A fact-light report from WREG-TV in Memphis. (Image via YouTube.com)

Can someone please arrest the blogosphere and put them all away? Don't worry about gathering evidence or building a case, just lock them up and throw away the key — they'd do the same to you.

Drunk on the prospect that the 20-year-old son of a Democratic legislator in Tennessee was behind Wednesday's Palin e-mail hack, many blogs, political and otherwise, have summarily convicted the young man based on an impressive array of rumors, recycled nonfacts, misinterpretations and outright negligence. Then some TV stations and newspapers picked up the canard, running stories whose factual underpinning was that the hacking accusation was "the topic of heated discussions by bloggers all day." 

The whole circus started with the resemblance between a pseudonym of someone who claimed to be the hacker, and the supposed e-mail address of the politician's son. Both contained the word "rubico."  For many reporters, that might prompt a few phone calls. For bloggers, it was enough to light the torches.

Leading the misinfo-pack is conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who began a post on the subject by quoting Nashville's Tennessean newspaper's report that, among other things, that "the son of state Rep. Mike Kernell has been contacted by authorities in connection with a probe into the hacking." 

But — and this bears strenuous emphasis — the Tennessean has completely changed its tune. Without a note or correction, it soon replaced the version that Malkin quotes with one in which Rep. Kernell merely acknowledges that his son "is at the center of heated Internet discussion into the hacking." 

Malkin doesn't mention the change, and the original, incorrect version has been cited more widely than the less exciting up-to-date version.

Malkin does, however, link to Gateway Pundit, a blog whose modus operandus is apparently to trumpet falsehoods with multiple exclamation points so other blogs can at least have a source when they want to spread rumors. Here's the headline of the Gateway post Malkin links to (the ellipses are part of the headline): "FATHER OF HACKER Is Tennessee Dem State Rep!!!!! ...Update: Name- [first name deleted by Web Scout] Kernell ...Update: He's Been Contacted by Feds!" Then later: "Kernell Confesses?"

What? Every one of these statements is dead wrong. There's been no admission of guilt nor official  suspect named by any agency.  No one, not even the Tennessean, has stood by reporting that the younger Kernell was contacted by the authorities. (Rep. Kernell has said explicitly, including in the WREG-TV video that Gateway itself posted, that neither he nor his son has been contacted at all.) So seriously...huh?   

But here's where the snake really begins to eat its tail. To back up its suggestion that Kernell confessed, Gateway links to an article on a British tech site called PC Pro, which claimed that "a message was posted by Kernell on the 4chan forum claiming that he was behind the attack."

But the message that PC Pro was referring to, widely disseminated by Malkin, apparently came from the image board 4chan.org. I say apparently because 4chan's posts are not archived, and often disappear without a trace in a matter of minutes, making it difficult to prove anything originated there. Moreover, the confession that Malkin posted carried only the ID "rubico" — it did not contain the younger Kernell's name anywhere — and was itself sent to Malkin by an unnamed source. 

So, to recap:  A pseudonymous message on a nonarchived discussion board famous for mischief and anonymity was rescued by another anonymous user (Malkin's), and Malkin unquestioningly posted it on her blog.  From there, the account was passed around until it was picked up by a British computing site that mistakenly attached Kernell's name to it — based on an e-mail address someone found by Googling the pseudonymous rubico.

Then, with the fiction gaining steam (but no fact), Gateway Pundit and others were free to run with it until — surprise! — their posts were linked by Malkin, who helped create the story in the first place. Ain't it pretty?

The blogoshere has assembled numerous details and speculation about what's going on, but it's my contention that there's not one verifiable truth in this story. The clue that started it all — the tale of two rubicos — is certainly worth a raised eyebrow, but it's a far cry from enough evidence to conduct a virtual lynching.

On Thursday, the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads were shuffled off the stage so the next phase of the new Windows ad campaign could begin, starting with the ad released Thursday night. (A shorter version is above.)  Early reviews of this new effort were a little more favorable -- or at least they lacked the vitriol of the attacks on the Seinfeld spots.

