For nearly as long as the antifeminist culture war known as Gamergate has raged across the internet, a microcosm of the battle has taken place on Wikipedia. Should Gamergate defined as a push for ethics in gaming journalism, or a paranoid campaign against women in gaming? This week, Wikipedia's highest court made a major decision in favor of the former.
A bot created by a group of artists spent the last few months selecting items at random from a Silk Road-style darknet marketplace, buying them with Bitcoin, and having them shipped to a gallery in Switzerland. After the it bought some ecstasy pills and a counterfeit passport, we asked: How will authorities deal with the complex legal and moral issue of a piece of artificial intelligence breaking the law? It turns out, the answer was simple: just arrest the computer.
Like several other adult sites, Pornhub employs a young woman who acts as the friendly public face of the company. She goes by Pornhub Katie, and she posts hardcore JPEGs and spunky commentary to the company's Twitter account, gives secret santa gifts to random internet users, and occasionally gets in trouble for telling an off-color joke. Unsurprisingly, she's very popular on Reddit. Or was—until she invaded the site's no-masturbation subreddit.
Eleven years ago, it was difficult to inadvertently look at child pornography, a woman's corpse, or a detailed cartoon of Dragon Ball Z characters sucking each other off. Today all of those things are within reach thanks to 4chan, the anarchic id of the internet—and its creator and sole proprietor, Chris "Moot" Poole. Now he's calling it quits.
Well, would you?
Refer to the question above: do you have any interest in watching a man sit and smile for several hours? If so, follow me down here.
Alec Monopoly, pseudonymous American graffiti pop artist, sells dumb art to foolish people for large sums. Good for him—he's got a great scam going. But he's also operating one of the most obnoxious Instagram accounts on this side of Dan Bilzerian, turning him into a rising app celebrity and member of the shithead vanguard.
FuzzBeed, a website that automatically generates nonsense content in the style of a certain well-funded social news and entertainment company, popped up on Hacker News just yesterday, and is already filled with such stilted and existentially haunting shareables as "The 37 Most Perfect Toothpastes That Will Make You Laugh Every Time."
Since his arrest in 2013, Ross Ulbricht has remained the chief suspect behind the Silk Road, a sweeping and sophisticated online drug market. But today in court, his defense dropped a shocker: they claimed the market's actual kingpin was Mark Karpeles, who is infamous for running the world's biggest bitcoin operation into the ground before he turned 29.
Once a week for several months, a bot created by a group of artist-hackers purchased one item selected at random from Agora, a Silk Road-style darknet marketplace, and had it delivered to an art gallery in Switzerland. In November, the bot bought a packet of ecstasy pills that were hidden inside a DVD box, and last month, it picked a forged Hungarian passport. Who committed a crime?
You got some time? You feeling patient and maybe a little crazy? You wanna watch every single episode of Friends (season one) played in tandem? Yeah, come on, you know you do.
If the likes of Tolstoy and Beethoven are to be believed, art is important in part because it speaks to some essential humanity shared by creator and beholder. On Tumblr, artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is figuring out what happens when the beholder is less "human" than "reasonably smart piece of software."
