VFiles' YouTube videos are among the most stupidly entertaining on the internet, and you should be watching all of them. I Love VFiles. I love VFiles so much that I almost don't want to write about it for fear that it gets really popular then MTV turns it into a shitty television show.

This is ironic, since the simplest way to explain VFiles' videos, which you can watch here, is that they do to the fashion world what MTV did to music: smartly package the inscrutable culture and business of high fashion to make it fun for outsiders. VFiles accomplishes this mainly through the relatively unknown but spectacularly talented hosts they've plucked out of the fashion world, and the high production values that make them look great.

One of the best VFiles series is Model Files, a mockumentary that follows real-life fashion casting director Preston Chaunsumlit on a series of made-up (I think?) assignments. Model Files spoofs a lot of the obvious fashion absurdities on display on America's Next Top Model and previously tackled by Zoolander. In the first episode, Preston casts the shirtless guys who hold open the door at Hollister: "Hollister guy has to be chiseled," he says, "he has to turn on both soccer moms and frat guys." But the show is infused with an insider's perspective that makes it as educational as it is amusing. The show teaches you new ridiculous facets of the fashion industry even as it spoofs them. And of course there are many beautiful models, who turn out to be pretty good actors, too.

Another series, Xtreme Fashion Week, takes the fashion press' endless appetite for behind-the-scenes coverage of runway shows its logical conclusion by strapping GoPro cameras to the heads of models and reporters for a nauseating gonzo experience.

But my personal favorite VFiles series is Status Update, a surreal gossip and entertainment show hosted by comedian and animator Casey Jane Ellison. Ellison, whose on-screen character is sort of a goth Paris Hilton, turns the low-rent pop culture vlog into a hilarious stoned-out parody. It's vocal fry as performance art.

Here's the latest Status Update, released a few hours ago:

My only issue with VFiles is, having watched most of their YouTube videos, I'm still not sure exactly what VFiles is. Their website, VFiles.com, is a confoundingly ambitious mix of Pinterest, Facebook and Style.com that demands a sync to your Facebook account (gross). Wikipedia says it's: "A New York-based social media platform for Fashion, style, and pop-culture enthusiasts." There's also a VFiles store that sells weird clothes inspired by the costumes of various nineties subcultures (raver, grunge, hip hop, etc).

Whatevs, as they say on Status Update:. All you really need to know is they make great videos, and Model Files' Season 2 starts on May 21st.

Here's the thing: Rob Ford DOES use crack cocaine. A friend of mine, her mother is a serious drug addict. Rob Ford regularly goes over to her house to smoke crack.

The problem is this: The daughter wants to expose Rob Ford's drug abuse, but her oldschool Italian grandmother won't allow her to "bring shame" upon the family, long story short.

Remember LulzSec? The Anonymous-offshoot gang of hackers who alternately terrorized and delighted the internet in the summer of 2011 have been pretty much all rounded up. And today four Brits who were core members of the group were sentenced in the UK for their crimes.

LulzSec's 50-day crime spree was most notable for the publicity the group sought and received; they hacked mostly for laughs, not money, taking down Sony, the CIA, Fox and many others while churning out a stream of amusing propaganda and inside-jokes. But at their sentencing today in London, the judge made clear that the law found nothing funny about their stunts:

"It's clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity. They saw themselves as latter-day pirates," she said. "This is not about young immature men messing about. They are at the cutting edge of a contemporary and emerging species of criminal offender known as a cyber criminal."

Naked Security runs down the sentences received by the four hackers, all who all pled guilty:

• Jake Davis - "Topiary" - Two years in a young offenders' institution.
• Ryan Cleary - "Viral" - Imprisoned for 32 months, of which he will serve half.
• Mustafa Al-Bassam - "T-Flow" - 20 months prison sentence suspended for two years, and 300 hours community service.
• Ryan Ackroyd - "Kayla" - 30 months prison sentence, of which he will serve half.

The most compelling of the LulzSec characters is 20-year-old Jake Davis aka Topiary. A teenager when LulzSec began, Topiary was the smarmy spokesman of the group who debated the Westboro Baptist Church while his colleagues hacked them live on a radio show. Before he was busted he posted a final, self-aggrandizing tweet, "You cannot arrest an idea." Later he penned an op-ed for the Guardian about how better his life was without the internet after he'd been caught.

Today, Davis took to the BBC for his first television interview and admit the now regrets "95% of the things I've ever typed on the internet."

The problems keep coming for Mt. Gox, the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange. Just days after Gawker revealed a key business partnership had devolved into a $75 million lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security seized a payment processing account belonging to the company, alleging it lied on financial documents.

According to a warrant issued Tuesday by the U.S. District Court of Maryland, the DHS seized Mt. Gox's account with payments processing service Dwolla after an agent discovered that Mt. Gox did not properly register as a money services company when opening a U.S. bank account in 2011.

Iowa-based Dwolla was an easier way for Americans to exchange cash for bitcoins through Mt. Gox without having to wire money to the company, which is Japanese-based and has struggled to establish an American base. But an affidavit by Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Michael McFarland alleges that Mt. Gox has been using Dwolla to run an "unlicensed money transmitting business" through a U.S. subsidiary called Mutum Sigillum LLC. This is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

The warrant alleges Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles failed to disclose that he ran a money transmitting business when opening a bank account with Wells Fargo in the name of Mutum Sigillum, a Delaware company he set up to facilitate Mt. Gox's Dwolla payments. The application asked several questions including "Do you deal in or exchange currency for your customer?" and "Does your business accept funds from customers and send the funds based on customers' instructions?" to which Karpeles responded no.

However, Mutum Sigillum did function as a money transmitter, according to the warrant. Mt. Gox wired money to the Mutum Sigillum's Wells Fargo account from Japan, which was used to pay customers who cashed out through Dwolla. An informant exchanged Bitcoins to dollars on Mt Gox through Dwolla, and bank records showed the transfer was done through Mutum Sigillum.

Money transmitting services are required to register with the Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), which Mt. Gox has not done. The seizure comes just weeks after FinCen issued new guidelines suggesting certain Bitcoin-related operations qualified as money services and had to be registered. Mt. Gox had negotiated a much-hyped partnership with CoinLab, a start-up that has registered with FinCen, to handle its U.S. transactions, but that fell apart when CoinLab sued Mt. Gox for $75 million for breach of contract.

Mt. Gox has not issued a statement on the allegations, but this latest scandal makes one wonder exactly how shady Mt. Gox, which originally started as an exchange site for Magic The Gathering Cards, is. The company has recently been touting a huge effort to conform to international regulations and transform into a legit business. "We are the leader," Mt. Gox marketing director Gonzague Gay-Bouchery told The Verge, "We have a huge responsibility to do things by the books."

The fact their CEO potentially faces five years in prison for lying suggests otherwise. Fancy Latin name aside, the barely-functioning website of Mutum Sigillum does not seem a very promising backbone on which to build the new Bitcoin Global World Economic Order, especially as Feds seem intent on cracking down on the illicit use of the currency.

Here's the full warrant:

Mt Gox Dwolla Warrant 5-14-13

"No Takedowns. Ever." That was the defiant message that Cody Wilson delivered in a YouTube video promoting Defense Distributed, an organization he founded dedicated to designing and distributing plans for weapons that anyone can make using a 3D printer at home. But after Defense Distributed was targeted by the U.S State Department, Wilson and his colleagues have taken the plans down, for now.

In the past few months, Wilson, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas, has become something of an internet folk hero for his blustery campaign to make gun schematics as easily downloaded on the internet as Mad Men episodes. Earlier this month Wilson demonstrated the "Liberator," the first completely 3D-printed gun. 3D printing is being hailed by libertarian nerds as the most disruptive technology since Bitcoin, putting the power to physically print anything that can be designed on a computer (as long as it's made out of plastic). 3D printed guns have caused gun nuts and geeks to form up into a sort of Libertarian voltron.

But yesterday, the State Department ordered Defense Distributed's website, DEFCAD.org, to remove a number of blueprints for guns because they believe they may violate international arms regulations. Wilson did.

"We have to comply," Wilson told Forbes. "All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we'll do our part to remove it from our servers." Predictably, copies of the files, which have been downloaded 100,000 times so far, have been compiled into torrents that are now being distributed by The Pirate Bay. (Kim Dotcom is also involved in this story, as Defense Distributed uploaded their plans to his Mega file-locker site, which means 3D printed guns connects pretty much every node of this particular internet subculture.)

The more ardent techno-libertarians say that the Liberator and Defense Distributed proves that gun control is now pointless since anyone can make their own using the files that have now spread throughout the internet. But as the State Department takedown shows, even virtual gun nuts still have to obey the law. If you were extremely determined you could still track down the gun files on the Pirate Bay and print your own. Or you could buy a much better gun the old fashioned way, at a barely-regulated gun show.

Everything was going great for South Korea's new president Park Guen-hye during her first trip to the U.S. Then her spokesman allegedly groped an intern while he was drunk in D.C. earlier this week, and skipped town.

South Korean president Park Guen-hye fired her spokesman, right-wing columnist Yoon Chang-jung, after the incident, which involved a 21-year-old intern at Washington D.C.'s South Korean Embassy. Yoon was accompanying Park on her visit to the U.S. to meet with Obama.

According to a Metropolitan Police report, the 56-year-old Yoon was drinking with the intern this Tuesday evening when he allegedly "grabbed her buttocks without her permission." ABC has more details about the incident:

On the evening of the summit, Yoon apparently drank alcohol with the intern at another hotel lobby close to where he and the President Park's team were staying, according to Yonhap. South Korean media New Daily reports that Yoon actually drank with the intern and his driver, and then went for another drink at his hotel room, this time inviting only the intern. He was allegedly wearing "underwear" when she showed up.

Yoon then booked it out of D.C. so quickly that South Korean media reported he left his belongings in his hotel room.

The alleged sexual assault is still being investigated as a misdemeanor, but Yoon's quick escape means there will be no Dominique Strauss-Kahn-type spectacle in the U.S. But in South Korea, the scandal is dominating the news. Park's office said Yoon was fired for a "disgraceful incident." Yoon hasn't been seen since.

When North Korea announced it had sentenced imprisoned American tour operator Kenneth Bae to 15 years hard labor earlier this month, it gave no details about his crime other than he had attempted to "overthrow" the North Korean government. But now North Korea has presented more details about Bae's crime: They say he smuggled anti-government propaganda into the country, and preached the overthrow of regime as part of a Christian missionary-backed plan called "Operation Jericho."

The report from the Korean Central News Agency paints Bae, a devout Christian, as the leader of a plot to undermine the government called "Operation Jericho," according to a translation by NKnews.org. Operation Jericho was launched in 2006 by Youth With a Mission (YWAM), an international evangelical Christian organization Bae belonged to, according to KCNA. It consisted of mobilizing 250 of Bae's "followers" to infiltrate an area of North Korea near the border and create an "anti-government coalition." They would base their operation in a hotel.

KCNA also says Bae smuggled in "propaganda materials." This included a copy of the National Geographic documentary "Don't Tell My Mother I'm In North Korea," in which the reporter Diego Bunuel visits North Korea, and a book about persecution in North korea, according to NKNews.

How much of this is true? It's clear that Bae was a Christian minister with Youth With a Mission, and there's evidence to suggest he was using his tour agency, Nation Tours, as a front to sneak Christian missionaries into the country. NKNews dug up a video of a sermon in which Bae preached to a Korean congregation in the U.S., telling them that "I knew that Jesus wanted me to be a 'channel' to the North." Bae was dispatched to China by YWAM, and the tour operation was likely a front for some kind of missionary work.

In a 2011 note to a Korean church in St. Louis he wrote: "We plan to open up a new base from which mobilization and missionary works for North Korea can all be carried out from one location."

However, simply leading trips of missionaries into North Korea would probably not be enough to get Bae such a harsh punishment. The practice of Christianity is virtually banned in North Korea, but there is a community of foreign evangelical Christians living there—many of them run aid organizations. But they have to keep their religion quiet: they're not allowed to distribute Bibles or other material, or even visibly pray, one missionary told Foreign Policy. They instead must attempt to lead North Koreans to God by subtle example.

There are, however, Christian groups with more explicit anti-regime goals. One is the Voice of the Martyrs, which stages guerilla evangelizing by sending balloons with religious material, sending radio broadcasts of bible readings over the border, and connecting with underground Churches through contacts in the country. Todd Nettleton, the director of media development for the group, told me that his group's work directly attacks the government.

"The deification of Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il, their political system is built on that idea," he said. "A new religion coming in is not just a religion—it literally undermines the very foundation of the government. North Koreans who accept Christ aren't just accepting a religion, they're committing a treasonous act."

This fact is born out by the history of proselytizers being arrested in North Korea. The Korean-American minister Robert Park was imprisoned in 2009 when he illegally crossed into North Korea to proest human rights abuses, for example. He was released after a few months in prison. We don't know yet if Kenneth Bae will be so lucky.

Everyone has trouble finding things on the internet: A restaurant's address, the date of President McKinley's assassination, minute details about a specific person, hidden confidential files mistakenly put on a public website. Luckily the National Security Agency, that monolithic embodiment of the contemporary surveillance state, has compiled an exhaustive guide on how to find information on the internet. It's a strange document.

The NSA is collecting millions of emails and phone calls from normal Americans, but sometimes they've got to use Google like you and me. The 642-page guidebook Untangling The Web (pdf) was written in 2007 by Robyn Winder and Charlie Speight, according to MuckRock, which obtained the document in a FOIA request. The guide is written in a surprisingly down-to-earth, equivocating style for a book published by an organization whose headquarters looks like something from the Minority Report set, full of literary references and light-hearted asides.

The all-seeing eye of the NSA brings to mind the Greek myth of the Gorgon, but Untangling The Web begins with the myth of Sisyphus, comparing the task of trying to understand the internet to Sisyphus' never-ending trek up the hill behind his boulder. "Sometimes I feel that all I can do is to push the rock to up to the top of that virtual hill, then stand back and watch as it rolls down again… My hope is that Untangling the Web will add to our knowledge of the Internet and the world while recognizing that the rock will always roll back down the hill at the end of the day." No doubt spying on all private communications in the U.S. is a similarly daunting task, but that hasn't kept the NSA from spending billions of dollars in trying.

One of the more intriguing parts of the manual is a section that gives researches tips on "Google hacking." Also known as "Google dorking," the technique relies on using creative Google searches to turn up information accidentally made public on the web. "In short," according to Untangling The Web, "it's using clever but legal techniques to find information that doesn't belong on the public internet." This includes "personal and/or financial information," "userids, computer or account logins, passwords," and "sensitive government information." For example, one can search for "stock words and phrase" that might signal sensitive data such as "Proprietary, confidential, not for distribution, etc." Coupled with searches for specific filetypes, especially excel spreadsheets and Word Documents, one might stumble upon some nugget of secret info.

Google hacking wasn't pioneered by the NSA or Untangling The Web—it's been the art of a subset of mischievous geeks for a while. It's also been used by criminal hackers, most notoriously to steal social security numbers by searching likely combinations. But Untangling The Web cautions: "Please use the information… judiciously because many of the Google hacking techniques… are really designed for cracking, i.e. breaking into websites and servers. That is not something I encourage or advocate."

As the guide was written in 2007, much of the other information is outdated or useless. In fact its best use to readers today is to illuminate just how much the internet has changed in five years, and in worrying ways. For example, Untangling the Web's lengthy section on finding people on the internet is almost comfortingly sparse. The author warns: "Searching for people remains one of the most popular and important internet reserach projects, it also continues to be one of the most frustrating." In 2007 it wasn't so hard to hide online from even the most dedicated searcher.

But the ease of finding people online has increased infinitely in the past five years: Now, Facebook, Twitter and the ever-increasing number of databases we voluntarily enter our information into has greatly increased the ability for normal people to find out pretty much anything about pretty much anyone.

Surprisingly, Untangling The Web actually sounds a prescient note of caution when it comes to the centralization of our personal information in databases, which has proved such a boon to organizations like the NSA:

I close with an example of the reach of the web. My 97-year-old aunt in South Carolina had a bit part in an obscure movie in 1989. Despite the fact that the movie has been largely forgotten, my aunt has an "actress filmography" in the Internet Movie Database. She, of course, was unaware of her internet presence and was both thrilled and more than a little shocked to find that even she was in 'cyberspace.'

The point, of course, is that no one is out of reach of this powerful, invasive technology. We change the world with our technology and we, in turn, are altered by that same technology. It remains to be seen where our technology leads us, whether into an 'endless frontier' or, more ominously, into a 'cemetery of dead ideas'"

To contact the author of this post, email adrian@gawker.com.

