Google: Mega scorcher in Chatsworth!

Google's built-in weather doohickey reports that Chatsworth is enjoying a spot of weather, with temperatures hovering at 178 degrees Fahrenheit, winds southwest at 114-mph hour (that's a category 3 hurricane), and humidity at a muggy 110%. 

Five miles south in Canoga Park, it's like a cold day on the moon in comparison, 73 degrees cooler, 97% less humid and barely a breeze to speak of. 

Maybe Google's Chatsworth weather scientists have gone mad, because wunderground.com says Chatsworth's only 108F. Which might come as a disappointment to all the tourists out there who were hoping to sweat through a couple of T-shirts on their way to a nuclear cyclone insta-tan.

UPDATE: Either Google fixed it or Chatsworth just got hit by a nor'easter...conditions are back to a healthy swelter.

I've been fiddling around with this new life organizer website called PageOnce, which is meant to be a one-stop shop for everything transactional you do online. It maintains account information for e-mail sites, social networking, phone bills, banking, credit cards, travel and commercial stuff (e.g. Amazon.com and Netflix). 

Theoretically, the idea of having all of your life info in one place should be appealing.
But there's something about PageOnce that doesn't quite sit right. For one thing, it works fairly well with a few dozen mainstream sites, but there's an entire universe of others that are not available.  To name a few: Expedia, Travelocity,  Buy.com, Half.com, Overstock.com, Google reader, Friendfeed, Pownce, and on and on. 

What you find out after using PageOnce for a while, though, is that it's pretty good for keeping you up to date on things such as account balances and your cellphone minute quotas. However, it's not much good when it comes to performing tasks and transactions.

If you want to read an e-mail you just received, you still have to go back to your webmail site; if you want to do a bank transfer, you have to go to the bank site, to buy a book, back to Amazon. Ultimately then, you're actually going to more web pages than you used to, not fewer. It's sort of a frustrating result after you've spent 45 minutes inputting every password you could think of.

Is the Internet going the way of the dodo?  It is if you ask iPower, the Belgian filmmaker-activist group whose "Athene" YouTube show I wrote about a few weeks ago.  In a video that became the number one story on Digg yesterday and is today one of YouTube's most viewed, the group claimed it had an inside source at a major telecommunications company who told them that the telco industry was colluding on a plan to make the Internet subscription-based, kind of like cable TV. You'd pay a standard fee for your 'basic' sites--the high profile, mainstream sites that everyone uses, and would have to pay extra to access the little guys.

According to iPower's apocalyptic vision, the new paradigm would obliterate net neutrality--and the Internet as we know it, because once you put a tiered system in place, most users would choose not to pay extra for the non-mainstream stuff, and those sites would be extincted.

Warning: this video is long.  But you can get the basic idea in the first couple of minutes.  Incidentally, Tania's cleavage is a central part of iPower's publicity strategy.

Digg commenters cried foul on iPower's scandalous and unsourced claims. If the telecommunications companies were making back room plans to gut the Internet, people wrote, that would certainly be an antitrust violation. Second, there's an entire sector of companies whose raison d'etre is to innovate online--if they got their access revoked, a big fat slice of the economy would go poof. Take a site like Google, which is built to help users navigate a limitless Web. But if the Web was just a few hundred (or a few thousand) sites--a search engine as powerful as Google would be pointless.

So iPower's claim doesn't really add up. I spoke to Reese Leysen, one of iPower's members, and he swore that a high-level contact at one of the companies told him it was so. I'm tempted to believe Leysen since he's been a straight shooter before, but as is often the case with secrets, whatever secondhand truth he was handed probably got further muddled in translation. 

It seems plausible that the businesses that control the Internet might be having conversations about a next generation profit model--which might include ways they can decide which sites get to use their networks. It's an old prediction that without net neutrality laws, the big, high-traffic Web businesses would get the royal treatment--a sort of HOV lane on the Internet highway--and everyone else would fight for the scraps of bandwidth left over. But in a way, that's sort of what iPower is predicting, even if their specifics are off. The details of a nonneutral Internet don't matter as much as the big picture: once you make the net a pay-for-play system, it stops being a medium and starts being a market.

