such as @hackerTrends: "Toomany people in my timeline are having/love to have sex with goats."

Andrew Nacin, one of the core developers of the WordPress platform, wrote a post about this CSRF attack. Namely, he explains what that means.

Twitter allows a URL to send a tweet. Many sites and retweet buttons and such rely on it. No POST, no nonce, nothing. Just a simple HTTP GET triggers a tweet. Clearly, someone was going to exploit this eventually.

Authentication is not the same as intention. You can’t just determine that a user is allowed to do something, but also that they intended to do something. When intent is not established, and especially when the form can be submitted via a GET request, it makes these kinds of exploits child’s play, as you can see by the complete exploit code below. It’s called a cross-site request forgery, or CSRF (or XSRF).

TechCrunch let us know that Twitter was onto the problem, and pointed us to the company's blog for a status update.

A malicious link is making the rounds that will post a tweet to your account when clicked on. Twitter has disabled the link, and is currently resolving the issue.

Twitter updated its status after that to saying they've fixed the problem and "are in the process of removing the offending Tweets."

I doubt most Twits found the tweets THAT offensive; instead they rolled with it. And today, they're combining yesterday's funny with another annoying viral must-click: the #TwitRank. (I'm just kidding about that must-click. It takes you through some kind of survey. I saw the first page, and backed out, hands up in the air, fast.)

It produces something like @robinbogg's post: "My Twitter Rank is "i love anal sex with goats". What's your Rank? #TwitRank"

See the screenshot above for some more laughs.

Some of us become exposed to it in spam or worms, like what happened with the recent "Twitter onMouseOver incident", but others seek it out.

I'm talking about porn, people. In one of my first journalism jobs, at the Village Voice, I had to fact-check web site reviews. A few were on fetishes and bestiality. You can't erase those images once you've seen them! But, to each his/her own. Unless you've illegally downloaded copyrighted sex scenes. Then, you might be in trouble.

Under scrutiny by the porn industry: users who are downloading copyrighted naughty bits at BitTorrent sites that use peer-to-peer networks to exchange the material, according to a story by Agence France-Presse (AFP). AFP reported that in recent weeks, porn producers have filed lawsuits targeting those users, with the first salvo reserved for downloads of titles that focus on shemales/transsexuals and 18-year-olds that probably look a lot like jailbait, or "barely legal." (Those lawsuits are coming from studios that specialize in the production of those niche videos.)

The studios are counting on the threat of public exposure to deter pirates and those that benefit from their distribution.

While the industry is usually not known for its solidarity, producers are coming together to fight practices that threaten their very existence. AFP's story mentions Pink Visual as one studio that "is rallying dozens of adult entertainment studio operators at an unprecedented Content Protection Retreat in Arizona in October to train in ways to combat piracy and defend intellectual property."

Just as video revolutionized the industry, the Internet changed it in a fundamental way as well, making it possible for individuals to indulge in their private preferences in the privacy of their own homes, without the embarrassing trip to the video store. But soon, sex saturated free content, for anyone who would type in search terms online.

"People were willing back then to pay top dollar for porn, now it looks like the majority of users think adult content is free," Pink president Allison Vivas told AFP. (That's right, women aren't just the stars in the industry. They call the shots from behind the scenes, too.) "That is a huge shift in just a few years."

UPDATE: I got a hold of Vivas to ask her about how the material spreads. She told me some leaks are happening through Pink's subscriber-only Internet clips, possibly from some customers who are bringing it to the peer-to-peer networks. She and the heads of other studios have also noticed entire DVD rips online.

"We have also noticed that one piece of infringed content that shows up on one site, somehow that ends up on 50 different 'tube' sites," Vivas said. "This seems to indicate that they're spidering each other, looking for new content."

The studios are in active litigation against the company that operates the top "-tube" sites, such as PornHub.

"What's ironic is that the adult industry has always been seen at the forefront of technology, but when it comes to piracy, we're three years behind," she said. "The perception porn is free makes a huge impact." And not in a good way, on their business.

In a CNBC original documentary released last year, "Porn: The Business of Pleasure," CNBC anchor Melissa Lee also made the connection between the proliferation of free sites such as Redtube and Porntube in aiding and abetting a situation that has clearly gotten out of hand.

AFP reports Larry Flynt Publications is already charging forward, having sued 635 users in a Texas court last month.

Studios are in for an uphill fight, as the Internet opens up those worlds at an earlier age for tech-savvy younger generations. In 2009, Symantec's OnlineFamily.Norton reported that "sex, porn, and Michael Jackson" were among the most popular items kids ages 18 and under searched for online that year. For boys, "porn" was the fifth most popular search term and for teens (ages 13-18), it came in at No.6. But this is the jaw-dropper: it came in at No.4 for kids ages 7 and under.

Always reliable for their insight, Mashable made an observation about the development that studios probably find all too true:

Many of these producers built their careers by distributing their goods through web-based channels that challenged traditional distribution models. Now those technologies have developed to the point that the average user can simply acquire the goods for free.