4Chan

Kenley is back on The 404 today to announce the winner of our Nerd of the Year contest, and Stupid Andy is the victor!

Stupid Andy is a closet geek, so even though you might mistake him for a regular guy, he's well versed in audio/visual languages which I think puts him in the category of nerd, according to this article comparing the two.

Time has announced its Person of the Year for 2010, and although Justin Bieber, the Chilean miners, and the Tea Party all came close, Mark Zuckerberg clinched the title of the person who Time describes as "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

With Zuckerberg in the cockpit, Facebook has changed the way we communicate and consume news, but we have to question whether the release of "The Social Network" had anything to do with the nomination.

Plenty of Gawker accounts were compromised as a result of last weekend's Gnosis breach, and we learn on today's show that even some of our fellow CNET colleagues were affected by the hack! 

We also take a look at a graph of the top 50 Gawker Media passwords that are now posted online for public consumption. Clearly people just don't care about their commenting passwords on the site, because the first 10 are all lazy keyboard strokes  like "123456," "abc123," and "qwerty." On the stranger side, "monkey," "consumer," "superman," and just the number "0" were all identified as popular passwords.

In the face of disaster, the smart thing to do is adapt and move on, so check out this Lifehacker guide to reassessing your online security measures. The page suggests using a free password manager called LastPass that generates complex passwords for you, stores them on a network, and even audits them to make sure they're not easy to guess.

Narcs around the world have been waiting for a Big Brother app for the iPhone, and now it's here. It's called the PatriotApp, and it deputizes any iPhone user (pending a 99-cent fee) with the ability to report a number of crimes directly to the appropriate governmental agency. It links your iPhone to organizations like the FBI, the EPA, and the CDC so you can report things like government waste, environmental crimes, white-collar crimes, and public health concerns on the fly, but it just seems like a professional tool to snitch on your neighbor. Finally, you can also use the app to post your claims to Twitter and Facebook, so all your friends can be aware of your citizen's arrests.

Remember Daniel, our friend who visited The 404 studio last March? He left us this video voice mail telling us about the current fashion trends blanketing his middle school. Congratulations on your graduation, buddy--be sure to tell all your new high school friends about The 404!

This weekend's breach of Gawker has readers of the blogging empire's Web sites scrambling to see if their e-mail addresses have been publicly exposed, but even people who don't use the site can learn lessons from what happened.

What happened? The Web site and back-end database of Gawker was published on the Pirate Bay Bit Torrent site on Sunday. It included Gawker source code, information about a possible site redesign, instant messages between employees, and about 1.3 million user account passwords, usernames, and e-mail addresses. While they were encrypted using DES (Data Encryption Standard), simple passwords … Read more

The Wikileaks war is escalating and it's threatening to go all "War Games" on us. 4Chan's forces, the Anonymous group, are DDoS-ing the heck out of sites like PayPayl, MasterCard, and anyone who bows to "government pressure." Meanwhile, secret forces of, uh, governments, are DDoS-ing Anonymous right back. And who's caught in the middle? The poor, innocent routers. Also, SpaceX successfully takes off, and scientists tee off on NASA's arsenic microbe. Ouch. --Molly

The FBI has launched an investigation into an online protest that allegedly took down numerous Web sites belonging to antipiracy and entertainment groups, as well as the U.S. Copyright Office, a source with knowledge of the probe told CNET today.

Over the past two months, a group calling itself "Anonymous," with links to the 4chan Web forum and image board, has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against Web sites operated by the Motion Picture Association of America, The Recording Industry Association (RIAA), Hustler magazine, rocker Gene Simmons, The British Phonographic Industry, and other similar groups in France, … Read more

If you've ever allowed yourself to be subjected to Kiss songs, you'll know that they are jolly, somewhat empty-headed, and entirely innocent.

If you've ever allowed yourself to be subjected to a reality show called "Gene Simmons' Family Jewels," you'll know that the Kiss frontman is a man with a lovely family, experience of plastic surgery, and opinions that suggest a slight smattering of oldy-worldy self-righteousness.

How entirely stunning, then, that this wealthy aging, platform-booted man seems to have encountered a little difficulty with those who are able to put the digital boot in … Read more

The Web probably looks a lot less anonymous and private to the thousands of people whose identities were posted to the Internet this weekend alongside the names of the pornographic films they are accused of downloading.

ACS: Law, a law firm based in Great Britain that tracks down alleged illegal file sharers for the porn industry, saw its database compromised over the weekend caused by members of the Internet forum 4chan. In addition to private e-mails and financial data belonging to the law firm, the names of people whom ACS: Law has accused of downloading unauthorized copies of porn movies … Read more

Members of image board and Internet forum 4chan over the weekend launched a series of DDoS attacks against Web sites for the two biggest media trade groups.

Accused in the past of drumming up raids against Twitter, YouTube, and other popular sites, users at 4chan urged fellow members to carry out DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) late last week, taking both offline on Saturday.

The actions by 4chan users were launched in retaliation against similar DDoS attacks aimed at The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing … Read more

CNET's own laptop editor Scott Stein fills in for Jeff today in yet another completely random episode of The 404 Podcast! Today's topics tackle the ongoing Reddit vs. 4Chan vs. Digg hierarchy, the latest Google Instant music video trend, the next evolution of graphing calculators, and a very sultry (and minutely disturbing) reading from the sticky pages of Playboy Magazine courtesy of Houston's independent nonprofit organization Taping for the Blind.

We're excited to welcome Scott back into podcast studio, so much so that we force him to wear the infamous mullet wig for the entire episode. The wig is sort of appropriate for the first story of the day about a nonprofit radio station for the blind in Houston that records complete readings from Playboy Magazine and includes the articles, jokes, cartoons, letters, and--yes--accurate descriptions of the centerfolds.

To help us get a better idea of what that would sound like, Scott reads a few excerpts from the broadcast, and although it doesn't sound quite as sultry as when Suzi Hanks, the host of the show, does it, it certainly helps that he's wearing a wig...and sharing a mic with me...*disclaimer* CNET and The 404 are not responsible for any gag reflexes triggered from listening to this segment.

Google Instant, which arrived this week, can predict your search query and could possibly shave two or three seconds off your search time. Big deal, right? Well, if that doesn't impress you, maybe this music video will.

Google started the trend with a clever video advertisement for the service featuring Bob Dylan, and Whirled Creative jumped in next with an "Instant Elements" video remix, but our favorite is Urlesque's take on Billy Joel's hit, "We Didn't Start the Fire." Enjoy!

Stick around after the break as we spend way too much time gabbing about the latest calculator technologies, a few voicemails warn us about bashing the Zune, and we do a mini review of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's latest film, "The Social Network."

Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend everyone!

If you're reading this, there's a pretty good chance you've visited I Can Has Cheezburger, the Internet's foremost repository of LOLCats.

Then again, you might not even know what a LOLCat is. If so, here's a brief primer: At its simplest, it's a picture of a cat accompanied by a silly, misspelled caption. There might also--or instead--be a walrus and some variation of the phrase "mah bucket."

A few years ago, LOLCats began bouncing around the Internet and quickly became one of the fastest-growing online memes. In the earliest days, they might … Read more