With two months to go before the start of the most popular sporting event in the world, a group of merry pranksters from 4chan are trying to smear FIFA World Cup host Brazil as a sex-crazed country that used prostitutes to build its new soccer stadiums.

The scheme is called Operation Downfall. It’s been organized by 4chan’s random imageboard /b/, home to the Internet’s master pranksters, demented justice seekers, and perverse porn peddlers.

Early Sunday morning, /b/ laid out a five point plan to take downBrazil’s official World Cup website and disseminate images of fake news stories on social media using hashtags like #boycottfifabrazil.  

The following stories were faked by /b/ to look like they’re from organizations like the Huffington Post, CNN, and the New York Times. The stories feature terrible writing, grammatical errors, and all focus on the plight of prostitutes on the streets of Brazil.

As if often the case with 4chan pranks, /b/ moved its planning efforts to the 4chan-related chat site LiveChan to discuss ways to convince news organizations like Fox to mistakenly report these stories fake stories as fact.

Operation Downfall is just one of the many /b/ pranks this year to focus on women.

In January /b/’s Operation Bikini Bridge convinced the world that bikini bottoms suspended between the two hipbones, causing a space between the bikini and the lower abdomen, was a disturbing new trend. That same month, Operation Fourth Wave Feminism tried to pit feminists against one another. And in February, Operation Freebleeding tried to manufacture enough fake social outrage over women using sanitary pads that news organizations and feminists would fall for it. 

While each of these pranks were based almost entirely on lies, Operation Downfall does contain snippets of actual truth.

Prostitution, particularly involving children, is an ongoing problem in Brazil. In 2012, CNN reported, “the number of estimated child sex workers in Brazil stood at about half a million.” To combat this problem, the Brazilian government allotted $3.3 million to crack down on such practices in cities hosting soccer matches this summer. 

The World Cup begins on June 12 and runs through July 13.

Screengrabs by the Daily Dot | Photo by Crystian Cruz/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)

He calls himself the leader of 4chan, a true alpha, and a master hacker. The one title he forgot was expert troll.

Dillon Henderson has nabbed headlines on Vice’s Motherboard and Complex this week thanks to a series of cringeworthy videos. The 15-year-old berates 4chan, Reddit, and popular YouTuber Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, and also champions himself as the world’s premier hacker.

Since uploading his first YouTube video Thursday, Henderson has followed it up with four more. They’ve collected a combined 111,000 views. Each video features the bespeckled teenager in his bedroom firing off a barrage of insults.

“Mark this down on your calendars and burn it into your memory forever because you're going to want to tell your grandchildren some day,” Henderson says in his first video, getting so close to the camera you can see his braces. “Where were you when you first heard of Dillon the hacker? This is the most important moment of your life.”

If indeed the sole purpose of Henderson’s videos was to piss off YouTube commenters and 4chan users, he’s done that in spades. Here’s a small sampling of the thousand hate-filled YouTube comments and countless 4chan threads trashing the teen.

There’s been a lot of speculation as to who Henderson is an what he’s really trying to accomplish with his videos. He isn’t the first person to use 4chan to help jumpstart a career. And he’s certainly not the first to bait the community into raging. But there was something a bit different—something genuinely innocent—about Henderson that 4chan hadn’t seen since 2008. 

That’s the year when 4chan became obsessed with Catie “boxxy” Wayne, a teenage girl with heavy black eyeliner who became 4chan’s muse and target. As was the case with Wayne, 4chan is obsessed with figuring out who Henderson really is. Is he an actor or just some bored teen? And what sort of programming chops does he really have?

I asked him.

Daily Dot: In your videos you often look down at your screen as if you’re reading from a script. Can you explain this?

Dillon Henderson: Yes, I was reading off of my screen. I wrote down some talking points before making the video so that I could remember what I wanted to say. 

Are you an actor?

There is nothing about Dillon the Hacker that is fake. You have so many “actors” on Youtube playing fake characters for attention like Boogie2988, or Shane Dawson who dresses up in ridiculous costumes. My goal is to bring reality back to Youtube by telling it like it is. A lot of people like Undertakerfreak1127 and The Amazing Atheist wish that I am fake or that I am trolling, because I scare them so much. But unfortunately for all of them, their worst fear is true: This is real. Dillon the Hacker is real and he is taking over Youtube.  

How did you become the leader of 4chan and Anonymous?

Anonymous is a collective group of hackers who usually do not want to reveal their identity. I became the leader of the group simply by being the one brave enough to step up and take it. I saw a position that needed to be filled and I stepped up to the plate. I have been the leader ever since.

What is a typical day like as the leader of 4chan?

I spend most of my day coding and writing new applications. I can't talk about the other activities I am involved in on the Tor network due to security reasons. I am still in high school technically but am taking college courses. I have an IQ of 143 and have been hacking/coding since I was two years old. 

4chan recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary, making it one of the oldest web communities still in existence. What attracted you to the site and do you have a favorite imageboard?

I enjoy 4chan because it is raw and uncensored like me. As a world elite hacker, I can't deal with unintuitive websites like Reddit or Tumblr that will censor me for telling the truth. My current favorite board on 4chan is the /s4s/ [“Shit 4chan Says”] board. 

These days, Anonymous seems to have been eclipsed by hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). Do you have a message for SEA or for Anonymous?

I've never heard of the Syrian Electronic Army, but if they think they're going to be the top dogs in the new era of hacking, then I welcome their challenge. I am currently in the process of forming my own new hacker group which will be called “The Meme Krew.”  Some of the members include BG Kumbi, StraightUpStreett and a secret mystery member who is very big on YouTube but wants to remain in the dark for now. 

What are your thoughts on Christopher “moot” Poole, the creator of 4chan?

I have an enormous amount of respect for moot. Yes I will punish him if I have to, but just like with Anonymous, it is out of love. As a parent you sometimes have to give your children a spanking to keep their behavior in check. That is what I will do to moot, but only if I have to. 

The comments left on your YouTube videos are pretty inflammatory. Anything you'd like to say to your haters?

I respect everyone who is brave enough to stand up to me. Most people I encounter are too cowardly to step to me, so when someone actually has the courage to insult me, I respect them for it. 

What do your parents think of your videos?

My best friend Kevin is also a YouTuber (he is better known as BG Kumbi) and he supports my videos and has promoted my channel to his fans to help me. My father is away a lot, he works as a supervisor on offshore oil-rigs so he doesn't really know about my hacker life. My mom hears me making videos in my room, and I've explained to her what I am doing, but she is out of touch with the Internet and doesn't really understand what Youtube is.   

What can you do to prove you are a real person?

Screengrab via YouTube

More than $260 worth of pizzas, a bomb threat, and a prostitute were ordered to an address belonging to Dillon “the hacker” Henderson, a teenager and self-proclaimed leader of Anonymous who has 4chan’s public enemy no. 1.

