As noted by our fearless leader, paying for Internet service when you’re away from home is, at this point, stupid. You can find free WiFi in any Starbucks, and in fact it’s gotten to the point where you can walk into most major fast food chains and find a connection.

Seriously, when you can go into a Denny’s and start reading Uproxx, the ship has sailed on charging for the Internet, guys.

And now the huge cable companies that dominate the communications landscape have ever, ever so kindly decided to give each other’s customers access to their WiFi hotspots, generally placed in locations where people tend to congregate, like train stations, malls, and so on.

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So, yeah, iTunes won’t censor “bitch,” but it will censor “jailbreak.” Or at least it did.

For those who have Android, “jailbreaking” is the term applied to modifying iPhones and iPads to accept software Apple hasn’t approved of, and potentially can be used for app piracy. It invalidates your warranty, so you need to know what you’re doing before you do it.

Apple has fought jailbreaking for years, even though, really, once your phone is paid off, they have no right to tell you what you can and cannot do with your property. And, temporarily, they were trying to censor the term, although once it was pointed out to them that this meant apps and songs by Thin Lizzy were suddenly ridiculously censored, they knocked it off.

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One of the biggest problems researchers in academia face is the fact that people lie constantly, for reasons ranging from shame to really just wanting the test subject money to finding it hilarious to mess with PhD candidates.

But, increasingly, academics are discovering a method of communication with test subjects that offers a much higher chance of truth: texting.

According to the study that revealed this:

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It probably shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that advertisers hate your DVR/TiVO because they are convinced it leads to people fast forwarding through commercials, which it does a lot of the time, but then again people have been getting up during commercials to go the bathroom or to make a sandwich in the kitchen for as long as television has existed.

Still, advertising people are positively freaking the f*ck out over the new DVR that Dish Network just unveiled: it skips over all the ads in the shows Dish customers record, effectively erasing them, and eliminating the need to fast forward through them. Just press play, sit back and enjoy your favorite shows.

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Best Buy has not exactly been on a streak of late. It recently fired a whole bunch of employees amid serious losses, the wandering tallywhacker of its former CEO Brian Dunn wound up bringing down the guy who founded the company, and it’s just generally been a bad day.

And now their utter ripoff of a computer repair service, Geek Squad, is in hot water.

We’ll let Ars Technica sum it up:

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Quick…what the worst idea you’ve ever heard? Forcing readers of your website to “like” stuff on Facebook in order to read it? Yes, that’s a truly horrific idea, surely, but I’m not sure it’s the worst. Casting Ashton Kutcher to play Steve Jobs in a biopic? Equally appalling in its awfulness.

However, all of those bad ideas have been officially superseded by Virgin Atlantic’s bright idea to open the floodgates to people being able to yap on their cellphones on commercial flights.

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Throw Etsy onto the patent trolling pile: they just got sued by one because they dared, DARED, to use technology that involved transmitting messages and to have investors that gave them enough money to make them a target.

We often rail about patent trolling around here, for two reasons: one, it limits innovation by letting the slimy and the lazy sit on a patent and raise the barriers to entry to founding a successful company on the Internet, and two, it sucks money out of the economy.

There’s a Boston University study on the topic, but a few key points:

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If you went to college, inevitably, you got stacks of handouts photocopied straight out of a published work. Technically, that’s illegal, but nobody ever questioned it; hey, the professor just saved you from buying a $45 book.

The digital equivalent of that are “e-reserves,” and it’s something the textbook industry is hugely nervous about, what with the fact that it doesn’t require students to pay $1000 or more for books each semester, and that’s not fair to them. So they sued, specifically Georgia State University, to force them to at least use a photocopier, for Pete’s sake, so somebody sees some cash out of the deal.

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If you’re the administrator of a page, or several pages, on Facebook, you already know about the Weekly Facebook Update, wherein Facebook lets you know that these pages exist and hey, you should log in and look at them!

And apparently Twitter decided that was such an awesome idea that everybody needed it, because now you’re going to get yet another “weekly newsletter” of “most relevant” Twitter messages:

Twitter has begun sending users a weekly e-mail digest of the “most relevant” tweets and stories shared by the people they follow. The introduction of the feature comes a few months after Twitter acquired Summify, a startup that gathered news from a user’s various social networks and compiled it in daily e-mails.

Notice there was nothing in there about how users demanded this feature.

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