The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922.  When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading.  "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a  headline from 1908.  (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)

Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access.  The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free.  You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site.  If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora. 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

PageOnce: All your info are belong to us

I've been fiddling around with this new life organizer website called PageOnce, which is meant to be a one-stop shop for everything transactional you do online. It maintains account information for e-mail sites, social networking, phone bills, banking, credit cards, travel and commercial stuff (e.g. Amazon.com and Netflix). 

Theoretically, the idea of having all of your life info in one place should be appealing.
But there's something about PageOnce that doesn't quite sit right. For one thing, it works fairly well with a few dozen mainstream sites, but there's an entire universe of others that are not available.  To name a few: Expedia, Travelocity,  Buy.com, Half.com, Overstock.com, Google reader, Friendfeed, Pownce, and on and on. 

What you find out after using PageOnce for a while, though, is that it's pretty good for keeping you up to date on things such as account balances and your cellphone minute quotas. However, it's not much good when it comes to performing tasks and transactions.

If you want to read an e-mail you just received, you still have to go back to your webmail site; if you want to do a bank transfer, you have to go to the bank site, to buy a book, back to Amazon. Ultimately then, you're actually going to more web pages than you used to, not fewer. It's sort of a frustrating result after you've spent 45 minutes inputting every password you could think of.

Is the Internet going the way of the dodo?  It is if you ask iPower, the Belgian filmmaker-activist group whose "Athene" YouTube show I wrote about a few weeks ago.  In a video that became the number one story on Digg yesterday and is today one of YouTube's most viewed, the group claimed it had an inside source at a major telecommunications company who told them that the telco industry was colluding on a plan to make the Internet subscription-based, kind of like cable TV. You'd pay a standard fee for your 'basic' sites--the high profile, mainstream sites that everyone uses, and would have to pay extra to access the little guys.

According to iPower's apocalyptic vision, the new paradigm would obliterate net neutrality--and the Internet as we know it, because once you put a tiered system in place, most users would choose not to pay extra for the non-mainstream stuff, and those sites would be extincted.

Warning: this video is long.  But you can get the basic idea in the first couple of minutes.  Incidentally, Tania's cleavage is a central part of iPower's publicity strategy.

Digg commenters cried foul on iPower's scandalous and unsourced claims. If the telecommunications companies were making back room plans to gut the Internet, people wrote, that would certainly be an antitrust violation. Second, there's an entire sector of companies whose raison d'etre is to innovate online--if they got their access revoked, a big fat slice of the economy would go poof. Take a site like Google, which is built to help users navigate a limitless Web. But if the Web was just a few hundred (or a few thousand) sites--a search engine as powerful as Google would be pointless.

So iPower's claim doesn't really add up. I spoke to Reese Leysen, one of iPower's members, and he swore that a high-level contact at one of the companies told him it was so. I'm tempted to believe Leysen since he's been a straight shooter before, but as is often the case with secrets, whatever secondhand truth he was handed probably got further muddled in translation. 

It seems plausible that the businesses that control the Internet might be having conversations about a next generation profit model--which might include ways they can decide which sites get to use their networks. It's an old prediction that without net neutrality laws, the big, high-traffic Web businesses would get the royal treatment--a sort of HOV lane on the Internet highway--and everyone else would fight for the scraps of bandwidth left over. But in a way, that's sort of what iPower is predicting, even if their specifics are off. The details of a nonneutral Internet don't matter as much as the big picture: once you make the net a pay-for-play system, it stops being a medium and starts being a market.

The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922.  When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading.  "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a  headline from 1908.  (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)

Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access.  The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free.  You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site.  If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora. 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

iPower predicts the death of the Internet

Is the Internet going the way of the dodo?  It is if you ask iPower, the Belgian filmmaker-activist group whose "Athene" YouTube show I wrote about a few weeks ago.  In a video that became the number one story on Digg yesterday and is today one of YouTube's most viewed, the group claimed it had an inside source at a major telecommunications company who told them that the telco industry was colluding on a plan to make the Internet subscription-based, kind of like cable TV. You'd pay a standard fee for your 'basic' sites--the high profile, mainstream sites that everyone uses, and would have to pay extra to access the little guys.