The pranks were in response to a series of YouTube videos that Henderson, 15, made to trash the 10-year-old imageboard and its creator, Christopher “moot” Poole.

“As your leader, I’m telling you to get it together,” Henderson states in a video from April 3. “Once in awhile big daddy Dillon has to come out of his hacker cove and give Anonymous a spanking. ... This is your warning 4chan. You do not want to cross a professional hacker.”

Late Friday night users from 4chan’s random imageboard /b/—where the Internet’s cat lovers, porn addicts, and prankers all come to hang out—ignored Henderson’s warnings after they dug up his home address in Arizona. (Warning: The following contains graphic language.)

Yet like a school of mindless fish, what these /b/ users failed to realize was the address they had found was a bait set by Henderson.

The bogus address (which shows up on Google Maps but not in the White Pages) was tweeted by Henderson Friday afternoon.

I've been getting pizzas sent to my house due to some guy posting my address on YouTube... #pizzaparty pic.twitter.com/4E2fLZJ07A

— Dillon Henderson (@DillonTheHacker) April 11, 2014

The screengrab of the address was captured from a random YouTube comment left by an alleged Anonymous member named John Smith. Smith has since scrubbed his YouTube channel of all his comments, leaving only 10 videos taken at Anonymous protests. His latest video was uploaded five months ago.

Having realized that they had just gotten played by a teenager, /b/ got more calculated in its hunt for Henderson’s true identity.

A handful of programmers created automated programs called scripts to compare the Twitter followers of BG Kumbi and StraightUpStreet. In an interview with the Daily Dot, Henderson claimed that he and these two YouTubers were part of hacker group called “The Meme Krew.” By comparing the followers of these two teenagers, /b/ hoped to turn up Henderson's name.

The Twitter analysis lead nowhere.

The only two pieces of credible evidence /b/ dug up were an old BG Kumbi video and a YouTube account called Marky Mole.

Marky Mole was started eight months ago and features videos of what appears to be Henderson wearing painted-on whiskers and talking about being beat up in school. In other videos, Marky Mole makes prank calls, talks about the Kardashians, and pulls a sandwich out of his underwear.

In a video posted on June 15, 2012, BG Kumbi discusses a friend named “Dillon who is a hacker as well as a loyal 9gager, who has join me in my crusade.”

“Not only are we going to take down 4chan, we’re going to take down Funnyjunk and Reddit as well,” BG Kumbi adds.

Taken together, it appears Henderson is just a bored teenager who found BG Kumbi’s video from 2012 and decided to create a troll identity.

Regardless, /b/ has become obsessed with taking him down.

Screengrab via YouTube

It was such a well-meaning prompt on recommendation engine BestBookRead.com: What's the one book that transformed your life forever?

But as the list filled up with self-help titles and Oprah's Book Club recommendations, 4chan's anarchic troll hub /b/ took notice.

The list changed. 

Weirdly, /b/ couldn't decide which version of Mein Kampf it liked the best, so it had two editions tie at No. 1. The rest of the list reads like a Best of 4chan, with references to 4chan creator Christopher "moot" Poole, Nazis, suicide, homophobic slurs, and pedophilia. These things are classic shock-site tropes, which spread on the site as a means to filter out the easily offended. After 10 years, they're just iconic 4chan imagery. 

Flooding polls and contests with Hitler imagery is nothing new, of course. Back in 2012, 4chan's /b/ took over a Mountain Dew contest called Dub the Dew, in which fans could win prizes for submitting names for a new drink. 4chan voted "Hitler did nothing wrong" to the top.

It gets even more obscene. See the rest here, on Best Book Read. As of 6:30pm on Thursday, it's still up.

Photo via shutterhacks/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It will go down as one of Reddit’s worst celebrity AMAs (“ask me anything”) in history—and you can thank 4chan.

The AMA, which launched Wednesday afternoon, featured director Steven Knight and actor Tom Hardy, best known for his role as Bane in the 2012 blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises.

As has become the case with most Reddit AMAs these days, the goal was self-promotion. Knight's latest film LOCKE, a story “about a man on a journey driven by principle and haunted by consequences of a single mistake," premieres on April 25.

Hardy had made his own haunting “mistake," at least according to 4chan’s television board /tv/. It happened in the spring of 2011.

That’s when Hardy was playing the mask wearing marauder Bane in Christopher Nolan’s final Batman installment. The film opens with Bane hijacking an airliner with government agents aboard. It is this odd scene between Bane and a CIA agent played by actor Aidan Gillen that has made Hardy a /tv/ punchline.

This was the birth of the “You’re a big guy. For you” meme, which pilloried Bane’s voice was the The Dark Knight Rises' editing. (For full size images of the screengrabs below, check out this album here).

/Tv/ could not resist asking Hardy about this scene. The following are some of the questions he and Knight answered unaware that they were from some 4chan pranksters.

By the time Reddit moderators discovered the bogus questions, they made quick work of deleting everything, leaving behind a content graveyard.

/Tv/ was exceptionally pleased.

One of Reddit’s r/IamA moderators allegedly took to /tv/ to scold the community for ruining the AMA.

This isn’t the first time 4chan users have raided a celebrity AMA.

In May 4chan’s random imageboard /b/ bombarded a Reddit-powered contest thrown by actor Samuel L. Jackson with the popular copypasta of  a macho Navy Seal "involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Qaeda."

Since this incident, Jackson has not returned to Reddit. Chances are, Hardy, who is known for being squeamish about the Internet, will follow suit.

Photo via comicvine

Nearly every single day on 4chan’s most notorious imageboard, a millionaire offers to dole out cash for free, a horny dude asks for pictures of Chloe Grace Moretz, and a bored teen asks people to critique the size of his penis.

This is 4chan’s /b/, an artistic work “of fiction and falsehood” in which “only a fool would take anything posted here as fact,” as the forum clearly states.

So last week, when a handful of threads claiming 4chan, a imageboard founded more than a decade ago by Christopher “moot” Poole, was hacked, the initial reaction was to scoff.

Turns out the rumors were indeed true and it may have been as bad as people thought.

In a post early Wednesday morning on 4chan’s official blog, Poole stated that an intruder eager to expose the posting habits of a user he or she was upset with accessed “administrative functions and information from one of our databases.”

“After careful review, we believe the intrusion was limited to imageboard moderation panels, our reports queue, and some tables in our backend database,” Poole added. “Due to the way the intruder extracted information from the database, we have detailed logs of what was accessed. The logs indicate that primarily moderator account names and credentials were targeted.”

4chan moderators can delete posts from boards they are assigned to. The site also has volunteer “janitors” who go through an interview process in order to gain “access to the report system and may delete posts on their assigned board(s), as well as submit ban requests.”

As part of the hack, three users who had spent spent money on 4chan passes had their credential accessed. A 4chan Pass costs $20 a year and allows people to “bypass typing a CAPTCHA verification when posting and reporting posts on the 4chan image and discussion boards.” These three users were notified of the hack, offered full refunds and lifetime passes.

