Last night on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert described Anonymous, the Internet group that originated on imageboard 4chan, as a “hornets nest” and described the actions of Aaron Barr, the computer security expert that tried to go up against the group, as “sticking your penis in the hornet’s nest.” However, Colbert had another message for the members of the group, one he delivered subliminally. The question now is…is Stephen Colbert actually a “/b/tard?”

For the past few weeks Glenn Beck has joined the chorus of opinion-media personalities discussing the fascinating story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In Beck’s inimitable fashion, he cut straight to the part of the story that resonated emotionally with his audience, focusing on revolution and youth, represented by “hactivists” and “Operation Payback.” But now that someone claiming to represent the renegade vigilante set of hackers known as Anonymous has sent a message to Beck regarding his coverage, one can only wonder if he is in danger of painting a target on his own back.

Over the last 24 hours Gawker Media’s network of sites have been under attack from a group who have identified themselves “Gnosis,” a seemingly mysterious collective of hackers who has been falsely considered part of the 4chan-related group of renegade vigilantes knows as Anonymous. Via several private email exchanges with Mediaite, an individual claiming to represent “Gnosis” has explained both the reasoning and methodology of his actions, which has led to a compromised commenter database and a content management system.

After months of taunting over various extensive 4chan campaigns, someone purporting to be a member of internet “hacktivist” collective Anonymous now appears to be claiming it has hacked into Gawker Media and stolen 1.5 million usernames, emails, and passwords. Update – Gawker Editorial Director Scott Kidder says via Twitter “No evidence to suggest any Gawker user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted anyway.”

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?

For those unfamiliar with the depths of Internet sub-culture, “Anonymous” is a hard concept to understand. Simply put they are an anonymous crowdsourced set of vigilantes responsible for puling off some of the most newsworthy stunts in Internet history. But past projects like punking Scientology of flooding YouTube with porn fail in comparison to their recent attempts to disrupt the established entities who they deem to have alligned with the wrong side of justice over the WikiLeaks story. Now, in eerie and awesome fashion, a new video has been posted that describes their agenda in the most historic terms.

Even as websites for Paypal and Mastercard suffer “Anonymous” blowback for closing Wikileaks accounts, Amazon UK has made a Kindle version of the latest document dump available for download. Ironically, the same 4chan hackers who attacked Mastercard and Paypal (and Sarah Palin?) have promised a similar attack on Amazon.com today, in retaliation for the site shutting down Wikileaks’ US server for what it called a “Terms of Service” violation. It seems that Amazon, Paypal, and Visa can now have their cake and eat it, too.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper is reporting that Sarah Palin‘s website and personal credit card information “were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters” according to an email received from the former Alaskan governor. Earlier today reports surfaced of hackers from the infamous “Anonymous” group connected to the 4chan message boards attacking major institutions such as Mastercard, ostensibly in retaliation for their treatment of Wikileaks

All through last night, the media section of TeaParty.org, an official Tea Party website, was bombarded with new users who filled the photo section with shocking and offensive pictures (Example: a very, very NSFW photoshop of Sarah Palin. I repeat, NSFW). The pictures were so shocking that the site almost began to look like the outlaw imageboard 4chan. Now, I wonder who could have done it. I wonder…

A couple of weeks ago, Oprah Winfrey started a contest to give one of her viewers their very own show on her new network. One of the contestants, a hilarious young man with cerebral palsy named Zach Anner, was heralded by the influential websites 4chan and Reddit (as well as celebrities like John Mayer) and rose to a seemingly insurmountable lead…until it was surmounted. However, Geekosystem writer Jamie Block used some great investigative reporting to find seeming proof that someone (quite possibly directly from Team Oprah) had rigged the contest to knock Anner out of the top spot!

It’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

The viral posters that compared Obama to the Joker and to Hitler feel tame compared to the latest nasty meme to hit the Internet: insinuations that Glenn Beck “raped and killed a young girl in 1990.”


Update #3, 4:30pm: “Glenn Beck murder” and “Glenn Beck rapist” are now top suggestions when you do a Google search for Glenn Beck.

Much like the #gmailfail hashtag, every other office in New York, and possibly everyone in the world, we here at Mediaite, Inc. are disheartened and profoundly terrified by the sudden shutdown of Gmail. How will we get work done? More importantly, how will we make insidery status updates and send funny links to each other [...]

Much like Vanity Fair dispatching a greenhorn naif into the unknowable badlands of Brooklyn, The Daily Beast recently sent its resident new media writer, Douglas Rushkoff, on a recon mission into the heart of 4chan. Rushkoff, the one-time would-be Tom Wolfe of the hacker counterculture, was tasked with living among the inhabitants of this online chamber of wonders/horrors and hopefully not coming back shivering from HTMaLaria, or riddled with digital assegai wounds, or something, we guess.

Twitter announced several hours ago that it is currently subject to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack (or DDoS attack), in which hackers, utilizing a network of third-party computers, convince a targeted site that it is experiencing vast amounts of “phantom traffic” until it slows and finally crashes.

No one knows for sure what’s going on with the Internet’s fastest-growing social network right now – but here are four possibilities.

In Defense of Trophy Wives; Evidence that Iowa is the weirdest state; and delicious sandwiches … Plus! Other fun things we’ve come across during our day reaping the fruits of the Internet.