InfoWorld, PC World, Robert X. Cringely

I love Facebook. I also hate it. And sometimes I'm indifferent, but not often.

As the big IPO day looms closer, lots of folks are taking a second look at this thing that started out as kind of a goofy diversion for college kids and has grown into the beast with 900 million heads.

Want a piece of the Facebook IPO action next week? Odds are you won't be able to muscle your way in past all the VCs and institutional investors that are going to cash out majorly when the world's biggest social network becomes the world's biggest tech public offering.

No worries. A site called GiveAshare will happily sell you one share of Facebook Preferred, framed and with a custom plaque of your choosing. I warn you, though, it's not likely to be cheap.

In the battle for the title of Most Inept Tech Company, the competition is fierce. There's of course Yahoo, which has been a contender since the mid-2000s when then-CEO Terry Semel tried to turn it into an online Hollywood studio before draining it of $300-plus million in salary. The soap opera there shows no sign of abating, with Resumegate still in full throttle as I write this.

There's MySpace, the one-time market-defining social network that got bought by Rupert Murdoch for $580 million and sold by him six years later for $35 million. The new owners just settled with the FTC this week after its Fox forebears lied about sharing its users' personal information with advertisers. (A Rupert Murdoch company caught in a lie? Who'd have thunk it?) It's a strong contender too.

Ah, Yahoo -- it gives and it gives and it gives, and what does it ask for in return? Only snickering mixed with incredulity. Just when it looked like things couldn't get worse for the Web 1.0 giant that cannot seem to make it in a 2.0 world, the bottom fell further.

It turns out that freshly minted CEO Scott Thompson, who has claimed to have a degree in computer science from Stonehill College since his days at PayPal, doesn't actually have a degree in computer science but rather in accounting. (For the record, I would never consider padding my resume to include a fake degree. No sir, not me.)

Remember how surprised Google was when it found out that its Street View vans had slurped up some 600GB of juicy personal information from unprotected Wi-Fi networks as they drove by snapping photos of our homes?

It turns out Google knew about it all along but did nothing to stop it. Oops.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and get your front-row seats. For a limited time only, the Oracle-Google Larry & Larry Circus will be performing in the big tent, otherwise known as the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Already this week, Google CEO Larry Page chased fellow clowns Sergey and Eric through the courtroom with a seltzer bottle, while Oracle chief Larry Ellison rode around the jury on an elephant. (We think it was an elephant; it may have just been one of his attorneys.)

This week saw two somewhat conflicting reports on our current state of insecurity. The news ain't good, but it's better than you might expect.

First up, Verizon released its eighth annual Data Breach Investigations report [PDF]. The star of this report: our old friends Anonymous.

As someone who's been in this business since mammals were still the new quadrupeds on the block, I've probably logged 3,000-plus hours on the phone with tech support for various companies. The pain threshold for those experiences has always been somewhere between having oral surgery without anesthetic and attending a Justin Bieber concert without earplugs.

Over the last few years, though, getting gear fixed has become much less painful, and the reason is simple: remote support. Letting the geeks take control of my PC over the Net and fix it while I watch has finally made tech calls bearable, if not exactly pleasant.

Just when you thought it was safe to return to your desktop, Microsoft spoils it all by introducing another version of Windows. Today, on leap day, Microsoft takes a leap by unleashing the Windows 8 Consumer Preview edition on an unsuspecting public. Whether it's a leap forward, backward, or straight into a bottomless pit is the question everyone is now asking.

You can download your very own copy. Good luck.

LG introduced today today the Optimus Vu, a combo tablet-smartphone LTE device with a 5-inch display to support easier multimedia viewing and ebook reading.  

The Optimus Vu will be on display at the Mobile World Congress next week and will be introduced in Korea in March, LG representatives say; no global availability or pricing was disclosed.

Another day on the InterWebs, another blogger squabble: This one has to do with the quality of online tech journalism itself, and it comes from a rather ironic source.

But first, some backstory. It starts with Path, a mobile social networking app that did a major privacy faceplant last week. Developer/blogger Arun Thampi discovered that Path 2.0 automatically copies users' smartphone contacts to its servers without asking permission or notification. As privacy violations go, this is way worse than anything Facebook has ever done, and it approaches Google's Wi-Fi spying debacle.

This just in: Legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs lived inside a reality bubble of his own creation. That's the conclusion of a confidential background check report just released by the FBI.

The G-men investigated the Jobs-man back in 1991, well before his second coming to Apple and the iMiracles that followed. It seems the then-CEO of NeXT Computer was being considered for a position on the President's Export Council, on which he served until January 1993.