As I wrote earlier, the message seems to be that "the world is one," carrying over the idea from the Seinfeld ads that Microsoft connects us. But in this age of constant e-mail/Facebook/IM/Twitter, can they really take credit for that? And do we really want even more people offering us connection, anyway?

Still, the ads are not as puzzling as the Seinfeld/Gates spots. They're cheerful and upbeat and easy to watch. Except nobody is watching them so far, at least on YouTube. By my calculation, there are fewer than 10,000 views today for all the copies of the ad that are on the site. There are fewer than 100 comments. Love him or hate him, Seinfeld may have been the draw with the first two. Those ads were both closing in on a 1 million views when they'd been on YouTube as long as "Pride" has now been.

Also, in my previous post I wondered how the high-achieving PC lovers in the new commercials -- Seinfeld's replacements, in a sense -- were cast. This is the explanation from a Microsoft spokesperson:

Microsoft sent out a casting director looking for interesting people doing interesting things. In order to avoid swaying responses, this person asked questions similar to those you might expect from a market researcher on the street, determining how the person uses PCs in their lives. We invited people with particularly captivating stories to participate in the ads. They were compensated for their time.

The people cast in the ad are all bona fide PC users, in other words. And fair enough that they were "compensated for their time." Still, if you're trying to show how the company embraces normal people, the staginess of it all seems off base. It's supposed to be a bunch of people out in the real world, spontaneously declaring their affection for PCs. But now that we know they were paid, it seems less like a grassroots uprising and more like a paid PR army. They may be fighting a stereotype, but they're fighting it on behalf of a massive corporation.

-- Maria Russo

A guest post from television editor Kate Aurthur:

In an article I wrote in July about the media coverage of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson's romantic relationship, I posed the question of whether Lohan would parlay the novelty of her lady liaison into a payday from one of the big gossip magazines. They were all approaching her, after all, so it appeared that Lohan would be the latest to profit. Like Jamie Lynn Spears did with her pregnancy and Brangelina has done with their babies.

Back then, I asked -- in the context of her calling in to Ryan Seacrest's radio show and using only gender-neutral words to describe her current partner, such as "the person I care about" -- "Is Lohan getting closer to more specific nouns and pronouns, particularly if one of the celebrity magazines will pay her a big check to do so, as has been rumored?"

But that so has not happened! Not only has Lohan eschewed capitalizing on an interesting story that people (not to mention People) might be willing to pay for, but she has actually done the opposite. She has plainly and simply written about Ronson as "the girl who means the world to me" (along with other references) on her MySpace page. On the Internet, the land of the free.

For that, I owe her this rowback/clarification.

Lohan first began blogging in late July. She wrote that she had just found out the log-in for her MySpace page, "so i can be more involved." Since then, she's written pretty frequently, checking in about what music she's listening to -- loves Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass," hates "Ladies of the Canyon" by Joni Mitchell: "So- I don't like the one person that requested this song once and they have ruined the song for me forever more....Those who know me and care about me will understand why... I love the artist, but dislike this particular song for my own reasons…" (Sidebar: Who is this person so horrible that he/she could make someone hate "Ladies of the Canyon"?)

But what's gotten more attention have been the rants, and there have been a bunch. Against the suggestion that her 14-year-old sister, Ali, has gotten breast implants; against her troubled father, Michael; against Sarah Palin. The most recent Palin post was in fact a joint one with Ronson, with the peg being an AP story about Palin's church promoting the conversion of gay people into straight people.

The celebrity blogosphere's reaction to Lohan's political blogging has been one of interest, of course. TMZ commented that Palin "may have trouble getting the rehabbed and rumored-to-be-gay vote come November." And Perez Hilton, who is himself obsessed with Palin and all campaign matters, has excerpted all of Lohan's blogs.

As has been true for months in the tabloids -- and continues to be the case on MySpace as well -- the Lohan-Ronson relationship is simply there for the public to see, with Lohan throwing random shoutouts to Ronson at the end of posts ("this song is for sr... ILY.") But as opposed to a big coming out party as paid for by a gossip magazine, Lohan's self-presentation is the less predictable route for a celebrity these days. She's mad at her dad, she's wishing her mom a happy birthday, she's trying to remember the name of an ice cream she liked when she was a kid and she's obsessed with the election.

