There are perils associated with apparently using Google Image Search to get material for your official news broadcast. When a German television news channel, N24, was reporting a story on Navy SEAL Team Six, the unit which spearheaded the operation which ultimately killed Osama bin Laden, the channel accidentally used a fan-made logo for the Maquis, an anti-Cardassian rebel group which originally appeared in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in place of the SEAL Team Six emblem.

his past weekend, Gawker Media was dealt a damaging blow when a group that calls itself Gnosis successfully hacked into Gawker’s servers and thereafter released a torrent which contained Gawker’s source code and a database containing 1.3 million Gawker commenters’ usernames, e-mail addresses, and passwords, about a fifth of which Gnosis decrypted. Considering that many people use the same password for multiple web services, this is bad news. Mediaite’s sister site Geekosystem got in touch with members of Gnosis and discussed what the attacks meant for Gawker Media, web publishers, and everyone who shares unsecured information on the Internet.

4channers are a formidable bunch. When AT&T blocked 4chan on Sunday, every blogger who knew what was what could see the dark clouds looming on the horizon. When AT&T restored service, and when they claimed that they had only suspended it to stop a DDoS attack (moot, the founder of 4chan, said “this wasn’t a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T’s part”), the whole Internet breathed a collective sigh of relief. A crisis had been averted. But why?

Before Tuesday’s midterm elections, 95 House and Senate candidates took a pledge called the Net Neutrality Protector’s Pledge [website], which consisted of a promise to stand “against any attempt by big corporations to control the Internet and eliminate the Internet’s level playing field … to protect Net Neutrality for the entire Internet – wired and wireless — and make sure big corporations aren’t allowed to take control of free speech online.”

>>>Full story at Geekosystem.

Wow. The rumors are true: AOL is buying TechCrunch, and it’s going down at TechCrunch Disrupt right now, with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong taking the stage to announce the purchase.

More details TK. In the meantime, here’s the press release announcing the purchase: (yoinked from MediaMemo)

If you arrived here from Twitter.com today, you should close that window ASAP; if your stream of tweets has been looking strange and full of code today, this is why. A major security flaw on Twitter.com has been exposed which allows users to exploit the onMouseOver Javascript command to cause other users to trigger pop-up messages or redirects to third-party websites merely by rolling over a Tweet with their cursors.

Well now, here is a sensational and surely reputable news report: According to Japan’s SPA! magazine, Steve Jobs was stopped by Japanese airport security for attempting to bring shuriken, or ninja throwing stars, onboard his private plane in July. Jobs was reportedly so upset by this routine stop that he vowed never to return to Japan again.

On July 26th, the Chinese city of Leshan witnessed a phenomenon that’s puzzling experts and led one Chinese paper to ask this morning if it was a UFO: What appeared to be three suns in the sky at once. Assuming this didn’t come from a close encounter of the third kind or a three wolf [...]

One inventor hopes to patent what he calls the “Suicide Bomb Deterrent”: Basically, a packet of pig parts that splatters everywhere if a bomb detonates nearby, with the express aim of deterring potential Islamic suicide bombers. (Several surah in the Koran forbid contact with the blood and meat of pigs.) But would it work?

>>>Find out at Geekosystem.

In the spirit of everyone in our country being really poor, CNN stepped in to lend a helping hand with this list of ten great part-time jobs to make money with. They are: Animal Caretaker, Bartender, Customer Service Rep, Dental Assistant, Hotel Clerk, Library Assistant, Museum Technician or Conservator, Pharmacy Technician, Recreation Worker, and Security [...]

The New York Times, like many print publications, is at a weird crossroads with respect to new tech: On the one hand, they’ve got a great digital operation and a lot of tech-savvy reporters; on the other hand, they try to maintain old standards which by definition conflict with newer terms and practices that weren’t around when those standards were established. Throw Twitter into the pot, and kaboom! Confusion.

A memo from New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett obtained by The Awl’s Choire Sicha puts some of that confusion to rest, although some folks may disagree with its conclusion: The Times is banning the Twitter-centric use of the word “tweet” as a noun or a verb.

