4chan’s /b/ is seeking justice against a well-off Texas teenager who was spared jail time after causing a car accident that left four people dead and one paralyzed.

Sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch killed a youth pastor, a teenage girl, her mother, and another woman in a crash June 15. He had a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of .24, three times the legal limit. But he got off because, well, he’s rich.

Couch was driving his father's Ford F-350 pickup 70 mph in a 40 mph zone. According to police, Couch lost control of the truck and hit the car of Breanna Mitchell, 24, which was broken down on the side of the road. Helping Mitchell with her car was Hollie Boyles and her daughter Shelby, 21, and Brian Jennings, the youth pastor; all four were killed. One of the passengers in Couch’s truck, Sergio Molina, “was paralyzed and can communicate only by blinking his eyes.”

During the legal proceedings, Couch’s defense team argued that the teenager was the product of “affluenza,” described as “a state of mind where the teen doesn't like bad behavior with consequences because his parents taught him that wealth buys privilege,” WJLA reported.  

“Couch got whatever he wanted,” Dr. G. Dick Miller said during the proceeding, according to WFAA: 

As an example, Miller said Couch's parents gave no punishment after police ticketed the then-15-year-old when he was found in a parked pickup with a passed-out, undressed, 14-year-old girl. Miller also pointed out that Couch was allowed to drive at age 13. He said the teen was emotionally flat and needed years of therapy.”

On Tuesday, Couch was sentenced to alcohol treatment and 10 years’ probation.  

The verdict set the Internet off in a hate-filled frenzy, particularly on Reddit and 4chan. 

/B/ is harassing him the only way they know how—with pizzas and prank phone calls.

Friday afternoon, /b/ tracked down the home and business information for Couch’s father. They’ve left the following reviews for his company, Cleburne Sheet Metal, on Google in retaliation:

/B/ ordered pizzas (a staple in /b/’s pranking arsenal) to the Couch family home in Fort Worth, Texas.

They’ve also tried prank-calling the Couch home, but they haven’t gotten through.

Some /b/ users were quick to point out how the pizzas and tomfoolery wouldn’t change anything and made no sense. Then again, does the verdict make much sense? Redditors don’t think so.

“When I first saw this case, I was certain that the headline ‘Affluenza’ was something straight out of the Onion,” canadian_arsehole commented. “Nothing that this kid could ever do can reimburse society for what he has taken. There are serial killers who have snuffed out less lives.”

Photo by pinksherbet/Flickr

As the price of Bitcoin continues to fall from its height of $1,000, another, lesser-known cryptocurrency is having its day in the sun.

It’s called Dogecoin, and while its value is nowhere near Bitcoin’s, its popularity is spiking this week thanks to 4chan users.

Over the past three days 4chan’s random imageboard, /b, has been engaging in what can best be described as Dogecoin Christmas. In more than three dozen threads, /b/ users have been giving each other dogecoins—sometimes up to 10,000 coins at once. 

Dogecoin was launched on Dec. 6 as the first open-source, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency based on the “Shibe” or “Doge” meme, a popular photo featuring a dog that shows what he’s thinking in Comic Sans. Doge’s unique use of language has made it 2013’s funnier answer to lolcats. 

There are currently more than 7 billion dogecoins on the market, with a cap of 100 billion that can eventually be mined. The current value is set at $ 0.00025 per dogecoin. In comparison, there are 12 million bitcoins on the market, valued at about $700 per coin.

So if one Dogecoin is worth less than the lint between your toes, why is /b/ going crazy over it? There’s two answers: It’s all for fun and wishful thinking.

4chan users were early adopters of the Doge meme— /b/ raided reddit with Shiba Inu pictures before Doge really became popular—and they’re fans of cryptocurrency in general. A /b/ user just paid for a Lamborghini entirely in Bitcoin.

But with basically no place to spend them, and the conversion rate being roughly 2.8 million dogecoins to 1 bitcoin, gifting dogecoins is just a way to spread good cheer and lulz. Or, as a few /b/ users have suggested, this is a way to establish the currency and market it. 

And from the looks of it, Dogecoin Christmas couldn’t have come at a better time.

Third-party Bitcoin payment companies have allegedly been banned from doing business with the People's Bank of China, according to a report Monday from Business Insider. This news broke around the same time a business owner on Reddit was told by Chase Bank that “any activity involving Bitcoin … is banned from our company.”

Dogecoin has a long way to go before it is taken seriously. It currently sits in 22nd place on a list of all cryptocurrency market capitalizations with $2.1 million. 

If that happens to change, there could be a couple hundred /b/ users dropping dogecoins on Lamborghinis.

Illustration by Jason Reed

Porn star Jenna Jameson spent Friday night on 4chan asking for help in tracking down an ex-assistant who had messed with her social media profiles.

Jameson asked 4chan’s most notorious imageboard /b/, known for its raids, vote rigging, and justice seeking, to find the assistant who had accessed her social media accounts and deleted her photos. (Click to enlarge.)

Despite /b/’s penchant for believing everything they read, the community put the 39-year-old through her paces before they helped her.

/b/ asked her to do the popular “Tits or GTFO (“get the f**k out”)” and the “put shoe on head” memes in order to prove that she was indeed sincere. They also asked her to hold a dark colored shoe in her right hand. Jameson satisfied all requests.

With the verification out of the way, /b/ got down to business.

The quickly tracked down the ex-assistant’s address, last four digits of his social security number, and his credit score.

Jameson was pleased. (To see all the uncensored and very NSFW photos she shared on /b/, visit this Imgur album.)

All of these /b/ interactions were verified by a man named Christian Feliz (@dirtmonst3r), who Jameson has tweeted about frequently.

