"Despicable, slimy, scummy websites" take revenge on Bill O'Reilly

After a 4chan message board user broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account and posted screenshots of her emails online, conservative Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly went on the air and yelled about it. "I'm not going to mention the Web site that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites," said O'Reilly on his show. "Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him? " 4chan management responded by changing the banner atop its random image posting board so that it read: "DESPICABLE, SLIMY, SCUMMY." One of the site's members took a more aggressive course of action, and hacked into O'Reilly's subscription-only site, BillOReilly.com, and posted the names, billing addresses, email addresses and passwords of 205 paying subscribers to Wikileaks and 4chan. In a statement, Wikileaks expressed no sympathy for O'Reilly — calling his site's security "nonexistent" — but had plenty for O'Reilly's attackers: "The hack was a response to the pundit's recent scurrilous attacks over the Sarah Palin's e-mail story — including on Wikileaks and other members of the press."

How visiting 4chan busted the alleged Palin hacker

Federal agents searched the apartment of a University of Tennessee student on Sunday they believe might be the hacker script kiddy who broke into Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's Yahoo account and then posted its password to the subversive discussion board site 4chan.org. The feds pinpointed the accused's IP address after contacting the proxy service he used in an attempt to disguise his identity. Gabriel Ramuglia, who runs the proxy service, told Portfolio that only one of his users had activity which matched what the feds were looking for: someone who "visited Yahoo Mail, 4chan.org, and the Web addresses that were visible in the posted screenshots." More »

How a b-tard hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo account

A member of the 4chan online community going by the handle "rubico" has claimed responsibility for hacking into Alaska governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. Reports allege Rubico is a college student with a father in the Tennessee state legislature. In his post, Rubico explains that all he had to do was find Palin's birthdate on Wikipedia, her ZIP code using the US Postal Service Web site, and find the answer to a security question — where did Palin meet her husband? — using Google search. 4chan links are not permanent, so we've copied Rubico's account, below. More »

Did Sarah Palin destroy Yahoo Mail evidence?

Alaska governor Sarah Palin may be in even hotter water over a Yahoo Mail account she used to conduct state business. One can hardly blame her for using Yahoo Mail, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, to handle official state business. Everyone loves to complain about the email provided by one's employer, and evade it when can. But for a state official, now a vice-presidential candidate, the practice was always questionable. Yahoo Mail is not archived as scrupulously as official state email accounts, which are covered by laws requiring the retention of government records. And her advisors specifically discussed using Yahoo Mail to evade archiving requirements. Here's where things just got worse: Palin, according to a discussion on /b/, an Internet messaging board frequented by online troublemakers, used a second account, gov.palin@yahoo.com, whose password users of the board say they hacked. Emails, allegedly Palin's, are now circulating on the Net. The whole thing could be a prank. But both accounts are now gone — which raises a much more serious issue. More »

Uh oh, the b-tards got their hands on Google's Chrome comic

The seditious perverts on bizzaro community board 4chan got their grubby hands on Google's Chrome comic and now they're doing to it what they already did to cute cat pictures when they came up with LOLcats. We'd link to 4chan but their links don't stay static and a commenter tells us the images originated from Yayhooray anyway. Sure, more topical and certainly more earnest parodies of Google's Chrome Comic are already out there, but for my money they can't beat the sociologically-revealing collection of awkward non sequiturs we've gathered below. More »

The Olds' guide to 4chan, the world's most obscene trendspotting site

Both Time and the Wall Street Journal have run articles in the past 24 hours about 4chan, the dirty little secret site that spawns many a Web fad — LOLcats and rickrolling among them. But you don't want to start surfing 4chan yourself. It's full of sophomoric poor-taste-on-purpose posts like the above image. Moreover, posts on 4chan rarely live more than an hour. They're automatically pulled once their comment threads go idle, rather than archived. Let the kids filter it for you. Anything really good on 4chan will turn up on your screen from somewhere else. More »

Why Kids On The Internet Are Scientology's Most Powerful Enemy

Tom Cruise has personally, PERSONALLY, been pwned. This weekend, an anonymous Internet group (named Anonymous — these are not masters of subtlety) started a war with the Church of Scientology by hammering the group's web site; Scientology.org is down after a brief traffic spike. This isn't the only group of Internet users unafraid of the intimidating cult; a whole range of sites has turned the Church into a mockery by doing what mainstream celebrity-coverage outlets wouldn't dare. Here's a guide to the war (and a creepy manifesto made by The Internet!). More »

What The Hell Are 4chan, ED, Something Awful, And "b"?

"Please run a post explaining 4chan, /b/, the Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.," asks reader Gabe Roth. "I just have no idea what that stuff is about, and it makes me feel old." While Gawker commenters know every obscure web site or at least can fake it, regular readers may want an explanation of some of the Internet's most strangely influential sites, an explanation shorter than Wikipedia's 2200-word article about 4chan. So I'll define Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, /b/, Something Awful, and YTMND. More »