According to iPower's apocalyptic vision, the new paradigm would obliterate net neutrality--and the Internet as we know it, because once you put a tiered system in place, most users would choose not to pay extra for the non-mainstream stuff, and those sites would be extincted.

Warning: this video is long.  But you can get the basic idea in the first couple of minutes.  Incidentally, Tania's cleavage is a central part of iPower's publicity strategy.

Digg commenters cried foul on iPower's scandalous and unsourced claims. If the telecommunications companies were making back room plans to gut the Internet, people wrote, that would certainly be an antitrust violation. Second, there's an entire sector of companies whose raison d'etre is to innovate online--if they got their access revoked, a big fat slice of the economy would go poof. Take a site like Google, which is built to help users navigate a limitless Web. But if the Web was just a few hundred (or a few thousand) sites--a search engine as powerful as Google would be pointless.

So iPower's claim doesn't really add up. I spoke to Reese Leysen, one of iPower's members, and he swore that a high-level contact at one of the companies told him it was so. I'm tempted to believe Leysen since he's been a straight shooter before, but as is often the case with secrets, whatever secondhand truth he was handed probably got further muddled in translation. 

It seems plausible that the businesses that control the Internet might be having conversations about a next generation profit model--which might include ways they can decide which sites get to use their networks. It's an old prediction that without net neutrality laws, the big, high-traffic Web businesses would get the royal treatment--a sort of HOV lane on the Internet highway--and everyone else would fight for the scraps of bandwidth left over. But in a way, that's sort of what iPower is predicting, even if their specifics are off. The details of a nonneutral Internet don't matter as much as the big picture: once you make the net a pay-for-play system, it stops being a medium and starts being a market.

The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922.  When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading.  "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a  headline from 1908.  (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)

Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access.  The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free.  You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site.  If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora. 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

NYT's TimesMachine cool, but you gotta pay

The New York Times website launched the TimesMachine feature today, a nifty tool that lets you flip back through virtual reprints of its first 70 years of issues, from 1851 to 1922.  When you hover your mouse over an old article, the text of it pops up for easy reading.  "Bullet Tears Brain, Man Lives for Hours," blares a  headline from 1908.  (Therein is recounted the tale of a man who shot himself in the head and didn't immediately die. "I thought I'd be dead," read the man's money quote, which he gave shortly before dying.)

Sadly, the new feature isn't free -- you've got to be a print subscriber to have access.  The NYT seems to be continuing its inconsistent policy of making some features for-pay, and others free.  You would think that the Internet demographic most likely to make use of the TimesMachine feature would be the group least likely to subscribe to the print version -- and that the NYT may therefore be missing an opportunity to use the flashy tool to lure readers to its site.  If I'm wrong, though, and making the service exclusive to print subscribers somehow boosts circulation -- I'll be happy to eat my fedora. 

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Arrington vs. Cashmore: Tech titans clash in Hollywood

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Last night at the Vanguard night club in Hollywood, there was yet another sign that the Silicon Valley tech scene is taking on Tinsel Town attributes (read: ego, expensive 2,000-person parties DJ'd by Perry Farrell, internecine territory squabbles and--crucially--more and more celebs caught on video).

Blog czar Michael Arrington (above) of the popular technology blog TechCrunch was accused by detractors of ejecting unwanted company from his exclusive Hollywood Boulevard shindig (co-thrown by PopSugar). The outcasts were, specifically, Mashable.com's Pete Cashmore, a young pretender to the tech blogging throne, and the crew from Valleywag, the tech scene's online tabloid.

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

.ME, .ME, .ME: Montenegro cedes control of its narcissistic domain

Montenegro, the Connecticut-sized state on the Adriatic and the world's second-newest country (after Kosovo, which also split off from Serbia), has done something decidedly unselfish: Instead of hoarding .me, its national domain space, for itself, it's letting anyone who wants a piece of .me have one.

