If you're not following the Carrier IQ story, it's the flip side of the User Agreement Trust Economy. It's the modern tale: Who Secretly Owns Your Data and What Do They Do With It? For background of the story to date, here's a fairly good timeline. Carrier IQ gathers diagnostic information on some phones; it may or may not actually keylog what you type on your phone; it may or may not sometimes or always gather the passwords you enter on your phone; and, according to the FBI's refusal to release information, it may or may not have actually turned over information to law enforcement. (Carrier IQ denies all of this.) Sprint has now disabled it on some or all of their phones. Most interesting is that Carrier IQ came in hot and legal immediately, trying to shut down the fellow who first started posting about the keylogging; then someone wrangled some sense into them about not appearing totally evil. Super-geeks will enjoy reading their recently released report that explains their product. Unfortunately, that document explains that their product sometimes "accidentally" records text messages. To be fair, if our stealth drones had this, we wouldn't have to ask for them back from other countries probably.

The late Steve Jobs is known to have been very keen on "taste." Microsoft has absolutely no taste, he said, going on to explain that by this he meant that "they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product." Great products, he said, were a "triumph of taste." The exquisite taste of Jobs himself has long been a matter of doctrine in the tech world. Kevin Kelly's remarks after his death expressed the general sentiment: "Steve Jobs was a CEO of beauty. In his interviews and especially in private, Jobs often spoke about Art. Taste. Soul. Life. And he sincerely meant it, as evidenced by the tasteful, soulful products he created over 30 years." READ MORE

Everyone in the Radiohead demographic hates Ticketmaster so much right now. MACHINES SAY: SCALPING IS GOOD BUSINESS.

NOW GLOATING BEGINS FOR FEW SUCCESSFUL HUMANS WHO GOT TICKETS!

Today the brave and wasteful decades of the American space program as we have known it come crunching to a halt. From its beginnings as wildly adventurous jaunts to its ghastly end as porters and bellboys to the International Space Station, 30 years and 135 space shuttle missions later, we are officially Done With Space Shuttling. We'll always have our little laboratory on the Station, and corporations are happy to do our transit for us, but space is now for the Europeans, the Japanese and the Russian nerd heartthrobs—goodbye, pencil-necked cutie Sergei Volkov, you second-generation cosmonaut! Now our machines are going to go to some asteroid and to the atmosphere of Jupiter and, most interestingly, our newest machine, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, which will orbit the equator and listen for black holes, and then later to triage with the other space machines to rise up and destroy us. FROM SPACE.

Did you know today was a holiday? It is. It is Flag Day, when we're all supposed to fly the American flag somewhere, in commemoration of the Second Continental Congress's June 14th, 1777 adoption of the design commonly, but, many believe, mistakenly, attributed to Philadelphian seamstress Betsy Ross. The best thing about this holiday, to me, is that it reminds me of my favorite song by the Housemartins. (That's former Housemartins singer Paul Heaton, above, performing it last year.) The worst thing about it is pretty much everything else. I don't like flags. READ MORE

This explains pretty much everything today! Let's break down this "why there are no jobs" article, nearly every paragraph of which is either depressing or a bit fury-inducing. Here's a one-two punch that deserves to have its dots connected: READ MORE

Using the vital new technology of That Can Be My Next Tweet, which "generates your future tweets based on the DNA of your existing messages," it's easy to discover what should come next in this very space, by analyzing our own Twitter feed. READ MORE

Remember how freaked out everyone was a couple months ago about all the birds that were dying? No one cares anymore, right? That's probably because now we know that even if all the birds die, it doesn't matter. We can just make new ones that look and fly pretty much exactly the same.