To recruit jihadis, you don't go to the Mall of America. Anyone who thinks a marketing conference is the right place for a pro-privacy speech is equally delusional.

Benchmark Capital is in ascendance, thanks to investments in Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram. Thus the VC firm can afford to say ridiculous things like: "Our belief that this is more of a guild than a corporation. So, we try to think of it as artisans practicing a craft," as if they were 18th century woodworkers and not financiers hand-carving embellished valuations.

Tencent sees your sprawling corporate campuses and raises you a 55-floor skyscraper in Shenzhen connected by "swirling sky bridges." The Chinese Internet megalith, which kicked off the bidding war for Snapchat, will have space for 12,000 employees. Up is the new out.

Brit Morin, technologist and "the" "Martha" "Stewart" "of" "Silicon" "Valley," baked a cake to celebrate the birthday of the internet. Except the internet is almost half a century old, not 25, and it wasn't its birthday. Oh, no!

Legendary rapper Ben Horowitz has a new book of platitudes out, and everyone is scrambling to buy their own copy—sometimes in print! But what do the critics say?

Glenn Greenwald's Snowden files are the bottomless mimosas of cyber-security scares. The latest dispatch from The Intercept describes how the National Security Agency exploited Silicon Valley by disguising itself as a fake Facebook server in order to infect targeted computers with malware.

Google's websites are safe, sterile, and boring. Its executives are anything but. Vanity Fair looked inside the secret affair that ended Silicon Valley's most prominent power couple, and found that the powerful people who run the web giant are just as horny and screwed up as anyone else—if not more.

Money has no meaning. What is money? Put money in a bowl and drizzle with milk and granola for a tasty healthy treat: the New York Times says Candy Crush's parent company will seek a $7.6 billion IPO.

Facebook's 57-acre campus at 1 Hacker Way was temporarily sealed off Tuesday night while police investigated a threat that was later declared unsubstantiated and "non-credible." Re/Code called it the "first significant scare" for the $179 billion social network.

The revolving door from public service to finance usually only benefits the person who walked through it, so this is a welcome change. Former NAACP president Benjamin Jealous is joining Kapor Partners to find and fund startups led by minority entrepreneurs, creating "a freeway" between tech and "poor communities of color."

There was a valet stationed outside The Battery on Sunday night. Even for a private clubhouse with a $2,400 annual fee, this seemed superfluous. San Francisco's Financial District turns into a ghost town after 6 p.m. The neighborhood was so desolate, the only place I could find to charge my phone was a SUBWAY® around the corner, where they gave me free rein over an outlet behind the soda fountain.

Bas Bosschert, the CTO of Double Think, claims that hackers can access your WhatsApp database using any Android app, even after today's update. "Facebook didn't need to buy WhatsApp to read your chats," he concludes.

There are bad people in every town, but New York has long managed to stay at the top of the prick-heap, despite steep competition from L.A and Portland. But the latest issue of New York mag raises the possibility of a Silicon Valley usurper.

Austin, TX — Strip away the pretension of the panels, and SXSW is pure leisure time. This rowdy crew swapped contraband wine bottles through the end of the night at one of this week's high budget parties, commanding the room, Google lanyards swinging. Now just think: soon every bar will look just like this.

There is a stirring debate on Hacker News right now about the ethics of "growth hacking," the grandiloquent term for getting users by any means possible. Weigh in on what is "scummy" and what is "acceptable" here.

Austin, TX — Today, after weeks of media aggrandizement, millionaire tech investor Ben Horowitz sat down on a stage in Austin with the rapper Nas and made a large room uncomfortable.

His name was already mud, but there are plenty of things worse than mud (poop, toxic waste, mud with spiders in it, etc.). Even Michael Arrington wouldn't touch Goldberg after The Bustle's latest bit of bad press:

Austin, TX — All the brands are here, and form a chorus of undignified pleas for your attention. But why are they bothering? Nothing will beat AOL's race to the bottom like Digital Prophet and escaped muppet David Shing, wobbling on a branded wrecking ball.

All does not necessarily end well just because your startup scored $6.5 million and a profile in The New Yorker. TechCrunch reports that Google Ventures pulled its $100,000 investment in Bustle "divesting after deeming the startup out of touch with its values."

SXSW has morphed into spring break for marketers, but Secret and its investors are working real hard to #win it anyways. The same hour that the app launched a feature to see anonymous confessions nearby, the Journal says Secret will raise $10 million at a $40 million valuation. It launched 5 weeks ago.