Says the .me website: 

"The Government of Montenegro recognized the potential worldwide appeal that .me could have and decided it should be operated as a generic name space to gain the maximum benefit for Montenegro."

You can register your .me space beginning the first week of June, when a "land rush" period begins. Afilias.info and goDaddy.com will be selling the deeds, which must be reserved for a minimum of two years.

Anyone have any ideas for good .me site names? Here are a few to get you started -- but I've got dibs on 'em, so don't grab them in the land rush.

Meme.me
knockknockwhosthere.me
help.me
shameon.me
di.me
ti.me
do.me
ro.me

Thanks, Montenegro!

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

From the Sunday Calendar: Qik.com is ready to shine a light on all of us

(Jason Calacanis streaming live via cell phone, as streamed live by Robert Scoble)

Get ready for your close-up. Because pretty soon, we're all going to have video cameras in our cellphones.

Also known as cellular video cameras. Meaning anyone will be able to broadcast from anywhere. Live.

You don't have to be a starry-eyed technophile or a surly dystopian to see what this is going to look like. Just go to Qik.com. The Silicon Valley Web startup has created a system that lets users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the Web. When the broadcast is over, the clip is auto-saved for repeat (public) viewings.

Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity, now regularly broadcasts ad-hoc "shows" from his cellphone -- and anyone watching can beam him questions through Qik's chat feature. Calacanis' programming varies in excitement: In one episode, viewers watched him speed down the highway in his yellow Corvette, in hot pursuit of a Tesla Roadster, the 100 mph electric sports car. Wow! In another, fans looked on as Calacanis diddled around on the sidewalk while his wife was inside shopping. Still, dozens or even hundreds of his fans tune in when Calacanis goes live, hoping for a peek into the life of a tech idol.

"Listen, I'm a nerd who builds websites," he said. "The fact that anybody cares to watch me at Starbucks, let alone 100 people . . . I should be flattered right?"

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

The spam donut: mostly healthy!

Today on Digg, a story is circulating about how 40% of all spam comes from one source. Its name? Srizbi. Srizbi is a thing called a botnet -- a cloaked network of parasitic spamming programs hiding inside compromised computers. If your computer gets infected by Srizbi, it becomes a "zombie" -- a member of an army of machines invisibly sending spam around the Internet, and reporting back the results -- mostly, which active e-mail addresses it has found -- back to some command center in who-knows-where.

The Srizbi report was put out by Marshall, a British e-mail security firm that has done significant research on the spam problem.  After digging around, I found this pie chart from a December 2007 spam white paper [PDF here]:

Turns out almost 70% of spam is health-related -- which is a nice euphemism for male performance enhancement. Notice how scams are only about 1%, and pornography is only 2.4%. This is an interesting window into spam economics -- clearly spammers are getting their best return by advertising pharmaceuticals and voodoo sex solutions. I'm not sure exactly what "products"' means -- unless "products" is the mechanical version of "health." For anyone who hasn't looked closely at their spam in a while, here's one I just got a few moments ago:

CA N2ADI AN PH3A RMACY SP4ECIAL

V I4AG6R A - $1.47

F3EMA LE V5IA G4R A - $1.44

C I5AL5IS - $2.26

We marked p8rices dow6n

(It's OK, you can click on it -- I changed the link to something innocuous.)

Share your noteworthy junk e-mails below, and let's see if we can spot any spam-trends of our own.

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

SXSW: Bag swag

I only chose that title because it rhymes nicely. The fact is that when you check in to get your SXSW badge, they give you a canvas shopping bag filled with more advertising than an old lady could carry home -- pounds of the stuff.  It's the kind of material that in less PC days you wouldn't even bother looking at before you stuffed it in the bottom of the hamster cage.

Surely there're a couple of interesting or useful items in the bag (and the bag itself is great!), but honestly, I've barely had time to keep myself hydrated and nourished, let alone go through enough postcards, magazines and 3D glasses to get to the moon and back five times.

On the other hand, there was a nice pad of paper in there -- thanks Metanotes*!

*metanote to self: find out what metanotes is.

