Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

“Gimme a break! Gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that KitKat bar.”

Yum. We have known since at least the 1980s that when we have a KitKat bar, we have friends. People we scarcely know will make eye contact when we are holding a KitKat, and look longingly at the treat and back at us. They, and others of longer, closer association do not seem alarmed that they might encounter a microbe or a million or so if we break off a KitKat segment with our fingers, without gloving first. Of course we can extend the partially revealed KitKat for the sharee to break, but that’s like offering a pal one glug from our beverage and watching helplessly as the pal chug-a-lugs.

So we know KitKats are irresistible. Google understands this full well, too. Google has been appealing to our instinctive lust for rich, satisfying treats throughout its many versions of Android operating systems.

Must be Nestle and Hershey (both owners of the brand, but in different parts of the world) are on board with this.

Ice Cream Sandwich hadn’t been out that long, and it seemed quite nifty. But KitKat is expected to attract another billion users, according to the Android, Chrome and Apps senior veep at Google, Sundar Pinchai.

How will it do that? The Android platform has been criticized for fragmentation, with different users having to use different versions depending on what gear they have, and some older version users not having access to certain apps or features. And older doesn’t mean very old at all, considering how each Android version treads on the heels of its predecessor.

KitKat, or Android 4.4, will be compatible with more devices than earlier Androids have been, Google claims.

It used to be that your less pricey Android phones couldn’t take advantage of the newest OS versions. For one thing, there wouldn’t be enough memory. But KitKat is not so memory hungry.

Google says this isn’t just a matter of KitKat coding, but also because of changes in the memory appetites of major Google services such as YouTube and Chrome.

A major part of what makes a phone more costly is more RAM (memory). Millions of users around the world use phones with 512 Mb of RAM, and KitKat can  operate comfortably with that much (or little). Starting to sound like the late Carl Sagan, Pinchai predicts, “Billions.”

KitKat will come preloaded on the Nexus 5 smart phone, another Google entry announced days ago.

Nexus 5 is a five-inch phone and is being offered contract-free and unlocked in much of the world, including here.

Contract-free is an option. The phone will be sold by Best Buy, Amazon, Radio Shack and also by Sprint and T-Mobile, for $349.

Sounds like a win-win for Google, huh? Or a yum-yum. But Google is having a bit of a row with our government and the National Security Agency (NSA) espionage activities that have been accessing Google’s data, and, in the process, OUR mail, our social networking, our contact lists, our data of more kinds than we know

Ours, and those of people in other countries, allies and potential enemies, including government leaders abroad and maybe here.

Days ago the Washington Post revealed that the NSA secretly hacked into unencrypted links behind the gigundus servers used by Google and Yahoo.

Well, we can’t do anything about that, can we? Au contraire. We can cancel our Gmail accounts and stop using Google, and the same with Yahoo. And many have, especially in Europe.

The NSA just collects metadata and analyzes it for patterns that would indicate espionage or potential terroristic plots—or so we thought. Just foreign citizens.

But now it develops that NSA has looked at emails, audio and video files, photos and recordings from regular Americans.

Seems the NSA and the British agency called GCHQ accessed a switch or cable of a telecommunications provider outside the U.S., in something they called Operation MUSCULAR.

When engineers with career connections to Google saw a diagram of the NSA hack, they used naughty words. The drawing was revealed by Edward Snowden.

NSA director General Keith Alexander assures us that the agency doesn’t access network servers without a court order. The NSA also says it uses only processes approved by the Attorney General.

The NSA also denies that it uses an executive order to circumvent the limitations contained in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other restrictions on such intrusions.

Um, well, that’s good. Only, just a little while ago, and then only after Snowden’s revelations, the NSA wasn’t snooping on ordinary Americans’ communications; and then, well, maybe just looking at metadata for patterns, and nothing more specific without court orders.

And in June we were told “unequivocally” that the NSA “cannot and has not listened to the telephone calls nor target the emails of a U.S. person.”

Not that I am being critical, you understand. I want you to know that, NSA folks, in case you happen to look at the emails I send to the editors of our free and unfettered press, with stories, columns and photos attached.