[Image via Wikipedia]

A group of students calling themselves Free Cooper Union have just staged a sit-in in Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha's office to protest the school's controversial plan to end its 154-year-old tradition of free tuition in order to address a $16.5 million budget deficit.

The group posted a statement on the website Cooper Union Student Action to Save Our School:

50+ students, faculty, and staff are maintaining a ‘sit-in’ inside Jamshed Bharucha’s office on the 7th floor of the Foundation Building of the Cooper Union. As students we have reclaimed the President’s office in response to the Administration and the Board of Trustees announcing the implementation of tuition for the incoming class of 2014- desecrating a 154 year old tradition of meritocracy and free education. We stand together with the extended Cooper community in opposition to this decision; we reaffirm all of the previous and future actions of our fellow students and allies.

For good background on the Cooper Union saga, read Sangamithra Iyer's piece in N+1.

Here's a livestream.

[Image via Free Cooper Union Facebook]

Multiple sources are reporting that internet traffic to Syria just dropped in a way that suggests a country-wide outage. It's unclear what's responsible. Syrian internet traffic was cut off last year--for 40 minutes. Sadly, a broken internet is far from the most pressing problem facing most Syrians right now.

[Graph via Akamai]

One of my favorite new songs right is "Rat" by Wise Blood. Weird lyrics and sounds. Reminds me of Okay, another one of my favorite bands, except with hip hop beats. Check out the stream after the jump.

Kathryn Bigelow's Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden. But the extent to which the CIA shaped the film has remained unclear. Now, a memo obtained by Gawker shows that the CIA actively, and apparently successfully, pressured Mark Boal to remove scenes that made them look bad from the Zero Dark Thirty script.

The CIA's whitewashing effort is revealed in a cache of documents newly released under a Freedom of Information Act request about the CIA's cooperation with Bigelow and Boal. The documents include a 2012 memo—initially classified "SECRET"—summarizing five conference calls between Boal and the CIA's Office of Public Affairs in late 2011. "The purpose for these discussions was for OPA officers to help promote an appropriate portrayal of the Agency and the Bin Ladin operation," according to the memo. (Hundreds of pages of CIA documents about the film were released last year; the memo obtained by Gawker was approved for release late last month.)

During these calls, Boal "verbally shared the screenplay" for Zero Dark Thirty in order to get the CIA's feedback, and the CIA's public affairs department verbally asked Boal to take out parts that they objected to. According to the memo, he did.

Here are the key changes:

The much-discussed opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty features the main character Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, observing a detainee at a CIA black site as he is water-boarded and shoved into a tiny box during an interrogation. It appears that an early version had Maya participating in the torture. But during their conference calls, the CIA told Boal that this was not true to life. The memo reads: "For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique."

According to the memo, "Boal said he would fix this." Indeed, in the final film Maya doesn't touch the prisoner during this scene. The decision to have Maya abstain from the torture was as significant artistically as it was factually. Her ambivalence was a key part of her character, and critics picked over every detail of the torture scenes, including Maya's status as an observer rather than a participant, for meaning in the debate over torture that the movie sparked.

Wired's Spencer Ackerman, for example, interpreted Maya's complex relationship to on-screen torture as a sign of a complex inner life: "Maya is... a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn’t object to it." Of course, the scene reads a bit differently if the choice was dictated by a CIA propaganda officer.

The CIA also took issue with an interrogation scene that featured a dog intimidating a detainee. Boal took it out: "We raised an objection that such tactics would not be used by the Agency," the memo reads. "Boal confirmed in January that the use of dogs was taken out of the screenplay."

The CIA might not have done it, but threatening detainees with dogs was a well-known feature of the War on Terror, even allowed in certain circumstances by U.S. Army interrogation manuals. The technique was pioneered in Guantanamo Bay and cruelly elaborated upon at Abu Ghraib. Some of the most disturbing photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal featured military dogs menacing naked prisoners.

The CIA also successfully pressed for a change outside of interrogation scenes. One scene in the early script featured a wild party in Islamabad, and the CIA asked Boal to take it out. He did.