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Gone SXSWin'

Dear reader,

No posts today because I've been in transit to Austin, TX, for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where I'll be covering what has become the Sundance of web culture and technology. There's so much stuff to do here, I don't even know which panels I'm going to hit yet, or which events, let alone where to eat for dinner. If anyone sees anything they're interested in, drop a comment and I'll make extra special sure to attend and document.  I even got a photo pass for my camera--so I'll be putting on my paparazzi fedora.  Beware all you techies, 20-year-old startup millionaires, Mark Zuckerberg, and other bloggers with cameras--or you're liable to get Scouted!

Check back tomorrow for the SXSW preview-slash-first-dispatch.

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Scientology taking hits online

 

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped."

So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.

One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

P.M. Scouting Report: anti-Scientologist suicide, e-meters on EBay

Digg continues to rapidly elevate pretty much every story that's even slightly unflattering for Scientology.

-- A St. Pete Times piece reports on the apparent suicide of longtime anti-Scientology crusader Shawn Lonsdale, who was discovered on Saturday  dead in his home in Clearwater, Fla., Scientology's national nerve center.  Apparently, a hose had been connected to his car's tailpipe into a window of his home.

-- Another Digg link says that Scientology has been trying to keep used e-meters off EBay, but their legal basis for it might not hold water. The Digg title is misleading, though ("Scientology Given Direct Access To eBay Database"). No evidence of that in the piece. 

"In short, the Church of Scientology is at least constructively aware that the e-meters being listed on eBay are authentic, and so have no basis under trademark—or under any other intellectual property basis, for removing these listings."

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Microsoft won't deny Gates' secret Facebook addiction

Earlier this week, Bill Gates quit Facebook.  According to the WSJ, he was getting inundated with friend requests--which conjures a nice picture of an industry titan and historical figure sitting at his desk for hours, deliberating over whether to approve new buddies, or ignore them.

But wait--maybe he is doing that--or so says ValleyWag. An anonymous tipster told them that Gates is maintaining a second, lower-profile profile.  Profile #2 is only accessible from inside the Microsoft Facebook network, but ValleyWag buys that it's really his.  Why?  Well, the shadow Gates' friends appear to include several "key internal people" from Microsoft.  Case closed.

.

Excellent.  So. In collectively agreeing that this profile is definitely Bill's (and not something a mischievous 'Softy faked in 3.5 seconds)--let's please strenuously and unquestioningly accept the following contentions:

1) That Bill Gates has a secret Facebook profile.
2) That Bill Gates gave "a bunch of teenagers" access to his secret profile.
3) That Bill Gates, in his secret profile's favorite books section, would misspell the names of Ernest Hemingway and Isaac Asimov ("All Heinlein; All Assimov; All Heminway").
4) That Bill Gates would put Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in the favorite books section of his secret profile.
5) That Bill Gates would have installed the HOTorNOT application.
6) That ... actually, if you need a sixth reason.... I've got a profile to friend you.

Wrote a Microsoft spokesperson when confronted with the question of whether the profile in question was legit:  "Microsoft does not comment on rumor or speculation." 

Which, OK,  let's give this to ValleyWag: there's no rumor or speculation here.  There IS a profile--you can find it yourself.  And it's either phony or not.  So why not just say it's phony, Microsoft? 

Unless ...

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

HOAX UPDATE: I'm going to kill myself in 90 days

This 24-year-old Los Angeles blogger says she's going to kill herself--and she wants you to help her plan it.

UPDATE: 90DayJane has pulled the plug. Her project was "a personal art piece," and "must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours."

Well, guess that's it then. Just when we had our magnifying glasses polished and our pipes nicely stoked...

This is either a very serious and unfunny situation where someone's young life is at stake, or--much, much, much more likely (given the precedent of pretty-young-women-in-trouble hoaxes), it's the latest envelope pushing net publicity stunt. 

"This blog is not a cry for help," writes 90 Day Jane in her blog's bio.  "Or even to get attention. It's simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I'm not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to?"

No, all you need is a sensational idea, some web savvy, and a crew of gullible web detectives to take the bait.  That latter element has been taken care of by myself and web myth buster extraordinaire Richard Rushfield, who led the charge in cracking the famous lonelygirl15 hoax.

