SNL has so dominated the election comedy video sphere, with Tina Fey's perfect Sarah Palin and Queen Latifah's celebrity turn as Gwen Ifill, that it's easy to overlook comparably funny video coming from less glorified realms. But let's not! The talented YouTube chameleon LisaNova does a mean Sarah Palin of her own. And she can use curse words and "work blue," as the old-school comedians call it, which in this case pays off.
But because her stuff is gleefully uncensored I can't embed or link to her first and most hilarious Sarah Palin video, "Is McCain Palin's bitch?" in which McCain comes undone while begging Palin to join his ticket. It's got well over 2 million hits on YouTube.
Now, LisaNova is featuring on her channel an actor named Iman Crosson who does a Barack Obama impression that is almost as eerily accurate as Fey's Palin. Turns out Crosson was the winning Obama in Denny's presidential-candidate impersonation contest.
I got Crosson ( who usually goes by Iman) on the phone, and he explained that he'd been doing Obama videos on his own since he won the Denny's contest. LisaNova came across one and asked if he wanted to work with her. The result is the above clip, edited by LisaNova from Iman's original.
No doubt being promoted on LisaNova's channel helped it get on today's Most Viewed list on YouTube, with just over 100,000 views so far. Iman, who is 26 and just moved to California from New York, said he is an Obama supporter, which is one reason he tries to keep his videos PG-rated. “I want to make it funny without making it dirty," he said. "My ultimate goal is I would want him to be able to see the video and laugh.”
Brave New Films, the Web video production company run by liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald ("Outfoxed," Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price"), is suing conservative talk-show host Michael Savage in a copyright dispute that hinges on the takedown of a one-minute-long YouTube video.
The video called "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" (and still available here) features a photo of Savage, along with a short audio excerpt from the "Savage Nation" program, in which Savage makes clear his disdain for Muslims and Islam. "You can take your religion and shove it up your behind," he yells at one point. "I'm sick of you."
Brave New Films has an adversarial history with Savage. The company maintains a site called NoSavage.org, which features the "Michael Savage Hates Muslims" video along with links to other inflammatory remarks by the host.
The complaint holds that Talk Radio Network Inc., the Oregon company that syndicates Savage's show, sent a takedown request to YouTube for the video on Oct. 2 -- the night of the vice presidential debate, and a moment of intense interest in online political news. As a result of the network's request, YouTube not only removed the offending video but disabled Brave New Films' YouTube channel completely. Because Brave New Films uses the YouTube player to embed its videos on its own public website, that site suffered as well.
According to YouTube, copyright law requires the company to terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe, and Brave New Films had problems with Viacom last year when they used material from the "Colbert Report." Suspensions can be lifted if one or more of the claims are retracted.
Reached for a comment before the suit was officially filed, Phil Newmark, a producer at Talk Radio Network, said on behalf of Savage, "Michael never sent a complaint to YouTube about anything. This did not come from him in any way, shape or form." Newmark said he had no information about where the complaint originated, but said he would contact TRN's chief executive, Mark Masters, to inquire. TRN is also named in the suit.
Brave New Films' channel is No. 71 of all time among YouTube directors -- a highly competitive category. The company's 300 separate videos have collectively earned 36 million views. Greenwald was able to get his channel reactived by midmorning on Friday, but by then it had missed the big wave of debate-related traffic. Adding to the trouble was that Brave New Films had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times that morning, while its site was still incapacitated.
Greenwald called the situation, which left most of his company's content "dead" during a time of peak political interest, "incredibly scary and troubling."
"On some level, no matter what the damages are, we can't get back the views of Thursday and the views and impact of Friday, when the New York Times ad came out," he said in a phone interview.
The lawsuit, brought by Brave New Films with attorneys from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asks that the court declare that the Savage video was a so-called fair use of the material, rather than a copyright infringement. The suit also seeks damages to compensate for "harm to [Brave New Films'] free speech rights and the visibility Brave New Films had worked so hard to achieve."
In 2007, Savage sued the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations over its use of the very same audio excerpt in a similar video, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the case entirely, concluding that the CAIR's repurposing of the audio was fair use.