In this case, at least, stars really are just like us.

We are not a bunch of pudgy, bespectacled, suit-wearing doofuses shouts the new Microsoft ad campaign, firing back at the widely admired Get a Mac campaign from Apple. But OK, well, if we are those things, we're proud of it, 'cause those are good things! The spot, which debuted Thursday night, features a John Hodgman lookalike saying "I'm a PC, and I've become a stereotype," followed by quick-cut clips of various multi-cultural successful types declaring "I'm a PC," some claiming the nerdy traits ("I wear a suit!" "I wear glasses!" etc.) made famous by Hodgman's PC character.

So here we are in Phase 2 of the Microsoft campaign, according to the company. The unpopular and confusing Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads have been halted, for now, at two installments -- reportedly there's one still left to be aired, but no date is set. Microsoft is strenuously asserting that they planned the campaign just this way all along. But after the firestorm of criticism, the whole thing has the smell of Plan B.

The first new ad, called "Pride" and made by the same agency who did Seinfeld/Gates, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, is shiny and peppy on the surface. The counterattack on Apple is clear enough: Don't you stereotype us, you snarky slackers! As Michael Arrington points out at TechCrunch, it does succeed in making Apple seem like the mean, name-calling kid, reminding you that lots of worthwhile folks are fine with their PC.

But the rest of the message is still, alas, a vast, undifferentiated wilderness. The tag line this time is "Life without walls," which doesn't mean a lot. So the ad zooms around the world to show us that the whole world is really one, and Microsoft plays a big role in that oneness. It's the "connection" alluded to in the Jerry and Bill ads. But it seems very pre-Internet to put yourself out there as a connector. If anything, in this age of e-mail/Twitter/IM/Facebook/RSS feeds, we could use a little less connection at times. It's way beyond Windows at this point.

Then there's that multicolored cornucopia of achievers from around the world: a black astronaut, a "green" architect, a mysterious-looking white guy with a beard. (Who is that guy anyway?) There's a lawyer, a graffiti artist, a mathematician, a fisherman. There's Tony Parker and Eva Longoria reclining poolside? Pharrell Williams? Deepak Chopra in a book-lined study proclaiming, "I'm a human being, not a human doing"?

Mixing celebrities and normals does not represent democracy -- you'd think this would be clear by now, especially after the Seinfeld debacle. Were the everyday people compensated, I wonder? If you pay a bunch of average people to say "I'm a PC," they'll say it, but it doesn't make it ring true. I'm trying to find that out, and will post if I get a response.

Somehow, the ad manages to make the concept of globalism, which has been reality for quite a while now, seem a little retro. In fact, the whole campaign is feeling a little bit too 20th century, from the ol' hands-across-the-world meme, to Jerry Seinfeld, to, in the end, Microsoft itself.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the participants were compensated. I'll have a full statement from the company on that in another post soon.

-- Maria Russo

Into the great wide open.  (Image via YouTube.com)

Jerry and Bill, we hardly knew ye... and that was exactly the problem, apparently. On Wednesday Microsoft announced the end of its controversial new Windows ads featuring Seinfeld and Gates attempting to mingle with the normals, after the first two commercials were widely panned, including by me here and here. The company is insisting that the plan all along was to do only the spots already finished, as a "warm-up" for the rest of the campaign. Future commercials, the New York Times reports today, will feature an attempt to directly attack the popular, cheeky Apple ads that feature John Hodgman and Justin Long mocking the PC as stodgy and out of touch. (In fact one of these ads dominates the New York Times' home page today, a strategy I wrote about here.)

Gizmodo reports that there's one more Jerry and Bill ad in the can, but no decision has been made about when it will air. But is it really believable that Microsoft intended only three Seinfeld/Gates ads to air, after paying the retired comedian a reported $10 million for the campaign? Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says his Microsoft sources all confirmed strongly that the plan was to stop here all along. Still: That means they agreed to give Seinfeld 3.3 million bucks a pop for the ads, one of which is 1 1/2 minutes long, the other a little over three minutes. Maybe the unseen one is a half-hour-long masterpiece, but still, Microsoft needs to work on negotiating tactics. ... Couldn't they have gotten him to do each commercial for, say, a cool million?

