I can't blame This American Life for falling for disgraced monologuist Mike Daisey's lies because I fell for them, too. I once confronted Daisey with my own doubts about his story, but he gave such a convincing performance that I stupidly dropped the issue.
The former CEO of Time Warner famously called his company's merger with AOL the "worst deal of the century." But at least that was a combination of two profitable companies. The takeover we heard Twitter wanted to complete with Tumblr is far more baffling.
Twitter Inc.'s been spinning quite a turnaround story in the press lately. The microblogging service "has finally turned a corner," declares the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's a juggernaut," a company executive tells the magazine. But the hard numbers we've been provided paint a very different story.
It was revealed today that the notorious Anonymous hacker Hector Monsegnur—a.k.a. "Sabu"—has been cooperating with the Feds for months, and even worked off a computer they gave him for some time. But that doesn't mean Mosegnur is a fed, as he learned last month when he was arrested by NYPD for trying to pass himself…
It surprised no one that Russian President Vladimir Putin was overwhelmingly re-elected on Sunday. But the massive panoptic webcam network he set up to monitor polling stations across the country captured some unexpected visuals: snoozing cops, abandoned AK-47s and dirty dancing.
Whine-aggregating service Yelp went public today, and is currently trading at $24.60 a share, which values the company at around $1.43 billion, according to Reuters. If this IPO were a Yelp listing, there would be a bunch of reviews like: "Not a bad IPO when you're drunk at night and nothing else is open, but WAY WAY…
Typical men: As soon as they see something women have, they have to have it for themselves. Like thong underwear and mangagement rings. So it is with a couple of Pinterest clones which aspire to be "Pinterest for men."
Now that teen smoking rates are in decline and rap music has been throughly mainstreamed, the only thing to worry about re: America's Children is whether the internet and smartphones are turning their brains into piles of frozen yogurt. Internet experts say: Maybe!
Julian Assange took some time from his busy television production schedule to leak internal emails the hacktivist collective Anonymous had stolen from a private intelligence firm. The leak is lame, but the new Wikileaks-Anonymous publishing partnership might prove promising.
The photo agency Pacific Coast News just breathlessly emailed us to say they had exclusive screenshots of Paul Rudd's "hacked" Wikipedia page, above. First of all, vandalizing someone's Wikipedia page is not hacking. Just because it happened on the internet doesn't make it hacking. Second of all: "Enjoys sucking…
Horse_ebooks became a bona fide internet celebrity when organizers of ROFLCON, the premier conference on internet pop culture, asked in January: "Anyone know how we might be able to get in touch with @horse_ebooks?" Horse_ebooks has 40,000 Twitter followers and a wildly passionate fanbase, but you're unlikely to see…
This was the week Facebook turned into the "What People Think I Do" machine. Has there ever been a meme both so ubiquitous and so uninteresting? This is the web 2.0 version of those awful "You might be a ___" chain emails of the nineties.
Turns out that just hours before we published our inside look at Facebook's content moderation process, they released an updated version of their guidelines. We've obtained the newest document and are happy to report that you can now splatter your Facebook wall with pictures of bodily fluids.
Metastasized Xbox fan message board Reddit is a little less pervy this morning after it explicitly banned all "suggestive or sexual content featuring minors," aka child porn. Only took six years and a couple public scandals.
The FBI has released, and posted on its web site, Steve Jobs' 191-page FBI file. Read it here. The file consists of a 1991 background investigation conducted when Jobs was being considered for an appointment to the President's Export Council in the Bush I White House, and records of a 1985 bomb threat against him.
The tech world has been consumed today with news the app Path quietly uploaded users' iPhone address books without permission. Path, in an increasingly common Silicon Valley ritual, apologized and promised it wouldn't happen again. But the company has given false assurances before. To us.
Sometimes you do something on Facebook — comment, post a link, "like" a status message — and it gets totally misinterpreted. And amid the backlash from family, friends, and strangers, you just have to be, like, "Facebook is fucked up, not my problem." Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have that luxury.
Today, it is tricky for governments and corporations to constantly spy on people using drones. By 2015, it wil be much much easier, thanks to a Monday Congressional vote authorizing drones above 400 feet, in the same airspace as commercial airliners.
Angry lactivists - that's the term, stop snickering - showed up in front of Facebook's offices in Austin to breasfeed their babies. They were part of a wave of such "nurse-ins," all designed to protest the social network's staggeringly dumb policies on breastfeeding photos.
After witnessing Woody Harrelson's spectacular Reddit Ask Me Anything fail, we wanted to talk to the genius who asked him about the time he allegedly crashed a high school prom and took a female student's virginity. So we messaged Reddit user AndyRooney.