See the full post at Geekosystem.

Another day, another Steve Jobs appearance. At today’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs announced the newest Apple product which is going on sale June 24th. It’s the iPhone 4, and it’s got some legitimately cool new upgrades that apple-lovers will want to get their hands on. We’ve sorted these new innovations into two categories at Geekosystem, [...]

Steve Jobs‘ keynote for WWDC 2010 is expected to kick off at 1pm EDT (10am PDT), and it’s a biggie: It’s widely expected that he’ll be unveiling a next-generation iPhone, which may be called (take your pick) the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4G, or the iPhone HD.

Alas, we’re not at WWDC, but there are some great bloggers who are: After the jump, their liveblogs, and some purported live video feeds from the event.

Bedfordshire’s Times & Citizen newspaper, which has a free circulation of 58,565, accidentally ran the above front cover on their June 3rd issue. And no, “headghgh” isn’t just some Scottish thing: This is a genuine screwup. According to PressGazette, the flubbed front page may be the byproduct of a new production system that allows reporters [...]

We already knew that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating whether Apple “unfairly dominates” the sale of digital music; contacting officials in the music industry as well as online music vendors.  Now, it appears the probe may be a bit broader than originally thought. See the full post at Geekosystem.

Does the end justify the means? This question has found its way into the plot of every season of 24, and made itself perhaps most prominent in the eighth and final season, which came to a close last night. CTU agent Jack Bauer, our gruff, remarkably well-aging hero, seems to have some controversial views on [...]

You don’t have to be a gene jock to recognize that this is a momentous achievement: For the first time ever, biologists have created a totally synthetic genome of more than one million base pairs and used it to make a previously lifeless bacterium grow and reproduce — by at least one plausible definition, they brought it to life with totally man-made DNA.

This is not an Onion headline: a geometry teacher in Alabama taught his students about parallel lines and angles using the charming example of assassinating President Obama. The geometry teacher, who has not been named, was investigated by the Secret Service after word of his lesson got out, but the superintendent at the school where the teacher works, Corner [...]

How did you spend your Mother’s Day? Maybe you woke up in the morning and brought your mom breakfast in bed. Some of you might have bought flowers and candy to your grandmothers. Jewelry may very well have been involved. Personally, I treated my mom and family to a late dinner. She still nagged me [...]

Ever since the early days of the Fail Whale, Twitter has earned, perhaps rightly, a reputation of not being the stablest of web services. The advent of today’s “forced follow” Twitter bug, which allowed users to very easily force anyone to follow them on Twitter, is not likely to help that reputation — nor is the fact that in combatting it, Twitter has temporarily reset follower and following counts to zero.

Found Footage Festival has a lovely clip of one of the modern world’s great philosophers, Mr. T, waxing eloquent about not just his mother, but every mother, everywhere. Happy Mother’s Day! Check out the video at Geekosystem.

No. Here’s the fact pattern, if you haven’t already heard it: One way the TSA trains screeners to use full-body scanners is by having the employees screen each other using the machines. One employee who was screened in the course of the training was thereafter teased “on a daily basis” by his co-workers for having [...]

Just as many threatened to burn their U.S. passports and move to Canada if George W. Bush won the 2004 presidential election, but few followed through when he did, so has been the anti-Facebook backlash: Though every successive wave of privacy-eroding, profit-maximizing innovations prompts lots of threats to quit, deactivate, and delete, not very many people [...]

Add this to the list of things Jay Leno has done to Conan O’Brien that Conan would probably never do to him: In a Facebook-centric gag on last night’s Tonight Show, Leno briefly showed a fake Facebook page for Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing this past weekend. (Since fake Facebook [...]

Last night there was a bomb scare in Times Square, New York, that was less a scare than an actual, you know, bomb. The “amateurish” car bomb was an SUV carrying three canisters of propane, ten gallons of gasoline, and some fireworks. While it’s a bit beyond our purview to cover the event itself (we’ll leave it to Mediaite), we did notice something funky on CNN.