Hate your online social networks? Sick of acquaintances who barely know you eating up hours of your time and rating how attractive you are compared to others? Want to get to know real people? Want to kick the habit? Kill yourself... online that is!

Since the launch of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, over 800 people have cathartically killed their online identities, de-friended over 50,000 friends, and removed over 200,000 tweets. Even Facebook got in on the action, sending a baseless legal threat to the group which was posted to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The site will quickly delete all of the content on your accounts at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Better yet, you can watch it do this live and enjoy watching your online demise which is as close as you'll get to an out of body experience without risking your health by fasting or taking drugs.

Why stop there though? These sites make money using their user's information (which is never really deleted anyways) to sell advertising. Give them something they'll love: more information for their hungry databases. Fill it with junk, join random groups, send meaningless messages, and friend request people you'd never even be remotely interested in back when you had your online identity. Poison the machine!

The police-only forensics tool made by Microsoft to capture forensics data from a live system has been leaked online. The tool, Coffee, has been the subject of much speculation by the tech media who now finally has a chance to see it. According to reports, it grabs process information, network data, user passwords, and all sorts of information. Could the methods needed to gather that data be exploited by others? Given Microsoft's security history the answer is most likely.

Admins at the torrent site what.cd in an act of betrayal and comedy refused to host the torrent because , “Suddenly, we were forced to take a real look at the program, its source, and the potential impact on the site and security of our users and staff,” said What.cd management in a statement." While the popo are scary, trying to stifle the spread of a program like this is clearly against the interests of the free flow of information, privacy, free speech, piracy, and everything else good on the internet (kidding)!

A campaign is being organized for people to send their old shoes to the presidential library as a guesture of disrespect and solidarity with the now infamous shoe thrower Muntadhar al Zaidi.  Presumably they will go next to the pretzels.  Here is the address:

George W. Bush Presidential Library
c/o SMU
6425 Boaz Lane
Dallas TX 75205

This guy could probably use some solidarity right now since he is most likely being tortured.

This came from a thread on the hackbloc-discuss list and it answers what I think is a very important question. "What if programming languages were subcultures?"  Feel free to add your own in the comments.  You can view the original thread here.

Python

S&M practitioners: Everything is FORCED. You do not make yourown decisions about where to put your code. GUIDO makes those decisionsfor you. You will OBEY THE GUIDO. You LIKE feeling his lash. This isn'tsome other sissy-boy language. This is PYTHON. You don't solve it anyway you want. You solve it GUIDO's way. And you LIKE it. Scum.

People with OCD: "I have to put exactly 1 tab before every   for loop or the world will end!"

COBOL

HP Lovecraft: No amount of opium can ever make me forget.

Intercal

Those thirty-somethings that still dress up as Klingons and terrify children on Halloween.      

Ruby
Hipsters: It is neat, it is good looking, no one would admit that they are a ruby programmer. 

PHP

Hot Topic Kids: You have all the trappings of a subculture but none of the real content, but it basically gets the job done.  If you don't mind being like everyone else.

Visual Basic.net
Middle Managers at IT shops:  This guy read onecomputer book in the 80's and still swears by it, he still thinks theinternet is a series of tubes.  He is really smarmy and has way toomuch money, but he always looks nice, in a sleazy kind of way.

Perl 
Old Yippies: They used to be cool and really  revolutionary at one time, but now they are crazy old bastards  and they yammer on and no one can understand what the hell they  are saying except for a few people. But if you can understand  what they are saying you are likely as not to hear something  really cool

Java

Middle Aged men who drive sports cars and try to date 18 yearold girls, but just can't seem to get the hang of when classes startand end, so they hang outside the highschool all creepy.

Lisp

Gothic, neo-colonialist, poetry reading fetsihists.  People whowrite in lisp are over arrogant dark harted people siting in theirbasements writing out "The world's most beautiful and complex closure"just waiting for the next chance they get to tell some one that asksfor help with the syntax of their .emacsrc, "If you don't know I amnot telling".  They all listen to really bad neo-synth pop fromgermany too.

Freemasons: Very few people understand what this language is doing and its probably a secret cult, but you are pretty sure you could controll the world if you could just figure out how to use it.

C

I was trying to think of a good stereotype for this, but the onlypicture that came to mind was impact.  These programmers are big guysyou wouldn't want to fuck with, but are really nice.  They probably have family members in motorcycle gangs.  When there is an error onthere linux laptop they sometimes just go look at the source instead of searching for the error online.  They are usually ham radio operators too.
 

For those of you who aren't familiar, SCO is a company that tried to basically sue the entire linux community.  You can read more about that here.  Recently they were ordered to pay out 4 Million which you can read about here.

Or you can read about the entire history of the controversy here.

The hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's, the Republican Governor of Alaska, e-mail came forward the other day and told how he preformed the hack. He used a simple google search to find information to answer the "Security" question that yahoo askes for a missing password. By looking up where Palin had met her spouse he was able to answer the question and reset the password. The account had nothing interesting and included just pictures of her family and no information that would help derail her campaign.

The group who has been attacking the cult of scientology for some time has now broken into Sarah Palins yahoo e-mail account. Copies of the e-mails were posted to WikiLeaks and can be found here WikiLeaks Sarah Palin's e-mail. It is not anything too interesting still it is pretty funny though.

Here are a few links to more information:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/group-posts-e-m.html

http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-email-account-hacked