Alex Goldman

Yesterday, PJ wrote an article about Porn MD's transfixing real-time display of other people's porn searches. In that article, PJ posited that part of the appeal was that it was a peak into a universe that we don't usually see, because "while we share most things online, porn consumption is one of the few online media consumption experiences that usually remains private. Very rarely will someone 'Like' a porn website on Facebook, or tweet a link to some great porn they enjoyed." One of our readers informed us that may not be the case.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Twitch Plays Pokemon, an internet phenomenon which allows thousands of people online to jockey for control of a single character in a game of Pokemon Red. I said that Twitch Plays Pokemon was a metaphor for the messy democracy of the internet. If reports are to be believed, it may not be quite as democratic as I imagined.

On September 11th, 2012, gunmen attacked two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans. Sean Smith, one of the four killed in the attack, was an IT manager in the real world, but online, he was Vile Rat, a hugely influential diplomat in the video game Eve Online. OTM Producer and TLDR co-creator Alex Goldman talks to Sean's friend Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco about who Sean was both in Eve and in the real world.

Programming note: This segment originally aired on TLDR, OTM's new blog and podcast. 

Sweepstakes

Tinder is a dating app that allows users to search for potential matches based on proximity. There's been a lot of talk of the app's popularity with Olympic athletes, which the media seems to be eating up. Yesterday, some security researchers published an article saying that they had figured out how to use Tinder to get users' exact locations.

Since it is used expressly for peer-to-peer communication, it doesn't require users to browse the internet, thus potentially exposing them to material they might not want to see.

Why leave eavesdropping on phone calls to law enforcement? With the new app Crowdpilot, you can invite anyone to listen in.

In its purest and most noble form, the internet is an experiment in community building. It allows people who would have no reason to interact in the real world to come together to work toward, or in some cases against, a common goal. In the case of Twitch Plays Pokemon, it allows tens of thousands of people to get together to play a game of Pokemon Red for the old-school Nintendo Game Boy.

How Swatch Tried to Reinvent Time as We Know It

BitTorrent is one of those classic "technology is neutral" pieces of software. There are people who are using the protocol in totally benign ways to share public domain and creative commons material, academic research, and more. But it is more notorious for being the protocol that powers a large part of the illegal file-sharing on the internet. The BitTorrent company is aware of its software's less than stellar reputation, and according to Variety, it is waging a PR campaign to win the hearts and minds of Hollywood.

In what is surely the most incongruous piece of marketing this season, electronic payment service PayPal is employing poets to write Valentines Day poems on the spot for consumers. I suppose it makes sense, as I've always found online transactions very romantic.

Can You Hide from Knowledge?

Aereo, the online broadcast TV service that has fought for its right to exist all the way to the US Supreme Court, is so popular in New York that it had to stop offering new subscriptions for a week because it didn't have the capacity to accept all the new subscribers.

Our intrepid host, PJ Vogt is on the Freakonomics Podcast this week, talking about - what else? - online dating. Listen to the episode below. PJ shows up around 10 minutes in, but it's best to start from the beginning.

News outlets are reporting it and sourcing their claims to "social media speculation" (!!!). Good news: It's not true.

Update: Journalist Quinn Norton strongly disagreed with me on Twitter, so I asked her to write something about why she disagreed. I have attached her response to the bottom of the article.

One of the favorite tools of the internet hacker/troll collective Anonymous is the denial of service attack, or DDOS. Basically it works by flooding a site with so many queries that it becomes overwhelmed, and the rest of the internet can't access it. I've compared it in the past to the online equivalent of a sit-in - when deployed correctly, it disrupts business but causes no lasting damage.

According to the latest Snowden leaks, British authorities were using the same disruption methods against Anonymous that Anonymous was using against other parts of the internet.

Day in the Life: Misidentified as a 9/11 Truther

Last week, PJ wrote an excellent article comparing early aesthetic critiques of Google Glass to those of the Sony's Walkman. The point was that all technology looks ridiculous and impractical until it becomes useful, and then it's basically indespensible. But cartoonist and journalist Susie Cagle pointed out on her Twitter feed that early Glass adopters may not be finding them all that useful.

To celebrate a decade in existence, Facebook released "Look Back," a page which creepily collects all of your posts into a short video narrating your time on Facebook. We found oursel...

If you've been following TLDR since the jump-off, then you probably know how we feel about the big reveal of both Pronunciation Book and Horse_ebooks as lead-ins the the bafflingly boring Bear Sterns Bravo. Pronunciation Book simply collapsed under the weight of the buzz and anticipation that it generated (including in our debut episode), while Horse_ebooks felt like another reminder of the internet's bottomless capacity for deception. Well Susan Orlean's New Yorker profile of Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender (paywalled), the guys behind the whole enterprise, came out today. And as much as I hate to admit it, it gave me a sort of grudging respect for their work, at least conceptually.