The Onion's satire — missiles will make a cranky Netanyahu calm down — was imitated by reality.

Hossein Derakhshan was imprisoned in Iran for posting blogs. When he got out of prison, he concluded that social networking sites are swallowing and destroying the World Wide Web. Blogs were good for conversations and thought, but the social networking sites are a sort of television that manages people's ideas.

The University of Mary Washington gives each student an internet domain and teaches the student how to manage it. The student's work is there, under the student's control, and the student can keep it after leaving the university.

I like this very much — even though it's a shame they miss the chance to support an allied philosophy, by saying "open source" instead of "free" .

AncestryDNA turns out to be a scheme to get lots of people to hand in their DNA sequence data to be correlated.

For some unlucky people, knowledge of their DNA sequences could lead to big problems (with insurance, for instance). However, I think tracking of people's movements and phone calls is more of a threat to human rights and democracy.

Political leaders are slowly yielding to pressure to recognize global heating as a big danger.

This does not mean that they will take effective action to halt it. Many remain just as much under the control of the fossil fuel interests as they were before. One can see this in the UK's continued elimination of subsidies for renewable energy, while subsidies for fossil fuels continue.