Ever wanted a semi-plausible looking identity to feed to a website you don't much care for, but were too lazy to cook one up on your own? Now there's help!

The fakenamegenerator site will instantly cook up just about everything you need to put in a bogus order for Viagra from those people who won't leave your grandmother alone, or even for filling out mortgage and loan applications from shifty online financiers. Full name, address, phone number, social security number, even a ficticious mother's maiden name... It's all cranked out for you, and all of it checks out until/unless someone tries to actually do something with it. The credit card numbers pass mod10 checks. The addresses appear to exist. The phone numbers have the right area code and a convincing exchange for the area they're in. The SSN is even apparently from a series that would have been handed out in that area at the time the fictional person was "born".

Very nice. :)

Fake Name Generator

If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

MemeStreams is OK again

Okay, pointless internet trollery aside... This looks like fun.

Basically, here's the backstory...

Some bloggers who didn't apparently care for the bullshit that Bill O'RLY spews out apparently called him names on their blog.

Bill somehow got wind of this (which is astounding because I didn't think Internet reached the nether depths of his ass yet) and began talking trash about said bloggers.

Fast forward a bit, bloggers fight back (because a large group of people combining their free time to come up with snarky replies will always win over one lone man's attempt at snarky replies, always--and let's not forget that the faceless hordes are actually used to opponents who can respond immediately and in kind) tearing apart Bill O'Reilly's precious little arguments and then stomping on the pieces.

Bill O'Reilly attempts to fight back using bully tactics. He digs around on their blogs a bit and finds that said bloggers have a small convention they attend. This convention has a sponsor (who probably gave them $100 and a stack of napkins) called JetBlue. Bill O'Reilly contacts JetBlue and (more or less) accuses JetBlue of sleeping with Al'Queda and killing kittens by sponsoring the convention held by the bloggers.

Bloggers, and everyone else who's gone beyond grade school, consider this to be a beyond-the-pale example of skullduggery on level with Michele Malkin. So, in response, said bloggers mobilize a bit, and begin contacting Bill O'Reilly's sponsors, calling into question why they apparently back up a man so full of vitriol, hatred, and bullshit. Lowe's considers this and drops their ads. Bill O'Reilly, not yet having learned his lesson, continues to press the issue and trash talk bloggers everywhere.

Fast forward a bit more... It's time for everyone to jump up and down on Bill O'Reilly's public face. The man hasn't yet learned that talking trash about special-interest groups and having millions ignore you in disgust is a bit different than talking trash at special-interest groups until they're angry enough to stop ignoring you and leave the high-road to do something about it.

Moral: Do not fuck with people who argue their way to the truth on a daily basis unless you are doing so from a 100% stainless steel and iron clad podium of absolutely inarguable points.

LET TEH GAMEZ BEGIN!

Fox Attacks: Much More Fun Than Just Taking It In The Rear from Bill O'Reilly

SummerCon 2007: August 24-26, 2007 Atlanta

Where: Wyndham Garden Hotel
125 10th Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30309
1 404-873-4800
(corner of Peachtree St & 10th)

Hell...
fucking...
yeah.

SummerCon

This is a great story.

Basically, a college intern leaves a tape full of highly classified information in his car overnight, unattended and when his car gets broken into and the tape stolen, he doesn't feel he should be held responsible for it.

Aside from the fact that both he and the University of Ohio are morons, I'm glad he got fired. It's the best thing that could have happened to him. Maybe next time he'll think before leaving important data in his car, and maybe from now on they'll hire some people who provide a secure offsite storage service.

College Intern that Doesn't Get It

Actually, using the search term 'hacker' to see what other "news" stories they've run turns up yet another lurid fantasy tale from mid-May of this year.

My favorite part of this story is when they talk about a response email that "melted the hard drive" of their little Dell machine.

Ass... hats.

Even more proof FOX11 has no clue

It looks like FOX is pretty pissed about getting their stuff hacked, and so they've gotten some of their affiliates to cook up a complete line of crap so they can run a "HACKARS R BAD, K?" news piece. It's rather sad.

For those of you who don't recognize what board they're talking about, where everyone is "required" to be anonymous, it's 4chan. If you don't recognize it, Google it. The reason almost all the users on 4chan post anonymously is definitely *not* what this news report claims it is... and the lies don't stop there.

Phil Shuman is a tool. It's one thing to be clueless, but this, coupled with the previous articles he's ran, borders on irresponsible.

FOX presents mostly fictional anti-hacker news story

Well, free speech apparently doesn't matter to the College Republican Convention, but that's not the best part.

Max Blumenthal interviews a bunch of college republicans asking them wonderful questions about whether or not and why they support the War In Iraq...

...and then followed up their gung-ho war-happy answers with "So, why aren't you serving in Iraq?"

...and the quote by Tom Delay about abortion affecting immigration, saying "If we had the 40,000 children that have been killed over the last years, we wouldn't need the immigrants to do these jobs."

Wow. That's just special it's so sick. Tom DeLay is such a tool, and every single person there is a twit for not calling him out right then and there on that one.

Max Blumenthal: the Unauthorized College Republican Tour

Yes, during the presidential candidates debates, one of the questions submitted by a YouTube user had the infamous goatse in it for one whole frame.

As an added bonus, here's a slightly NSFW image (don't worry, the actual goatse in it is about 10 pixels high, so very low gross-factor) of the actual event.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/6513/cnngo2gn8.jpg

ROFLMAO Moment: Goatse on CNN, Live.

Most sane investors know not to take anything at face value from the rabid idealogues who live in the WSJ Op-Ed section. But regardless of how you feel about the page, you gotta laugh at this comic:

Hillarious.

The Big Picture | Murdoch & the WSJ Editorial Page