“As a reminder, all payment information is processed securely by Stripe—we never see nor store any of it, and thus no payment information was compromised,” Poole added. “We patched the vulnerability quickly after it came to our attention, and have spent—and will continue to spend—dozens of hours poring over our software and systems to help mitigate and prevent future intrusions.”

Update:

The Imgur album with screengrabs of the hack was taken down becuase it contained IP addresses for 4chan users who were affected. 

Photo  by  Brennan Moore/Flickr (cc by 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III

Every Internet community has its strongman.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s ex-governor, has spent hours on Reddit doling out fitness tips and busting myths about his bodybuilding career. Twitter’sDrunk Hulk provides the sort of comedic relief you’d expect from a giant green killing machine who’s downed way too many daiquiris and can’t put down his phone. 

And then there’s 4chan’s Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, the six-pack prince, the “father of aesthetics.”

Like 4chan is to the Internet, Shavershian was a black sheep, a controversial figure in the bodybuilding world. His rumored drug use, his obsession with being the object of every woman’s affection, and his sculpted body didn’t just endear him to the Internet’s nerdy white males. They made him a god.

Shavershian’s most loyal followers are from 4chan’s health and fitness imageboard, /fit/—zealots who have created fanart, fanfiction, and even religious screeds as tributes to the bodybuilder. And like unnumbered gods before him, Shavershian’s death came unexpectedly, at the age of 22.

This is a look at the life of Shavershian and an attempt to answer why, three years after his death, the Internet can’t stop ’mirin’.

Photo via Lauren Mitchell/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Shavershian was born on March 24, 1989, in Moscow. 

As a young boy, he was thin and awkward. Shavershian called himself an ectomorph, a body type defined by its light build, small joints, lean muscle, and a high metabolism that makes it difficult to gain weight.

“I was ridiculously thin, I’m talking the skinniest guy in my grade in school; people always commented on how skinny I was and I hated it,” Shavershian told SimplyShredded in 2007. “I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them.”

In high school, Shavershian began frequenting nightclubs, where he envied the confidence larger guys exuded and the attention women showered on them.

Shavershian consulted with his older brother Said, an amateur bodybuilder nicknamed “Chestbrah.”

“I’d look at pictures of shredded guys and tell myself, ‘That’s going to be me,’” Shavershian said. 

He immersed himself into a bodybuilding regimen known as aesthetics.

Aesthetics differs from traditional body building in three different areas: mass, definition, and mentality.

In the early days of bodybuilding, from about the 1890s to the 1930s, it was all about strength. Whether your abs were etched out of stone or the veins bulged from your biceps was of no consequence. 

“The intention was not to develop ones physique into a glorious spectacle per se, but to thrill crowds with amazing feats of strength,” BodyBuilding.com reported. “The modern sport, as it was becoming, of weight-lifting was somewhat of a natural evolution from the comparatively primitive practice of stone-lifting in dark, dank dungeons.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, the culture shifted. Bodybuilding was no longer just about brute strength. It was about mass.

This shift in mentality was best exemplified by Schwarzenegger, whose stature and muscle size turned him into a legend. He won Mr. Olympia seven times, starred in films like The Terminator, and transformed California's Venice Beach into the center of the bodybuilding universe. 

But what truly made Schwarzenegger different from his competition was his attention to definition and unabashed confidence. As shown in the documentary Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger discusses how he treats his body like a sculpture treats a block of marble, taking a little off and putting some on to make the piece nearly perfect. 

This attention to detail is what drives the bodybuilding subculture of aesthetics. 

In essence, an aesthetic bodybuilder wants to look sexually appealing through muscle definition.They don’t care about competitions like Mr. Olympia. The real competition is out in the streets, and the prize is a woman's gaze. 

This difference between traditional bodybuilding and aesthetics is best summed up in this clip from Fight Club showing brawlers Edward Norton and Brad Pitt mocking a photo of chiseled Calvin Klein models.

In four years of gym training, Shavershian bottled up Pitt’s carefree attitude, the Calvin Klein–model body, and Schwarzenegger’s swagger. He completely transformed himself.

With a haircut resembling that of a Dragon Ball Z character, a permanent tan, and a sinewy frame, Shavershian put his body and machismo on display as often as he could. 

On YouTube, Shavershian uploaded videos of him and his entourage marching shirtless through music festivals, pumping their fists to electronic dance music in a parking garage, and of course, lifting at the gym. (His YouTube channel is here.)

In nearly every video clip, Shavershian can be heard muttering phrases like “U ’mirin’, brah” and “U jelly”—Internet slang suggesting, as Know Your Meme puts it, that people were “admiring or jealous of his physique.” Both terms, popular on /fit/ and BodyBuilding.com, have since become popular memes.

Shavershian posted on BodyBuilding.com 839 times. He also frequented /fit/, where he uploaded photos of himself along with one of his two favorite phrases.

Shavershian was also one of /fit/’s most notorious trolls, regularly taunting users with photos of himself and belittling others. Allegedly, Shavershian had his IP address permabanned on /fit/. This did not please one of Shavershian’s biggest fans.

In 2010, Zyzz was called the “epitome of aesthetics” on Urban Dictionary, and in 2011, he was featured in the YouTube series “National Road Trip,” an Australian reality show akin to MTV’s Road Rules.

As Shavershian’s star was on the rise, so were the rumors of drug abuse.

On July 14, 2011, Shavershian’s brother was arrested during a police raid in Sydney, Australia, and charged with possession of anabolic steroids, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. 

Shavershian denied taking any steroids and derided Australian media outlets for implicating him in his brother’s arrest. 

“The article portrays me in a negative light, using my photo for what was an article predominately [sic] about anabolic steroids when I have never been charged, caught, or convicted with anything related to drug use," Shavershian said in September 2011 email to the Herald. "What I have done, however, is use the Internet to build up my name and brand, I have my own protein label and supplement sponsorships, all made possible through social media.”

A week after sending this email, Shavershian was in a Bangkok sauna when he suffered a heart attack and died. 

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stated that Shavershian “had shown some minor symptoms in recent months, including occasional shortness of breath and high blood pressure, and that there was a family history of heart problems.”

Shavershian’s death was a major blow for the aesthetic subculture he helped to popularize and to those who looked up to him as the epitome of the nerdy loser who reinvented himself.

“His rapid transformation was the stuff of fantasy for thousands of skinny teenagers, and it made him a pin-up boy,” said Brendan King, a reporter for Australia’s Broadcasting Corporation.

…

Today Shavershian’s photos, catchphrases, and workout philosophy loom large on /fit/, Bodybuilding.com, and social media.

On Facebook alone, you can find a never-ending list of pages, profiles, and groups with hundreds of thousands of users who could dissect every detail of Shavershian’s life.

And most poignantly, on Shavershian’s BodyBuilding.com profile, fans regularly leave him messages. 