Shot by my baby @dirtmonst3rpic.twitter.com/cLwE5dV4BT

— Jenna Jameson (@jennajameson) December 13, 2013

Jameson can be seen in this Instagram photo wearing the same plaid shirt as she did Friday night.

Jameson, who appeared in more than 160 adult films, retired from pornography in 2008 to raise her children. Since then, Jameson has had some financial problems which forced her to sell her Hollywood Hills mansion in October. That same month a video of Jameson on "Good Day New York" went viral because, as Gawker put it, she was a “f**king disaster.” Jameson was on the morning show to promote her erotic novel Sugar.  In November, Jameson announced that she was returning to porn to feed her children.

Photos via Imgur

While millions of Americans shiver under duvets, waiting for the polar vortex to pass over, all 4chan users can talk about are bikinis.

4chan’s random imageboard /b/ is behind Operation Bikini Bridge, an attempt to spam social media and news organizations with conflicting messages regarding the fashion phenomenon that occurs when “bikini bottoms are suspended between the two hip bones, causing a space between the bikini and the lower abdomen,” Urban Dictionary states.

Apparently there aren’t enough photos of that on the Internet, because phase 1 of /b/’s plan is to create social media buzz calling the bikini bridge “the next big thing.” To do so, /b/ has asked people to share the following images:

Phase 2 involves circulating propaganda calling the bikini bridge an “unhealthy obsession.”

“After a fair amount of circulation has been accomplished, we circulate the images throughout parts of the Internet known to be biased on the subject of weight (i.e. thin privilege, fat shaming, etc),” one anonymous /b/ user wrote. “This should cause large enough of a stir to snowball into a fairly big subject.”

The operation appears to be a success so far.

Over the past 24 hours, #bikinibridge and #bikinibridge2014 have been tweeted more than 2,400 times. This is in large part to tweets from @blogilates (118,000 followers) and @_laurabozzo (25,000) sharing the hashtag. 

Wow. Apparently the #bikinibridge is the new inner thigh gap of 2014.

— ❤ Cassey Ho ❤ (@blogilates) January 6, 2014

/b/ doubled down on the success of phase 1 with articles on BuzzFeed and CNN’s community pages:

/b/ also created a Tumblr blog called The 4th Wave Feminist Manifesto to help fool people even more.

For phase 2, /b/ created fake Twitter accounts, like @j_betham and @kwatermalone, to goad real people into getting upset.

#bikinibridge It's unhealthy and sick. pic.twitter.com/L8aYyGAjwx

— Little Miss Aqua (@Wolfmotherulez) January 6, 2014

As with other recent operations—fooling people into trashing their Xbox Ones and dunking their iPhones in water—this one doesn’t have unanimous support.

Why the bikini bridge and why now? Considering the term has been around for more than five years, who knows why this is /b/’s latest obsession. Chalk it up to a bunch of bored, horny, chilly teenagers who are well-versed in manipulating social media. Who can blame them for missing summertime?

Photo by m00by/Flickr

4chan should have quit while it was ahead.

/b/, 4chan’s random imageboard and infamous prank hub, began spamming social media with photos of bikini bottoms Monday morning. The community manufactured Twitter accounts, submitted stories to the community pages for BuzzFeed and CNN, and Photoshopped image macros of women in two-piece bathing suits. The goal was to make the bikini bridge “the next big thing”—perhaps the next thigh gap. The next great symbol of thinspo.

A day after launching the hoax, /b/ was knocking back celebratory drinks. The plan was working: The hashtag #bikinibridge had been mentioned in more than 4,000 tweets. The “trend” was mentioned in ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald. Some publishers, like the New York Daily News, appeared to take the bikini bridge seriously, calling it something that “will likely do real damage.”

By weeks end, the bikini bridge was the most-talked-about topic online, edging out Gov. Chris Christie’s bridge scandal.

But like the bunch of overzealous teenagers they are, /b/ wasn’t satisfied. The community, as well as its politics (/pol/) board, piggybacked on bikini bridge with Operation Fourth Wave Feminism, an effort to emphasize “the attractiveness and sexualization of skinny and fit female bodies (and perhaps for added lulz, underweight females, but that may or may not be feasible).” /B/’s wanted to push this agenda so hard that it pitted feminists against one another. (Click to enlarge.)

To help spread their poison, /b/ and /pol/ created a subreddit, Facebook page, and a handful of Tumblr blogs. None of them, including the Twitter hashtag #fourthwavefeminism, have gotten any attention. Because unlike bikini bridge, Operation Fourth Wave Feminism was fatally flawed from the very beginning because it has no grasp of the different waves of feminism.

The first wave of feminism started in the 1950s and focused on the need for basic gender equality. The second wave dealt heavily with female autonomy and sexual politics. Women identifying with the second wave tend to place a lot of emphasis on the female body and deconstructing gender roles. The third wave—the one 4chan thinks it’s fighting—arose out of postcolonial theory, and focused on the idea that in order for feminism to be successful, feminists should advocate for the equality of all marginalized groups regardless of their collective identity. This idea encompasses women of all shapes and sizes, and includes women who are proud of their sexuality.

The idea that /b/ hoped to stir up trouble with Operation Fourth Wave is laughable because third-wave feminists already work to empower thin women as well as everyone else. Not to mention that there’s already plenty of tension between second and third wave feminist thought without dragging the trolls into it. As one /pol/ user put it, the operation’s bogus theoretical framework was its ultimate demise.

Boobs, juvenile pranks, and raids are all 4chan really knows. Feminism is too complicated for a site full of historically ignorant dudes who consider women just a place for their dicks.

Aja Romano contributed to this report | Photo by josemanuelerre/Flickr

Nearly three years after 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole launched his art products Canvas and DrawQuest, he’s been forced to shut them down.

