The video clip above, from YouTube, is grainy, but TechCrunch's Mike Arrington assures readers it's in the final movie. I hadn't seen the film myself, unaware it touched on social networking, but Arrington writes that MySpace takes up a solid five minutes of the movie.

The treatment is brutal. Early in the clip, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson asks Sandler if he actually uses the product. The star's reply: "No, no no. I fuck girls, Tom. I don't have time for that." When he goes on stage, the comic greets the MySpace crowd as "nerds" and then trashes their users: "They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life." .

Sure, MySpace's competitors are insulted, too. But companies like Silicon Valley-based Facebook are fighting hard to avoid Hollywood; Facebook trashed Ben Mezrich's book about the company, The Accidental Billionaires, and by extension the Aaron Sorkin movie based on that book, calling it inaccurate.

But MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, close to Hollywood, and seems to have a better handle on the big picture: Being on the silver screen, in any context, means you're culturally relevant. Why not embrace the opportunity to make your virtual community a lot more real? (Via TechCrunch.)

Johnson, at least, has received a more clear explanation for why his account was summarily deleted with no warning: Heather Champ, Yahoo's VP of customer service, told him he had been "spamming" the White House photostream. (Johnson has said he posted an initial batch of approximately 10 comments, then another 10 or so when those were deleted. Yahoo has declined to address Johnson's case directly with us.)

Champ also told Johnson the image he attached to his second batch of messages was too graphic. The picture, which you can see here, was from the Abu Ghraib prison and was linked over by Johnson from another Flickr account. Johnson, who has attended his share of political protests, was trying to draw attention to Barack Obama's support for a controversial bill that would have suppressed government torture photos.

Champ broke out both the carrot and the stick. She offered Johnson a $25 gift card he could use for a new Flickr Pro account. "She tried to shower me with platitudes like "Oh I know you are passionate about this issue,'" Johnson told us.

But she also told him there was no way to retrieve his old photos; that seems unlikely, as it implies Yahoo has no backups of Flickr's content. Champ also blocked messages from Johnson's new Flickr account on the internal FlickrMail system. Following a phone conversation with Johnson, she had posted a picture indicating her day wasn't going well, and Johnson had commented underneath the picture, "this is like watching a slow train wreck." She then blocked him.

So Johnson turned to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield (above), seeking help in reaching Champ. Butterfield left Yahoo last year, but he said he could tell what was going on from a distance: Johnson must be in the wrong. Their correspondence:

Yahoo's cuddly new head of PR, Eric Brown, might want to start exercising some message discipline over this situation. Does the company regret its actions (gift card) or stand by them? Does it really have no backups of old pictures? What are the guidelines for commenting on the popular White House photostream? People will inevitably criticize Yahoo's answers to those questions, but at least they'll have them.

(Picture by Dan Farber)

The cable network's Silicon Valley bureau chief has been something of a parrot for Apple's public relations flacks, but Bartz found him too antagonistic, at least after Goldman asked a lengthy, tortured question that implied Yahoo has contended itself with its rival's leftovers. See the top clip at left.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Missing were the flashes of humor that had the audience at the D tech conference eating out of Bartz's hand after she cursed Swisher. (All Things Digital has finally posted video of the f-bomb; it's included in the lower clip.)

Goldman didn't seem to take the anger personally; he later laughed that "to call [Bartz] the straight-talking CEO of Yahoo would be... an understatement." Hopefully, if only for their sake, Bartz's underlings are able to take her bluntness in the same good humor.

In case you were wondering, "ABR" is the love that dare not speak its name, because its mouth is too full of nipple.

L.A. Rag Mag breathlessly reported how notorious Hollywood gay Alexis Arquette helped the blog purchase a copy of a photo showing Brando performing fellatio. His partner's identity is unclear, but people believe that the penis in question belonged to Wally Cox, Brando's longtime friend who shared a New York apartment with the actor.

An amazing discovery. Or should we say rediscovery? Or re-re-rediscovery?

Findadeath.com first published Brando's cock shot in 2004. That photo has resurfaced repeatedly since then, in part because of its publication in the 2005 book Brando Unzipped, which published a small version of the photo and reported that it came up in Brando's 1959 divorce proceedings with Anna Kashfi, his first wife. (According to the book, Brando acknowledged the photo's authenticity but described it as a "joke at a party.")

Is it real? Brando Unzipped maintains that it is.

This, by the way, is a photo from the book of the aptly named Mr. Cox.

Another piece of evidence: A snapshot allegedly taken of a framed print of the photo in the living room of French artists Pierre et Gilles.

And then there's L.A. Rag Mag's excitement over the photo. Sure, they could have made the whole story up and just republished a copy of the photo from the Internet. But the blog's excitement over their supposed find seems hard to feign. It's how rumors circulate these days: From the real world to books to the Internet, and back again, endlessly. Brando's cocksucker photo will never get old.

Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart is suing Craigslist. He says it's "the single largest source of prostitution in the nation," and he's scheduled a press conference to discuss the move.

