Posted 05/21/09 at 03:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly

Jonas Brothers fans and those looking for marblecake recipes on YouTube may get more than they bargained for today. That's because 4chan and eBaum's World have teamed up for "Operation Porn Day," which involves uploading explicit video clips to YouTube using innocuous tags.

Many of the clips have already been removed, but according to Arstechnica, it was able to find others that haven't yet been caught (still reading?). In addition to the false tags, a lot of the clips contain 20 to 30 seconds of seemingly legitimately content, such as a newscast, before getting down and dirty.

"It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site," Google spokesperson Scott Rubin said. "Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable."

In other words, you may want to keep your kids and nephews occupied with something other than YouTube for the time being.

Read More

Posted 04/16/09 at 03:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly

It's all fun and games until the prank backfires, spreads like wildfire thanks to the advent of social media, and ends with felony charges and a PR mess to clean up. Or at least that's how it went down for Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, a pair of Domino's Pizza employees who filmed a prank in the restaurant's kitchen and posted it online.

The pranksters will be hard pressed to find any sympathy for the fallout, as their antics included filming an employee "putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violating other health-code standards while a fellow employee provided narration," according to a report by The New York Times.

In just a matter of days, the video received over a million views on YouTube and was spreading nearly as fast via Twitter. After being identified, Hammonds and Setzer, who maintain that they never actually delivered the sandwiches, have been charged with delivering prohibited foods.

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea," said a Domino's spokesman, Tim McIntyre. "Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair." 

McIntyre also said the company is also preparing a civil lawsuit.

Read More

Posted 07/13/08 at 01:54:13 AM by Norman Chan

Let's get the obvious out the way: yes, I bought the new iPhone 3G. Max PC's ex-podcast producer Jeremy Williams and I waited outside the Stonestown Galleria mall in San Francisco for three hours this afternoon to get ahold of Steve Job's latest shiny gadget. Both of us were existing iPhone owners and have no shame about it.

The wait was about three hours long, and we had to do most of the waiting outside the mall to prevent clogging up foot traffic in front of the Apple store. Every half an hour, 10 to 15 people would be led inside to stand in another line before finally making it inside the store to make their purchase. Maybe it was because I was wearing an ironed buttoned-down shirt and carrying a laptop, but many people passing by stopped to ask me what the line was for. More than a few of them had no idea that a new iPhone had been released when I told them, which was pretty shocking for me to hear. Even my tech-phobic parents who couldn't send email if their lives depended on it knew about the iPhone; I genuinely could not imagine being so out of the tech-news loop. Then I decided to just start lying.

Read More

Posted 03/17/08 at 12:49:52 PM by Will Smith

Gather round for a quick lesson in full pranking glory--perfect for use against co-workers, friends, enemies, and everyone else short of Homeland Security. Click the link for a full how-to for this gag!

Read More