“No soft landing, no happy ending—we simply failed,” he wrote on Tumblr.

“Building any business is hard, but building a business with a single app offering and half of your runway is especially hard (we created DrawQuest after the failure of our first product, Canvas),” Poole said. “I’ve come away with new found respect for those companies who excel at monetizing mobile applications.”

Poole launched Canvas in January 2011 as the safe-for-work alternative to 4chan—a place where people could paste cute digital stickers on photos or create original works of art using built-in editing tools. 

By June 2011, Poole has raised more than $3 million for the New York–based venture. Six months later, Canvas employed six people in a spacious Union Square office a few blocks from Tumblr, had collected 1 million posts, and had facilitated the exchange of more than 5 million stickers. 

A solid chunk of those stickers had been given out to Joe “photocopier” Palfreyman, of Manchester, England. In November 2011, Palfreyman took home first place in Canvas’s first official drawing contest, beating out more than 300 other users. Palfreyman’s illustration of a whale jumping out of the water to eat some cookies has collected more than 1,500 stickers and won him a print of his art shipped to him in England, courtesy of Canvas.

One of Canvas’s other 70,000 registered users was Jason “shooper” Reed, who won a image remix contest we had sponsored on Canvas in the fall of 2011, and who later became a freelance illustrator for the Daily Dot. Like Palfreyman, Reed was an early 4chan user who had been looking for a place to express himself artistically, where he wouldn’t be barraged with obscene images and language. 

“I'll always remember Canvas fondly,” Reed told me. “If it wasn’t for that ‘Turkish Cat GIF’ thread, I'd likely still be toiling in complete, rather than relative, anonymity.”

One user, named bhudapop, painted a remix of the Turkish cat and mailed it to me. It is currently hanging in the home of Daily Dot editor-in-chief Nicholas White.

Canvas was different than competitors like 9gag because of its ability to interpret breaking news with images. In January 2012, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was photographed greeting Barack Obama at the Phoenix airport with a wagging finger. She was upset over how the president responded to her book Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure the Border. Canvas latched on to the awkward image and created several notable remixes that landed in the Washington Post. 

Canvas followed up that success with some stellar remixes during a May 2012 protest in Chicago over the NATO summit. One controversial photo emerged from ruckus, showing a police officer reaching for a camera with his right hand clenched. 

These were some of the remixes the community made of the image:

It was fun while it lasted. In February 2013, Poole launched DrawQuest, partially inspired by a Canvas feature called Monster Mash, which allowed artists to collaborate on drawings. Over the next 11 months, the app was downloaded more than 1.4 million times in a year and used by about 25,000 people a day (400,000 in the last month alone). But like Canvas, Poole was not able to “crack the business side of things.”

“With that said, life goes on, and the best path forward is not a wounded one, but a more learned and motivated one,” Poole added on Tumblr. “I’m definitely not itching to start another company any time soon—it will take time to decompress and reflect on the events of the past four years—but I hope that if I do some day decide to pursue a new dream, I’ll be in a much better position to.”

Poole will continue to run 4chan, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and promises to write more about his startup experience. 

As a fitting end to Canvas, some of its most influential users have been making their final goodbyes with images, stickers, and kind words. (Click to enlarge.)

Illustration by Jason “shooper” Reed

Warning: This post contains material that may be NSFW.

Give a Reddit user a laser engraver and he’ll transform pieces of wood into beautiful illustrations of memes like Overly Attached Girlfriend and actor Aziz Ansari. Give one of these machines to a dude from 4chan’s /b/, the Internet’s worst nightmare come to life, and he’ll make toast art of Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, and, of course, the F-word.

From an artistic standpoint, they look pretty great. 

It’s unclear what machine was used to make the engravings; one Reddit user suggested an Epilog machine.

One of the engravings features Breadfriend, a three-year-old image-macro series featuring a picture of a slice of bread with the face of anime character Masaki making a sexy startled face.

“I can't wait until laser toasters are commercially viable and then I can have custom toast every morning,” orthag commented on Reddit. 

H/T Reddit

For some reason, 4chan really has a thing for Justin Bieber. The Internet pranksters have targeted the singer and his teenage fans in four Twitter pranks over the past year, creating fake accounts and Photoshopped images to try to get girls to slit their wrists and flash their breasts. Now, following Bieber’s arrest, 4chan’s imageboard /b/ wants teens to get arrested in solidarity.

News of the singer’s drag-racing DUI gave the media a terrible case of Bieber fever. The amount of attention paid to Biebergate was so absurd, /b/ had to join in. The plot: #Cuffs4Bieber. 

Using the hashtag, /b/ users encouraged the community to share the following random images of teenagers getting arrested on Twitter.

Over the past 48 hours, both hashtags have been mentioned on Twitter about 1,000 times combined. In other words, it was kind of a failure. 

They should have focused on just one prank. While #CuffsForBieber was trying to get off the ground, other /b/ users were busy attempting to convince Beliebers to starve themselves (#StarvingBieber) and kill themselves (#EndBieber). 

"@ViiBieber_: Please help. Justin got no food in prison, and was forced to remove tweets by the authorities. #StarvingBelieber"

— Never Leaving Justin (@imabelieber2266) January 26, 2014

#starvingbelieber I'm sorry but what is this? I hope no one gets sick or anything.

— i love him (@biebersabrina35) January 26, 2014

Another hashtag, #BoycottBiebs, has begun to spread rumors that child pornography was found in one of the singer’s cars during the arrest. Users mocked up this fake Yahoo News article to help spread the rumor:

Another reason why all of these pranks failed is because of Bieber himself. When /b/ tried to convince his fans to slit their wrists over a photograph allegedly showing him smoking marijuana in Jan. 2013, Bieber was still a squeaky clean teenage heartthrob who could do no wrong. This helped propel #cutforbieber to the top of Twitter’s trending topics list.

