(Photo: Facebook)

Facebook Home has already passed 500,000 installations on Google Play a week after launch, which just goes to show people love to throw away their friends. [The Next Web]

A cadre of Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, are quietly trying to kill a privacy bill in California that would give residents the right to know how tech companies are using their personal information. [insideBayArea]

Japan wants to stymie access to TOR by asking ISPs to flat out block it. [Wired]

Comedy Central is planning to host a comedy festival on Twitter because this is what the future is like now. [New York Times]

How technology helped the FBI track down the Boston Marathon bombers. [Washington Post]

It's baaaaaaaack. [Valleywag]

In a post published a few days ago, the  Australian edition of SC Magazine elaborated:

Information security experts and privacy advocates of all political stripes have organised the causal gatherings to teach users how to use cryptography and anonymity tools including Tor, PGP and Cryptocat.

The magazine reports the concept of CryptoParties was born during a Twitter discussion in August between security experts and "privacy activist" Asher Wolf.

SC Magazine claimed cryptoparties are going viral. That may not yet be true, but on Friday Asher Wolf tweeted the following regarding the wiki at CryptoParty.org:

Two weeks after the term #Cryptoparty was coined & a website set up - the frontpage of cryptoparty.org has received over 20k views.

— Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) September 7, 2012

On its landing page, CryptoParty.org lists pages for "global meetups," including a tentative September 22 cryptoparty in Philadelphia. The author of the Philadelphia meetup page addresses the connection between cryptoparties and surveillance concerns but states a CryptoParty is "not a 'hacking course' or a 'hackathon,'" even though participants might, you know, "expect to learn the basic operation of some information security tools."

The most interesting cryptoparties so far are going on in Cookeville, Tennessee. SC Magazine reports the first party held in Cookeville "had more than 100 people turn up to its afterparty, an event complete with music, beer and fire-twirling."

Anyone attending the next party, set for September 13 in the Volpe Library on the campus of Tennessee Tech, can expect to learn about bitcoin, Tor, IRC and hard disk encryption.

That's all fascinating hacker-friendly arcana, but we kind of hope the fire-twirling guy gives some lessons as well.

A hypothetical Silk Road customer. (Getty Images)

Australian authorities have put supposedly anonymized users surfing Silk Road for weed and other sundries on notice: the coppers are one step ahead of you. A joint press release published by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Customs and Border Protection Service on Wednesday may serve as notice to anyone who is happily booting TOR and using the miracle of the Internet to score weapons-grade kush:

Silk Road is an overseas based illicit e-commerce website which facilitates the sale of drugs, weapons and other items prohibited under Australian law.

Law enforcement is well aware of this method of drug procurement and other illicit e-commerce platforms and are committed to identifying and combating users importing narcotics via this website into Australia.

This warning comes after a Melbourne resident was snagged for allegedly using Silk Road to transport unspecified narcotics into the country.

The most interesting part of the release might be a quote from customs official Alana Sullivan, who said, "Persons who buy or sell through online market places, on so-called 'anonymous' networks should understand that they are not guaranteed anonymity."

Ms. Sullivan's words may be a splash of cold water in the faces of  TOR users and Silk Road consumers around the world, or at least in the United States and Europe. If Aussie cops know where your Bitcoins go, who is to say American or European authorities are in the dark?

(Photo: flickr.com/nostri-imago)

In keeping with today's theme of aggregating news you can perhaps use if you have more money than common sense, we thought it worth pointing to Gizmodo's in-depth investigation of the dark Internet's hub for ordering weapons online.

Wares for sale at the aptly named Armory include everything from the humble Glock to the aforementioned AK-47, and yes, you will need to pay in Bitcoins. Guns are shipped in a series of small, discretely wrapped packages (just like vibrators!), which you then reassemble into your mail-order death machine.

The best part: Gizmodo called the ATF, as in, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And they sounded, frankly, a little befuddled?

The ATF later called back to say they'd located The Armory in Virginia Beach, and that it was a fully licensed, legitimate operation. This, despite the fact that I'd explained again and again that it existed only within a marsh of online encryption, with the explicit mission of illegally selling illegal guns, illegally. I explained how a storefront in Virginia was sort of the opposite of The Armory, but it wasn't much good—the ATF said it'd have to dig around itself again and get back to me. It hasn't.

Getting to the site will require a little IT jujitsu, however, starting with the installation of the software program TOR, which "routes and reroutes your connection to the Internet through a sprawling maze of encrypted nodes around the world, making it a herculean feat to find out who's who."

So unless you're looking to stage an outright coup d'état, maybe just stick to gun shows for now.