internet outrage

About a year ago, a disgruntled NSA contractor ran off with a bunch of classified documentation and released it to a bunch of news organizations before fleeing to Hong Kong and later Moscow. The files therein explained an ongoing campaign to systematically violate the privacy of American and non-American citizens, compromise the security of encryption standards, install malicious software onto the routers of arbitrarily selected "high-value targets", and generally make the world less secure because we can.

About a week ago I downloaded a mobile application called Flappy Bird. Now, I normally don't touch cellphone games, but this one was different. Why? Because it had no in-app purchases. This alone struck me as odd; but the lack of microtransactions alone was enough to sucker me in. The result was a quite difficult tapping game with a name that sounds like a certain Rovio game and pipes that look like a certain Nintendo game. But it was very challenging and engaging, so I kept it on my phone.