Why sue Craigslist? The site rolls over when the police come calling, and the data it gives up about its users regularly results in large-scale arrests for prostitution. In 2007, Dart's department arrested 254 people in a four-month-long bust. A similar bust in New York's Westchester County yielded 66 arrests. Police in Irvine, Calif. and Everett, Wa.directly credited Craigslist ads with helping them make arrests.

Why shut down such a rich vein? It's telling that Dart is making a big, public stink about prostitution on Craigslist. If his goal were stopping prostitution, he'd want to keep Craigslist open, providing his department with a steady source of leads. It's easier than staking out street corners.

No, Dart needs to be seen as stopping prostitution. And that requires calling out Craigslist. He'd better hope he doesn't succeed, because pushing the whores and johns to darker corners of the Internet will mean he and his men will have to work a lot harder to keep their arrest numbers up.

(Photo via KOMO)

The clip (do we even need to mention that it's NSFW?) from ClubJenna, apparently meant to broadcast on the Shorteez channel but instead spliced into KVOA's feed of the football game, is but one of the many porn channels from which Comcast makes a healthy profit. Across the industry, porn accounts for more than a quarter of pay-per-view revenues. Cue a round of handwringing among the media. Comcast customers have better purposes for their hands.

At an all-hands meeting today, Bartz told the staff that she'd "dropkick to fucking Mars" anyone whose company gossip ended up on the blogs. And, of course, a Yahoo promptly told Valleywag, which is so favored a recipient of tips from inside Yahoo that it had a cameo in a company-produced spoof video.

Was she kidding? Perhaps. But it's a foolish threat to make in jest if she's not prepared to apply boot to rear. And if Bartz is, she's going to wear her foot out fast.

(Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

We have scant details, but a tipster sent in this picture of the Googlers' flight crew at a party in Auckland, New Zealand. (Another planespotter recently sent us a sighting of the Google Jet down under (right) in late December, so the location seems to check out.) The woman on the left, we're told, is named Colleen, and chose to expose herself in front of the camera. A bit nippy, though, considering the nearby ice sculptures.

It's hardly a surprise Google's dynamic duo, known for attending the sex-infused Burning Man festival in Nevada, picked a racy bunch to steer the plane. Page was famously photographed canoodling aloft with his future wife, Lucy Southworth. And Brin demanded that his private bedroom in the sky be fitted with a king-size bed. Colleen seems like the type who wouldn't blink at mile-high-club antics.

Does anyone recognize the rest of Larry and Sergey's aeronautical servants? Please let us know.

Instead, he's starting a new site, Kaplan index, which promises to help people "get recognized for your skills in 2009," which, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington notes, sounds like a boring jobs site.

Kaplan strongly considered relaunching FuckedCompany, even approaching former Valleywag editor Nick Douglas to run the site. "i really wanted it too," Douglas told me by IM. "A new shot at calling out the bad guys, this time with more grace and fewer civilian casualties. [I] wanted to prove I've learned a lot since my rocky tenure at Valleywag."

Too bad for Douglas, and a pity for fans, who must make do with pale imitiations. But understandable for Kaplan, who lived in New York when his site viciously savaged the Valley's failing startups after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. He now lives in San Francisco and has founded a startup of his own, AdBrite, an online-advertising firm whose troubles would make good fodder for a revived FuckedCompany. He's engaged, too, to a do-gooding lawyer. A happy insider makes for a poor chronicler of disaster. But it's disappointing to see a one-time prince of derisive darkness turn to the light.

(Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Kaplan, best known for founding FuckedCompany, the scathing tabloid tipsheet of the first dotcom bubble's bursting, proposed to his longtime girlfriend Ilona Turner. I'm guessing, from his Twitters, that he did the deed in Paris — how romantic! (She said yes.) He was in Paris to attend a money-wasting tech conference, though, which rather kills the romance of it.

Turner is not a techie; instead, she's a staff attorney at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. (Full disclosure: I met Turner at a fundraiser she, Kaplan, and I hosted to fight the passage of Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban.)

Of course, for those who know Kaplan from his New York days, it's not surprising that he's not adhering to the Valley's strict social mores. Back when he ran FuckedCompany, he prided himself on his outsider status. He's more of an insider these days, as the founder of AdBrite, a turmoil-racked online-advertising startup. But in a world where people only date within a small circle — preferably people who can do them a favor — it's refreshing, shocking almost, to see that love can prosper even when it's not on the same payroll.

(Photo via Mobog)

Free-speech zealots among Wikipedia's volunteer editors have insisted that the original cover of Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by German heavy metal band the Scorpions — shown here with a teddy-bear bowdlerization — must run alongside the site's page for the album. Their stubbornness has landed the Wikipedia page on a list of porn sites maintained by Internet Watch, a British group, whose censorship recommendations many British ISPs follow.

The ban seems like overkill, since it covers the album page, not just the image in question. But the fact that Wikipedia has let matters get this far speaks to the site's screwed-up culture. Erik Möller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, has defended child pornography in the past. His extremist stance is mirrored by an outspoken minority within Wikipedia's ranks of editors.