From the memo:

"One scene early in the film that was objected to was a rooftop party in Islamabad where an officer, after drinking fires a celebratory burst of AK-47 gunfire into the air. We insisted mixing drinking and firearms is a major violation and actions like this do not happen in real life. We requested this be taken out of the film. Boal confirmed he took this out of the film."

To be fair, drunken firearms abuse was more a Blackwater thing.

Another minor issue was the fact that Maya analyzed videos of detainee interviews in order to track down Osama bin Laden's courier. The CIA told Boal that they didn't videotape interviews and use them in analysis. (This is itself a lie of course—the CIA did record 92 tapes, totaling hundreds of hours, of the interrogation and torture of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. It subsequently destroyed them.) But Boal explained "visually this is the only way to show research in an interesting cinematic way," according to the memo. The CIA "did not request Boal take this scene out of the movie," and it remained.

The document reveals the extent to which CIA access was a quid pro quo arrangement, in which Boal made substantive changes to his script to appease them. "As an agency, we've been pretty forward-leaning with Boal," wrote a CIA flack to her peers in documents released last year. "He's agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us so we're absolutely comfortable with what he will be showing."

Reached for via email, Mark Boal wouldn't comment on the record. But a person with knowledge of the Zero Dark Thirty production process confirmed that specific changes had been made to the script after suggestions from the CIA, including Maya's lack of participation in the torture scene. But this person said these changes were only due to security or accuracy concerns, and the CIA had no input on creative decisions.

Update: in an email, Boal wrote:

We honored certain requests to keep operational details and the identity of the participants confidential. But as with any publication or work of art, the final decisions as to the content were made by the filmmakers.

Here's the memo (pen mark-up is ours):

A few minutes ago, The Onion's official Twitter account let loose a series of tweets that suggested it had been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, the same outfit responsible for taking down the Associated Press' and CBS' account. Of course the possibility of this being some meta-joke has twisted everyone's brains into pretzels.

Here are the tweets, which seem very similar to other tweets by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of angry nerds who support Assad's regime by hacking twitter accounts and defacing websites with pro-Assad messages:

Israel denies forging new alliance with Al Qaeda: "We were friends all along, so it can't be new" - IDF Spokesperson onion.com/LZuAvY

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

UN's Ban Ki Moon condemns Syria for being struck by israel: "It was in the way of Jewish missiles" onion.com/104PKAs

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

Poland todouble flights from the Middle East, anticipating Israeli mass exodus."The bagel bakery ovens are working over time" ~ Larry

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

BREAKING: #TheOnion readership mass confusion as Syrian Electronic Army takes over. All demand a permanent column. twitter.com/TheOnion/statu…

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: "Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor"

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

We only wish this one was a joke, but this is what we have to live through in #Syria. twitter.com/TheOnion/statu…

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 6, 2013

The unfunniness of the jokes suggests that this is not The Onion. Of course it could just be the onion doing a spot-on impression of an anti-Isareli hacker. But according to Business Insider's Adam Taylor, a hacker named Th3 Pro, one of the SEA's leaders, sent along a screenshot to prove he was behind the hack.

Syrian hacker Th3 Pr0 says that SEA is behind @theonion attack, sends this screenshot twitter.com/mradamtaylor/s…

— Adam Taylor (@mradamtaylor) May 6, 2013

If The Onion truly was hacked, then that leaves about three media organizations that haven't been taken over by Syrian hackers. Maybe everyone should just find a new social media platform.

Have you heard of the twitter trend #followateen that everyone is talking about? No? Congratulations. Life is good. Turn off the computer now and go outside and enjoy your perfect life. Still there? Well, if you insist on biting into this poisonous knowledge fruit, read on. Learn of the Great Teen-Adult Twitter War of 2013.

Twitter users are constantly trying to devise new and more unsettling ways to waste time on Twitter. One twitter user, the writer David Thorpe (@arr) decided a good way to do this would be to follow a random teen. In 2011 he tweeted:

Today, everyone find a normal-ass teen to follow and report back on their boring exploits. #followateen

— Lucrative Trillion (@Arr) December 29, 2011

A few days ago ago he re-launched the #followateen concept:

By request of @katienotopoulos, let's bring back #followateen for 2013. Here's how it works: find a teen, follow it, and report on its life.