The spokespeople are all spinning the announcement of the ads' ending as vaguely as they can, with statements about Seinfeld's continuing "involvement" with the campaign.

Microsoft says the spots, by the boundary-pushing Crispin Porter + Bogusky, did their job and got people talking about the giant company again. They say they don't mind that quite a bit of that talk was downright nasty (or as the New York Times delicately put it, there was a lot of talk, "not all of it positive"). That piece quotes a brand perception expert saying that Microsoft's image started out 25% positive and 13% negative, but by Tuesday was 28% positive and 8% negative. You have to walk before you can run, I guess.

The new ads, meanwhile, are reportedly going directly at the Mac ads, with a John Hodgman type saying, "Hello, I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype."

The first one comes out tonight, so let's wait to see how that plays. We're promised appearances by Eva Longoria and Deepak Chopra in future spots. But I can't resist one early impression: After condescending to us regular people with the Seinfeld and Gates ads, now Microsoft is asking us to view them as victims of ... stereotyping?

-- Maria Russo

Chatter on 4chan.org's /b/ board.

In perhaps the most astonishing development yet for the culture of online troublemakers, 4chan.org's /b/ board (see a few of their past exploits here and here ) apparently managed this morning to take over the e-mail account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.  The generally apolitical 4chan pranksters, who have now been widely profiled in the media, are known less for their social activism than for their propensity for pulling online stunts designed to evoke maximum anger, shock and disgust. 

But now the anonymous participants on 4chan's /b/ bulletin board--the home base of their community and launching pad for their pranks--seem to feel they blew a chance to do some real damage.

According to accounts so far, and chatter on /b/ itself, shortly after the password information to Palin's account was posted on the board, the account became inaccessible, either because too many people tried to access it at once, or because a dissenter from within /b/ changed the password.

Either way, the amount of information retrieved from the Palin account appears to be relatively small.  A screen shot of Palin's account shows it contained 84 unread e-mails and possibly hundreds more, but only two have made their way online, suggesting the rest were not saved before the account was locked. If they were, wouldn't we have seen them online by now? 

"/b/ is now 'epic fail /b/' for not finding anything good in Palin's e-mail," wrote one anonymous commenter on the site, slamming the board with /b/'s highest-order insult.  "Seriously, /b/. We could have changed history and failed, epically."

"I agree," said another.  "This is epic fail. How can there not be something good in those messages?"

One of the bits of data that appears to have been taken from the account is a text-only list of all the e-mails contained in its Inbox, including the subjects and names of the senders.  The list, linked here, looks authentic and matches with the data in the screenshots of the account. (Note: this link was having trouble Wednesday night because of interest in this story.)

The list contains several interesting-looking entries, including several from Palin's chief of staff Mike Nizich labeled "FW: CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter" and "RE: Request for Information and Documents," one by Palin aide Ivy Frye titled "veep talking pts" and a variety of others relating to judicial nominations, policy points and personnel and budget issues in the Alaska government.

Illegal invasion of privacy and e-mail hijacking will never be an acceptable way to express your political views, or your nihilistic lack thereof, or whatever was motivating the /b/ participants. So there's probably some poetic justice in the ending of this episode: This frenzied crew, having decided to break the law in order to gain access to a possible political motherlode managed--amazingly--to do little more than lock themselves out of it without having found much at all. 

Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman contemplate the swedish meatballs in the cafeteria of the Ikea where they now work in "Easy to Assemble"   (Credit:: Easy to Assemble)

For the last year or so, amid the angsty teenagers talking into their webcams and the skateboarding dogs, you could find professionally made Web series scattered around if you knew where to look, and when. But this month and next, there’s a critical mass approaching: Hollywood is bringing out what you might call the first “new season” of spiffy, corporate-backed Web series designed to be watched on your computer.