Astley in Singapore, August 2008. (Photo by flickr user Chinnian)
HOLD THE PHONE: There's something confusing happening here. MTV's post appears to be referring to the poll about whether Astley should be in the contest, and not the contest itself. This is perplexing, given that we haven't heard anything about a campaign to game this mini-poll, let alone one that's already generated 20 million votes. I am attempting to untangle this sordid mess, so please standby.
CORRECTION (4:40pm): Indeed, I had the wrong number. The 20 million votes MTV cited were in reference to voting on the 'does he deserve it' poll, not the "Best Act Ever" contest--although both have been bot-driven. As to the contest voting itself, MTV has not released numbers, but Mark Lancaster of bestactever.com, the site leading the automatic charge in the main contest, says there are now "26-27 million confirmed votes" from the RickVoter bot, plus another 4
million from people who sent in screen shots of tallies from home-brewed bots. Meaning a likely 30+ million Astley votes for the contest so far. What we don't know is what kind of lead that gives Astley, especially given that Tokio Hotel fans have apparently 'bot in' to the game as well.
ORIGINAL POST:
According to MTV UK, '80s pop-rock legend Rick Astley has clocked in 99.98% of the 20 million votes cast, eking out the narrowest of victories over his competitors in the Best Act Ever competition.
So I was fudging the headline: Astley didn't actually capture all 20 million of the poll's total votes, just 19,996,000. That leaves a cache of 4,000 votes for Britney, Christina, Green Day, Tokio Hotel and U2 to apportion among themselves.
MTV Europe, huffing cheekily on the smoke of a memefire it set a few days ago, is now polling voters on the all-important meta question of whether Astley deserves "to be in the same category of those great aritsts" or not. This is a new level of inanity, given that the site was the one that decided to put Astley -- a write-in candidate -- on the ballet in the first place.
But, as Alexa shows, the Astley hijinks are paying dividends for MTV UK -- the site's traffic is spiking (independent of all the phony requests), suggesting that MTV may have a legitimate culture coup on their hands.
The site has also shown a sense of humor about the vote fixing. At one point site administrators shot back at ballot stuffers by redirecting auto-vote attempts to a video of Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively ReverseRickRolling hundreds of people.
Aussie Mark "Vote4Rick" Lancaster, the brains behind bestactever.com, may be surprised to hear that MTV is touting the 20-million number*. In an e-mail exchange last night, Lancaster guessed that only about 8 million of the RickVoter's automated vote attempts had gone through, though he added that home-brewed vote-bots may have added significantly to the tally:
"They haven't bothered to put in a delay of any form and this has begun to overload MTV's servers," he wrote -- and indeed, MTV's site appeared to be intermittently troubled yesterday. "To help slow this down, we've increased the artificial delay in our scripts so that we're doing voting slower. We want Rick to win, but we don't want to destroy MTV's bandwidth in the process."
What a guy, right?
A representative from MTVE has not answered communications about the Astley voting, and we don't know if they've contacted the reclusive Astley about appearing on the EMAs in the event that his election is ruled legitimate.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that if he agrees to go on the show, the election will stand, and if he turns it down, MTV will rule that our votes didn't count. And that would be a major run-around, letdown and desertion.
As Microsoft's take-that-Apple "I'm a PC" campaign rolls on, an ad featuring Pharrell Williams was released on YouTube today and already has over 650,000 views. Whether or not Williams is really a Mac guy, the ad has that dorm-room-philosophy appeal some people just know how to pull off, even when not high. "It's just the illuuuusion that things are solid," Pharrell informs us, before explaining Einstein's idea that "energy can't be created or destroyed." So, "no one ever really dies" -- that's where he got the band name N.E.R.D. from.
Assuming anyone's going to start associating Williams with PCs at this point -- a big assumption -- you can see why he was an inspired choice for this Crispin Porter + Bogusky campaign, which is trying to recast the dowdy PC image as futuristic, and global in a proudly nerdy way. Still, that smart move makes you wonder all over again how on earth anyone thought paying piles of money to Jerry Seinfeld, star of the much-maligned first two ads in the series, was a good idea to get the campaign rolling. There may be no human being more diametrically opposed to the whiter-than-white, intellectually uncurious, complacent Seinfeld than Pharrell Williams.
