Before going on, I want everyone to locate and read Nothing to Envy, the best account yet of the lives of ordinary North Koreans. OK? Everyone done? The most striking scene in the book illustrated just how isolated the country is: North Koreans, in possession of an ancient mobile phone, huddled at an isolated spot on the northern border where one bar of reception would occasionally leak over from China.

It's a feel-good Internet story: Man tracks down Internet troll who made his life a living hell, gets him to beg for forgiveness.

Both Slate and the New York Times have extensive reports on yesterday's Internet Cat Video Film Festival in Minneapolis. Basically the festival is this: thousands of people gathering outside the highly regarded Walker Art Museum to watch a curated collection of the internet's best cat videos.

Last Friday, a Canadian man live-tweeted his proposal of marriage to his girlfriend. The story went slightly viral as it unfolded—more than 700 response tweets came in bearing the hashtag #MikeProposes over the course of Mike Duerksen's 12 hour tweet session—and has since exploded in a major way as the Internet has, in typical self-fellating fashion, clamored to read more stories about itself.

For a minute there, it looked like Trayvon Martin might avoid the kind of horseshit thunderstorm that tends to accompany the shooting deaths of unarmed African-Americans. It seemed like everyone agreed that the police had fucked up. Fox News had only one segment on the killing in the weeks following. Not even white racists wanted to defend Martin's killer, George Zimmerman: when I wrote about the case last week, the worst response I got was from one particularly dedicated nutcase, who set up a Twitter account to harass me for not properly specifying that Zimmerman is Hispanic.

Austin, TX—The cultural season has turned here at the South By Southwest Festival, now on day seven. With the end of SXSW Interactive on Tuesday, the internet obsessives shipped out and were replaced yesterday by the cool kids of SXSW Music. Can you tell the difference between rival camps?

New York-based marketing firm BBH is running what they're calling a "charitable experiment" this week at the South by Southwest tech and arts festival in Austin, Texas. They've outfitted 12 homeless men, and one woman, with equipment that turns them into walking 4G wireless hotspots. It's a simple, innovative solution to an important, pressing problem: lack of internet.

What is a "Bebo?" Is it a) a new Internet nickname for Justin Bieber (my first guess) or b) a social network you have never heard of as a result of its stint as an AOL property that was sold at an $840 million loss? According to a lot of unexpected weeping on Twitter, it's the second of these two things. The site unceremoniously went dark and left everybody (including the site's original co-founder) confused about what had happened for several hours before a seemingly drunk company spokesman got around to clarifying that the actual problem was, ahem, "a technical clusterfuck."

If you've taken your frustrations with the Stop Online Piracy Act to your congressman's online contact form and tried to type that famous protest cry "DELETE THE BILL! DELETE THE BILL!", then you've already discovered a dark truth: You get censored, thanks to oxymoronic "congressional rules." But don't worry, you can always curse out your congressman instead.

Time-traveling Slate essayist Katie Roiphe is back from 2005 with another crazy article about "the information superhighway." This one—a real scorcher!—is about how she will never get off the internet, ever, no matter how many of her friends beg her.

Twitter's assembled a nice set of lists documenting the topics, places and hashtags that dominated the site this year—and wouldn't you know, it tells you basically everything you need to know about the internet.

Melanin-deficient battle rapper Mac Lethal's pancake-focused cover of Chris Brown's "Look At Me Now"—which he recorded while making pancakes—has garnered nearly half a million views since being uploaded to YouTube about 24 hours ago. Why? Because as you'll see above, it's amazing. But also: because it hit the top of Reddit's front page shortly after appearing online Wednesday morning, immediately taking its place in the Viral Video Hall of Fame and giving its creator some of the Internet's best temporary bragging rights.

The enlightening Tumblr Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses reveals a fact heretofore unknown to us: that every nose has the power to become a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle head. Your nose, my nose, Justin Bieber's nose, and Usher's nose—everybody's nose. Together we are one.

Cats and the internet: They go together like peanut butter and jelly. But until now, we could only enjoy online cats in the most passive of ways. No more! Thanks to the iPet Companion, you can control robotic cat toys at humane shelters around the country with the click of a computerized mouse! You can even move the camera around. It's really fun!

The internet is full of depressing things. Sometimes it's snuff films. Sometimes it's racism. And sometimes it's Brides.com's bizarrely retro "Waiting for the Ring" forum, where unmarried women come together to beat their breasts and keen while waiting for men to propose marriage.

Our favorite Internet place for watching the stars of tomorrow and the stars of yesterday is reportedly preparing to launch at least a dozen new channels in 2012. Unlike Vevo and other existing "channels" that offer whatever unscheduled clips, these new channels will be just like TV channels, with scheduled programs and, one hopes, seemingly endless commercial breaks. Apparently Google, which owns YouTube, wants to pull folks away from their televisions and toward their computer screens? As long as people are staring at some kind of screen, everything will be okay.

If you've been gearing up for the annual dog eating festival in Jinhua City, China, you'll have to find something else to do that weekend: "Internet-savvy" animal rights activists and dog lovers convinced the local government to cancel the fest, originally scheduled for October.

Urban Dictionary has become an invaluable internet resource for anyone looking to crack the ever-evolving slanguage of the streets. Where else can you learn the difference between a "pink pancake" and a "Belgium biscuit," while picking up a handy term for that thing where you Facebook request someone you just met at a party, all in a single visit? Now even the po-po have gotten jiggy to its 411, or whatever.

While many of us spent our weekends complaining about Irene and all media coverage of said under-performing storm, other things in the world happened! For example: South African police launched an investigation into a photo that depicts a smiling, pale-skinned man—rifle in hand—kneeling over what appears to be the lifeless body of a little brown-skinned boy.

The country's top internet providers have reached a deal with Hollywood and the music industry that would require them to identify, then warn, and eventually punish illegal downloaders. The new process, announced Thursday, would identify customers suspected of digital copyright infringement, then issue a series of six warnings, each promising "progressively harsher consequences if the initial cautions were ignored," writes the Times. At the sixth and final warning, the ED-209 from RoboCop stomps into your bedroom going, "Please stop your download. You have 20 seconds to comply," then malfunctions spectacularly, spraying brains and guts across a monitor tracking the progress of your torrented copy of the new Beyoncé album. Amazingly, it still won't do anything to discourage piracy. [NYT, photo via Shutterstock]