So, as we digest our hook, line and sinker, let's go over what we know so far:

-- Basic info:  Jane is* 24, lives in Los Angeles, has family back east.  She is slim and attractive (see this partially NSFW YouTube vid of her trying on her dress for the "blessed day.")  She clearly knows how to edit video.  And she's going to stay anonymous and not grant any interviews. 

-- Other characters:  Guy at work she's going to go out on a Valentine's Day date with.  "I just hope he's not looking for anything long-term," she writes.  Clever, but suicidal?

-- Web clues:  The blog.  The video (where is this vintage clothing store?).  The Facebook profile and group. The strange bulletin board she plugs without explanation.  The picture of a Hollywood-adjacent location near her favorite Starbucks--can anyone give the precise intersection?

Let us know if we're being too skeptical--if anyone has any reason to believe this should be taken more seriously, we're all ears.  There have been Internet-related suicides before--including the recent and tragic case of 13-year-old Megan Meir, who killed herself after allegedly being bullied on MySpace by a friend's mother. 

90-day Jane may be 'riffing' on this unhappy trend.  But her take on suicide is so slick and glib, it's hard to think it's the real thing.

*here we use the 'to be' verb in the loosest possible sense.

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

'Anonymous' takes anti-Scientology to the streets

"Anonymous" now has a bunch of faces to go without its name. The loosely bound group of net activists who've got a beef with the Church of Scientology showed up Sunday at the church's largest Los Angeles' locations. The protests were part of a global day of demonstrations against Scientology. Hordes of masked, costumed (and mostly young) picketers showed up in Boston, New York, Toronto, the U.K., Australia and a dozen other locations (thanks wikinews).

Many of the Los Angeles picketers wore the Guy Fawkes masks made popular in the movie "V for Vendetta," and it seemed like every other person was recording the event with a digital camera, camcorder or cellphone.

The protests were peaceful and colorful, with music and chanting (often: "Religion is free -- No Pay Per View" -- a reference to an alleged tiered system whereby the religion's adherents must pay money to gain spiritual clarity).  A near constant stream of horn honks provided the background noise as cars passed the Scientology center on Sunset Boulevard and continued as the mob moved to the so-called Celebrity Center on Hollywood Boulevard.  At least one ambulance and several fire department vehicles honked as they passed.

Security personnel, some wielding video cameras, were stationed at every entrance to the Sunset Boulevard center.  Most wore impassive expressions and, when spoken to (or in some cases, danced with) by rollicking protesters, would betray no more than the wryest of grins.

Protesters were quick to hand leaflets to any cars that slowed or stopped for red lights -- and many drivers freely accepted them.

"Ask a Christian about the Bible; you will be answered," read one leaflet.  "Ask a Scientologist about their text: You will be answered -- after your check clears."

A Fawkes-masked spokesman for Anonymous, who wouldn't give his name but whom several protesters identified as the organizer of the L.A. event, explained one of the group's concrete goals.

"We want set off a government investigation into how they got tax-exempt status," said the man, who said he was in his early 20s.

Scientology was granted the tax-exempt status in 1993 after a protracted battle with the IRS, which for 25 years had maintained that Scientology was a business and not a religion.

When contacted for a comment on the protests, a Scientology spokesperson issued a statement that read, in part: "'Anonymous' is a group of cyber-terrorists who hide their identities behind masks and computer anonymity" and it "is perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry." The statement did not mention the Sunday protests.

The protesters Sunday looked mostly young, white and computer-oriented -- few had anything like a serious tan -- but among the group were other more established anti-Scientogy elements, such as investigative journalist Mark Ebner, Mark Bunker from Xenu TV, and several people who identified themselves as former Scientologists.

Asked to explain the sudden groundswell of opposition to Scientology, Lynn Fountain Campbell, who said she'd been part of the church for 40 years, said, "It's just reached a critical mass. People just aren't scared anymore." 

"They try to make people shut up," Campbell added, "and I'm not the shutting up type."