Still, as suave as Williams is, the video makes a slightly ungraceful leap to connect his world view to PC's. But he tries, and maybe that's enough to get the campaign some momentum. So what if it's a bit abrupt to go from talking about how we're on the brink of a major cosmic breakthrough, to asking, "What possibility lies beyond
the on button for your computer?" (Some days, mainly just endless e-mail,
IMs, and work I can't catch up with, but 'preciate the sentiment!)
In the same semi-mystical, pop-futurism vein, Microsoft posted a similar ad last week featuring Deepak Chopra sitting in his study. Chopra's of the opinion that computers are going to bring about "global healing." That video only has 3,000 views, for some crazy reason.
Actually, the two videos point toward a promising direction for Microsoft to go: tech evangelism with a slightly spiritual undertone. Apple's cool, sleek, no-nonsense image has nothing soulful about it, so that's open territory as Microsoft tries to build its own new image.
But: It's time to start worrying that Eva Longoria and Tony Parker, the other celebrities in the first "I'm a PC" ad, are going to tech-philosophize next week. Will they tell us they're psyched for the singularity?
Just as every corner of the connected world benefits from the Web’s power to eliminate time and distance as obstacles to the spread of information, no place is safe from its equal and opposite power to promote misinformation. Wall Street, perhaps more than any other industrial nerve center, sits astride this fault line. The financial sector has an endless thirst for hypercurrent news, but it also gulps down plenty of impurities.
There was the case last month of the 6-year-old Chicago Tribune news article announcing United Airlines’ bankruptcy on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s website (the two papers, like the Los Angeles Times, are owned by Tribune Co). By way of various computer gaffes at Tribune and Google News, plus a dollop of human error, the archived story was mistaken for a breaking development and was picked up by Bloomberg’s financial news service, where it immediately triggered a panicked sell-off that hacked 70% off United’s stock price in a matter of 10 minutes. The Nasdaq had to halt trading on the stock for more than an hour while investors figured out what had gone wrong.
A screen at the Nasdaq MarketSite shows the decline in the price of Apple shares on Oct. 8, 2008. Not related to the hoax. (Photo: Mark Lennihan / AP.)
Then last week, an anonymous user of CNN’s ireport.com — a loosely moderated site where users can submit homegrown news — posted a report that Apple Inc.’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, had suffered a massive heart attack. The report was picked up by the popular technology blog Silicon Alley Insider, which contacted Apple for confirmation but not before posting the rumor, describing it as “a story of major consequence” that “no one else has reported.”
When Apple got back to Silicon Alley Insider, the company denied the rumor, and CNN removed it, calling it “fraudulent.” Still, in the story’s half-hour life span, Apple shares fell more than 5% before partially rebounding. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators are reportedly looking into whether the rumor was started by someone trying to manipulate the stock.
Both stories underwent a now familiar alchemy, whereby junky Web rumors gain credibility the moment they’re touched by a source that someone’s heard of.
Sometimes the story passes through so many hands that assigning blame becomes academic. Was it Tribune’s fault for letting an old story appear to be new or Google’s fault for not knowing the difference, or was it the fault of the guy who believed Google when it offered a new-looking story or Bloomberg’s fault for not vetting its contributors well enough? And what about the traders? Can’t these highly paid professionals get someone to spend 10 minutes verifying these catastrophes?
Not so fast. Or rather, not so slow. “These things happen very, very quickly,” said economist Robert Aliber of the University of Chicago. “The people who are closely involved probably don’t have the time to do the checking. It’s more important for them to be on the right side of the trade than to be library-type researchers.”
You wouldn’t get much further pinning the Jobs rumor on CNN, or Silicon Alley Insider, or even the hoaxer who posted the false report.
And, as Silicon Alley Insider Editor Henry Blodget pointed out, the crisis came and went in a flash. “The Web can certainly spread misinformation fast, but it’s equally capable of spreading correct information fast. With the Steve Jobs heart attack story last week, the market had the rumor and the answer within half an hour — and both were accessible to everyone.”
But rumors by their nature are destabilizing.
