Hasta La Gadget!

Digi-Muckrakers WikiLeaks rocked the global power broker community by exposing the Mean Girls world of international diplomacy. Aside from sometimes less than flattering performance reviews of world leaders, is it possible that WikiLeaks also uncovered intel that is far more out of this world? Head WikiLeaker Julian Assange seemed to hint at just that in a recent reader-submitted Q+A with The Guardian.

When asked if WikiLeaks had ever uncovered any documents regarding UFOs or extraterrestrials Assange answered:

Many weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were
the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over
a pot-plant. However, as yet they have not satisfied two of our
publishing rules.
1) that the documents not be self-authored;
2) that they be original.
However, it is worth noting that in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs.

Intriguing. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath for some kind of E.T. bombshell to come out of Cablegate for three reasons:

1) Assange only makes reference to “UFOs,” which, of course, refers to any airborne object that has yet to be identified. The term is used to refer to unknown objects that were later determined to be errant planes, meteors, or even balloons. There’s nothing surprising about government documents mentioning UFOs without it referring to anything sci-fi-tacular.

2) I can’t imagine Assange or anyone at WikiLeaks would be able to keep from putting a bombshell regarding visiting extraterrestrial life front and center.

3) Of the quarter million files included in Cablegate, they’ve all been “unclassified” or “secret.” There were no “top secret” files included. And from what I can tell so far, these “unclassified” and “secret” cables mostly seem to contain colorful expressions of things that everyone already knows. I imagine all that real-life X-File intel, if it’s anything juicy, is filed under “top secret.”

Josh Duhamel, aka the dude from Transformers, aka the dude who married Fergie, reportedly got booted off of a flight from New York to Kentucky after reusing to shut off his BlackBerry before takeoff.

The flight attendant asked the actor to shut the phone off three times, and Duhamel finally laughed at her. She called for assistance, and the plane turned around on the runway and headed back toward gate.

TMZ apparently spoke to a passenger on the flight who called Duhamel’s behivor “very rude,” accussing him of “taunting the attendant.” A representative for Duhamel ultimately issued a statement apologizing for the event which led to flight delays.

Meet Oleg Nikolaenko. You probably don’t recognize his name, but odds are pretty good that you’ve received an e-mail from him at some point. The 23-year-old Russian man goes by the handle “Docent,” and the FBI believes that he’s behind roughly one-third of the world’s spam.

Nikolaenko is suspected to be the person behind Mega-D, a botnet that has infected 500,000, sending out thousands of spam messages about things like Rolex and prescription pills. The Moscow resident is the first person named in connection with Mega-D.

The FBI nabbed financial records showing that Nikolaenko managed to pull in $500,000 in six months via Lance Atkinson, a spammer who was sentenced to prison last year.