Of course, the Bieber we’ve come to know is a tattooed, strip-club-frequenting wild child.

Illustration by Jason Reed

Animal lovers from 4chan are out to destroy a man from France who captured two videos that appear to show him viciously abusing a cat.

The first horrific video, which you can still find on Facebook (warning: it’s extremely disturbing), allegedly features a man named Farid from Marseille, France, hurling an orange cat more than 20 feet into the side of a building. The other shows Farid tossing what looks like the same cat more than 50 feet in the air, toward some bushes. Both videos have been shared more than 5,500 times combined since they were posted Jan. 22.

The videos have gripped 4chan’s random imageboard, /b/, where more than three different threads have collected thousands of comments from users seeking justice.

Not only has /b/ tracked down Farid's full name and phone number, they have contacted French police with the videos and information. /b/ has also flagged Farid’s videos on Facebook, which has thus far resulted in no action.

The community is also encouraging people to share the following image to help bring Farid down:

While /b/’s penchant for raids, pornography, and crude humor has earned it the title of the Internet’s outhouse, its zeal for taking down animal abusers is unparalleled. 

In August, /b/ raged against a South Carolina teenager for kicking a kitten on Vine. /b/ retaliated against 17-year-old Walter Easley by posting his personal information online, contacting his school and local newspaper, and prank-calling his home. /B/'s tactics ultimately worked.

On Aug. 19, Easley was arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. Easley pled guilty to animal cruelty charges while the cat was confiscated by animal control and is in good health.

In September, /b/ hunted down the information for “Kevin,” a senior at Maryland's Tuscarora High School, who uploaded the following photo to his Instagram:

Eventually, Kevin deleted it and the rest of his photos. But it was too late. 

"[T]his bitch needs a good raiding," one anonymous user wrote in a /b/ thread containing his full name and links to his Twitter profile and Facebook page.

With social media marketers, late night talk show hosts, and anyone with a decent set of Photoshop skills able to fool the masses into believing anything, there is a chance Farid’s videos aren’t 100 percent real. 

In one of the videos, where he’s seen tossing the cat toward some bushes, the viewer loses sight of the animal. The sheer distance the cat flies is enough to raise some eyebrows, but it’s not definitive proof the video is fake. And in the video where Farid hurls the animal at a building, the camera does not break away from the horrific act, which culminates in a shot of the cat splayed on the concrete, crying loudly. Farid can be heard laughing in the background.

The Daily Dot has messaged Farid on Facebook and has not heard back at time of publishing.

Photo by gangster car driver/Flickr

The Frenchman who was captured on video brutally torturing a cat has been arrested less than a day after 4chan flooded social media with his personal information.

According to France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, a 23-year-old suspect confessed he was the man abusing the animal in two Facebook videos. He was placed in police custody Friday morning. 

“According to a source close to the investigation, the man, born in 1989, admitted the facts to the police and also stated that the kitten was alive,” Le Monde reported, according to a rough translation. “It should be presented to the prosecutor of Marseilles Saturday morning. The police are now looking for the one who filmed the scenes, presumably with a mobile phone.”

The man used the name "Farid" on Facebook, but Le Monde did not identify him by name.

On Thursday, 4chan’s notorious random imageboard, /b/, was blanketed with links to two videos showing a man abusing an orange cat. 

One video featured him hurling the animal more than 20 feet into the side of a building while the other showed the same cat being tossed more than 50 feet in the air, toward some bushes. Both videos were shared on Jan. 22 and have since been removed by Facebook. 

Although the suspect told police the cat survived the attacks, the French National Police stated on Facebook that they’re still investigating those claims.

The videos set /b/ users off in a frenzy, with thousands working to track down the man’s full name and phone number.

/b/ also contacted French police with the videos and information. A petition on AVAAZ.org to find the man and bring him to justice collected more than 135,000 signatures.

By late Thursday night, French police were on the case. 

This was the following tweet sent out by the National Police (according to a rough translation): “[ANIMAL ABUSE] Thank you for reporting these videos. This information was transmitted to the PHAROS teams.”

[MALTRAITANCE ANIMALE] Merci de nous avoir signalé ces vidéos. Ces informations ont été transmises aux équipes PHAROS.

— Police Nationale (@PNationale) January 31, 2014

That message was followed up by another thanking Twitter users for their help in finding the culprit: “Thanks to your reports via @twitter, National Police questioned the alleged creator of videos showing abuse of a cat in Marseilles.”

Grâce à vos signalements via @twitter, la @PNationale interpelle à #Marseille l'auteur présumé des vidéos montrant des sévices sur un #Chat

— GendarmerieNationale (@Gendarmerie) January 31, 2014

This isn’t the first time /b/ has crusaded against animal abusers online.

In August, /b/ hunted down a South Carolina teenager for kicking a kitten on Vine. The teenager was 17-year-old Walter Easley who had hiss personal information online dumped online by /b/. The community also contacted his school and local newspaper. /B/'s tactics paid off.

On Aug. 19, Easley was arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. Easley pled guilty to animal cruelty charges while the cat was confiscated by animal control and is in good health.

If the Frenchman is convicted of animal abuse, he faces two years in prison and a €30,000 ($40,500) fine.

Photo by Jorbasa/Flickr

Warning: This story contains content that may be NSFW.

How’s 4chan’s mission to dismantle modern-day feminism going? Terribly. That’s to be expected when a group of teenage boys, with no understanding of the movement they’re criticising, launch a couple silly hashtag trends.

But they’re having fun.

