Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need To Read Right Now

It was a dramatic week in the world of tech. A major blow was struck against the future with a court ruling effectively striking down net neutrality while dramatically increasing the control ISPs could exert over content on the Internet, Target was taken down by hackers, and Google spent billions acquiring a thermostat manufacturer for unknown reasons. But while the future was darkening on the horizon, the tech world produced another dizzying week of weird inventions, unfortunate bot incidents, and 500 cloned pigs. Here are all the tech stories from the week you need to read right now.

Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, NewYorker.com, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.

Computers have longer memories than people and that can be a dangerous thing. This week a Massachusetts man spent a night in jail after his ex-girlfriend received an email invitation from him to join Google+. The man didn't actually send the invite himself, because his ex-girlfriend had filed a restraining order against him during their breakup. Google's auto-invite generator wasn't aware of this important fact and just skimmed through the log of email addresses connected to the man's account and took a guess. That guess prompted his ex-girlfriend to call the police, who dutifully arrested the man, fined him $500, and let him spend the night in jail.

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This week a group Google Glass developers made a bid to turn the $1000 fashion accessory into a mainstay of techno vigilantes with an app designed to seek out pedophiles in your field of vision. NameTag lets users aim their Glass camera at anyone on the street, upload a photo, and await for the network's facial recognition software to crosscheck the suspect against a database of millions of known sex offenders. Developed by FacialNetwork.com, the app will theoretically allow access to the person's name, occupation, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profiles as soon as a match is found. The app directs antagonism toward a universally loathed group as cover to build a loathsome network encouraging people who want to carry mistrust and suspicion with them everywhere they go, while opening up literally anyone who crosses their field of view to unwelcome digital invasions.

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In 2010, Paul Thacker crashed a snowmobile during a training exercise in Alaska. The accident left him paralyzed below the waist and doctors told him he'd likely spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. A year later, Thacker connected with the robotics company Esko Bionics and decided to become a guinea pig for their bionics research. The company's main product, The Esko, is pair of flexible leg braces driven by a computer in system in a backpack, which helps move the braces in a natural approximation of a human walk. The suits cost about $100,000 each, and so far 50 have been sold to hospitals and rehabilitation centers around the country, and the company has even bigger plans for the future. "We've made a commitment to get a million people walking by 2022," Esko CEO Paul Harding told The Verge.

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Coming out is a difficult thing. Going through all of the complicated mixture of sexual and emotional impulses of pubescence is a hard for everyone, but this is unthinkably exacerbated for people who find themselves coming of age in a culture that treats them as a separate social group, who must bear the responsibility for announcing that difference to everyone else. A new website developed by a graphic designer in Frankfurt aims to make the process easier by automating it. Users can go to a site, Heyfriendsiamgay.com, create a profile that connects to their Facebook account, and the site will craft an appropriately tasteful announcement.

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Experiencing a dating website from a woman's point of view is unfathomable to most men. Jezebel reports on an account from one curious Reddit user who decided to see what it might be like to be on the receiving end of digital male eros. The man received messages from ten different users in his first two hours, a number of whom were alarmingly hostile and presumptive. "Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn't responding and what was wrong," he wrote. "Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn't interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature." That was when he called it quits, leaving all the other women to fend for themselves, as ever.

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In Las Vegas this week, Elio Motors announced a new budget car to compete in the miniaturized smart car market. The incredibly narrow vehicle looks almost like a motorcycle with an outer shell wrapped around it and runs on just three wheels, two in the front and one in back. The car can reach 100mph in just under 10 seconds and is estimated to get 84 miles per gallon on freeways and 49 in city driving. Built in an abandoned General Motors plant in Louisiana and based on pre-existing engineering, Elio hopes to have 6000 cars ready to ship out a year from now, in the first quarter of 2015. "We didn't design it to be cool," company founder Paul Elio told Yahoo! News. "It was cool by accident."

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Cloning is still a subject of superstitious caution in American culture, but in China it's becoming an increasingly normal part of business. David Shukman reports for BBC on how pig cloning has become a growth industry in the People's Republic. A company called BGI is leading the effort and produces more than 500 cloned pigs a years. When Shukman asked BGI's cheif executive Wang Jun whether he has mixed feelings about the ethics of controlling nature, he was quick to respond. "No, we're following Nature-there are lots of people dying from hunger and protein supply so we have to think about ways of dealing with that," he said. "If it tastes good you should sequence it."

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The Friendship Paradox is a long-established phenomenon in which a person's friends will have more friends than them. In the age of social networking, this means that most your friends on Facebook will have more friends than you, and most of your followers on Twitter will have more followers than you. This week researchers in Finland published the results of an experiment to extend this phenomenon in terms of wealth and happiness. The researchers found that the Friendship Paradox held true for both money and mood-your friends are richer, happier, and more accomplished than you. "This might be the reason why active online social networking service users are not happy," they noted. Being less happy than everyone else might be easier to bear when not surrounded by constant reminders of it.

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One good milestone for when The Age of Apps stopped being cool is when Pizza Hut joined the party. The company built a custom app targeted at a cultural stereotype for the Xbox 360 that allows players to order a pizza directly from their game console. The company recently announced that it sold more than $1 million worth of pizza to pepperoni-crazed 360 owners in the four months since the app launched. "It's been an incredible source of unbelievable growth for us," Pizza Hut's Doug Terfehr told Polygon. No doubt, it'll be an source of another kind of growth for players too.

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