“I think he sticks around because he had no air of humility, he was all about promoting his alpha-male lifestyle and the idea that physical appearance could trump everything,” former KnowYourMeme researcher and current Tumblr staffer Amanda Brennan told the Daily Dot. 

“He represents the idea that any normal, scrawny dude could eventually grow up and become an Adonis that women want to have and men want to be. He knew that he could build this god by playing into what he believed the Internet wanted to hear.”

Unlike most of us mortal netizens, Shavershian represented the best and worst of the Internet—someone who could inspire thousands to get in shape and others to cringe at his lack of self-awareness. Zyzz lived long enough to see himself become a hero and a villain in his world; three years later, his legacy can still be felt. And that’s something worth ’mirin'.

Photo via sffoghorn/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) | Illustration by Jason Reed

Microsoft is tired of watching you play video games in your underwear.

The company announced that it would be releasing a cheaper Xbox One that isn’t bundled with a Kinect, a device that contains a motion-tracking camera and a microphone.

The announcement comes about a year after Microsoft angered the gaming world and privacy activists when it stated that the Kinect would always be on in the background whether an Xbox One game required it or not.

"Microsoft's new Xbox meets the definition of a surveillance device under some Australian laws," Vines told NineMSN in May 2013, "so they need to be upfront and tell customers whether anyone else can intercept their information or remotely access their device."

The new Xbox One will be released on June 9 and cost $399, down from the original $499 price tag, and the same price as competitor Sony's Playstation 4. Microsoft also stated that apps like Netflix, Hulu, and ESPN will also be available to Xbox One users without them having to shell out $60 for a Xbox Live Gold subscription.

One of the communities cheering Microsoft for the decision was 4chan’s video game board /v/.

The Xbox One was officially released on Nov. 22 and has sold about 5 million consoles. In February alone that number was 258,000 units, a 61 percent increase over its previous console the Xbox 360 in the same time frame. The Xbox One’s competitor, Sony PS4, was released on Nov. 15 and has sold 7 million consoles.

Aside from its cheaper Xbox One, Microsoft will continue selling its $499 unit which comes with the Kinect.

Photo by tandemsystemsltd/Flickr (CC By 2.0) | Remix by fern

The Internet’s perverse pranksters from 4chan are trying to convince teenagers to tweet nude photos of themselves in response to a video of One Direction members allegedly smoking weed.

The prank was started by 4chan’s /b/—known for its loud-mouthed teens, pornographic proclivities, and cat-saving prowess—less than 24 hours ago after a video surfaced that supposedly showed One Direction’s Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson toking up in the backseat of a car in Peru.

The grainy video was allegedly filmed by fellow group mate Tomlinson, who narrates the scene.

“Zayn takes his job very seriously,” Tomlinson says in the video. “He makes sure he goes through a two-hour intense warm-up regime before every show, just to get himself in the zone. One very, very important factor to Zayn’s warm-up, of course, is Mary Jane [a common term for marijuana] herself. In fact I’m presenting it to him now for some fantastic singing.”

Capitalizing on the impressionable nature of One Direction’s teenage fanbase, /b/ encouraged its community to create fake Twitter accounts to spam the hashtag #skinfor1d. The goal was to convince real teenagers to strip in solidarity with their favorite English boy band, who has come under media scrutiny since the release of the video.

So far, the prank has been wildly successful.

The hashtag has been mentioned more than 89,000 times and helped it briefly land as one of Twitter’s official worldwide trending topics.

Because of the sheer number of tweets coming from a mix of new and old Twitter accounts, it’s impossible to discern for certain which are from fake accounts. For example, the account @CaitlinPrauge (which has content that is pornogaphic and NSFW) appears to be one of the fakes; it’s brand-new and has tweeted the same nude photo three times in the past 10 hours. There are numerous others like it.

/b/ couldn’t contain its excitement.

The prank has gotten so out of hand, One Direction member Liam Payne asked fans on Twitter to calm down and keep their clothes on.

In January 2013, /b/ pulled of a nearly identical prank when they convinced Justin Bieber fans to allegedly slit their wrists in response to a photo of him smoking weed. The hashtag #cutforbieber became a trending topic at the time as well and spawned two other hoaxes asking fans to tweet nudes (#boobs4bieber) and get arrested (#jail4bieber) for the teenage heartthrob.

Illustration by Jason Reed

Volume dials were turned up, computers began recording, forum posts were hastily typed. Something big was happening.

OBYaVLENIYA KOMANDA 135

For the first time in a history that stretches back nearly 40 years, the mysterious Russian radio signal popularly known as UVB-76 had issued an order. On Jan. 24, 2013, it was heard clearly by its legion of fans:

Command 135 initiated

The radio signal that occupies 4625 kHz has reportedly been broadcasting since the late 1970s. The earliest known recording of it is dated 1982. Ever since curious owners of shortwave radios first discovered the signal, it has broadcast a repeating buzzing noise. Every few years, the buzzer stops, and a Russian voice reads a mixture of numbers and Russian names.

A typical message came hours before Christmas day, 1997:

“Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4”

Instead of shutting down with the fall of communism in Russia, UVB-76 became even more active. Since the millennium, voice messages have become more and more frequent.

It’s easy to dismiss the signal as pre-recorded, or a looping tone. But what listeners quickly realized was that UVB-76 is not a recording. The buzzer noise is generated manually. The reason for hearing telephone conversations and banging noises in the background of the signal is that a speaker creating the buzzer is constantly placed next to the microphone, giving the world an eerie insight into whatever cavern the signal originates from.

The modern popularity of UVB-76 can be traced to /x/, 4chan’s non-archiving message board devoted to discussion of paranormal activity and unexplained mysteries. Just as 4chan created memes like Pedobear and Rickrolling, the online image board served to bring UVB-76 before the eyes of a host of Internet users.

Online chatter about the signal increased in 2010 as bizarre broadcasts were issued on an almost monthly basis. Snippets of Swan Lake were played, a female voiced counted from one to nine, a question mark was transmitted in Morse code, and strange telephone conversations were overheard by the receiver.

The short recording of Swan Lake that was broadcast by the signal in 2010.

Since October 2010, the station has changed location. The flurry of activity and voice messages preceded the most important development in the signal since it began broadcasting in the 1970s. It seems likely that the heightened activity of 2010 was related to the establishment of the signal in a new location. The new call sign was read out after the move: “MDZhB”.

Previous triangulation efforts had led to the discovery of the transmitter for UVB-76: a Russian military base on the outskirts of Povarovo, a small town 19 miles from Moscow.

After the station changed location, two groups of urban explorers and UVB-76 followers travelled to the remote Russian town in an attempt to visit the military bunker that the signal had originated from for over 30 years. When they reached the town, a local man told them about the storm of 2010. One night a dense fog rolled in, and the military outpost was evacuated within 90 minutes.