As part of its month-long vendetta, 4chan’s prank-loving community /b/ is trying to convince women that feminine hygiene products are a form of oppression and they should not be used. 

It’s called Operation Freebleeding, a “new radical feminist movement.” The goal is to manufacture enough fake social media outrage over the use of sanitary pads that news organizations and feminists fall for it. 

As was the case with two other feminist-related pranks this month, /b/ has created dozens of dummy Twitter and Facebook profiles to disseminate out-of-context photos and shoddy Photoshopped images of women menstruating down their legs. 

One of the photos /b/ has used (the third one down) is by photographer Emma Arvida Bystrom. It’s part of a Vice photo series addressing our tendency to turn natural bodily processes into something shameful. 

Since launching the operation Friday morning, #freebleeding has been tweeted about 1,000 times. Many of these tweets have been sent from fake accounts, while a few appear to come from real users. And they aren’t happy.

@Bidenshairplugs These idiots have totally lost their minds. #freebleeding

— Cherry_Bos (@cherrybos) February 1, 2014

I looked at the #freebleeding hashtag. It's the end of days, people. Prepare yourselves for zombies or Jesus. Or, like me, prepare both.

— Sheila Gunn Reid (@SheilaGunnReid) February 1, 2014

I feel sorry for the conservative women having to put up w/ this crap by radical feminists #FreeBleeding#tcot

— Mitch Behna (@MitchBehna) February 1, 2014

/b/’s latest spat with feminists began on Jan. 5 with Operation Bikini Bridge. The goal was to spam social media with conflicting messages regarding the fashion phenomenon that occurs when bikini bottoms are suspended between hipbones, causing a space between the fabric and the lower abdomen. 

/b/ was successful, and then some.

A day after launching the hoax, the hashtag #bikinibridge had been mentioned in more than 4,000 tweets. This new “trend” was mentioned in ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald. Some publishers, like the New York Daily News, even appeared to take the bikini bridge seriously, calling it something that “will likely do real damage.”

By week’s end, the bikini bridge was the most-talked-about topic online, edging out Gov. Chris Christie’s bridge scandal.

But that wasn’t enough for /b/.

About a week after Bikini Bridge went viral, /b/ and 4chan’s politics board (/pol/) launched Operation Fourth Wave Feminism. It’s goal was to emphasize “the attractiveness and sexualization of skinny and fit female bodies” and pit second- and third-wave feminists against one another.

The free-bleeding trend is nothing new, however. A simple Google search for “free bleeding” turns up a handful of blog posts discussing it (here, here, here, and here). 

It’s also nothing to get riled up about.

On the site Remaking June Cleaver, author Kenda Smith answers questions surrounding the topic of free bleeding and what it should mean. “Maybe if you forget to change your tampon on a regular basis—yes, you should definitely do this and save yourself the risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome,” she writes. “But I’d wager the majority of women don’t have that problem. Many of us like keeping Aunt Flo contained.”

Free bleeding was a thing before 4chan. But let’s be clear: This iteration is a hoax. 

Photo via me and the sysop/Flickr

The orange kitten captured on video being abused by a man from France has survived.

The 5-month-old named Oscar was rescued by France’s Society to Protect Animals (SPA) after two Facebook videos of a man hurling it at the side of a building spurred international outrage.

“The animal owned by a resident of the 15th district who had offered his children and was looking for him for 10 days,” La Provence reported according to a rough French translation.”An inhabitant of the city's Maurelette waited until the perpetrators left the scene to try to recover and help him. He then contacted Oscar’s owner. The cat is being treated at a veterinary clinic for a broken leg. It would be yet in shock, refusing to eat, but his condition should improve quickly.”

The SPA posted the following video of Oscar on Facebook showing that he was OK. It has been liked more than 20,000 times.

The videos, which were initially posted on Jan. 22 before being taken down, were brought to the world’s attention thanks to 4chan’s random imageboard /b/.

The community leaked the abusers name and address online Thursday morning, sending hundreds of tweets to news organizations like Le Monde. /B/ also contacted French police with the videos and information. A petition on AVAAZ.org to find the man and bring him to justice collected more than 135,000 signatures. By Friday morning, French police had arrested the man in the videos. He’s in “custody at the police station in the 15th arrondissement of Marseille,” La Provence added. He is expected in court today. If convicted, he could face two years in prison and a €30,000 ($40,500) fine.

H/T La Provence | Photo by tambako/Flickr (CC by-ND 2.0)

The 4chan community has thrown its support behind a petition to take a Texas judge off the bench after she sentenced a teenager, who killed four people in a drunk driving accident, to probation.

Judge Jean Boyd set off 4chan’s infamous /b/ community Thursday after she again spared Ethan Couch, 16, jail time for killing a youth pastor, a teenage girl, her mother, and another woman in a crash June 15. This is the second time Boyd has let Couch off. The first came on Dec. 10, when Couch was initially sentenced to alcohol treatment and 10 years’ probation.

During the legal proceedings, Couch’s defense team argued that he was the product of “affluenza,” which is described as “a state of mind where the teen doesn't like bad behavior with consequences because his parents taught him that wealth buys privilege,” WJLA reported.  

Boyd’s first ruling was subsequently challenged by prosecutors who requested jail time for the teen.

On Wednesday Boyd ordered Couch to a “rehabilitation facility that would be paid for by his parents, but didn't require a minimum amount of time to be spent there,” NBC reported. “The family previously offered to pay for a facility in California that cost around $450,000 per year.”

The /b/, or "random" board on 4chan, is infamous for its elaborate trolls, hoaxes, and pranks. Following the news, at least three different threads were started on /b/ calling for action.

