Beyonce and voodoo have been ruled out as potential culprits in the bizarre 33-minute blackout during last night's Super Bowl. But what about hackers? It took just a few minutes after the lights went out in the Superdome for hackers to begin hinting they had something to do with it. "#TangoDown Superbowl XLVII," …
The website belonging to the United States Sentencing Commission is down this morning, following a hack by Anonymous overnight. The site, which normally bears information about sentencing guidelines for federal crimes, instead showed a nearly 10 minute long YouTube video and the same message typed below it.
In 1992, the sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling published The Hacker Crackdown, a riveting nonfiction book about a string of high-profile hacker busts on the early "electronic frontier" of the late '80s and early '90s. The first hacker crackdown shook the early internet to its core and helped mobilize political geeks.…
A rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, involving some members of the city's beloved football team has drawn national attention. The Times said that it was a notable case because it was "a sexual assault accusation in the age of social media, when teenagers are capturing much of their lives on their camera phones ... and…
A Twitter shit-storm is brewing. A hugely popular Anonymous twitter account, @youranonnews, which boasts 750,000 followers was suspended minutes ago, and if there's anything the hacktivist collective hates it's online censorship.
After prominent Westboro Baptist Church member/professional troll/mother of illegitimate son Shirley Phelps-Roper announced her group's intention to picket Sandy Hook Elementary School "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," the wrath came quickly.
Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today's indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown's in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to…
Over the weekend, hacktavist collective Anonymous declared a formal vendetta against sext troll Hunter Moore, who recently announced plans to relaunch a revenge-porn site and publish addresses of people he doesn't like. Anonymous wasn't kidding: yesterday, they briefly took down HunterMoore.tv and now, they claim to…
Anonymous leaked 1 million Apple device IDs last week, claiming they were found on an FBI laptop. This had the unexpected result of me wearing a tutu and putting a shoe on my head in order to elicit more information from the hacktivist group. But an NBC report has revealed the leak actually came from a boring app…
For 24 hours, the internet was subjected to, or blessed with, if that's what you're into, the image of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head. (We're still waiting for the Smithsonian to request the tutu for inclusion in its special collections.) Now it's time for Anonymous to hold up their side of the deal.
As a journalist, I am sworn to bring facts to light by any means necessary. So here is a picture of me in a tutu with a shoe on my head at Gawker HQ. (A size 9 1/2 men's Reebok Question, to be exact.)
Anonymous really wants to see a picture of me wearing a ballet tutu with a shoe on my head. This is the hacker collective's condition for releasing more information about their latest blockbuster leak, for some reason.
Anonymous declared war on the New York Times this week, launching "OpNYT" on Wednesday. Unlike most actions by the crippled hacktivist collective these days, their attack on the Times doesn't just consist of writing boring, unreadable manifestos (though there is a lot of that). Anonymous has leaked 'secret'…
An employee at a Fort Wayne, Indiana Taco Bell found himself on the wrong side of Anonymous after he tweeted a photo of himself allegedly urinating on an order of Nachos BellGrande.
The French online retailer Early Flicker has reportedly registered both the logo and slogan of hacktivist collective Anonymous with France's trademark agency, INPI.
The Bill Keller who wrote the op-ed "WikiLeaks, a Post Postscript" makes his position clear: regardless of your feelings about Julian Assange, WikiLeaks must be protected under the First Amendment — so, too, the New York Times reporters who published stories based on WikiLeaks information.
After a Burger King employee posted a photo of themselves or a colleague stepping on a tub of lettuce accompanied by the warning "this is the lettuce you eat at Burger King," 4chan users immediately jumped on the opportunity to ferret out the location of the OP's branch for great justice.
Yesterday I wrote a a post about the decline of the message board 4chan as a cultural force on the web. This sparked an unusually well-reasoned email from a 4chan browser explaining why 4chan's newfound obscurity is 'great news' for its users. Here it is, with a few annotations.
At the internet culture conference ROFLCON in May, the assembled geek digerati were asked during one panel if they were readers of 4chan, the legendary butthole of the internet. A bare smattering of hands went up in the MIT lecture hall.
