Updated at 4:40 p.m. PDT with Google comment.
YouTube was busy deleting porn videos on Wednesday after users of forums at a rival site and an imageboard site declared a "Porn Day" campaign against the popular video service.
The forums at video site eBaum's World and 4chan organized the mass porn "carpet bombing" on YouTube, according to Ars Technica.
YouTube has been removing the videos as fast as it can, but even videos that are removed are still showing up in search results with explicit images in the thumbnails, the report said.
It could take a couple of days for all the explicit results to be removed from the search results, Google spokesman Scott Rubin told Ars Technica.
In a phone interview with CNET News late on Wednesday, Rubin said that in addition to the porn videos were removed as soon as community members alert YouTube to them, certain channels where the posters were bragging about the campaign and listing the videos were being disabled.
"This group of pranksters thought it would be funny to load a bunch of porn to YouTube," he said. "This is an unfortunate, and I think poorly directed, prank. I think our systems are doing really well at removing content that violates the guidelines."
(Credit:
Topherchris.com)
Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."
It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.
It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."
Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).
This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. took his place.
The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.
One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.
It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.
UPDATE: It's not totally clear who's actually responsible for this attack. We've been getting a handful of e-mails indicating that it may have been a non-4chan group called Myg0t that was using the 4chan forums to organize, and another e-mail claimed credit on behalf of another forum community, Ebaumsworld. Indeed, screenshots show that one of the hacker messages read, "We are from Ebaumsworld. We are hackers on steroids."
Honestly? The world may never know.
This post was updated at 2:13 p.m. PT.
Sarah Palin
(Credit: Alaska governor's office)A grand jury in Chattanooga, Tenn., investigating who hacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail ended its meeting on Tuesday without indicting a Tennessee lawmaker's son.
Speculation on the Internet has centered on 20-year-old David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student.
On the Internet forum 4Chan.org, where the e-mail break-in was first announced, posts attributed to someone named "Rubico" more or less described how the Yahoo account had been compromised using the password recovery feature. The e-mail address used for Rubico has been linked to Kernell.
Kernell's father, Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernel, further fueled speculation last week when he confirmed his son was the subject of the investigation. On Saturday, investigators searched David Kernell's campus apartment.
Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney told the
There are mixed reports on Friday whether or not the son of a Tennessee state representative has been contacted by the FBI or Secret Service in connection with Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo Mail account.
The father, Democratic Rep. Mike Kernell has told Knoxville News Sentinel and The Tennessean that despite a lot of online chatter, no formal contact has been made.
The person who gained access to Palin's e-mail account did so by guessing details of her life, then changed the e-mail password to "popcorn."
Using the online nickname Rubico, someone posted details of the hack to a forum on the 4Chan.org Web site starting on Tuesday. Password-protected zip files containing the contents of the now-deleted e-mail account once belonging to the Republican vice-presidential candidate have also been posted to the forum.
Subsequent posts by Rubico to the /b/ board over the last few days have provided additional insight into how the hack was carried out, although many of the posts have now been deleted.
Details describing how someone hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account emerged on Thursday, and it appears to have been done with little more than social engineering, the process of acquiring personal information through social manipulation.
Meanwhile, the Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that a 20-year-old University of Tennessee student has been contacted in connection to the federal investigation of the break-in. Further details are not known.
Since Tuesday, anonymous posters using a forum on the 4Chan.org Web site have been circulating password-protected zip files containing the contents of the now-deleted e-mail account once belonging to the Republican vice presidential candidate. Various posts to the /b/ board have also provided insight into how the hack was carried out.
Like most Web account services, Yahoo Mail provides an option to reset or recover one's user name and password. What is unclear is how the account recovery was rerouted from the alternative e-mail address chosen by Palin to a secondary e-mail address.
When Yahoo Mail prompted for Palin's birthday, one poster said it took only 15 seconds on Wikipedia to answer that question. When it prompted for ZIP code, Wasilla, Ala., has only two ZIP Codes. As for Palin's personal security question "Where did you meet your spouse?" that did slow the process down. The poster claimed it took several tries but eventually hit upon the correct answer: Wasilla High.
Web mail accounts are not alone in using online security questions. In May Axiom, a Little Rock, Ark.-based data warehouse company, announced it was introducing a new biographical authentication service that asks online banking and e-commerce site users random questions based on their personal lives such as "How many fireplaces are in your current residence?" The answer can be obtained from any real estate Web site.
4Chan's "random" /b/ board is no stranger to controversy. In January, members waged an online media war against the Church of Scientology. Prior to that, the site popularized Lolcats, pictures of kittens with cute captions, and rickrolling, linking to videos of Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up".
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