The Wikipedian child-porn fetish is disturbing. But it's a sign of a much deeper problem. Wikipedia editors love to make up bureaucratic rules. It's part of what makes the site so intimidating to new users, and why bias and misreporting so often go uncorrected on the site. Knowledgeable people are scared away by the need to engage in time-wasting arguments with bored teenagers and obsessive Internet users for whom enforcing these rules is a source of cheap entertainment. Why Internet providers are banning Wikipedia pages instead of Wikipedia editors is beyond me.

Dan Lyons is a cruelly funny man. He's been a journalist and fiction writer for decades, but Lyons is best known for the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog he launched in 2006. Writing from home at night, Dan vented his frustrations as a Forbes writer by inventing a fictional Steve Jobs character. Fake Steve said everything about the tech industry's titans that Dan wasn't allowed to print in Forbes. (Check out "I love to fuck with car salesmen" and "Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.")

Today, it seems Dan has taken down a post, for the first time any of us can remember. From most reporters, I'd consider this typical pointy-haired management, what can ya do, etc. But seeing Dan Lyons self-censor his own honest work makes me wonder if I'll be able to stay true to my own after I leave Valleywag's free-fire zone next month.

What's changed for Lyons? Simple: This past summer, Newsweek hired him away from Forbes. After a long series of talks with both old and new editors, Lyons shut down Fake Steve Jobs and started a new blog, Real Dan Lyons.

Yesterday he blogged a potty-mouthed, Fake-Steve-style rant about Yahoo's PR people yanking his chain in his official Newsweek reporter role. Today that post is gone. Dan's not answering his cellphone or email today, so I have to presume it was his Newsweek editor who made him take it down. Certainly, I've never seen Lyons wake up in the morning and rush to undo his previous night's typing.

Here's the timeline:

• A month ago, Yahoo's PR reps put Dan on the phone, as a Newsweek reporter, with Roy Bostock, Yahoo's chairman.
• Bostock swore up and down, over and over again, that Jerry Yang was not being challenged as CEO of the flailing, sprawling company he co-founded more than ten years ago. A side note: A lawyer Yahoo PR put in touch with Lyons also swore that a lucrative deal to have Google sell ads for Yahoo was going to make it past antitrust regulators, no problem.
• Yesterday: Whoops. The Google deal never happened, and Yang has been forced out of the CEO seat.
• On Monday, Lyons posted to his own blog, blasting Yahoo's PR people as "lying sacks of shit."
• Today, that post is replaced with a 404 error. I dialed Dan's cellphone and got a robotic message saying this customer is not accepting calls.
• We can't think of a single Fake Steve Jobs post that Dan redacted while at Forbes. Can you?

I’d never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they’re really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo’s attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true “inside story” of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they’re fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah. Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.

And in case Newsweek's handwringingly sanctimonious editors make Lyons pull the blog post in the morning, here's a screenshot:

For good measure, Lyons also slapped Kara Swisher, the thoroughly self-involved AllThingsD editor who broke the story about Yang's departure.

Xgoes.mobi is definitely iPhone-only – it won't work on your computer's browser if you try it. What do you get when you go there and plunk down a membership fee? Access to a slew of cam feeds of both the single and couple variety, although mostly just single, sad girls on ugly bedspreads. The quality ain't great, and this is on WiFi. And if it's not worth it on WiFi, it's definitely not worth it on 3G. But hey, this is the only game in town for mobile cam feeds, so if you're the type of person who really gets your rocks off talking to a stripper on the internet in the back of a cab, your ship has come in. [Xgoes.mobi (iPhone only, NSFW) via Fleshbot (NSFW)]

Silicon Valley is just a facade, constructed to just allow us to work together. But underneath, as an individual you have the caveman nature.

Update: Julia Allison has posted another photo of herself with Zuckerberg. Has no one ever told her that only the bride wears white?

In August 2007, Facebook lost U.K. advertisers including First Direct Bank, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the U.K.'s Automobile Association, Halifax Bank, and Prudential after displaying their company logos on pages like this one, the group home for Aryan Satan Worshipers. Notice the ad for Vodafone's France Telecom's Orange on the bottom left. Facebook eventually decided to U.K. advertisers to opt out of promoting their products next to neo-Nazi content.

Why does anyone sign on to Facebook? For hot "cam to cam" action, of course. This ad came out just as Facebook started to take real heat over its Beacon project. Mm. Something about the photo reminds me of my early childhood. And also makes me hungry.

This ad is missing a company logo. At first we thought it might be American Apparel ad but the models aren't strung out enough. Our second guess based on the first photo: Preparation-H.

This ad came out just before Christmas. Facebook didn't bother to "Santa-tize" it, so we did the honors.

Either Facebook ad-targeting technology isn't quite up to snuff yet, or the guys in Facebook's ad-targeting department totally missed the last season of Will & Grace.