If you logged onto 4chan's anarchic /b/ message board today, you would have found a changed place. Soft music played. Instead of prodigious amounts of child porn and virulent racism, there was only a little bit. What happened?
Anarchic internet hangout 4chan sent a little more hate Gawker's way today, launching a denial of service attack against our website, spamming our email accounts and even trying to bother one staffer's spouse. All so we'd stop talking about them.
The denizens of internet troll hive 4chan.org launched an attack on Gawker Media's servers at noon Eastern today, apparently unhappy we wrote about how they coordinated the harassment of an 11-year-old girl. We survived the onslaught, but 4chan isn't done.
Sometimes the Internet saves people from being sex trafficked. Good! But sometimes the Internet beats up on an 11-year-old girl, posting her address, phone number and making her cry. Bad. This is what happened to Jessi Slaughter.
America has a terrible health insurance system and crippling shame about sex. On the bright side, our problems are helping some Eastern Europeans make thousands of dollars per week, one fraudulent internet transaction at a time.
*Which means it's probably a marketing ploy for something.
Members of the staffs of John McCain and Barack Obama are holding an official debate on Twitter, presumably to attract the Tech-savvy Urban Early Adopter Influencer Creatives who have been almost entirely committed to Barack Obama since before the primaries. Mike Nelson (an "outside adviser" to Obama) and Liz Mair…
The Internet can change elections! Just not through Meetup and Friendster like some people thought. Okay, these five pictorial jokes about Barack Obama and John McCain won't be entirely responsible for Obama's imminent November victory. They're just mobilizing the base! Because Influential Thought Leaders don't join…
An anonymous blogger is posting Facebook statuses along with comically slightly disguised photos of the people who wrote them. It has the potential to be a carnival of derision, except the blog has no comment form. Good thing we do.
A new handful of YouTube videos supposedly show cell phones popping popcorn. The method: Surround kernels with a few cell phones and call the phones. When they ring, the kernels pop. The videos have gotten a couple million combined views, and they've seemingly convinced many commenters to fear phones, despite the…
Vimeo's Jakob Lodwick, the ex-man of both Star talking head Julia Allison and her BFF Mary's little sister, 18-year-old soap star Leven Rambin, is in Esquire this month. He's finally fulfilled his dream of becoming a model! (They featured boys of the web, who got to keep their clothes on.) Meanwhile, Iminlikewithyou's…
Bo Burnham is not only part of the much-fanfared generation of young YouTube stars making music in their bedrooms, he's also as sharp as a budding Tom Lehrer with the dirtiness of Stephen Lynch. Bo dropped his first new video since his popular punny rap from eight months ago, "Bo Fo' Sho'." The new song "New Math"…
"It doesn't matter at all what I write about," Ken Layne wrote at AOL News this weekend, "because the comments will be an insane half-literate string of racist nonsense and startling ignorance that has nothing to do with the subject of this post." The post got twelve pages of comments. Guess whether the Wonkette…
"All Internet humor is entirely reliant on you recognizing that thing you know, and nothing more." An article at Something Awful, the astute comedy site devoted to critiquing the Internet, explains why the Internet ruins all humor. Below, what would have happened if Seinfeld aired today. (In short, it would have…
In San Francisco, the land where Internet memes are incarnate, a LOLcat photo has become a giant mural (note to self: are there small murals? investigate). Big photo below. [Laughing Squid]
Maybe you didn't like the list of powerful people you're supposed to follow on Twitter. Neither did I! Because powerful people don't Twitter. But witty people do! Such as the man who wrote, "How much do you have to pay a cop to forget he saw a bloodstained Tickle Me Elmo stuffed with opium? Wikipedia is like zero help…
Everyone has a little online jackass in them; some of us add people on Facebook too soon, some of us beg for votes on Digg, some make white whines on Twitter. But these behaviors can lead to more annoying habits, like constantly bugging people to blog you, getting hooked on Yelp, or writing drug metaphors. Thank god…
Apparently there's only one script for viral ads on the Internet: Guy does small trick with product, guy does bigger trick with product, guy's friends tell camera, each other, bystanders and guy how awesome he is. There's always music in the background and you can always tell it's fake. I just explained how the same…
My friends are blogging about this viral video of guys doing backflips into their jeans. So neat! So shareable! So worth the million views the three-day-old clip already earned! But I could tell instantly (and I have no idea why no one else did) that this was a stealth ad — because it's a direct copy of a stealth ad…
It's over! The most consistently funny comedy site on the Internet is getting folded into AdultSwim.com. Turner is shutting down Super Deluxe and laying off most of its staff, according to paidContent.org. Now the original web content will get stuck with clips from Family Guy and Adult Swim's increasingly…