/B/ called for the community to support the petition (which has collected 25,000 signatures) and to file complaints against the doctor used by Couch’s defense with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. /B/ also encouraged users to disseminate the following image of Boyd across Twitter and Facebook:

On Dec. 13 /b/ tracked down the home and business information for Couch’s father. They’ve left the following reviews for his company, Cleburne Sheet Metal, on Google in retaliation. /B/ ordered pizzas (a staple in /b/’s pranking arsenal) to the Couch family home in Fort Worth, Texas.

Boyd is planning on retiring at the end of her term this year.

Photo by stuseeger/Flickr (CC By 2.0)

If that lucky someone in your life happens to love guns, puns, and painfully minimalistic Valentine's Day cards, 4chan’s gun loving community has got you covered.

4chan’s weapons board /k/, where people share photos of their firearms and debate gun laws, has whipped up some hilarious cards to share on the day of love.

The cards feature photos of some of /k/’s most beloved weapons, including the “moist nugget,” a Russian “bolt-action, internal magazine fed, military rifle that was used by the armed forces of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and various Eastern bloc nations,” Urban Dictionary states.

Here are the best 11 cards /k/ came up with.

H/T Reddit | Photo by JoLi Studios AKA Leasepics/Flickr (CC By-SA 2.0) and Neal/Flickr (CC By 2.0) Remix by Fernando Alfonso III

By early Friday morning, Bill Keller, the brash televangelist from Largo, Fla., was enraged—and it was all thanks to 4chan. 

Every single weeknight, around 11:30pm, /b/ begins filling up one to three different threads and an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room with ways to rile up Keller during LivePrayer, a two-hour program in which he discusses topics like evolution, homosexuality, and abortion before taking prayer requests live from midnight to 2am. 

This is what /b/—responsible for the Internet’s most popular memes, disturbing pranks, and destructive trends—has done to Keller over the past month:

By 1:30am last Friday, these “under-the-rock maggots” from 4chan had gotten under Keller’s skin. They’d even taken down his site.

“You gutless weasels, you don’t even have the guts to come out,” Keller said. “I get it, you hide behind your spoofed IPs and everything. Big, big, deal. Try and be a real person, a real situation. Try changing real lives. Try being in the public eye where people send pipe bombs. That’s why I laugh at you people.” 

Fast forward to 1:30:00 to see it all go down.

Like most things on 4chan, the reason why the community targets Keller is unknown. But if you take just one look at one of the hundreds of shows on his YouTube channel or his 1990s era website, you can make a guess.

In 1989, Keller was convicted and jailed for two and a half years for insider trading. While in federal prison, Keller found God and “received an undergraduate degree in biblical studies from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia,” he states on his site. Keller was released from jail in 1992. Since then, he has produced programs for Christian television stations around the country and spoken out on almost every topic imaginable.

He has debated Oprah regarding her faith, created a 9/11 Christian Center in response to the Islamic community center planned near Ground Zero in Manhattan, and in 2007, he stated that"if you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan.” 

In 2006, Keller has his first big run in with Internet trolls. These pranksters were from TOTSE (“Temple of the Screaming Electron”), one of the first Web communities in existence that was popular with hackers. They called his live show with sob stories that cleverly worked in references to the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Some of the best TOTSE calls were compiled in the following video (the best comes at about 2:50). 

In the years since the TOTSE raids, Keller has changed how he produces his live show. Each episode now has a three-second delay; callers must first talk to Keller on the phone before he broadcasts them; and he even has a few people visiting sites like 4chan to see what pranks they have planned. This is why most of /b/’s prank efforts have failed. 

One 4chan tactic was to have the Sanic hedgehog video—terrible Sonic fanart and loud, distorted music—playing when they called. 

“[This is] nothing new,” Keller told me in an email. “Bringing God's truth to a secular, mostly non-Christian viewer, it is simply part of what we go through. At the end of the day there are always 20–30 percent of viewers who are seriously hurting, looking for help and hope in their time of need.”

Since Thursday’s show, Keller has paid less and less attention to the prank callers. But considering /b/ has helped his show collect between 100 and 300 live viewers on YouTube every night, he may want to embrace the trolls.

Illustration by Jason Reed

Tails, Sonic’s happy go lucky sidekick from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, raced down an endless path. This was the Green Hill Zone, the iconic Sonic level known for its bright blue sky, oversized flowers, and tiny woodland creatures. Only something was different about this level, something was off.

As Tails ran, he came across piles of small birds bleeding. The farther he went, the more carcasses he found. Then he found Sonic standing with his back to him, eyes closed. As Tails approached, Sonic’s eye opened to reveal black with red glowing dots.

The screen cut to black.

This is “Sonic.exe.” The story was the inspiration for /creepythread, a collaborative art book of illustrated scary stories from the Internet best known as creepypastas.

The book is the brainchild of Jensine Eckwall and Peter Schmidt, two artists who felt putting pen to paper was the ideal way to pay tribute to their favorite Internet obsession.

“[Sonic.exe is] one of the worst creepypastas I've ever read, yet it manages to tap the 8-year-old in me that was obsessed with a super fast, blue hedgehog, and somehow that creates this horrible, nostalgic feeling,” Schmidt told me. “Like looking how no one wants to look at the car crash they're staring at, except the car crash is Sonic and 8-year-old me.”

/creepythread couldn’t have come at a more popular time for creepypasta, a 7-year-old Internet institution started on 4chan’s paranormal board /x/.

Creepypastas were a variation of the copypasta, a “block of text that gets copied and pasted over and over again,” Know Your Meme explains. The term copypasta was coined by 4chan but the concept existed during the early days of the Internet when chain emails and AIM buddy icons were all the rage. The purpose of both was essentially the same: A bait-and-switch scheme to fool people into wasting time reading something made up.

