No wonder they’re
valuing Groupon at $15 million. It’s hard to argue with a deal like this. At 57
percent off, you’re definitely going to need a new pair of pants.
Honestly, is there a better reason for undergoing major cosmetic surgery than finding a coupon in your inbox?
The man who hacked into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Webmail account started his year-and-a-day-long prison sentence this week in Ashland, Kentucky. David Kernell, the 23-year-old son of Tennessee Democratic politician, accessed the then Vice Presidential candidate’s inbox by answering a number of security questions.
Kernell’s findings eventually made their way onto WikiLeaks, a site that has come under increased scrutiny in the past year, thanks to the release of thousands of classified documents.
According to the BBC, the judge in the case suggested that Kernell serve out his term in a halfway house. The Bureau of Prisons thought differently, sending the 23-year-old, who goes by the online name “rubico,” to a low-security prison.
The biggest threat to the future of the Internet? To many it’s the possibility of an end to net neutrality. Not to Jimmy Wales. The Wikipedia founder told a crowd in Bristol, England that the largest threat to the openness of the Internet is the presence of walled off app stores from companies like Apple.
“People talk about net neutrality as an issue but the real action is in thinking about whether apps are a threat to the openness of the system,” said Wikipedia’s 44-year-old co-founder.
Wales added,
The action is taken place in the development of the apps model which is undergoing an incredible boom because there are some amazing things going on. However, the concern is that in order to make software and distribute it for free, you have to get permission from Apple so that chokepoint is very dangerous and something I’m concerned about.
Wikipedia turns ten years old tomorrow. The user-supported site boasts more than 17 million editions in hundreds of languages.
There’s no love lost between between AOL’s tech blogs. There’s a war of words being waged between Engadget and the recently purchased TechCrunch–actually, from the looks of it, it’s primarily TC-founder Michael Arrington taking potshots against the former in some very public forums.
Things started when Arrington derailed a post about Google Ads to talk smack about the blog, writing,
So we’re sad to see our sister blog Engadget doing just that-buying ads to pump up their Comscore rankings. We’ve seen a ridiculous number of ads on Google over the last month or two saying things like “Keep Up With What’s Going On In The Tech World With News From Engadget.”
Oh, and, “Engadget’s editors seem to be spending more time trolling TechCrunch comments than doing any actual work.”
Oh yeah, and also, “I miss the days when Ryan Block ran that site. Almost immediately after he left the sellout began, and Engadget’s rough but smart edginess vaporized into a plasticized caricature of a real blog.”
It was a pretty solid barrage in the space of a meager four paragraphs.
When Business Insider wrote up the odd attack, Arrington took to the site’s comment section to respond (and add fuel to his own bonfire), saying things like “I’m throwing punches at the engadget team and their bullsh*t” and “they’re immensely unethical.”
Engadget editor-inc-chief Joshua Toplosky quickly responded in the aforementioned comment section, writing,
You need to explain this comment and the source of your hatred for our brand and people. You need to tell me how we have been “trolling you.” Explain what we’ve done to you. Explain anything that you’ve said beyond a personal vendetta. I haven’t heard a shred of substance behind your attacks — only the vitriol of a man-child who can’t control himself. “Immensely unethical”? Explain it.
He concluded by telling Arrington to, “grow up.”
And then the comment section kind of breaks down from there.
So, what’s going on? Is AOL gunning for more hits, or is Arrington just setting himself up for the most awkward Christmas party, ever?
This is Justin Bieber. All he wants to do is make you happy. He wants to play music for you and shorten your links. And now he finally has a venue for the latter. It’s Bieber.ly, and it’s Biebertastic.
The service will not only shorten your link into a Bieberific URL, it’ll overlay a Bieberazing image of the Bieb over your Bieberful site. Biebersome!
Update 2:45 ET: Bieber, Bieber, Bieber, Bieber, Bieber.
For some, it’s a source of limitless information about nearly every topic imaginable. For others, it’s a focal point for poor research and liable. For most of us, however, Wikipedia serves one important function–it is, quite probably, the greatest time waster that the Internet has to offer.
Who among us hasn’t spent hours on end journeying down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, jumping from one page to the next, genuinely baffled by how exactly we ended up where we did.
In light of its 10th birthday this Saturday, we’ve decided to pay tribute to Wikipedia by featuring some of the staff’s favorite articles that are amongst the 3.5 million currently available in the English version of the site.
The following 10 articles are fascinating, goofy, mind boggling, hilarious–or all of the above.
There are some things you can always count on. Things like Courtney Love. She may clean herself up and become a “serious actress” one minute, but you can bet that, like clockwork, she’ll be back to that old, loveable, mic throwing Courtney the next. You see, her methods of delivery may change over time, but the message will stay the same.
Love and fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir have been having a Twitter fight–and by “Twitter fight,” I mean, of course, that Love has been yelling at Simorangkir on Twitter. The parties have been fighting over a $4,000 payment, and Love has taken her message to the microblogging site, calling Simorangkir a “drug-addled prostitute,” a “nasty, lying, hosebag thief” (hosebag?), and a “52 year old desperate cokes ass [sic].”
Oh, and it gets better–she’s also threatened the designer, stating that she would wind “up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead [sic, sic, sic].” Her one women screaming campaign has also lead to posts on MySpace and online craft storefront Etsy.
Simorangkir fired back in 2009, with a suit against Love, featuring 20 some pages worth of examples. Not above personal judgments of her own, the libel suit says that Love has “drug induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality, or the belief that her money and fame allow her to disregard the law.”
Love attorney James Janowitz, is taking a strongish stand on the matter. “We don’t believe there’s any defamation, and even if there were defamatory statements, there was no damage.”
These days, all seems like gloom and doom over at the MySpace headquarters. Earlier in the week, we reported that the once dominant social network has plans to slice its workforce in half for cost cutting purposes. Today comes word that News Corp. is planning to either sell or spin off the site.
MySpace spokeswoman Rosabel Tao told Bloomberg, “News Corp. is assessing a number of possibilities including a sale, a merger and a spinout,” Tao said. “The process has just started.”
If the company does opt for the spinoff option, MySpace will remain a News Corp-funded site, though the company will bring in partners to help MySpace work in a more entrepreneurial fashion, says Bloomberg.
A News Corp. spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny the spinoff/sale plans. MySpace has suffered in the last few years as it has taken a backseat to the astronomical growth of Facebook.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
