Gawker Gift Guide: Kotaku Edition
Merry Christmas. Or not. Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, you probably do it by substituting love and kindness with cheap plastic garbage wrapped in pretty paper. And if you're like us, you find it distracting to put too much thought into what to buy your loved ones. Each year we try to solve that problem by…
Who Did 'The Creepiest Television Hack' of All Time?
The Max Headroom signal intrusion hack is one of those hacker legends that seems too good to be true: In 1987, an unknown group hacked into the signal of local Chicago TV channel WGN-TV. 25 years later, Vice's Motherboard blog has published a fascinating investigation into who pulled off the still unsolved crime.
Police Bust Drone Dropping Contraband Into Georgia Prison Yard
We're always hearing of new creative uses for drones, but this has got to be one of the better ones: Four people in Calhoun County, Georgia have been accused of using a mini helicopter to smuggle contraband tobacco into a prison.
Big Data Company Pays Insultingly Small Amount For Our Personal Info
We hear a lot about how valuable our personal information in the age of social networking. There are all these tools to help us calculate how much our Twitter account is "worth" and movements to get Facebook to pay for our data. But, it turns out, our personal information is just worth pennies to the largest…
What Was On Alleged Silk Road Boss' Laptop At The Moment of His Arrest
Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old California geek accused of running the massive underground drug market Silk Road, was logged into Silk Road's customer support control panel the moment he was arrested in a San Francisco public library, according to new court documents filed federal prosecutors. And there are the…
'Livin On a Prayer' Just Charted Thanks to a Four-Year-Old Viral Video
We live in a strange world. Thanks to the internet's multifaceted infostream, time, formerly arrow-straight, has wrapped around itself like a Hot Wheels track which now, unfortunately, has sent the miniature muscle car of history careening back to the 80s.
Popular Dark Net Drug Market Users Outed by Journalists
In the aftermath of the shuttering of the notorious black market Silk Road, the race has been on to fill the multi-million dollar hole left in the underground online drug trade. One of the most established of these sites is Black Market Reloaded, where thousands of users trade drugs anonymously—they think. But here's…
After 30 Years of Silence, the Original NSA Whistleblower Looks Back
The four-story brownstone at 141 East 37th Street in Manhattan has no remarkable features: a plain building on a quiet tree-lined street in the shadow of the Empire State Building. In the summer of 1920, Herbert O. Yardley, a government codebreaker, moved in with a gang of math geniuses and began deciphering…
How Did I Do This Year?
Each year Gawker Media asks writers to review their own job performance as part of a conceptual art project about the impossibility of self-awareness. In the spirit of Gawker Media's new community collaboration platform Kinja™, I want to hear from you. How do you feel I am doing in my job? What do you think are my…
Doge Is An Actually Good Internet Meme. Wow.
There was a time—early 2012?—when memes were "cool," and "funny." In those days, I often laughed at the memes when I came across them in my browsing, sharing them with friends via Twitter or Facebook, and even posting them on Gawker.com.
Facebook Cracks Down On Sepia-Toned Instagram Drug Deals
It's an internet law that any new social media technology will instantly be used to buy and sell drugs. I've come across allegations of drug trades on Facebook, Topix, Craigslist, and, of course various Dark Net forums like Silk Road. Now Instagram is in the spotlight for apparently being a hotbed of artfully-filtered…
Alleged Silk Road Boss Makes First Court Appearance In New York
Ross Ulbricht, alleged founder of the online drug market Silk Road, appeared briefly in court today for the first time since being transferred to New York City. According to Forbes' Andy Greenberg, he didn't say much, but his lawyer Joshua Dratel told reporters that Ulbricht wasn't Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonym…
Something About How Steve Roggenbuck's Poetry Will Save the Internet
Today, we're going to talk about whether the internet is Good or Bad for society.
Fax Machine Creates Found Poetry Masterpiece
What happens when the garbled datastream of a fax machine is transcribed by one of those increasingly popular voice-to-text services? Web developer E.J. Brennan says this is what was produced when a fax machine called his number and left a voicemail on Twilio, which offers automatic transcription service.
Ask Former Air Force Drone Operator Brandon Bryant Anything
During his six years as a U.S. Air Force drone sensor operator, 27-year-old Brandon Bryant helped kill, by his estimation, 1,626 people in combat, mostly from bases in the U.S., thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Years later, he's dealing with PTSD and speaking out about the…
'The Zuckerberg Files' Tracks Everything Mark Zuckerberg Says
As the head of Facebook, with over one billion active users, Mark Zuckerberg probably has more influence on information technology than any one person alive. Now a couple of information scholars have archived his every public utterance into a massive archive they're calling the Zuckerberg Files.
Guy Tweets Ex-NSA Boss Giving Off-The-Record Interviews On a Train
The Amtrak Acela is the subject of many jokes and legends among Washington D.C. political people. Now we can add the Tale of the Blabby Ex-NSA Director.