One of the first and most detailed creepypastas to date revolves around the SCP Foundation, a mysterious wiki featuring reports of supernatural occurrences. One of the most notable reports is SCP-231 which tells the story of an impregnated young girl rescued from a sex cult. The only way to terminate the pregnancy is through Procedure 110-Montauk, which has the “possibility of accidental fatality.” It’s a story that Eckwall is illustrating for /creepythread.

“I think the omission of certain elements is what makes it so spooky,” Eckwall said. “I think any creepypasta can make a compelling image, as long as the core idea behind it is strong. I think some of the meandering atmospheric ones make for great conceptual pieces based on tone, and the more direct ones make for great narrative or literal illustrations.”

Photo by gusstorms

In 2010, creepypastas hit a milestone after the New York Times reported how these scary stories are a fun, even creative new option for wasting time online. Today, creepypastas are inspiring video games and full-length films.

Eckwall and Schmidt will release the book in April at MoCCAfest, Toronto Comics Art Festival, and Small Press Expo (SPX). It will feature the work, and nightmares, of 31 different artists.

“I think that the way the Internet affects horror media is pretty striking,” Eckwall said. “We're in a culture of shared content, so we have a superficial understanding (like in GIF sets) of so much horror media, whether it's manga, movies, or stories. It's so easy to have one's content become a meme, and easy for what once were classics or mainstays to become lost… The art we're getting for /creepythread comes from both a contemporary self-referential and a classically illustrative place. The work may be based on recycled content but the application is not derivative at all.”

Photo by ofishel

Main illustration by Peter Schmidt

When Flappy Bird creator Nguyễn Hà Đông decided to unexpectedly remove his hit game from Apple’s App Store and Google Play on Feb. 10, dozens of clones were created almost instantaneously—including ones ones featuring porn, Fall Out Boy, and Miley Cyrus.  

The latest Flappy Bird clone is part of a new breed that mixes the games addictive quality with cryptocurrencies.

Super Doge was launched on Google Play on Monday and allows players to earn dogecoins as they navigate the world’s favorite dog meme through a maze of green pipes.

“You win dogecoins every time you play Super Doge and collect at least one coin,” the developer explains. “The collected coins from all your games within one day will get you a certain share of the prize pool. The more coins you collect the bigger your prize pool share will be.”

Since launching in December, Dogecoin has become an Internet sweetheart. The currency, named after the doge meme featuring a cute Shiba Inu pup and Comic Sans text, was embraced by communities on Reddit and 4chan, who have gotten in the habit of gifting millions of dogecoins to each other for fun. Sites like Dogefaucet.com have also sprung up to give away coins for free. This open exchange is possible because of how little a Dogecoin is worth. As of Wednesday morning, one dogecoin traded at a mere $.001.

Still, Dogecoin enthusiasts have combined to put the currency to work for good causes, raising thousands of dollars for Jamaican and Indian Olympic hopefuls to travel to the winter games and funding a charity that trains service dogs for special needs children.

So far Super Doge has been reviewed 208 times and has a 4.8 rating out of 5. It’s been downloaded about 5,000 times as of Wednesday and looks like it will continue to grow.

“This is great,” flippi273 commented on Reddit’s r/dogecoin. “The only thing I could think to make it better would be to try and get away from getting the Flappy Doge through pipes and use something different. The ground and background suggest we are on the moon. Let's think of something better than green Mario pipes.”

Super Doge is the second Flappy Bird clone to embrace a cyrptocurrency.

In late February the 4chan community launched Flappy Party, a massively multiplayer online version that has integrated Bitcoin gambling. This is how it works: Each player types in a username and tries to navigate pipes while a few hundred other people (there were about 700 when I played) do the same. On the right side of the game is a leaderboard that keeps track of how many pipes you’ve passed in the round. Each round is about 15 minutes long and before each one starts, “bookmakers offer odds on competing players within the first 30 seconds of a round, while punters rush to take them up on their offer,” Imgism reported. “The funds from both parties are held in escrow until the end of the contest, then doled out to the winners via a tip to their online wallet.”

According to Imgism, Flappy Party was taken offline on Feb. 26 or 27. But from the looks of the site, the game is still very much alive. What is unclear is whether the gambling aspect is still functional. The Daily Dot reached out to Flappy Party for a comment, but there’s been no response yet.

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Flappy Party responded with the following comments.

"Let me just say that we are a family-friendly game and we did not include any features to promote gambling when we created the site. We are aware of the room created by some 4Chan users but we played no role in facilitating any financial activities within the game – if that was done, it was without our knowledge or consent.

"The site continues to work very well, we often have 800 players at the same time and currently have over 60,000 coming to our site to play every day, sometimes up to 100,000 players/day. We’ve recently added several features like round/global leaderboards, private rooms with chat ability, and are adding a selection of new themes to the game this week. We have players coming to our site from all types of forums/gaming communities from all around the world—4chan, jeuxvideo.com, koreus.com, etc. They’re welcome to play our game in any way they see fit."

Photo by Fernando Alfonso III

Newsweek's Leah McGrath Goodman knew that outing the identity of Bitcoin’s alleged creator would be controversial. She probably didn’t expect pizzas to show up on her doorstep. 

After publishing a 4,500-word exposé on Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese immigrant purported to be the creator of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, the author has experienced a spectrum of reactions: adoration, skepticism, rage, and everything in between. 

No news organization captured this polarization better than Forbes, which championed Goodman’s story as “brilliant journalism” Thursday morning. About eight hours later, a Forbes tech reporter tweeted that Newsweek“has got some splainin to do.”

All the while, a steady stream of hate was pouring from Reddit’s r/Bitcoin, trashingNewsweek and Goodman for violating Nakamoto’s privacy.

