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The Justice Department indicted Reuters social media editor Matthew Keys on Thursday for allegedly conspiring with the hacktivist collective Anonymous to deface the website of The Los Angeles Times and other Tribune Co. newspapers. According to the indictment (read it here), Keys, using the handle AESCracked, gave Anonymous hackers access to Tribune servers. Keys had recently been fired from Tribune-owned TV station KTXL FOX 40 and still had valid login credentials — so he allegedly unleashed Anonymous, urging the group to “go f**k some s**t up.”
They did, kind of. The above headline ran on LATimes.com for roughly a half hour on Dec. 14, 2010
“Keys is being charged under the general federal conspiracy statute and under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the same act under which Aaron Swartz was charged,” says Justin Peters at Slate. Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit, committed suicide in January before he was to face charges for allegedly downloading millions of files illegally from MIT computers. He, like Keys, was threatened with jail time, of up to 35 years. And the similarities don’t end there. The vagueness of the CFAA — passed in 1984, to nab “sophisticated, malicious hackers” targeting the only entities networked at the time: Banks, universities, and the federal government — allows prosecutors to push for “outrageously severe” punishments like this, for whatever reasons. In this case, “just like with the Swartz case, the feds are going to use the threat of a huge maximum sentence to intimidate Keys into accepting a plea bargain.”
Peters goes on:
“The DOJ doesn’t want to lock Keys up for 25 years, but they’ll be more than happy to pretend they do in order to get the outcome they really want — likely for Keys to spend no more than a few months in jail and provide information about members of Anonymous…. The government wants Anonymous pretty badly, but I’m not sure what their actual game is here. Do they think Keys will roll over and lead them to other Anonymous members in exchange for a reduced sentence? Are they trying to make an example out of Keys so that other people will think twice before cooperating with Anonymous? Or are they simply being disproportionate and unreasonable out of habit? Apparently, they didn’t take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case.”
25 years for “providing login information that resulted in a joke headline which lasted 30 minutes” is “enormously steep, given the alleged crime,” says Sam Biddle at Gizmodo.
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5 rules for taking #selfies on Instagram (if you must)
First, let’s define what a selfie is. Just so we’re clear:
1. It’s a picture with your face in it.
2. You took the photo yourself. Another human being was not involved.
3. It is shared on the internet — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever.Now, the rules:
- Selfies are off-limits for anyone over 21*
Are you allowed to legally consume alcohol in the United States of America? If so, you are too old to go fishing for compliments with a self-portrait. Leave the selfies for Snapchatting teens who can use the word “ratchet” in a sentence without Googling “ratchet” and “urban dictionary” at the same time.
*Exceptions: Fashion bloggers, models, and anyone else who makes a living off of their appearance is exempt from this rule. So is anyone 21 or over who’s using the selfie to communicate something new to friends. New haircut: Great! New glasses? Snap away! GoofyMovember mustache? By all means, share. Same old you? Put the camera down. - The following words and phrases are banned from selfie captions:
“Bored”
“Studying”
“Ready for bed”“Good morning!”
“Hitting the gym”
“#GQ” (LOL)
“Work hard, play hard”
Essentially, ask yourself, “What would Kim Kardashian do?” Then do the opposite.
- Selfies are off-limits for anyone over 21*
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I did some actual journalism and wrote an article about internet addiction for The Week magazine, and interviewed the head of an Internet Addiction Rehab. Here’s an excerpt.
Researchers have noted a rise in something called Digital Attention Disorder — the addiction to social networks and computers in general.
How does it work? More than 50 years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was experimenting on rats and pigeons, and noticed that the unpredictability of reward was a major motivator for animals. If a reward arrives either predictably or too infrequently, the animal eventually loses interest. But when there was anticipation of a reward that comes with just enoughfrequency, the animals’ brains would consistently release dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that (basically) regulates pleasure.
What does this have to do with the internet? Some researchers believe that intermittent reinforcement — in the form of texts, tweets, and various other social media — may be working on our brains the same way rewards did on Skinner’s rats.
