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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. More »
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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. More »
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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. More »
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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. More »
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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. More »
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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. More »
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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. More »
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Silicon Valley geeks are wearing garish fun socks under their very blah super-casual uniforms, according to the always unreliable New York Times Style section. It's "almost like a gang sign," says one Googler. OH REALLY? TELL US MORE. More »
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If you think Apple is a vertical corporate monolith, wait until you get a load of Amazon's reported plans: The e-tailer turned tablet maker turned publisher is said to be planning a physical store in Seattle with an eye toward building a national chain. And you thought the literati hated Amazon before. More »
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Woody Harrelson experienced what is known on the internet as a 'fail' on Friday, when he hosted an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) thread on the social news site Reddit. He was promptly asked if he remembered taking some random high school girl's virginity. More »
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Anonymous is on a rampage today. Just hours after leaking a confidential phone call between the FBI and Scotland yard, members have released a huge archive of emails and documents related to the 2005 Haditha Massacre, which left 24 Iraqi civilians dead. More »
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This is pretty crazy: Anonymous, as part of their regular "Fuck FBI Friday" release, leaked a 16 minute phone call between the FBI and their counterparts in the UK. England's Sky News has confirmed with the FBI the call's legitimacy. More »
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Eduardo Saverin isn't just a Facebook co-founder made famous by The Social Network and set to get very rich off the Facebook IPO. He is also, judging from the burgeoning genre of Mark Zuckerberg fanfic, the college hottie online romance authors most want to see hook up with Facebook's young CEO. More »
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Have you all heard of Pinterest? It's the hottest new social network for sharing your favorite cookie recipes and pictures of expensive furniture. But a barely risque post by a Pinterest power user has torn the burgeoning community apart. More »
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Scottish post-electo crew Errors threw together this very normal and comforting video about, like, how we're all being subsumed into a hypermedia e-dystopia that is once absurd and soul crushing, or something. It's weird that I'm not "getting" the subtext because this is such a straightforward and obvious-feeling video. As Creators Projects writes, this is "a parallel universe that seems to resemble Giorgio de Chirico paintings... [with] a bit of the Pet Shop Boys about it, a pixel or two of Net Art and a WTF aesthetic that will have a Marmite effect on you." Um, exactly? Also, it feels like something I should have downloaded at 9600 baud. More »
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Stephen Fry, the British actor and vocal Apple admirer, defended the company on Twitter against accounts of brutal working conditions in its contract factories. This did not sit well, at all, with Mike Daisey, creator of a critically-acclaimed one-man show about those very factories, and, now, of a blog post in which he says Fry "is being a total idiot" and calls him a "fanboy," "apologist" and "pathetic." More »
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Has Facebook's $5 billion IPO gone to Mark Zuckerberg's head? In new propaganda, the Facebook CEO claims Facebook will spur a populist transformation in governments around the world—an idea he called "arrogant" less than a year ago. More »
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Facebook just released its first-ever official financial numbers as part of its filing to go public, and they're very impressive. One billion dollars in annual profit impressive. Also: Much of humankind is hopelessly addicted to Facebook. More »
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Kremlin-backed talk show host Julian Assange is back in court in England today, in what will be the final, hopefully failed, attempt to appeal his extradition to Sweden to face rape and molestation allegations. Assange's legal troubles—and the fact that Wikileaks' submission system still isn't fixed after more than a year—haven't kept him from guest-starring in an upcoming episode of The Simpsons. This really validates our decision to stop watching the The Simpsons after Maude Flanders died. More »
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Facebook will file to go public tomorrow, in case you missed the rolling thunder bombardment of news articles this week, or in the months preceding. There won't be the faintest reason for the average person to care about this IPO until shares actually start selling months from now, but in the meantime you should steel yourself for endless breathless hype pandemonium. Oh, it's going to be awful. More »
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Since this morning, the whole internet has gone crazy for breading, the meme where you put your cat's (or dog's) face into a piece of cut-out bread, take a picture then post it on the internet. Unfortunately, a recent spate of media coverage makes it painfully clear that breading is over. More »
