Just when you think you’ve heard it all, another bizarrely specific world record sneaks up behind you, slaps you across the face 400 times with a wet fish, and breaks a world record doing it. Pat Vaillancourt of Quebec currently holds the world record for having the most URLs tattooed on his body. He’s currently at over 10,000, but he shows no signs of stopping and wants to get to at least 100,000 before he quits. Why’s he doing this? To be remembered as a world record holder, oh and to help people.

A couple of months ago, we Geekolinked a thread on reddit asking if one could destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if one traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion. The thread was (and still is) very fun, and it turns out, it was fun enough for Warner Bros. to preemptively buy the pitch, Rome, Sweet Rome. The movie will follow marines as they are transported into the past, where they encounter one of the world’s most legendary villains, which in turn causes them to disrupt history. In order to return home, they have to set things right and put history back the way it was.

Adam Kolbrenner of Madhouse Entertainment caught James Erwin’s, the writer of Rome, Sweet Rome, well-thought out responses on the reddit thread, and contacted him to begin working on the concept. When the project was in shape, Kolbrenner brought it to executive Chris Gary, who encouraged Warner Bros. to pick it up, and pick it up they did.

Techdirt is reporting that “reports are coming out” claiming that the Pakistani government has told all ISPs in the country to prevent any user from using technology that would allow them to privately browse the Internet. Goodbye anonymity. The source of the story, an employee at an Islamabad-based ISP, says the Pakistani government is claiming the measure is only intended to prevent militants from using a secure connection to communicate with each other. However, this could be achieved by preventing all Pakistani Internet users from using VPNs, rather than banning all forms of encryption, a seemingly simple measure that was not outlined in the directive to Pakistani ISPs.

As we all know, Bitcoin is basically fake money that people can automatically generate by leaving a computer on. Sure, to make significant progress, one would need a fairly powerful rig, but Bitcoins are still able to be generated out of nothing — mined by forcing the computer to complete complex mathematical problems in order to prevent the sudden influx of billions of Bitcoins. The more computational power directed toward solving the mathematical problems, the quicker Bitcoins can be generated. Not everyone can afford to buy a bunch of computers and set them up to mine Bitcoins, so taking after spam email botnets, Bitcoin miners have attempted to compromise other people’s computers in order to gain their computational power to put toward Bitcoin mining. Instead of some low-key controller directing the compromised computers behind the scenes, F-Secure found one Bitcoin botnet being controlled over Twitter.

LulzSec and Anonymous have again teamed up and this time they are urging a boycott of PayPal. OpPayPal was announced yesterday and the weapon of choice was not, oddly enough, DDOS attacks, but a comparatively gentle boycott. As per usual, the obligatory Pastebin announcement cited motivations for the operation, which include the arrest of Anonymous and LulzSec affiliates across the globe and PayPal’s continuing refusal to be associated with WikiLeaks.

Anonymous is currently claiming to have been responsible for the closure of some 35,000 PayPal accounts and a reported 1 billion dollar drop in stock value, but whether this is cause and effect or just a lucky coincidence has yet to be determined. Anonymous definitely has a vested interest in spinning their facts.

The LulzBoat may have sailed off into the sunset, but LulzSec weren’t the only ones who knew how to make waves. Anonymous and the People’s Liberation Front launched HackerLeaks earlier this week in a bid to make hacked information more widely accessible. The site is apparently the brainchild of several PLF members and was concieved during “Operation Orlando”, an attack against the city of Orlando after the repeated arrest of members of the group “Food Not Bombs.” This new site which is admittedly modeled after WikiLeaks, provides hackers with a centralized site with which they can publicize their hacked data.

In the site’s own words

In both security as well as overall strategy, HackerLeaks is closely modeled on WikiLeaks. Our firstpriority is to provide a safe, secure – and anonymous way for hackers to disclose sensitive information.
Our team of analysts first carefully screens each submission for any possible trace of the senders
identity. Our second commitment is to ensure that each and every leak receives the maximum exposure
possible in order to achieve the most profound political impact for the risks taken by those submitting
material. To that end, we work with media outlets all over the world.

The infamous Nyan cat video has disappeared from YouTube, much like a certain video about a certain day of the week. The plot has thickened in this case, however. Although the video’s page explains that the video has been removed due to a copyright claim by creator PRGuitarMan, he insists that he requested no such action and is currently in touch with YouTube to try and get the video reinstated. His website is currently serving as a liveblog of sorts as he tries to correct the situation.

While it may not be of dire importance that the original Nyan cat video is on YouTube at this very second (it’s not like there aren’t any reasonable substitutes), this situation brings to light the way in which YouTube deals copyright infringement accusations. That is to say, with a heavy bias towards the accuser. This bias raises some serious questions as to how issues like this will be handled in the future in order to prevent copyright removal requests from potentially being used as weapons towards controversial videos, considering that proving you’re the owner gets a lot harder when trying to reinstate a video.

Prguitarman states on his website:

Funny how someone can easily make a complaint but to actually prove it the owner has to jump through all of these hoops. FUN TIMES! But seriously, there is a lot of work involved here and it’s pretty stressful.

UPDATE: It’s back!

(Prguitarman via The Daily What)

Some of the United States’ top Internet service providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, are set to adopt a new, harsher strategy to handle software piracy. The final agreement between the ISPs and media and entertainment outlets has yet to be signed, but the proposal, which is expected to be reached sometime next month, would have the ISPs adopt a “graduated response,” which is fancy talk for punishments that become harsher as infringers are caught repeating the offense.

The plan outlines various punishments from which the ISPs can choose, including throttling bandwidth speed or limiting web access — something this blogger remembers being enacted on some of his peers around his dorm back in college. Almost hilariously, an example given regarding limiting an infringer’s web access would have the ISP limit said access in such a way where the infinger could only access the top 200 websites until the infringer proves he or she stopped with the piracy. Another awful-sounding punishment would require the infringer to participate in a program that educates them on why piracy and copyright infringement is bad, similar to the course taken when nailed with a traffic ticket. Luckily for both ISPs trying to run a business and copyright infingers who’d like to keep their service, the proposal does not currently require the ISPs to kick infringers off their service.

If implemented, the proposal could have a fairly drastic effect on the piracy community, but as anyone who has been following software piracy over the years knows, pirates tend to be some of the cleverest, quickest-acting people on the Internet, and one can only assume they would eventually find a clever way around ISP monitoring. For more detail on the proposal, check out CNET’s coverage.

(via CNET)

No reward necessary, the Lulz are enough. When cybersecurity consulting firm Black & Berg issued a challenge to hackers to change the picture on their website for a $10K reward and a position working with senior advisor Joe Black, LulzSec was more than happy to oblige. But LulzSec has said they won’t be collecting the reward, leaving the message “Done, that was easy. Keep your money. We do it for the Lulz.” on the Black & Berg homepage.

Joe Black needn’t worry about his reputation in light of the hack, as he is in good company with other LulzSec victims. The group also claims responsibility for hacks of PBS, Fox, a UK ATM, the television show X-Factor‘s contestant database, and InfraGuard (notable for its affiliation with the FBI) in addition to its highly publicized hack of Sony.

Lady Gaga has reached a Twitter milestone: The first user to obtain ten million followers. The milestone was reached near midnight on May 15, when she thanked her fans by saying “we did it!” The milestone says as much about Twitter as it does about Lady Gaga, considering only two years ago, Twitter had its first user to reach one million followers, Ashton Kutcher. The jump from the one million mark to the ten million mark in only two years certainly shows the impact and reach and Twitter.