Nick Bilton

Increasingly, a number of influential people in Silicon Valley seem to think that Mark Zuckerberg will likely run for president of the United States one day. And some people, including myself, believe that he could indeed win.

“He wants to be emperor” is a phrase that has become common among people who have known him over the years. “Zuck has the kind of personality that, no matter what he decides to do, he’s going to do it better than anyone else on the planet,” someone close to him said to me a couple of years ago. “If Zuck was running a nonprofit, it would be the world’s biggest most successful nonprofit that would have distributed the most money in history to people around the world. It just so happens that he started his career building Facebook. Hence, the fact that it’s the biggest social network on the planet.”

[Commentary] Dr Bernie Mayer, author of several books on conflict resolution and a professor at the Creighton University School of Law in Omaha, noted that beyond keeping up with the sheer near real-time pace of heated Internet discussions, another problem with digital arguments is that people can’t detect tone, facial expression and, most of all, sarcasm.

Admit it: Sometimes you just want to punch your PC, or slap your smartphone, or knock your notebook. We all get riled by technology once in a while, with all those feeble batteries, endless updates and spinning wheels of death. But what if our devices could see it coming?

What if they could pick up the tics and tells of our brewing anger -- or, for that matter, any other emotion -- and respond accordingly?

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. To hear experts tell it, this is where technology is going.

Researchers and companies are already starting to employ sensors that try to read and respond to our feelings. While this sort of technology is still in its early days, the possibilities seem many.

One day, your PC might sense your frustration when a program keeps crashing and politely suggest that you take a walk while it contacts tech support. Or your smartphone could sense that passions -- of one sort or another -- are running high and, in response, disable messaging. Or your car might discern an early case of road rage and soften the car’s lighting and stiffen its steering. A new generation of sensors can judge emotion through people’s skin and breath.

Social media’s promise was that people with different views and political ties could mingle in digital bliss. But some social sites are more popular with one political party than another.

According to a new survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Democrats love Google Plus and Twitter, while Republicans are more interested in sharing on Pinterest. Some sites showed virtually no differences between the parties.

Democrats and Republicans used Facebook the same amount, 87 percent. With Snapchat, 24 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of Republicans said they actively used the service. Most other sites were predominantly used by Democrats, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr. While it’s difficult to tell why more Republicans than Democrats have joined Pinterest, this could be because of Mitt Romney, who used Pinterest to share pictures and information during his presidential campaign. His wife, Ann Romney, was also a frequent user of the site.

A federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker and self-described Internet troll, who was accused of stealing the personal data of 114,000 Apple iPad users in 2010.

At the time, Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler, operating as part of a group called Goatse Security, gained national attention when they discovered a security loophole on AT&T’s website that allowed them to gain access to the addresses of the carrier’s customers and their corresponding iPad identification numbers.

In its decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said that the conviction of Auernheimer by a jury in Newark (NJ), and the subsequent 41-month prison sentence could not stand because the case did not belong in that state. Prosecutors had argued at the time that the case should be tried in New Jersey because AT&T’s servers were housed there. But an appeals court judge, writing in the unanimous three-person opinion, noted that evidence at Auernheimer’s trial showed that the servers that had been entered were in Texas and Georgia.