10 Tech Things You Need To Know This Morning

We hope you had a great weekend. Here's the news that is circulating in tech as 2013 comes to a close.

1. The NSA has a way to intercept computers mid-shipment and install spyware on them.
2. Paul Graham was criticized for comments he made about female hackers (or lack thereof) during an interview with The Information. Graham said women haven't been hacking for the past ten years. "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers," Graham said. "I would have to stop to think about that."
3. A woman at MIT rose to Graham's defense. Instead of painting the Y Combinator co-founder as sexist, she says we should focus on solving the problem he mentioned. Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson agrees.
4. Why you shouldn't sweat the haters, according to Business Insider's Josh Barro, who receives hate mail for being openly gay.
5. Here's a look inside the penthouse headquarters of Rap Genius, the crowdsourced lyrics company that just got in trouble with Google.
6. Scientists are building computers that can learn and adapt.
7. Google is partnering with Audi to make Android-based car dashboards.
8. Here are Facebook's country-by-country mobile growth stats. Top international markets include Germany, which has 25 million monthly active users (MAUs), France, which has 26 million MAUs, and Turkey, which has has 33 million MAUs.
9. Throwback: Economist Paul Krugman once said that the Internet's growth would "slow drastically" and that its impact on the economy would prove to be "no greater than the fax machine's."
10. Late last week, Quartz wrote an article about how 2013 lacked tech innovation. Apple blogger John Gruber fired back and called it a "sad pile of piss-on-everything cynicism." Here's why Gruber thinks this year wasn't a "lost year" for tech.