Goodman not only revealed Nakamoto’s identity and personal characteristics, but she also showed a picture of his house and his car with the license plate number. In Internet lexicon, this is known as a “dox,” the dumping of someone’s personal information without his permission. And on Reddit, doxing is a big no-no.

“The house, car and plates photos are absolutely out of bounds,” atraininprint commented Thursday. 

“Red card offenses. Tracking down the real Nakamoto is a legitimate story. But this was done with no understanding of what serious journalism is all about. Not only has the reporter and this version of Newsweek (which is not the same as the old, highly responsible Newsweek) done a great injustice to this Mr. Nakamoto (whether or not he's the inventor of bitcoin), they have done an equally great injustice to serious journalism.”

In retaliation against Goodman, 4chan’s business (/biz/) and technology (/g/) imageboards dumped all of her personal information online. The Pastebin document includes her current address and nine previous residences, her cellphone number, and the names of family members. On /g/, an anonymous user also posted what looked like Goodman’s social security number. Users claimed to send her pizzas. (It’s an old joke.)

Underneath all the usual noise on 4chan and r/bitcoin, the communities had one glaring question: Who is Goodman, and was she really the best person to task with the biggest story of Bitcoin’s five-year history?

Redditors dug up parts of Goodman’s professional history, including a story that got her banned from entering the United Kingdom for a year. 

In 2012, Goodman attempted to research abuse claims at the Haut de la Garenne children’s home, on the island of Jersey off the south coast of England.

“Both the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and Jersey's customs and immigrations service insist her ban was unrelated to her journalistic investigations,” the Guardian reported in June 2012. Goodman disagreed: She was flagged by Jersey customs officials as soon as they found out she was conducting research there.

The ban was ultimately lifted in July 2013. Once news spread on Reddit, U.K. users became wary:

“I'd take any level of research by her to be dubious at best,” bitcoinoisseur commented.

Furthermore, they noted Goodman’s blog history has no reference to Bitcoin in the past three years, and her first tweet about the digital currency was in January 2014.

Hours after Newsweek published the Nakamoto story, the man himself denied any involvement with Bitcoin to swarms of reporters parked outside his home. 

He doubled down on this assertion in an interview with the Associated Press Thursday afternoon: "I got nothing to do with it," Nakamoto said. “It sounded like I was involved before with Bitcoin and looked like I'm not involved now. That's not what I meant. I want to clarify that.”

“I stand completely by my exchange with Mr. Nakamoto,” Goodman told the Associated Press. “There was no confusion whatsoever about the context of our conversation—and his acknowledgment of his involvement in Bitcoin."

Original photo by Damian Dovarganes (Remix by CoinCult)

The punishment was intended to teach Amia a valuable lesson about privacy and social media.

On Tuesday, the teens' mother took a photo of her daughter and posted it on her Facebook page as a sort of experiment to show how easily a picture can permeate through the Internet.

A day later, the experiment was working better than Kira could have expected.

“She is pretty miserable!” Kira wrote on Facebook about her daughter. “And angry! I’m just trying to prove a point. 468 [shares]. The photo has now moved beyond Facebook. It is now on two other websites (that I’m aware of). Lots of messages, and nice people keeping me in the loop with what they are doing with the photo.”

One of the sites the photo had found its way to was 4chan—the Internet’s justice seekers, raid specialists, and premier pranksters—who wanted to teach Kira and her daughter their own twisted lesson.

4chan’s random imageboard /b/ tracked down Kira’s Facebook page, home address, and phone number. Late Wednesday night, /b/ began prank calling Kira’s home and ordering them some pizzas (4chan’s favorite prank).

Through all of /b/’s perversions and obscenities, 4chan’s message to Kira was this: Instead of exposing your daughter to the Internet’s ridicule, communicate your concerns to your daughter privately.

Sometime after 11pm ET Wednesday, Kira removed the photo of her daughter from her Facebook page and scrubbed the rest of her profile of personal information.

Photo via Facebook | Phone photo by John Karakatsanis Remix by Jason Reed (CC BY-SA 2.0)

One 4chan user had seen one too many of Facebook’s sponsored page requests.

The sponsored page, which is essentially an advertisement encouraging a person to like a business, was for Madison Marcus, a law firm in Sydney, Australia, specializing in property law and commercial litigation.

After seeing one of these requests pop-up Thursday, a user from 4chan’s random imageboard /b/—that neighborhood creep who will save your cat from the middle of the street while sporting a bikini bridge—decided to have a little fun with the lawfirm's official Facebook page.

When Madison Marcus didn’t respond to the /b/ users bogus legal inquiry, he decided to leave the business a one-star review. This allegedly got the lawfirm's attention.

“Consequently they threatened to take me to court if I did not remove my review, for the past few weeks I have been receiving threatening calls and emails, they even called my employer,” the /b/ user wrote. “After just getting off the phone to the police ‘yes, the police’ I have decided to take down my post but now I feel hollow and defeated, so here is my request.”

This sob story, which is likely exaggerated or a complete fabrication, was shared on /b/ late Thursday night along with a plea for the community to retaliate against the business.

Since midnight, more than 100 fraudulent reviews have been left on Facebook for Madison Marcus, causing its rating to plummet to 1.5 stars out of five.

/B/ also created the Facebook page “Anti-Madison Marcus law firm” to coordinate their trolling efforts.

Haphazardly coordinated antics like this are /b/’s specialty. In 2013, /b/ allegedly convinced iPhone owners to dump their phones in water, destroy their brand new Xbox One’s, and helped whistleblower Edward Snowden become a contender for Time magazine’s Person of the Year award.

Illlustration by Jason Reed