After making their way across the site and avoiding the guard dog stationed outside, the groups found the bunker and military buildings in a state of abandonment. Possessions and equipment were strewn across the base. Icy water had filled the bunker, yet clues were still to be found inside. One group described the Povarov military bunker as "a quiet and lonely dark place, something like a maze with lots of corridors and rooms."

A book was found that contained a log of messages sent by UVB-76. The ethereal signal that had fascinated the world for years now had a physical presence, along with confirmation that it had been run by the Russian military.

But the mystery continues to this day. Sporadic voice messages are still emitted. Legions of listeners tune in via radios and online streams every day. A file can be downloaded at this link that allows followers to listen to UVB-76 in iTunes.

Along with a renewed interest in studying and archiving the broadcasts of UVB-76, multiple triangulation attempts have been made to try and ascertain the new location of the signal. Unlike before, it seems that UVB-76 is emanating from multiple transmitters across Russia. Triangulation has given rise to three possible locations.

One possible location is the small Russian village of Kirsino, which has a registered populace of just 39 people. One signal can be traced here. But this isn't the fan-favorite location.

Near to the Estonian border lies the Pskov Oblast. This is currently the most likely source of UVB-76, due to the multiple triangulation attempts that lead here.

Photo via Sergey Rodovnichenko/Flickr (CC BY S.A 2.0)

Recently a new theory has been the cause of much discussion amongst the followers of UVB-76. Could the signal be related to the Russian Government radio channel Voice Of Russia? One location that appears during triangulation attempts is very close to a transmitter array southeast of Kolpino that is reportedly used by the Russian government to transmit state radio across Russia.

As UVB-76 settled into the new location, Dance of The Little Swans from Swan Lake was played. Instrumental passages from Swan Lake are a favorite of Voice Of Russia.

The radio array that offers an intriguing link between UVB-76 and the Russian government.

While Internet followers may have discovered the location of the old signal, the purpose of UVB-76 remains a mystery. As with any unexplained mystery, conspiracy theories abound, some more credible than others.

The closest thing to an official explanation for the signal’s purpose comes from an academic paper published by the Borok Geophysical Observatory. This state-funded organization describes itself as a "branch of the Federal state budgetary institution of science." They explain that the signal originates from an observatory using the 4625 kHz frequency to measure changes in the ionosphere.

This does not explain the military bunker, or the voice messages. Nor does the paper detail how successful the research has been. A signal on the 4625 kHz frequency would have suffered from extreme interference, rendering it nearly unusable for researching the ionosphere.

The fan-favorite conspiracy is that UVB-76 is the audible version of Russia’s "Dead Man Switch" system. In the case of a nuclear strike that cripples Russian military command, the automated system will launch a counter-strike. While it’s likely that Russia does possess such a system, it’s fanciful to think that this humble buzzing sound is the noise of our impending nuclear apocalypse.

The most credible explanation of UVB-76’s purpose is that it is a military communication system operating across western Russia. The coded messages are announcements for various military districts, enabling a simple means of communicating with multiple units at the same time. As for the repeating buzzing noise, this is thought to be a channel marker that exists to discourage others from using the same frequency.

An image posted on Russian Wikipedia seems to confirm the military communication theory. A small, framed piece of paper in an administration and enlistment office of the Russian army refers to 4625 kHz, the broadcasting frequency of UVB-76. With this so prominently displayed, it’s possible to confirm that the signal is not a "Dead Man’s Switch," nor is the signal intended to be a secret.

The Internet has, for decades, been listening to the internal communication network of the western division of the Russian armed forces.

Photo via Orlando Avare/Wikipedia

While the mystery of UVB-76 may have been solved, its legion of followers and obsessives will continue to listen. Thousands of people across the world tune into the signal, hoping to catch one of the ethereal voice messages.

For those in the know, it’s a bemusing social phenomenon. But for the residents of 4chan’s /x/ board and the radio scanner fans, UVB-76 is far more than a communications network. For them, it’s a sign of the forthcoming apocalypse, it’s an international spy network, it’s a secret Russian space experiment.

Whether you believe the theories or not, there’s no denying the thrill that comes with hearing the distorted voice messages of UVB-76.

Photo via Janm67 / Wikipedia (CC BY 3.0)

The hashtags #EndFathersDay and #WhitesCantBeRaped trended worldwide Friday, apparently the work of angry feminists on Twitter. They were really part of an elaborate 4chan hoax.

The prank was started by 4chan’s politically incorrect board, /pol/, in an effort to rile up feminists and make them (and men) look like idiots. 

“This is a holiday celebrating misogyny, demanding appreciation and gifts for doing what a father should be doing anyway, especially when almost all cases of domestic abuse stem from the father,” an anonymous user on /pol/ wrote. 

“Fathers all over the country are refusing to pay alimony or child support, which should not celebrated and rewarded, but should be shamed. ‘Father's Day’ should not be about celebrating the role of a father in the family, but about correcting it. It shouldn't be celebrated in its present form.” 

Click here to read /pol/’s full call to action.

The hashtags have been mentioned more than 40,000 times combined in the past day, thanks to an army of fake Twitter accounts. 

Unlike 4chan’s last hoax, which targeted impressionable One Direction fans, this one has seemingly convinced real people to respond to the hoax and proliferate it.

Thanks to #EndFathersDay , I learned a new word today: misandry. Thank you twitter!

— Malaka Gyekye Grant (@AbenaGyekye) June 13, 2014

This is why no one can take modern feminists seriously. #EndFathersDaypic.twitter.com/GzdZwStasX

— John C. Rieber (@JohnCRieber) June 13, 2014

Stop #EndFathersDay because being a feminist means achieving equality, not hating men.

— haley (@irlkhaleesi) June 13, 2014

Get your tubes tied. #EndFathersDay

— Rusty Redenbacher (@rustymk2) June 13, 2014

Both of these hashtags are part of a six-month-long prank war 4chan launched against feminists. 

The first prank to get traction was Operation Bikini Bridge in January, a scheme started by 4chan’s random imageboard /b/. The objective was to spam social media and get news organizations like CNN to report that the bikini bridge—what happens when a bikini bottom is stretched between the two hipbones—was a shocking new fashion phenomenon, the next wave of “thinspo” or pro-anorexia social media.

4chan followed this up with Operation Freebleeding, which tried to convince women that the use of sanitary pads was a male construction to keep them down. 

H/T Death & Taxes | Photo by danrocha/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

4chan has baked up the pizza from your nightmare.

Using a “Design A Pizza” Web app from DiGiorno, 4chan’s random imageboard /b/—known for saving cats, pranking tweens, and insulting feminists—has whipped up some offensive pizzas to sink your teeth into.

Most of the designs are too offensive to display below, you can see them on Imgur, if you're up for it. (NSFW!) The following safer-for-work designs capture 4chan’s obsession with calling themselves fags, using the word “implying” to mock someone’s logic, and dickbutt, a 7-year-old meme that has replaced the Rickroll as the Internet’s favorite bait and switch.

