There’s a new Facebook exploit out there that showed up a few days ago, but is only just now reaching critical mass. What does it do? Not much, just post gore and pornography to the infected user’s feed, causing them to unwittingly share it with all their friends, their acquaintances, a number of people they’ve probably never met, and sometimes even Grandma. The exploit has been snowballing over the past few days, affecting more and more users directly by forcing them to post the material, and even more indirectly, those who just have the pleasure of stumbling across them.

Irish airline Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is looking to make flying with his company just a little more enjoyable. To that end, he’s looking to provide a smartphone and tablet app for passengers that would grant them access to entertainment options, including some controversial additions like video games and gambling. Also porn. Did we mention the porn? He wants to charge passengers for watching pornography on his planes.

Of course, there are some major obstacles.

Last night, the YouTube account of Sesame Street got hacked, having all of its regular videos deleted and replaced with hardcore porn videos. YouTube was quick to react and shut down the channel in under half an hour, making the Internet once again safe for young, innocent eyes. Whoever the hacker was changed the name of the YouTube account to “MrEdXwx,” a YouTube user who claims innocence in the fiasco, in that he was framed by the actual hacker. MrEdXwx posted a video (seen after the break) to his YouTube channel stating that he did not hack Sesame Street, and that he works hard to make “quality gameplay videos” and he respects the YouTube community guidelines.

The above picture is a screenshot taken of the hacked page, sporting a banner that says “I’ts where porn lives,” with the apostrophe out of place with no indicator as to whether or not that was intentional. As of Sunday, the channel had 140,000 subscribers when the videos were replaced with hardcore porn; one video clip being from “First Anal Quest,” a website with a theme one can easily guess from the name. As of this time, no one has stepped forward and claimed responsibility of the hack, and Sesame Street’s YouTube channel is still currently unavailable, so users will have to get their wholesome puppetry or hardcore anal porn clips elsewhere.

Four major UK Internet Service Providers are to start blocking pornography as a part of David Cameron’s attempts to crack down on pervasive and easily accessible adult content. When the plans take effect, new users of BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin will be presented with the option of parental controls which they will have to actively accept or decline.

Prior to all this, the UK government approached Reg Baily, chief executive of the Christian charity group the Mothers’ Union, about conducting a review concerning the “commercialisation and sexualisation of children,” along side the Department of Education. The ISP pornography blocking iniative is thought to be only one of many upcoming policies that aim to make sexualized content increasingly difficult for children to be exposed to.

An Indonesian politician who was known for his role in passing a stringent antipornography law resigned yesterday after he was photographed watching porn on his computer during a parliamentary debate last Friday. The politician, who goes by the single name Arifinto, is a member of Parliament with the conservative and Islamist Prosperous Justice Party.

Apparently, Arifinto viewed the pornography “for several minutes as fellow legislators debated plans to build a new parliament building.”

In a speech to his constituents, the politician stated, “I am a human. I err like anyone else. I said this to the people and to the party. They understood.” He says that he will return to his previous business as a printer.

Ironically, the Jakarta Globe says that he could potentially be charged under the very law he helped enact: “‘If you are unaware that a particular Web site contains pornography, then it is permissible. But if there is enough evidence that [Arifinto] was browsing the Internet, intentionally accessing pornographic sites, then it is punishable,’ [a legal analyst] said.”

(Belfast Telegraph via The Daily What)

Our long, national nightmare is over! Two years ago, during Super Bowl XLIII, the Arizona Cardinals took the lead with a fourth-quarter touchdown by Larry Fitzgerald. And during that touchdown, a 30-second clip of porn appeared on the screen alongside Mr. Fitzgerald. The Pittsburgh Steelers ended up winning that game, but were most likely not distracted by the porn since only Tucson low-definition cable subscribers saw the clip. And it only took two years to find out who was responsible! Um, really?

See, we were going to talk about this Wired article about conceptual artist Jonathon Keats getting some chunks of lunar and martian rock, smashing them up with a hammer and growing cactus and potatoes in them, because it contains all of the following language:

Like all astronauts, these potatoes and cacti are test pilots. And if you think of the greatest test pilots in history, from Chuck Yeager to Neil Armstrong, you find that they’re highly intelligent and also extremely dumb: Intelligent enough to navigate the unknown, and dumb enough to let themselves be launched in the first place. Plants also have these essential traits: The smarts to adapt to novel conditions and the stupidity not to run away…

Few people, in my experience, have ever revered a potato, let alone envied one. We tend to eat them, and of course the Irish cursed them during the Great Famine. But now here’s the chance for children to look up to potatoes as heroic, just as John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin were once role models…

Of course by colonialist standards, potatoes will have territorial claim to Mars since they’ve beat Homo sapiens, and what’s most hospitable to them may be to inhabit it without us around.

So, yeah, we were going to do a whole post just on that. But then we went to Jonathon Keats’ Wikipedia page, and got lost for fifteen minutes. And so, without further ado, we present a list of Things That Jonathon Keats Has Done.

Porn sites will soon be able to make themselves even more identifiable with the convenient suffix “.xxx” at the end of their URLs. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the behemoth organization that basically serves as any and all federal oversight over the grand Internet, is, in its infinite wisdom, set to allow the .xxx suffix.

Results from an in depth study of the security of free porn websites were released at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security,which was held at Harvard.

The practices used by free porn websites to drive traffic (their only commodity) “have almost inadvertently created a whole ecosystem that’s easy to abuse for cyber crime on a large scale,” according the leader of the study, Dr. Gilbert Wondracek of the International Secure System Lab.

I know, I know, but listen, we all can’t be academics.

Online MBA has a helpful infographic about what is perhaps the Internet’s greatest contribution to civilization: making it incredibly easy to find porn. No longer will young people be shoving magazines under mattresses, and that’s good, because I’m sure we’re all going to be sleeping in zerograv stasis pods any day now.

Some of the stats on it surprised us, nevertheless. For example, only 12% of the internet and 8% of all e-mail is porn. We would have guessed a bit higher.

See the whole thing below: