That's one headline I hoped I'd never have to write, but it's true: the name of the group that exposed the glaring security flaws in AT&T's iPad whatever network is called (or is calling themselves) Goatse Security. Whether that's a little joke being played on Gawker is hard to say, but one can hope. The FBI are now investigating the security problem as well as Goatse Security, which we certainly hope, for their sake, doesn't include Googling "Goatse." There are just some things you can't unsee. All in all, it does make sense: Goatse has been world-famous seemingly since the birth of the internet for exposing holes.
There aren't many people in the media whose pants remain unstained by bricks shit over Facebook privacy, with Gawker's Ryan Tate leading the fecal freemasons by leagues. For anyone who was born before, say, 1980, and doesn't count on page views to earn a living, retaining your privacy on Facebook is fairly easy. There are two steps: 1. make sure your Facebook profile and information is as private as you want it to be, and 2. don't authorize websites you don't trust via Facebook Connect.
The first doesn't seem to be much of a problem—if you don't believe that, the next time you meet a guy or a girl at a party and want to Facebook stalk them, see how much information you get these days. For the most part, you get a profile picture, a city, maybe a few pages the person is a fan of. Hell, half the time, I can't even search a girl's name on Facebook. That seems more nefarious on Zuckerberg's part than anything else. Isn't he a guy, after all?
The second is probably the more important of the two, just by virtue of how little the average Facebook user knows about what third party sites do with their Facebook Connect information. Granted, sites like The Muffington Post don't really know what to do with information period, let alone the personal data of its users, so maybe it's not really a consideration. With a pilot program rolling out in conjunction with Yelp, Microsoft, and Pandora, though, Facebook's Instant Personalization seems poised to do something far, far more sinister than give your information to untrustworthy parties: they're trying to reverse engineer Aol circa 1995. Sharing documents via Facebook, facilitating every aspect of your digital life so that the website essentially becomes the shitty thread holding your online experience together. It's only a matter of time before they start sending out CDROMS in the mail.
The important thing to remember, of course, when reading panic-inspired articles like this one at PC World or anything with a Ryan Tate byline at Gawker is that after you fix your privacy settings, they'd love you to comment on or like their articles using Facebook.
That's our guess, anyway, because normally people with this level of disregard for the truth work for Arianna Huffington, not Nick Denton. From just above the Monday fold:
Glen Runciter, the new Gawker writer who doesn't use his or her real name (see also: Cajun Boy, other also-rans), sure has taken the piss out of those lazy cops there! Except that anyone who clicks through the Wall Street Journal article and has any sort of reading comprehension will note that it was the Port Authority police that let Zazi slip by, not the NYPD (which sort of ruins the Sean Bell joke, unless his bachelor party was on a bridge or in a tunnel), and the article doesn't say that the local authorities were tipped off about there being explosives in Zazi's car—it just quotes Zazi's attorney saying they'd been tipped off about the explosives. Not exactly worthy of making it through the aggregation/summary membrane, especially since the FBI and Port Authority aren't commenting on the story). Speaking of laziness in the workplace—Well! As long as we get those cops-hate-black-people and enjoy-your-morning-commute zingers in there, who cares if the reporting is wrong?
This will probably become more and more common throughout the internets as former Gawker employees dissipate through the work force, but right now The Awl is really the go-to place for parody responses to the The Gay Lady's internal memos. To whit, former weekend editor Foster Kamer—now gad-about-town with The Village Voice's Runnin' Scared blog—tossed out an internal memo about headlines and maturity from Nick Denton, the Guy No One Would Ever Want To Work For Unless, You Know, He's Offering You A Job... Wait, Is Gawker Hiring? OMG, to Gawker staffers.
In a slightly more interpretative response than before, The Awl released their own internal memo about office breastmilk pumping stations and the correlating break time allowance.
...you will notice that I must be provided with a room other than the bathroom that is both private and "free from intrusion" by both co-workers and the public, where I may pump my breast milk.
Anyone with the proper ability to stitch together the correlation between Nick Denton's editorial reviews and a man triumphantly asking for a room in which to pump breast milk should contact us immediately.
With weekend editor Foster Kamer giving no indications he regrets the move to The Village Voice and John Cook already out-the-door in favor of a new job at the Yahoo! content mills, it's probably not altogether surprising to find out that political editor, Alex Pareene, is also jumping ship. Pareene will be joining Salon's War Room blog, where he will engage in hand-to-hand combat with life-sized cutouts of Wolf Blizter and Anderson Cooper. This is, of course, on the heels of Gabriel Snyder's rather storied departure as editor-in-chief of Gawker (NYSE symbol: SNRK) in the wake of Nick "Everyone Calls Me 'Overlord'" Denton's acquisition of the elitist internet diorama CityFile. Whether this has anything to do with CityFile founder Remy Stern's (Snyder's replacement) reign is probably anyone's guess, but check out this fun fact: most people who have worked at Gawker no longer work there! That surely means something.
Ana Marie Cox has a review (registration required) of Emily Gould's memoir And the Heart Says Whatever in the new issue of Book Forum. Let's ignore for the moment that that is quite possibly the worst book title ever. Let's also ignore the obvious conflict of interest in Cox reviewing a book written by someone with whom she admits to having mutual friends, and who also worked for Cox's former boss Nick Denton as part of the Gawker empire. Cox's review, while overwhelmingly negative, is also balanced and thoughtful. She admits that Gould is a good writer and notes of her controversial time as Gawker's editor-in-chief that, "whatever faults she might have, [Gould] is not cruel, and few people can survive such relentlessness."
