A brilliant neutron star winked out of existence today, when grammar-challenged baseball player Jose Canseco abruptly shut down his wonderful Twitter account. But "Jose Canseco" is not currently trending on Twitter, probably because anyone who would be tweeting about it is on the floor weeping.
Now that Joseph Kony is in jail thanks to everyone tweeting that Kony 2012 video (he is, right?) all future activism will consist of slick viral videos which online mobs will tweet incessantly at everyone in the hopes of annoying them into action. But this sort of online mobtivism can easily backfire, as the case of
Hey everyone: Before you send an important email make sure you check to see that you didn't accidentally attach a webcam picture of a topless woman. That includes you, hacktivist collective Anonymous.
Have you ever wondered what teens do all day on their smartphones? We haven't either. But a psychology professor has amassed an enormous database of text messages, photos and IMs sent by dozens of Texas teens over four years. Contained in its depths is the Secret of the American Teen.
Google has been placing more and more crap around search results, which is very annoying, but it turns out this crapification may work out quite well for the giant internet company. That's reportedly because people can't really tell anymore what's a Google advertisement and what's a Google search result, turning the…
In this new trailer, the screech of dubstep summons the lucrative 18-34 year-old male demographic to Wikileaks editor Julian Assange's upcoming talk show, The World of Tomorrow, which premiers on the Kremlin's favorite TV channel, Russia Today next Tuesday. The show will feature a theme song penned by M.I.A., who is…
Motivations are supposed to be pure in Silicon Valley. Facebook, for example, was developed to make the world a better place; its billions of dollars in revenue are just a happy accident. And when a Facebook scion eagerly promoted her titillating new reality show, she was roundly condemned as a terrible sellout—by…
Kevin Systrom, 28, made off quite well when he sold his company Instagram to Facebook, personally clearing a reported $400 million, or $725,000 per day of work. But Systrom, described by one associate as an "ultra nerd," didn't get there on his own. Longtime girlfriend Nicole Schuetz has been with him the whole way.
In by far its largest acquisition to date, Facebook said it will buy photo-sharing service instagram for $1 billion, or about $100 million per Instagram employee. At last, the world will be blessed with a fresh gigantic explosion in Instagram-manipulated pics.
Randi Zuckerberg has been awarded a Bravo reality show, a show that will follow young people trying to become "Silicon Valley's next great success stories." The mere existence of the program shows how the myth of golden opportunity in the Valley is, once again, far surpassing reality. But beyond that, the show's a…
Eric Schmidt has either gone through a sudden midlife transformation or is a hopelessly tangled web of contradictions. Either way, the Google chairman and longtime CEO wants to make one thing clear: He is still devoted to his wife, despite all the, you know, extramarital girlfriends.
Two years ago, a series of odd billboards greeted passers-by in New York, Atlanta, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They showed a cuddling, smiling couple under the title "Charles & YaVaughnie" and listed a website documenting the couple's romance. Research only deepened the mystery: The man was an Oracle president…
It was revealed Friday that hackers had hit the credit card payment processor Global Payments, and stolen potentially millions of Mastercard and Visa customer details in January and February. But on Sunday, Global Payments said in a press release that actually "less than 1,500,000 card numbers may have been exported."…
Charles Forman made tens of millions of dollars selling his company last week. And thank God for that: It's been far too long since "fuck you money" went to a tech whiz who was at least marginally interesting.
Like a moth emerging from a cocoon, lying monologuist Mike Daisey has reached the final stage of his belabored public apology for making up stuff about Foxconn. Let's trace his dramatic transition from fatuous defiance to full contrition.
What is it about Wall Street Journal editors that makes tech executives give horrible, self-destructive quotes? They got Google's CEO to say children will someday change their names to escape their Google hits. And now they apparently got the inventor of the Segway to say many women and minorities are more interested…
On the internet it's not just hard to be alone: It's depressing as hell. Design Observer points us to Screenshots of Despair, a Tumblr that collects sad moments from social networking that remind users of their fundamental isolation: "No one currently likes this." "You have no favorites." "You are invisible."
It's been almost one year since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google, and sometimes it seems like he's experienced a midlife identity crisis. Schmidt drives a Ferrari, will reportedly divorce his wife, and now he's calling on programmers, like those at Google, to speak out against any evil practices their bosses…
Monologuist Mike Daisey, we've all learned, is an excellent liar. Now, let's see what else Daisey has lied about in his decades-long career, besides many of the facts in his story about investigating Foxconn. Here's one.