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

The War Against Scientology 101

As a service to those who have not had time to fully educate themselves on one of the most important ideological battles of the last 1,000 hours, here's a roundup of some useful information, videos and links you can use to get acquainted with the basic facts in the run-up to the global Scientology protests the hacker group Anonymous has called for this Sunday.

The Timeline

Jan. 15 - Cruise video leaks (Telegraph)

Jan. 15 - Scientology tries to control leaks, fails (Web Scout)

Jan.26 - Hackers Hit Scientology With Online Attack (PC World)

Jan. 29 - Some guy gets accidentally hacked by anti-Scientology hackers, plus pro-Scientology hackers disrupt anti-Scientology hackers' plans to disrupt Scientology (Wired)

Jan. 31 - Someone mails benign white powder to Scientology sites (LAT)

Jan. 31 - Feb 10th is set by shady hacker forces as anti-Scientology D-Day (FOXNews.com)

The Videos

Tom Cruise discusses scientology (Gawker)
    -- Jerry O'Connell's spoof (FunnyOrDie.com)

Anonymous to Scientology (YouTube)
    "We have decided your organization should be destroyed.")

Anonymous clarifies itself (YouTube)
    "Contrary to the assumptions of the media, Anonymous is not simply a group of superhackers,   Anonymous is a collection of  individuals united by an awareness that someone . . . must bring light to the darkness. Among our numbers you will find individuals from all walks of life.")

Anonymous's long and ridiculous code of conduct for public protests (YouTube)
    "Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles."  "Rule #18: Bring water.  A dehydrated, thirsty Anonymous is not a useful Anonymous." "Rule #19: Wear good shoes.")

Scientology leader David Miscavige's niece speaks out (Inside Edition)

Scientology critic Mark Bunker of XenuTV warns hackers against dirty tricks (YouTube)

The Web Sites

Project Chanology
    "A large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology in its present form"
    --Chanology on Wikipedia

Church of Scientology News Page
    No mention of controversy, protests or leaked videos
    --Scientology on Wikipedia

Allegedly stolen high-level Scientology documents (Via Digg.com, origin unconfirmed, use salt-grain)   
    "This series may have been given the pc on entrance to the Marcab Confederacy plus or minus 20,000 years ago, and then again much later just before the first Between Lives Implant as a preliminary step before the actual Between Lives Implant."

Hollywoodinterrupted.com - Investigative journo Mark Ebner was the source of the original leak.

Surely we're missing a whole bunch of material -- feel free to fill in the blanks in the comment section.  Thanks.

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

MySpace makes a move on Facebook's turf

 

Today MySpace -- which it reminds you once again, lest you dare forget, you Web peasant, is "the world’s most popular social network" -- announced the release of its own application development platform, a technology that could threaten to eat away at Facebook's greatest competitive advantage. 

The MySpace Developer Platform has one weapon in its arsenal that Facebook doesn't (yet) have: It's called OpenSocial, and it was made by the world's most skillful digital weaponsmith. Google's OpenSocial takes Facebook's app development tool set one step further by letting you create apps that will work on a bunch of social networks for the price of one -- no customization necessary. On the OpenSocial bandwagon so far are Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo and XING.

I haven't heard of most of those either -- but it doesn't matter.  Syndication like this -- a distribution strategy whereby content like videos, blog posts and applications can be published to many sites at once -- is the heir apparent of Web economics.  It's like if you wrote and produced a TV show and could decide who to give it to -- would you rather it aired on NBC or simultaneously on ABC, CBS, ESPN, FSN, TNT, AMC, TruTV and the Playboy Channel? 

OpenSocial may mean that Facebook's magic genie is out of the bottle.

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Apptitude: Steal My Booty

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Scientology plays Whack-a-Tom

If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video of Tom Cruise the church orders taken down, 10 new ones sprout up in its place.  There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle. 

Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.

After all, they are singing the praises of the religion.  In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards." 

"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.

Why would you want to suppress a message like that?

--David Sarno

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno

Where the youth vote is: MySpace, Facebook

NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!

Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).

The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).

No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.

Read more

--David Sarno