“Internet addiction is the same as any other addiction — excessive release of dopamine,” says Hilarie Cash, executive director of the reStart program for internet addiction and recovery, a Seattle-area rehab program that helps wean people off the internet. “Addiction is addiction. Whether it’s gambling, cocaine, alcohol, or Facebook.”
And thus begins my contributions to The Week!
Welcome!
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At 5:26 a.m. New York time (12:26 p.m. in Damascus), Syria’s internet went dark. According to two U.S. internet monitoring companies, Renesys and Akamai Technologies, Syria is now completely cut off from the e-world, with all internet connections down along with at least some phone service. “A smaller outage could be chalked up to an errant mortar shell,” but the entire country? says Sam Biddle at Gizmodo. “Only the Syrian regime has the power to create that kind of lockout at will.”
“Shutting down web and phone service is a tactic increasingly pursued by countries to limit the spread of information both within the country and to the outside world,” says Shara Tibken at CNET News. Without communication, the anti-government rebels are cut off from one another, limiting their ability to fight.
Why Bashar al-Assad unplugged the internet in Syria(Source: theweek.com)
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White people mourning Mitt Romney: Some people took GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s loss on Tuesday harder than others. This opportunistic Tumblr compiles the most heartbroken, furious, and disillusioned responses to the Obama victory from Facebook, Twitter, and news headlines. Sample tweet from Victoria Jackson: “Thanks a lot, Christians, for not showing up. You disgust me.”
The best memes, videos and gifs to emerge from the internet this week
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The 25 worst passwords of 2012
Why is ‘monkey’ so high up on this list?
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Skateboarding through a ghost town — A group of lucky skaters live every kid’s dream of tearing their way through an eerie ghost town unchecked by authorities. This short takes place in Ordos, a northern China city that’s nearly completely deserted thanks to soaring property taxes.
More awesomeness can be found in our list of this week’s best of the internet
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Vancouver native Amanda Todd, 15, was found dead last week in an apparent suicide, evidently pushed over the edge by persistently cruel bullying, online and in real life. And now, the vigilante hacker group Anonymous claims to have identified — and unmasked — her virtual harasser.
In a newly released YouTube video (see it here), a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask says in an auto-tuned voice that “Kody Maxson is an abomination to our society and will be punished.”
Did Anonymous just unmask a man who allegedly drove a teen to suicide?
(Source: theweek.com)
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You don’t need a highlighter for anything on an iPad. You don’t need a 3M Post-it for your iPhone. Five years from now, I predict that copier sales will be a fraction of what they are today
— Cody Willard at MarketWatch predicts the downfall of Staples, which announced this week that it is closing 60 stores worldwide as part of a restructuring effort to halt sliding profits. -
“Media outlets should wake up and take note — because what Morgan Jones did last week just may be the future of journalism.” —Linda Sharps at The Stir.
On the night of the massacre that killed 12 people in Aurora, Colo., 18-year-old Morgan Jones of Denver was up late playing a video game when he spied a Facebook update from his local news station reporting a possible shooting at a movie theater. Jones began a thread on the popular social-media news site Reddit that over the course of the night morphed into what many are describing as the most comprehensive timeline to emerge from the event, replete with minute-by-minute tweets from witnesses, reports from traditional media sources, and police scanner updates. Jones and his fellow Redditors also had some major scoops, unearthing the picture of alleged shooter James Holmes from the online dating site AdultFriendFinder.com, the first to show him with his distinctive red hair. Many commentators say Reddit’s coverage exemplifies a new breed of journalism, though some, like CNN’s Howard Kurtz, criticized the timeline as error-ridden.
Is Reddit’s style of citizen journalism the wave of the future?
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Have you seen this yet? This is the first photograph ever posted to the web.
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Facebook is launching a new type of mobile advertising that targets consumers based on the apps they use, pushing the limits of how companies track what people do on their phones.
—Shayndi Raice at The Wall Street Journal
Is this a smart way to make mobile advertising profitable? Or is it too invasive?
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What does it mean that a grown man can pull down a six-figure annual income making piano-playing-cat videos in America in the middle of the worst recession in decades?