There’s now a clear line between amateur “user-generated content” and the new wave. On one side, you have the YouTube revolution in all its rough-edged glory. On the other are slick, premium productions coming from Web teams at Warner Bros., Sony and HBO, and from hopped-up bands of writers and directors who were motivated by the writers’ strike to land corporate sponsorship and create their own shows. Many can boast celebrity names on camera, behind the scenes or both.

The professionalism of the new Web series comes at a price — literally. Just like regular TV, you can’t escape the commercial element. Some are “branded entertainment,” in which the creators have struck a deal with a sponsor to integrate the product into the show. At this early stage of the business model, the debate among those involved with Web series is how to make that corporate presence feel “organic” to the show. It’s a raging debate for TV and movies, too, but on the Web the stakes are even higher — because annoy users, and clicking away from a site is even easier and more constantly tempting than changing the channel on a TV.

So what does a Web series look like? At this point, the main characteristic linking the various kinds of shows vying for your clicks — scripted and unscripted dramas and comedies, talk shows, news shows, animated shows — is brevity. The range, so far, seems to be from 1 1/2-minute bites to 10- or 11-minute snacks, with three minutes emerging as the length à la mode. Such blink-and-they’re-over shows rely on super-fast editing: short scenes, quick transitions (or no transitions). But some shows are already shrugging off that conventional wisdom about the automatic ADD of Web viewers and letting rip for eight to 10 minutes — and that gamble seems to be paying off.

Here’s a look at eight noteworthy, new Web series...

Remember the  "Wii Fit girl" Web sensation from a few months ago, when the boyfriend surreptitiously (if brilliantly) taped his girlfriend doing virtual hula hooping in her undies?  (She was "furious," she told us back then). Well, she's finally struck back by forcing her boyfriend, Giovanny "Gio" Gutierrez, to come out of the doghouse and on to "The Tyra Banks Show" -- to play some pantsless Wii of his own. As a nice added meta-touch, Lauren Bernat shot a home video of Gio's embarrassing moment (complete with the same "face" he made in the first video) and has now put it on YouTube so no one misses it.

With the debut Tuesday of "The Groundlings," the Web series by the L.A. comedy troupe of the same name, the second season of Crackle.com's C-Spot lineup continues to gather momentum (info on the first season here). The series' first sketch, "Tapped," milks a glass of humor out of the eminently unhumorous possibility that government spooks are listening to regular people's phone conversations.

Xinhua.net, the website of China's state news agency, carries a number of downloads that computing security firm McAfee identifies as what "some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs." 

According to McAfee's SiteAdvisor tool, which warns users about websites that post potential security risks or load down users' computers with nuisance software, Xinhua is classified as "red" -- the highest warning level -- because it attempts to install at least four programs that McAfee considers questionable. 

One program McAfee says Xinhua installs is FlashGet (003.exe), an executable file that in turn saddles the user's computer with three more programs that can, variously, automatically connect to other websites, automatically change a computer's settings and add toolbars to a user's browser -- all with minimal awareness on the part of the site's visitor. 

The programs appear to fall into the category of adware -- that is, tiny pieces of software that can silently track and gather user behavior and relay it to some distant home base. Adware is not considered as threatening as so-called malware -- a category of unwanted program that includes viruses and worms -- but McAfee still describes one piece of Xinhua adware as "any piece of software which a reasonably security- or privacy-minded computer user may want to be informed of."

"China's got some serious troubles," said McAfee research analyst Shane Keats, who pointed to a study called Mapping the Malweb, which revealed that in terms of e-mail spam, harmful programs and unwanted downloads, China is among the riskiest subsections of the entire World Wide Web.   

Still, it remains notable that a government news website would be trying to foist suspicious downloads on news consumers (of note: the website of China's People's Daily, one of the world's largest newspapers, ranks "yellow" on McAfee's test). 

For reference, I used the SiteAdvisor tool to tested the websites of the 30 largest newspapers in the world, according to this (outdated but useful) list -- and no site but the People's Daily generated a warning, nor did any of the five largest U.S. newspaper sites. 

Perhaps another reason to be vigilant about where you get your news.

-- David Sarno