— Lucrative Trillion (@Arr) April 12, 2013

Adult Twitter users began reporting bemusedly on teens' lives:

My teen can't dance to bob marley #followateen

— Eric (@NotreDameEric) May 3, 2013

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen

— Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

My teen has been watching Gossip Girl for the last several hours and finds tumblr to be an acceptable boyfriend substitute #followateen

— Dub Step Dad (@DubStepDad) December 29, 2011

#followateen my teen is so upset that its dad double dips chips

— dendycrew (@dendycrew) April 28, 2013

My teen asks you to retweet if you see a slut on your timeline. #FollowATeen

— J. Mapes (@jmapes) May 1, 2013

#followateen continuted to gain steam, helped greatly by people like Slate economics blogger Matthew Yglesias being confused and/or concerned by it:

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

As someone who has long followed teens (for work, I swear!), I knew trouble was brewing. Teens may seem naive, but they are not stupid. And if anything, they know when people are talking about them. Inevitably, the teens found out about #followateen:

Am I someone's #FollowATeen ?

— Jax (@Jaxy_O) May 3, 2013

And the teens were mad. The counteroffensive was led by the Queen of Teens herself, 17-year-old Rookie Magazine founder Tavi Gevinson. Someone came up with the amusing hashtag #followanadult, spoofing #followateen, and Tavi and Rookie took up the mantle:

my adult is making yet another hilarious joke about google vs bing #followanadult

— Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 3, 2013

my adult is offended by alleged misuse of the word "literally" #followanadult

— Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 3, 2013

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?

— Rookie (@RookieMag) May 3, 2013

My adult relates to #Girls #FollowAnAdult

— Jazmin Martinez(@jazminbobby) May 3, 2013

But then the mean adults co-opted the tag:

my adult only retweets rick warren #followanadult

— Rembert Browne (@rembert) May 3, 2013

my inner teenager doesn't want to work today and would prefer to take the day off and go ride a bike #followanadult

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) May 3, 2013

The teens did not like that. They thought perhaps the adults did not understand that the teens were mocking them:

burn RT @rookiemag: It's cute when olds try to act "cool" by taking part in a thing that is essentially mocking them #followanadult

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) May 3, 2013

Which brings us to now. The age-old war between teens and adults has moved into cyberspace. Pretty soon cadres of teens might start hacking into adults' computers accounts and stealing their trade secrets. All of this will be adapted into a summer blockbuster. Adults v. Teens. Whoever wins: We all lose.

[image via Shutterstock]

Bitcoin, the virtual currency libertarian geeks expect us all to use to pay for pizza in the future, has had a rough few weeks. A series of booms and busts have sent shivers down the spines of Bitcoin enthusiasts. Now, Gawker has learned that a much-hailed partnership between two of the most prominent players in Bitcoin, Mt. Gox and CoinLab, has devolved into a nasty $75 million lawsuit, which appears to be by far the biggest Bitcoin-related lawsuit ever.

The two companies are in the business of Bitcoin exchange, which plays a central role in the Bitcoin economy. For all the hype surrounding Bitcoin's promise as the "future of currency," at present it's not really good for buying much. So all those Bitcoin millionaires must exchange Bitcoins for actual currency if they want to actually get any use out of it. The trades on the exchanges also set the closely-watched price of Bitcoin. (Currently hovering around $100.) Mt. Gox is the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. It handles about $6 million in trades a day, accounting for 76 percent of trades worldwide, according to The Verge. Coinlab is a relative newcomer to the Bitcoin game, but has received notice for attracting $500,000 in venture capital and partnering with Silicon Valley Bank.

This February, Mt. Gox and Coinlab announced they were forming a strategic partnership. Under the contract, Coinlab was to handle all of Mt. Gox's North American services. It seemed like a perfect match: Mt. Gox has years of experience handling hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, and a massive customer base, but they're based in Japan and so have can't serve American customers efficiently. Coinlab is a small but savvy upstart based in Seattle, looking to expand. The partnership would allow Mt. Gox to access the huge U.S. market handled by a capable partner, and Coinlab could latch onto Mt. Gox's reputation and existing customer base.