Robert Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and author of “The Panic of 1907,” said that at the center of every market scare, micro or macro, is a kind of disorientation that comes when some people know what’s going on and others don’t.
“Somebody asked me, ‘So how is today’s crisis different from the great crash of 1929?’ And the answer is the speed, complexity and sheer scale” of the market system.
It’s no coincidence that the same phrase describes the Web’s central information problem as well. There are so many parties both producing and consuming information that it’s impossible for everyone to be on the same page.
Just go to any trading floor, Bruner said. Besides the banks of TV screens and news feeds on the walls, “the traders have their own news sources, scanning the Internet, reading the blogs and chatter, looking to exploit the arrival of news advantageously.”
Wall Street, in other words, has the Internet pumped directly into its brain. Just so, the two share the same exhilarating, maddening personality.
The single count indictment, returned on Oct. 7, 2008, and unsealed today, alleges that on approximately Sept. 16, 2008, Kernell, a resident of Knoxville, obtained unauthorized access to Gov. Palin’s personal e-mail account by allegedly resetting the account password. According to the indictment, after answering a series of security questions that allowed him to reset the password and gain access to the e-mail account, Kernell allegedly read the contents of the account and made screenshots of the e-mail directory, e-mail content and other personal information. According to the indictment, Kernell posted screenshots of the e-mails and other personal information to a public Web site. Kernell also allegedly posted the new e-mail account password that he had created, thus providing access to the account by others.
If convicted, Kernell could face a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. This is a much stiffer penalty than some people around the Web had been guessing, and shows that the federal authorities are not treating Kernell like a kid, or the hacking crime as a prank.
No date has been set for the trial.
Kernell is the son of a Tennessee Democratic legislator. Because of a similarity to an e-mail address Kernell was linked to through various online accounts, those chasing the story believed Kernell was the pseudonymous "Rubico" who apparently posted a lengthy account of his exploits to the bulletin board 4chan.org, detailing the way he gained access to Palin's Yahoo email account. Essentially, Rubico looked up the publicly available answers to her security questions (What's your zip code? Where did you meet your spouse?).
Screenshots posted by Rubico appeared to contain information about the address of the hacker's computer, which may have allowed authorities to narrow the search.
Federal agents reportedly served a search warrant on Kernell's apartment in late September, but no indictment was immediately handed down.
-- David Sarno
Photo of David Kernell by Emily Spence of the Associated Press
The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's culture and news website, went up Monday, and in case any puzzlement remains about what she's up to, there's a long Q&A with Brown herself laying it out. The site, she says, is not an "aggregator," as some have called it, including me here. Meaning it will not merely collect stories a la Yahoo News, but will "sift, sort and curate" the Web every day, combining some original stuff with links to other sites' content.
Whether that's "aggregation" or not, it's a fairly standard approach to the Web. So Brown includes the key question in her Q&A: "Why should I visit you?"
"Sensibility, darling," is her answer. She hopes that if you like the site's sensibility in "choosing news and opinion, then you'll trust us to be the lens you view it through."
I'm not convinced you can sell a site on "sensibility" alone. That's like offering "value" to stockholders. Brown might have told us a little more specifically what her particular sensibility is, and what it will add to our lives.
But I'll try to glean it myself. Judging by the first two days of the site's existence -- admittedly a limited sample, and every site evolves -- I'd describe The Daily Beast as a thematic relative of her defunct Talk Magazine. There's a bravura, devil-may-care tone in the display text and in the writing the site has commissioned. It's perfectly captured in a blog post from Brown herself on Sarah Palin. Brown celebrates the candidate's sex appeal to both men and women, Republicans and Democrats -- she's "hitting the hot buttons of bipartisan horniness even as her hope fades
of attracting the hot flash vote of Hillary Clinton supporters." In that one phrase we see Brown at her best: clever, daring, randy.
It can be fun to watch her spin and dip heedlessly through what interests her, which is anything that inhabits any elite echelon of the culture. It can also be tiring. Brown has an unquestioning admiration of power, fame and conventional kinds of success, and that sets the tone for the site as a whole (and may explain why the age of contributors and subjects skews to over-45, and the sex of its contributors skews male, just as in most mainstream magazines). Thumbnails of the faces of prominent, prosperous Boomers are everywhere on the site: Bill Clinton, Arianna Huffington, Christiane Amanpour, NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly, among others, give book and DVD recommendations, for example.