This isn’t the first time /b/ has abused a create your own design app. In October, /b/ tried to get names like “Nig Nogs Tears,” “Moot,” and “A. Hitler” to win Neuro Drink’s create-a-SONIC contest.

H/T Reddit | Photo by deapeajay/Flickr (CC By SA 2.0)

Warning: This story contains graphic content that may be NSFW. 

Two North Florida girls are in hot water—off- and online—after torturing a rare gopher tortoise and sharing the footage online.

The teens, as catalogued in graphic and disturbing videos they posted to YouTube and Facebook, attempted to burn the turtle multiple times. Unsatisfied, they threw it against the hard pavement multiple times, taunted it, and ultimately stomped it to death, all the while laughing and delighting in its suffering.

In posting the videos online, however, the girls only assisted in the Internet’s attempts at serving up vigilante justice for the gopher tortoise, who was listed as a threatend species in Florida in 2007. Earlier this week, 4chan’s /b/ board commenced with a doxing effort—doxing refers to the public release of private, identifying information—dubbed “Operation Shell Shock.”

Photo via Imgur
 

Using stills from the videos, the /b/ board members were able to gelocate the address that the video was filmed at and the supposed home of one of the girls. After an exhaustive combing of social media, members began sending out email blasts to local media outlets, as well as Ridgeview High School, detailing the girls' actions and their supposed identities. The Florida Times-Union, while unable to confirm the identities of the girls, aged
15 and 18, has confirmed through friends and local law enforcement that the two are indeed students at the Orange Park, Fla., high school.

Photo via Imgur
 

After being alerted to the videos by a Las Vegas Animal Control officer, Nevada Voters for Animals President Gina Greisen joined in the quest for the girls to face justice. Campaiging on Facebook, the animal right's group posted both original videos with pleas for its members to report the actions of the teens to the Clay County sheriff's office.

The group’s Facebook page applauds a teen named Ash for bringing the videos to their attention. According to a GoFundMe.com page set up by the teen to raise money for the Wildlife Foundation of Florida, he claims he was friends with one of the girls in the videos and downloaded the videos off her profile before they were deleted. According to Ash’s fundraising site, the girls had taken the tortoise in as a pet after finding the endangered animal but “got bored, (and) they took it outside and tortured it.”

After receiving multiple complaints about the torture and killing of the tortoise, the girls are currently under investigation. Karen Parker, a spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is working with the State Attorney’s Office to determine the charges that the girls could face. Parker told The Florida Times-Union:

“We received quite a few complaints about this and a call from the Sheriff’s Office, so we had an officer go out last night. Everybody is pretty much sickened by it and can’t believe someone would do that to an innocent animal."

The girls could face multiple felony charges. One for aggrevated animal cruelty, and an additional felony charge for the death of an endagered species. With the girls delighting in the animals abuse, yelling "Burn baby, burn baby," as the animal tries to escape the flames, many are hoping to see them tried as adults. 

Despite its notorious reputation, 4chan's attempts at serving up justice for defensless turtle is just one of the group's acts of animal goodwill. Previously, the /b/ board members have come to the aid of a French cat brutally abused on video and a dog who had a gun held to its head by a high schooler. In August, /b/ also got a teenager arrested for kicking a kitten on Vine.

An Omegle post claiming that a missing 12-year-old had been killed is a hoax.

The post was made on Omegle, a free chat service often used by teenagers, sometime over the past day regarding Julissa Romero, a California girl who has been missing since April 23.

"I have a gift for you strangers," stated the message. "At [this] latitude and longitude is the body of 12 year old Julissa Romero stabbed 17 times, she has been missing for 5 months. Enjoy."

The message led Reddit and 4chan users on a digital and offline hunt for the missing girl.

The coordinates in the message matched up with 11029 Dublin Canyon Rd, Pleasanton, Calif.

Other redditors were turned into amateur gumshoes.

“[I]f I were a cop investigating this, I'd ask google for a list of all [IP adresses] that looked up those coordinates,” loki5456 commented. “[T]hen I'd look at the ones who were looking it up before that Omegle post.”

Meanwhile, other 4chan users—who had quickly realized the entire message was a hoax around 8am Tuesday morning—decided to prank news organizations like CNN into reporting the information as fact.

About two hours after 4chan’s random imageboard /b/—a dark corner of the Internet where porn is posted, tortured turtles are avenged, and feminists are mocked—a CBS affiliate in California debunked the hoax.

“Commander Henry Gomez of the Salinas Police Department said Julissa Romero, 12, is alive,” CBS reported. “Gomez said the department has received dozens of phone calls in regards to the post, which has been written about on several other websites and blogs.”

Photo by reynermedia/Flickr (CC By 2.0)

4chan users are behind a new video about female video game designers—and the result isn't quite what you'd expect.

The Fine Young Capitalists (TFYC) is a new website telling interesting stories about people you might not have ever heard of. For the past few months, it's been tackling the dearth female video game developers. Although women are a sizable chunk of video game players, from casual to hardcore, very few tend to actually make the games.

TFYC also wanted to test the waters of 4chan, and bluntly asked the community what they wanted to hear about. Some users on 4chan wanted to study up on some influential female developers, so TFYC released a video talking about Roberta Williams. It goes into detail about how a woman brought about such monumental change to the video game landscape at an age when video games really weren’t a thing. 

Though it does include the phrase "softcore porn" (which makes sense in context), it's a remarkably tame video given the community it was borne out of. In fact, the narrator spends the last 30 seconds of the video debunking any notion of the 4chan sponsorship being a joke.

Currently TFYC is working on a project in which women pitch video game ideas, people vote on which ideas they like, and the one with the most votes will be turned into a video game. Those who vote will be given shares of the profits, which can in turn be donated to charities of the voters' choice. It’s a really interesting concept that turns crowdfunders into investors. Learn more at the TFYC Indiegogo page.

Screengrab via The Fine Young Capitalists/YouTube

Online data is a gamble: Don’t wager anything you can’t afford to see slip through your fingers and into the grasp of others. It's the sad, stupid reality of an Internet that incentivizes creeps to do stuff like this. Nothing is safe. You can make your private stuff like passwords and topless spring break pics safer, but you can't make them safe—not if they're in any way connected to the Internet, which seems to be teeming with even more low lifes than usual.

In the Great Nude Photo Hack of 2014, voices blaming the victims are loud, of course. If you can't stand for something to pop up on the front page of Reddit, you shouldn't do it to begin with.

Put together a list of tips for celebs after latest leaks: 1. Don't take nude selfies 2. Don't take nude selfies 3. Don't take nude selfies

— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) September 1, 2014

And really, if everything is fair game, why live your life at all? Where’s there’s the will of a hypocritical creep eager to invade your privacy, there’s a way. While that problematic argument defends the hackers who leaked nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and others, it’s a sadly useful mindset that’ll protect you from both horny teens on 4chan and the invasive policies of your own government.

