Today, June 15th, marks the first of what may well become an annual tradition of Cheer Up Keanu Days. What began as a thread on 4chan’s /tv/ board defending Keanu Reeves from all the easy “Whoa” jokes and an epic thread on Reddit anchored around a picture of a forlorn-looking Keanu Reeves sitting on a bench have become that rarest and specialest of things that can happen on the Internet: A genuine celebration of human kindness and decency.

There’s a lot of anger and snark on the internet (I should know, I write some of it), so it was great news that this weekend gave us an internet story that just makes you smile. That story is the tale of Zach Anner, a young man with cerebral palsy, who became the internet’s latest celebrity when he entered Oprah Winfrey’s contest to give a regular person their own TV show. Anner’s audition video was hilarious and his overall good nature won over the internet and soon a few well-placed links had landed him more than two and a half million votes!

When it comes to online gathering places for savvy young clotheshorses, the major players are fairly well-known. Styleforum.net, Ask Andy, 4chan.org…

Wait a minute…4chan? Cesspool of all that is wrong with the internet? Violator of Time‘s Person of the Year polls and Sarah Palin’s email account? Birthplace of LOLcats and Rickrolling?

This post originally appeared at our sister site Styleite.

A cursory examination reveals that 4chan does in fact have a fashion forum, and it’s called /fa/! Its members refer to each other as /fa/scists (oh, dear) and really like online retailers like Yoox and Indochino. Their primary pastime? Conducting ruthless holy wars over everything from desert boots to keffiyehs.

(The forum can be found here; it is decidedly Not Safe for Work.)

Let’s run through the general types of discussion that happen on this hidden internet fashion kingdom, with examples!

The Internet has officially decided that June 15th is Keanu Reeves Day. Why?

It seem like he’s just a really cool dude who’s had some bad breaks. Even 4Chan, the well oiled pistons of the Internet Hate Machine, offers this in his defense. And so, The Internet would like to give back to the movie star who has a healthy history of charitable donation, by dedicating a day in his honor.

But where is the Facebook Group, you ask? Why, right here.

Christopher Poole, a.k.a. moot, stumbled upon a Japanese forum and subsequently launched an Internet empire. So large and interesting an empire, in fact, that he was invited to speak at TED. The talk covers a surprisingly broad subject matter in such a short time. From the origins of the site to its social impact, he covers nearly everything about the what, where, why, and when, and distinct lack of a who behind his chaotic forum.

In the brief Q&A after his talk, Poole is pressed to defend the supreme message of anonymity he advocates, and he does a great job. Other excerpts from the video include parental response, former music stars jumping out of floats, why his site’s viewers are better than CSI, marble cake, and the game.

Yesterday, when Wikileaks released their video showing the military accidentally killing 12 civilians in Iraq, there were two things that were clear: a) People would somehow turn it into a right vs. left debate within minutes, and b) Other people would turn the tragedy into off-color humor shortly thereafter. Sure enough, the Internet didn’t disappoint on either front.

The Wikileaks video is just the latest in a continuing cycle: In the past few years, every single horrible event has been cause for near-instantaneous lampooning on the web. Users take the latest terrible image that’s haunting the national psyche, photoshop something ridiculous in, and post it online for the hundreds of angry comments they so crave.

4chan admin, evil genius and TEDTalk deliverer moot shakes hands with FourSquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. Both are festooned with the coveted Gold Badges.

(via Geekosystem roving correspondent and SXSW Interactive presenter Rachel Sklar.)

Trebek was just trollin’. Video after the jump:

Read on...

Cryptome, a whistleblower site that regularly leaks sensitive documents from governments and corporations, is in hot water again: this time, for publishing Microsoft’s “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” a comprehensive, 22-page guide running down the surveillance services Microsoft will perform for law enforcement agencies on its various online platforms, which includes detailed instructions for IP address extraction. You can find the guide here (warning: PDF). not anymore.

Microsoft has demanded that Cryptome take down the guide — on the grounds that it constitutes a “copyrighted [work] published by Microsoft.” Yesterday, at 5pm, Cryptome editor John Young received a notice from his site’s host, Network Solutions, bearing a stiff ultimatum: citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Network Solutions told him that unless he takes the “copyrighted material” down, they will “disable [his] website” on Thursday, February 25, 2010.

So far, Young refuses to budge.

Well, this was inevitable. The abysmal tedium of Mass Effect 2‘s mining segments has been well-known since initial reviews of the game came out; however, the minigame has now inspired minor nerdcore sensation Kabuto the Python (above) to pen a rap about his frustration with BioWare’s design choices.

Sample lyrics: “I used to rock microphones, rhymin’ in the stadium/These days I launch probes, mining for palladium/Slouched at my console crying from the tedium/I contemplate relations with the slimiest of aliens.”

Video below: technically NSFW, but if your boss doesn’t care about your listening to tracks about Mass Effect at work, we don’t think the obscenities per se are going to be an issue.