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For the past week or so, everyone's been discussing that Google disclosure page showing what the search engine has inferred about your age, gender and interests. Some interesting patterns have emerged. For an advanced distribtued search supercomputer, Google reaches some remarkably old-fashioned conclusions. More »
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This whole video of teens dancing at a Hong Kong Apple store is entertaining. But go to around 1:06 and check out the moves of the girl in white. Her face is like the face someone would make while carving an ice block into a statue of a machine gun, with a chainsaw. More »
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Over the past few months, something of a feud has developed between me and Reddit, one of the largest, most-insane hive minds on the internet. Alright, Reddit, let's talk it out. More »
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It might be built on science, but Silicon Valley can be as fickle and fashion conscious as any Paris couturier. Back in 2004, for example, social networking looked trivial and grubby; truly cool programmers worked on swapping copyrighted music and movies. Even robotic Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was swept up in the trend, planning to sacrifice his now-$75 billion social network for a file-sharing venture, according to newly released instant messages. More »
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Earlier, we introduced you to the new internet craze breading—putting a piece of bread around your cat's head and taking a picture of it. Now people can't stop talking about breading! Here are the best 11 tweets about the controversial viral craze that is sweeping the internet. More »
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Forget planking. All the cool kids are putting their cats in bread and taking pictures of them looking like little yeasty lions. "Breading" is a throw-back to the old Japanese "putting-food-on-rabbits" meme of the early viral web, but with a modern twist. More »
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It doesn't take much to set off the fury of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Last night a California cop made a tweet suggesting he'd shoot hackers. Now he's been run off Twitter and is under an official investigation. More »
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Barack Obama convened the "first completely virtual interview from the White House" today in an attempt to connect directly with citizens. It turned out one of those citizens wanted the president to dance for her. Bet that never happens in the White House press room. More »
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"Unfriend Finder" is a browser extension that lets you know when someone has defriended you on Facebook. It's a very useful piece of software, in the sense that if you ever want to install it you know your life has taken a wrong turn somewhere. More »
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Paid Content's Jeff Roberts discovered what may be the world's geekiest stretch of graffiti on the Pulaski bridge in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There was this Google stencil, a "Stop SOPA" tag, and a painted Anonymous Guy Fawkes mask. More »
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Reputable internet business Groupon has been banned from ever again advertising snake oil, an activity Groupon not only engaged in, but defended, back when it was trying to assure everyone of its steady growth. More »
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Well, this is certainly interesting: Google's CEO Larry Page knew all about ads his company ran for an illegal Mexican drug ring run by a convicted con artist and described in detail to Google executives. But the advertisements for illicit steroids were allowed to continue because, hey, more revenue for Google. More »
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A while ago, a twenty-something geek we'll call Martin arranged a meeting with some potential clients in an an unusual place: the sidewalk across the street from a police precinct on Manhattan's West Side. More »
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Glenn Beck produced this pretty spot-on right-wing parody of those infamous spooky Anonymous video manifestos. Instead of overblown anarcho-revolutionary rhetoric, it's overblown ultraconservative rhetoric. Will Glenn Beck's fans now DDoS the SEIU's website and leak George Soros' personal emails? More »
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The anxious cyborgs who rule Google have decreed, after much controversy and deliberation, that they will alllow people to register accounts that do not match their official hu-man names. All you need to do to obtain a pseudonym is to furnish a printed "offline" news article, government document, popular Twitter account and three (3) types of bodily fluid. More »
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The New York Times breaks the alarming story of how a hacker was able to easily gain access to numerous boardroom videoconference systems throughout the country. Alarming, because this hacker got into Goldman Sachs' boardroom but didn't even spy on the bastards once. More »
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You can only join the exclusive new social network TopCom if you're among the 200 richest people in the world. Then again, if you're on hand in Davos Switzerland when TopCom is unveiled by scary software compant Tibco, there's a pretty good chance you're in that group. More »
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Anonymous really loved Megaupload. Still reeling over the loss of the best place to download the entire TLC discography on the web, members of the hacktivist collective have apparently launched an effort to build a replacement for the file-sharing service killed by the feds last week: Anonyupload. More »
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Texas Rep. Lamar Smith shelved his terrible internet-destroying Stop Online Piracy Act today after the internet's week-long anti-SOPA freakout. More »
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