Personally, in spite of this, I don't plan on listening to the haters. I'm no celebrity, but I'm plenty sex positive and not particularly ashamed of the fact that I've taken nude selfies. (They're like relationship currency!) But that doesn't mean I won't make reasonable efforts to secure anything that might be "compromising"—namely, anything someone would compromise my privacy to obtain. 

The details of the celebrity hack are only just emerging. On the tech side, Apple is characteristically mum about any potential technical flaws in iCloud—its big, amorphous floating cloud storage realm where your secrets sleep at night—though it is reportedly looking into things. Given the myriad ways that creeps on the Internet can weasel their way into your private data (social engineering techniques being both the easiest and most common) it’s less likely, though possible, that the security flaw is a chink in Apple’s armor. 

After social engineering (which could explain Celebgate), any product's social sharing layer is going to be the next weakest link in the chain, because... well, humans. Whether iCloud is vulnerable to intrusions like brute force attacks or not, Apple's cloud service has another big problem for its users to worry about. Same goes for products by Facebook, Google, and any other of the other tech companies that extract monetary value from what they know about us. These companies have a vested interest in making privacy settings on their products difficult to understand and a hassle to navigate. And the default rarely errs on the side of privacy. 

Facebook is notorious for its intentionally labyrinthine privacy settings, though it's cleaned things up a little lately. Apple’s iCloud isn’t much better, especially when it comes to photos. It doesn’t help that over the past few years an iPhone’s photos might be backed up to iCloud, Photo Stream, and iPhoto—three services which weren’t woven together in any kind of coherent way until relatively recently.

With the burden falling on the user, most people are lazy about privacy at best. And—silly us—we tend to believe a user interface when it presents us with a “delete” button. Unfortunately, even if you delete a photo from a device backed up to the cloud, that photo will still live on a server somewhere for some amount of time. Companies aren’t exactly forthcoming about what happens next, but they like to make it easy for us to restore our data, even if we explicitly say that we want it to go away forever. 

Remember: Snapchats don’t actually disappear, Secrets aren’t really secret, and email is about as private as a postcard.

While there are very few ways for the average user to make themselves invulnerable to hacks, there are some basic precautions anyone can take that lower the odds considerably. Yes, it’s the same stuff you hear again and again—but it’s an important refrain. Make strong passwords. That means maxing out a password’s character limit, with a generous mix of numbers, symbols, and capitalized characters. Use different passwords in different places; a universal password is like giving hackers a skeleton key to your bank account and nudie pics alike.

The other big one is two-step verification—yes, it sounds boring, but it’ll save you. Most people don’t use two-step verification with iCloud, but now’s a good time to start. It’s the single most powerful way that the average person can fend off hackers. Do it right now... even though Apple apparently makes it as difficult as possible. 

Still want to share those sexy iPhone pics? Then follow these step for sharing nudes safely, for the layperson (rules do not apply to celebs, sadly):

1) Disable everything that connects your photos to iCloud. You can find these controls in your iPhone's settings menu, under Photos & Camera. Look for anything with a green toggle. Destroy all of the green toggles. When you turn off Photo Stream and Photo Sharing, Apple will warn you that it will delete all of your existing cloud-synced photos—that's a good thing. With all of this photo syncing nonsense enabled, your photos are accessible through any email address associated with your iCloud account, and there can be a lot of those. 

2) Done with Step 1? Let's take this offline. Hold something as collateral. If you want to trade pics, make sure that the relationship is bi-directional. A nude for a nude, if you will. This will make you feel like (and be) a terrible person, rendering something fun totally unfun. 

3) Share your nudes on physical storage devices. Thumbdrives work great—they’re discreet, cheap, and not network-connected. Be sure to label them clearly, or misleadingly, as the situation merits. (A thumbdrive labeled “XXX” might stir the curiosities of your roommate; try “Cat Photo Archive II” or “Thesis Backup-Rough Draft” instead.)

4) Take a polaroid photograph, hand it to the person next to you, and watch them place the photograph into an actual fire after a pre-determined interval of time. It's like Snapchat, but rustic!

And if you really want to lock down those sexy shots of you draped over a leopard skin rug in Ibiza? The Daily Dot’s Aaron Sankin offers the following bulletproof advice:

The key is you gotta keep your sext pix in cold storage. Airgap that shit. Put it in an external hard drive. Inside of a ziplock bag. Tie a rock to it and drop it in the bottom of a lake.

We wish we were joking.

Photo via Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Emma Watson’s recent speech to the U.N. was praised by very nearly everyone thanks to its impassioned feminist message. We say it was praised by nearly everyone because as it turns out, for a small group of 4chan messageboard users, the popularity of Watson’s speech was too much to handle. She had to be stopped. 

In the words of one of the 4chan posts, “she makes stupid feminist speeches at UN, and now her nudes will be online, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.” One commenter wrote about wanting to hunt down and share unpublished paparazzi upskirt shots that Watson had once mentioned in an interview. Another 4chan user created a website, which is currently counting 12am EST on Sept. 24. The implication is that it’s counting down to another nude photo leak.

There is no proof that anyone has any nude photos of Emma Watson. This is almost certainly a case of trolling. But in the light of the attention paid to leaked nude photos of other female celebrities, it’s still a blatant intimidation tactic. No human being is so perfectly squeaky-clean in their private life that something can’t be dug up to discredit them, and the aim of this game is to discourage Watson—and other women—from speaking publicly about feminism.

The nude photo threat was coupled with a celebrity death hoax using the #RIPEmmaWatson hashtag, along with fake news headlines claiming that she had been found dead in her hotel room.

“@BlurOfBlaze: #RIPEmmaWatson She was a really good actress and a good person. pic.twitter.com/KvARRCLxhL” HAHA WHAT

— nick (@nxxck) September 22, 2014

Contrary to what CNN might think, 4chan is far from a homogenous entity. However, the site’s notorious /b/ board does have a long history of cyberbullying, doxing, and most recently, the public sexual harassment of female celebrities. The backlash against Watson is relatively minor when compared to the kind of abuse fielded by game developer Zoe Quinn, but that’s says more about the severity of online misogynist attacks than it does about Watson’s 4chan harassment.

So far, Watson has taken the high road and ignored any negative attention sent her way, only tweeting to publicize her #HeForShe gender equality campaign. It’s already caught on, with a number of celebrities, from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rashida Jones taking part. 

I consider myself a Feminist & I wanna know what #Feminism means to you. Watch+Contribute: http://t.co/IuNphYG8Nqpic.twitter.com/fLWkz81eMy

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt (@hitRECordJoe) September 22, 2014

Considering Watson’s response to the celebrity photo leaks last month, however, she is definitely already aware of the darker side of the Internet.

Even worse than seeing women's privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson) September 1, 2014

Photo via Joella Marano/Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

A website promising the release of stolen nude photos of actress Emma Watson is a hoax—and 4chan is not behind it.