This might not seem like high praise, but compared to the kind of venomous reactions Gould's confessionals have inspired in the past, Cox might as well be her best friend. The review goes on to highlight what has always bothered me about Emily Gould, namely that she seems like one of a million moderately talented self-absorbed hipsters who seem to think their lives are much more dramatic and fascinating than they actually are.
Cox writes, "Gould is a member of a generation that has grown up confusing irony with tragedy, nonchalance with acceptance, a pose with poise, self-dramatization with self-awareness." She is also apparently of a generation that gets rewarded for such confusion and inability at self-reflection with a six figure book deal.
I am not part of the camp that freaked out when Gould landed the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 2008. I thought her essay was boring and I wasn't sure why she'd been chosen for such a coveted spot, but I also thought that many of the people who commented on the article online were unnecessarily vicious in their criticism of her. Why would you hate Emily Gould? What has she done to inspire that much emotion in anyone? This memoir covers ten of her twenty-eight years and includes such unique earth-shattering life experiences as losing her virginity, cheating on her boyfriends, and getting some tattoos. I haven't read the book myself, but if Gould had killed someone, gotten a sex change, or spent five years in a third world prison camp I'm pretty sure Cox would have mentioned it.
At the end of her review Cox writes, "Gould is special, she is talented, but there is something hugely interesting, as well as disturbing, about the generation she represents and its ability to narrate its experiences without understanding them. Candor is not the problem, but to reveal something—cheating on your boyfriend, your feelings about bums—is not the same thing as a revelation." Chronicling lots of bad things you've done and admitting you're a jerk does not make you not a jerk. It also does not make you interesting.
At the very least, that's what the headline would say if The Fluffington Post wrote it. But, to whit: today, Brian "Oh Fuck They Rehired Lawson" Moylan writes a post about how Four Square is one of the dumbest things on the planet and how its users are annoying jackasses.
And you know what? He's right! Four Square is Dungeons & Dragons-level idiotic, with rewards and competition that have no actual value except the kind of self-satisfaction one gets from being able to say they're a 33rd-level wizard with a douchebag of infinite holding. We wouldn't go as far as to say that the users are jackasses—more like all Four Square users are just bored. Or perhaps boring. Hard to decide.
However, Moylan's Gawker co-worker, video editor and Gawker.TV version of Nick Denton, uses Four Square. All the time. It shows up in Facebook feeds, so it must be true:
For sure, worse things have been said about Richard Blakeley, mostly by Get Off My Internets, but still, slagging off your own coworker by association when he sits two seats away from you at work?
A woman in New Albany (what was wrong with the old Albany? Oh... right) who had added a long-lost acquaintance (20 years long-lost) on Facebook, posted a status update about not being home that evening, and was promptly robbed, says she's learned her lesson:
“I’ll never put that I’m not going to be home again online,” she said. “The guy who added me I hadn’t seen in 20 years. He’s not someone I would say that’s my friend.
Adrian Chen at Gawker points to people who pointed a tentative finger at Four Square, the website for people who can't yet commit to a full-on Second Life, but it all boils down to the same thing: you can't live your life like it's the 1950s, lady. Anyway, we don't even care about who's responsible for what or which website or iPhone app made this deft little automatic withdrawal possible. I want to know what this fucking Four Square kid is doing:
Is that a dodgeball? Come on, guy, you almost caught it! But there's a window frame behind him and sort of under him, so maybe he's on a holodeck? You have all of the options in the world at your fingertips, and you choose to play dodgeball? Badly? Good luck getting laid when the ladies find out you're the mayor of Midtown Comics!
Or Too Ugly; Don't Look. Either way, we're trying to retrofit the internet to our liking.
In response to Gawker's article about an alleged one-night stand with Peaches Geldof and the Church Of Scientology. Yes, there are pictures, but tu;dl.
Well, fifth, if you don't count Staten Island (who does?), but you get the point. The New York Times is reporting that everyone's favorite way to deplete a trust fund will be expanding their New York land holdings by forty percent, spreading the zombie virus of entitlement to Downtown Brooklyn (too late!) and Governers Island. NYU—the Robert Moses of academia—has been a bit of a hassle to everyone who lives, works, or otherwise wants to enjoy life in Greenwich Village over the last thirty years.
“We’re deeply concerned,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “N.Y.U. seems to have worked on their P.R. machine quite a bit, but the reality of what they’re doing — which is taking over more and more of the neighborhood — doesn’t seem like it’s changed very much. They’ve given everybody the opportunity to say what they think and then they’ve largely ignored that feedback.”
To be fair, it's really hard to listen to feedback with wads of hundred-dollar bills jammed in your ears. Back when there were rumors of an elaborate Williamsburg satellite campus, people seemed largely okay with the idea. But Downtown Brooklyn is altogether too close to the parts of the borough where assholes don't live, and with the Jehovah's Witnesses selling off their considerable holdings there, the potential for per-square-foot NYU infiltration is alarmingly high. Alex Pareene over at Gawker doesn't think much of NYU students, either:
"Community groups" of people dumb enough to still live within a stone's throw of the entitled pajama monsters who wander the streets in packs of a dozen or more nine months out of the year are not happy with these plans to buy everything and build stuff.
Back to Staten Island, though: why don't we just give them the entire borough in exchange for moving out of every other NYU stronghold? The city can use it as an excuse to finally build a subway line that goes all the way the hell and gone across the harbor so students can continue vomiting on the streets of Manhattan during the weekends.