You could carp about how the site is behind the times, not "webby" -- the blog roll, for example, is displayed too prominently, with no apparent principle of selection other than a preponderance of big, well-known sites; there are no community-building goals in evidence on the Daily Beast's home page -- no sign that any mere reader's presence would be welcome. So far, the site is talking at us, not with us.
I'm not sure a Web filter benefits from the kind of Upper East Side professional-class sensibility The Daily Beast is conveying at this point. Both Drudge and the Huffington Post have succeeded, in part, by keeping a common touch: The Huffington Post's lifestyle stuff, for example, tends to be on a homey, Ladies' Home Journal level ("How to Recession-Proof Your Family"); Drudge serves up supermarket-tabloidish scares and oddities ("Man Accused of Binding Teen's Hands on Flight"). What sensibilities the two sites have derive from their political slants (left for HuffPo, right for Drudge).
But The Daily Beast wants to be down the middle politically, which is not going to inspire the kind of visceral responses HuffPo and Drudge depend on. Without a guiding passion like politics -- or something else addictive and attitude-filled, like celebrity news -- maybe a good Web filter doesn't even need much personality, in the end. Helping us find cool stuff should be the main point, not jazzing up the way you link to it. Remember when we first got answering machines, and everyone wanted to express something through their outgoing message? Now, do you know
anyone who would do a Chevy Chase impression or put an REM song on
their greeting? Same with ring tones--a ring does the job more
efficiently than a Bananarama tune. As we get comfortable with a
technology, it seems to me, we gravitate toward its pure functionality.
Anyway, as Web filters go, I like Google Reader's soothingly personality-free interface. The more I use it, the less I want to go to visually busy, design-y sites like The Daily Beast, which look like
they're trying to emulate the look of magazines -- not the best use of
a computer screen. On Google Reader, I've "subscribed" to the websites and blogs I like, and I've sorted them into categories. I get a constantly updated scroll of each one's new material, with just headlines and lead paragraphs, which is enough to judge if I want to read the whole thing. So I can sort and edit the Web -- including any original content the Daily Beast has that I might want to read -- all by myself, thank you.
I fear the Daily Beast is the Web equivalent of the intrusive staff at some "luxury" hotels, constantly bothering you with offers of help you don't actually need. As the jet-setting Brown should know, the really high-end hotels these days have a famously "invisible" staff that anticipates and fulfills your every need before you even realize they're there.
Wasting no time in getting their man elected "Best Act Ever," the large and mostly anonymous under-culture of Rick Astley fans has already deployed a device to defraud the voting on MTV Europe's website.
The "RickVoter" is a very basic utility that simply navigates to MTV's voting page and votes for Astley...over and over and over.
MTV most likely didn't bother to build a big security wall to defend against this kind of ballot stuffing, but it seems clear that having left the contest open to being tinkered with, they essentially guaranteed a win for Astley.
Why do I say this? Consider the following anecdote. I loaded the RickVoter to test it out, curious if it actually did what it said it would. But after looking at it for a couple of minutes, I got distracted by a few phone calls and e-mails. By the time I got back to my experiment a half-hour later, I saw that it had been busily voting the entire time, and I had registered my support for Astley 961 votes. Er, my bad?
I would beg for MTV's forgiveness for contributing to the fixing of this election, but there's no real point. If even a few dozen people have left the RickVoter on all night long, then Astley no doubt has hundreds of thousands, or millions, of votes, and 961 is barely a drop in the pond.
The question now is whether MTV will consider the results valid or if they'll throw them out because of the irregularities here. One could easily argue that they invited this kind of mischief by putting Astley on the ballot in the first place and that pleading ignorance to the perils of malwebolence should not be a defense in this case. But I still think that if they're smart they'll just declare Astley the winner, get him on the show, and take a shower in the ratings windfall that would follow.
ADDED: From Digg commenter Nat3r: "i had about 100 tabs of bestactever.com open when this first happened,
with 5 votes every two second... meaning every two seconds i would vote
500 times...i left it on for 17 hours." You do the math...
