If you were looking for Santa, you would probably head to the North Pole. But we ran into St. Nick just walking down the street in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. And this one, who in the off-season goes by the same Alex Roshuk, attorney at law, is a tech Santa. He’s a longtime hobbyist and electrical engineer, and he invited us into his workshop, which isn’t full of elves, it’s full of drones.

A video gamer has asked for a kind of “ceasefire” today, 24 hours in which people agree not to play shoot ’em up digital games as a gesture of respect to the children and adults killed in the Newtown massacre a week ago. And there’s new data on how social media reacted to the Sandy Hook story. Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has been looking at Twitter, Blogs and op-eds online.

There are apps that let stalkers track their victims. Now there’s a move in Washington to outlaw them. And while they’re at it, some members of Congress would like us all to have a clear idea of which pieces of software for a smartphone keep track of our physical location. One of the sponsors of new legislation that has just come out of committee is Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.

The net this week is awash with complaints about privacy and Instagram. That’s the photo-sharing application Facebook bought this year for about a billion dollars. A new Instagram policy is set to take effect within weeks that seemed to give the company the legal right to use your photos in advertising. Even though the company says it has no plans to actually use pictures this way, the policy change is angering some users.

It’s likely that Google will go into the holidays with what some see as a nice bouquet of holiday flowers courtesy of the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC could wrap up its antitrust investigation without forcing Google to make big changes to the way it displays search results. At the heart of the case were complaints about the way Google sometimes puts its own products at the head of the pack when listing results.

They’ve been dutifully circling the moon all this year, but the craft that make up NASA’s GRAIL mission end with a flash today. Ebb and Flow, twin spacecraft the size of a washer and dryer, have been gathering data about gravity for a high-resolution map of the inside of the celestial body. The plan is for the robotic twins to hit the edge of a lunar crater and disintegrate as a separate orbiter records any data kicked up by the impact.

People who don’t like the Apple maps that came with the new iPhone–quite a few–can finally go back to Google Maps, which seem to do a better job getting you where you’re going. The iPad version is also here soon. But the map battles are not over.

You could believe the advertising about who has the fastest Internet connections or you could believe Netflix. The company’s movie streaming service generates useful data about which data service providers are fastest. Now it’s sharing its latest list. Plus, General Electric has come up with a new way to cool down electronic devices that’s quiet and thin. Dual piezoelectric cooling jets that quietly inhale and exhale. Think fireplace bellows or when you gently waggle the blankets for a bit when the bed overheats.

Call it a sign of the end of the world, or a sign of new beginnings…the Pope will likely be trending on Twitter today. Benedict the 16th will be tweeting official answers to followers’ questions in 8 different languages. And Facebook maybe a community but it’s no longer a democracy. Members were given the chance to vote on changes to the company privacy policy, and though the overwhelming majority did reject the changes–it wasn’t big enough.