Mt. Gox founder Mark Karpeles (pictured, above) was enthusiastic in his press release on February 28th:

"This should be a huge win for everyone — faster deposit and withdrawal times, easier-to-reach customer service, and better access for United States financial markets, market makers and liquidity providers"

It didn't work out that way, according to a Federal lawsuit filed today by Coinlab's attorneys in Washington State. Coinlab alleges that Mt. Gox has breached a contract clause which was supposed to give Coinlab exclusive access to the North American market. "Defendants have breached the exclusivity provisions of the Agreement by directly servicing customers in the United States and Canada since the Agreement took effect," the lawsuit states.

Coinlab also says Mt. Gox hasn't allowed them to transition existing U.S. and Canadian customers from Mt. Gox to Coinlab, as agreed in the contract. "Despite repeated requests to do so, Mt. Gox has failed to deliver all passwords, Yubikeys, administrative logins and any other security information required so that CoinLab may assume operation of the Bitcoin exchange services for customers in the United States and Canada."

Coinlab is demanding $75 million in damages, and even that, it says, "likely underestimates the actual damages."

If it's true that Mt. Gox botched the deal, it's a big setback for the company, which has had a rocky past. An ongoing series of hacks, outages and other weirdness has led many in the Bitcoin community to question whether Mt. Gox is stable enough to be a major Bitcoin broker. Whenever Mt. Gox experiences downtime or a problem, the price of Bitcoin drops noticeably: Not a good look for what's supposed to be a radically decentralized currency

The Coinlab-Mt. Gox juggernaut was supposed to bring a new level of service, along with the legitimacy that came with the Silicon Valley Bank's backing, to Mt. Gox and the economy as a whole. The partnership was considered so important to the growth of Bitcoin that some observers credited it with sparking a massive 40% surge in Bitcoin prices past $250 when it was first announced, during which some big Bitcoin hold probably made millions. (At least until the price crashed back down again.) Now the biggest hope of Bitcoin has devolved into the biggest lawsuit.

Bitcoin might someday be utterly worthless, but it's clear there's big money to be made, and lost, right now.

(Mt. Gox's Mark Karpeles did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Update: in an email, Karpeles wrote:

We have not been served nor notified of such a lawsuit (except from your email), so it is difficult for us to comment at this point in time. We will review this within the next hours.

Update II: Coinlab CEO Peter Vessenes gave some details about the lawsuit in a blog post. He wrote: "Today, CoinLab regretfully filed a formal complaint in Federal Court against Mt. Gox."

What tipped us into filing was our complete inability to get Mt. Gox to deliver on the few simple things left that were needed for customers to move over en-masse; we were often left just apologizing to our alpha customers while their own businesses suffered. I'm just not willing to put any of our customers in that position — if we can't do a good job for you, I won't promise that we can.

Here's the lawsuit:

Coinlab v. Mt. Gox

[Image via Getty]

I don't buy the idea that Brown wanting to protect his 'macho' image or whatever is analogous to the systematic power inequality that enables sexual violence against women and also keeps them quiet after it happens. You can say it's a double standard but it's an appropriate one because man-on-woman vs. woman-on-man incidents are a different context and situation and should be held to a different standard.

American tour operator Kenneth Bae was detained in North Korea late last year for unnamed crimes against the regime while he was in the country leading a trip. Today, a court convicted Bae of "hostile acts" and sentenced him to 15 years of "hard labor," according to a report from Korean Central News Agency. But what exactly he did, and whether he'll actually have to serve those 15 years, remains uncertain.

North Korea originally charged Bae, a Washington resident, with attempting to "overthrow the government," which could have ended in the death penalty. Speculation about his crime centered around the possibility that he took unauthorized photos of North Korean orphans, or tried to proselytize in the country. Bae is a devout Christian and may be associated with a Christian group called the Joseph Connection, which organizes trips to closed regimes, according to the Christian Post.

But could this guy actually have been trying something more serious? NKNews quotes Tony Namkung, a Korean-American who acts as a sort of fixer for foreigners in the country, suggesting Bae was involved in a plot to kill North Korean leadership:

“I think there were two charges that had been levied upon this man. One, plotting to overthrow the North Korean regime, and two, plotting to kill the leadership… likely Kim Jong Un, though his name was never mentioned."

The idea of a Christian tour director from Washington attempting kill Kim Jong Un sounds pretty far-fetched, but who knows. Regardless, Bae will probably be used as a bargaining chip by the North Korean leadership and bailed out by the U.S., as happened with with journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and a number of other Americans detained in North Korea.