HBOlab's "Hooking Up," the college campus comedy featuring a raft of YouTube stars, including sXe Phil DeFranco and Jessica Rose of lonelygirl15 fame, debuted Thursday (I wrote a preview here). On its second day on YouTube, it's gotten more than 450,000 views. It also has its own site with the predictable "extras" such as video blogs from the characters.
NewTeeVee has been tracking the evolving consensus on what makes an Internet video a hit, and the range of opinion is between 100,000 and a million views in a video's first week. So "Hooking Up" has a pretty strong start at least.
The plot of the first episode hinges on an IM exchange between Nick (sXe Phil) and Meg (JRose). It's basically an age-old Venus-and-Mars set-up, with Facebook and IMing to bring it into the modern era. Meg thinks that Nick is asking her out, and she is all discombobulated because she's had a crush on him all semester; he just wants to know the reading for "Perspectives" class. (But he does think she's "hot." In fact, that's why he picked her to IM to find out the reading, so it's a little confusing that he refuses to IM flirt.)
That's a surprisingly familiar TV sitcom plot for a show with such free-form Web DNA. That and the show's fairly standard comedy pacing make it seem "professional," or at least conventional, like a shrunk-down episode of "Friends." There's also a radio-announcerish voice-over intro -- "The very first episode of 'Hooking Up' starts now!" -- that sounds right off a TV network, or an SNL parody of one. (Can the "very special" episode be far behind?) But the actors' timing is slightly off occasionally, and the set kind of looks like a real, semi-skanky college dorm, so the overall effect is jaggedy and unpretentious. In the end, there's something cute and almost winning about it, I think. Everyone seems to be having a good time. Still, Web Scout is now officially of the opinion that three-minute videos are never going to rock anyone's world.
Rose has some comedy chops, it turns out. She's pretty, of course, but also slightly unusual-looking, with her wide-set eyes and her tiny teeth. Even in what is basically the cliched college-girl mode of this show, she conveys an earthy realness. She's not a grasping, self-satisfied, overgroomed "Hills" clone like so many other girls who want our attention online these days.
DeFranco, whom in his "sXe Phil" YouTube career we've rarely seen more than five feet from his webcam, is revealed in "Hooking Up" as not cut from the usual young-TV-heartthrob cloth. It's more like he's cut from a pair of XL sweat pants. Which is fine, even refreshing, but it does make you wonder why Kevin Wu (KevJumba), who is just as popular as DeFranco on YouTube and is a nice-looking dude, has to play the tired role of the Asian friend who helps the white guy get the chicks.
A final thing: The comments on YouTube so far for "Hooking Up" -- there are more than a thousand at this point -- are full of what seems like more nasty nastiness than the usual video gets. The haters are out in force. It may be that by casting YouTube stars in this structured, scripted, ultimately conventional format, HBOlab opened them up for some extra-heavy hating. People who like the raucous, direct, outsider buffet of YouTube are not necessarily going to applaud their stars for getting all cleaned up for a sit-down dinner with the parents. Even if it's on the Web.
This corpse is rumored to have been in the possession of the Russians for two years. (Image via EnglishRussian.com)
New information is surfacing that the famed "Montauk Monster," the dangerous, weird-looking and still-unidentified creature that washed ashore in the Hamptons this summer, may be only the latest in a longer line of weird unidentified monsters washing ashore around the globe.
"According to the bones and teeth -- it is not a fish," wrote the fellow who posted the photos. "According to its skeleton -- it’s not a crocodile or alligator. It has a skin with hair or fur."
Well, where is the specimen, then, so the rest of us, including maybe some scientists, can look at it?
"It has been said that it was taken by Russian special services for in-depth studies."
Drat! Those Russian special services guys have had this thing for over two years, and no results? Is this creature really that super-secret? When will we know the real story of this Moscow Monster*, and is there any connection to the Montauk Monster, either evolutionary or familial -- or perhaps between the people who made each of them up?
I've contacted the documentarians at EnglishRussia.com and am awaiting a response.
*Moscow is thousands of miles away from Sakhalin but it seems possible that the monster could have migrated from there, like to die or something.
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
Wasting no time in getting their man elected "