Emmayouarenext.com is the work of SocialVevo, a team of social media pranksters who previously preyed on NASA during the government shutdown, took emotional advantage of Family Guy fans following the “death” of a beloved character, and sent the Daily Dot a wave of bogus Twitter followers in a spam attack.

Now it appears that SocialVevo has again duped some of the world’s top news organizations into falling for its shenanigans.

Because of 4chan’s celebrated seedy side, and its ephemeral nature, nearly every single burp or whisper surrounding Celebgate has been blamed on the notorious imageboard. 

Its bad reputation is compounded by the fact that, unlike Reddit, 4chan does not employ a public-relations professional to fact check the media. The only official 4chan “employee” is Christopher “moot” Poole, the site’s founder, administrator, and muse. And unless he’s called into court, he’s not one to discuss 4chan drama openly.

The Emma Watson-branded website was created in the wake of the second round of leaks in Celebgate (or “The Fappening”), the release of hundreds of nude photographs of celebrities, such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kaley Cuoco, and Hayden Panettiere. The first round of leaks originated on an obscure NSFW imageboard known as AnonIB but quickly gained traction on 4chan’s /b/ board, notorious for its pornography, pranks, and love of animals. 

Following the initial round of celebrity leaks on Aug. 30, news organizations like Vox, the International Business Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times parachuted into /b/ to try to make sense of the community and gulp down that delicious traffic nectar. 

This has resulted in a massive spike in 4chan popularity, according to Google:

It’s also resulted in a lot of misreporting. 

On Monday, Business Insider, the Washington Post, the Belfast Telegraph, the BBC, and others ran articles claiming that 4chan was behind emmayouarenext.com. The Daily Dot also reported on the countdown. (Editor's note: James Cook, the author of the Business Insider article, is a former staff member of the Daily Dot.)

None of these stories provide any proof that /b/ was actually behind this. Not one screengrab from /b/ discussing the prank is included. The only thing these organizations cite as proof of the imageboard users’ involvement is the 4chan logo featured on the countdown site.

What all four of these news organizations and others failed to realize—or at least fail to mention in their articles—was a report from a shady blog called FoxWeekly, published a day earlier, alleging 4chan’s connection to emmayouarenext.com.

This lack of evidence connecting 4chan to the Watson site led redditors, 4chan users, and folks from 8chan (a 4chan clone) on a massive quest that connected FoxWeekly and emmayouarenext.com to SocialVevo.

For starters, the Internet sleuths pieced together evidence that shows emmayouarenext.com is hosted on the same server as a company called Rantic Marketing.

In summation: Rantic Marketing is pretending to be 4chan threatening to release @EmWatson photos. @nero#GamerGatepic.twitter.com/zXJrEgUmBS

— Mr. Universe (@Memnix) September 23, 2014

A search for Rantic turned up its website and Twitter account. On its site, Rantic claimed to have worked with almost the exact same list of companies as SocialVevo. And on Twitter, hundreds of fake accounts that tweeted links to emmayouarenext.com are following Rantic’s Twitter handle, @RanticMarketing.

On @RanticMarketing is where these sleuths found a now-deleted tweet praising FoxWeekly for its 4chan coverage:

FoxWeekly has, for the past six months, lifted dozens of copyrighted articles from the BBC, the New York Times, CNN, and the Associated Press. The site was founded by someone who calls himself Joey, joey b, and juice7292—the names used by SocialVevo’s founders.

A small group of Internet marketers, SocialVevo (also known as Swenzy) capitalizes off of trending topics and major news events by manipulating social media and creating prank websites that it uses to sell YouTube views, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers. 

During the Oct. 2013 government shutdown, for example, SocialVevo built a site called rememberte13th.com, which featured a rocketship and a countdown that alleged NASA planned to release the “biggest discovery that will shake the Earth” on Nov. 13. The top-left corner of the page displayed the official NASA logo.

Once Reddit users discovered that the site was a hoax, SocialVevo moved up the release date which turned out out to be a lousy music video from an artist named Beeki Vendi. 

Since its NASA hoax, SocialVevo’s pranks have followed a similar pattern. Each one has involved exploiting some pseudo-national news item, the creation of a countdown site promising to release some sort of scintillating information related to the news event, collecting mass media attention, a revision to the countdown because of people snooping around, and wrapping up the countdown with resulting links to one of SocialVevo’s sites or social media accounts.

Below are some other examples of SocialVevo’s countdown sites from the past year or so:

After having looked over all this information Tuesday, the connection between Rantic, FoxWeekly, and SocialVevo wasn’t strong enough. So I reached out to “juice” (one of the SocialVevo founders) to find out if any of it was true. He denied having any part of emmayouarenext.com.

“[T]hose 4channers are just eating on that article you published about the fox site,” he told me via Skype chat. “[M]e and simon [one of the other alleged founders of SocialVevo] are trying to find out who owns the countdown too. [I]t started in 4chan. [W]e keep getting our emails hacked by 4chan users and ppl emailing us about the countdown its [sic] annoying as fuck.”

Hours after this conversation, Rantic completely overhauled its website (the original site can be seen here) to reflect the alleged drama with 4chan. This is what Rantic’s site looks like now:

So when the timer on emmayouarenext.com runs out, will it reveal some nudes of Watson? Not likely—especially since, as of midnight Tuesday, the site now redirects to rantic.com. 

Photo via David Shankbone/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed 

Some pranksters from 4chan are trying to convince iPhone 6 owners to bend their phones.

The effort by /b/, 4chan’s random imageboard and pit of sin, follows news reports of people intentionally and unintentionally bending their brand new phones.

The objective of /b/’s prank is to use various Apple-inspired ads to convince gullible owners to bend their phones as a way to improve their screen angle and give it a “unique shape.”

The prank has been unofficially called Bend.

The following screengrabs are from one of the threads /b/ users used to share their ads. To see them larger, visit here and here.

This prank follows just a week after /b/ tried fooling people into microwaving their iPhone 6’s in order to unlock some special feature. That prank was called iWave.

In case you don't trust your BS meter (or know an iPhone user who's particularly dupable), here are some of the other /b/ Bend ads to watch out for.

Photos via 4chan

Last week, you learned all about the Snappening, a purported leak of hundreds of thousands of Snapchat users’ photos. Although many initially speculated that the hack resulted from a breach in a third-party Snapchat app like Snapsaved, which allows users to save images without the sender’s consent, it wasn’t confirmed until earlier today, when the website itself took responsibility for the hack in a statement on its Facebook page.  

“I sincerely apologize on the behalf of snapsaved.com we never wished for this to happen,” the statement on Snapsaved’s Facebook page says. “We did not wish to cause SnapChat or their users any harm, we only wished to provide a unique service.”

The statement went on to say that Snapsaved.com, which has since been shut down, was hacked as the result of a misconfiguration in its Apache server. But contrary to allegations made in an anonymous Pastebin post from a user claiming to be responsible for the hack, which stated that the images came from “an administrator of the site,” Snapsaved denied that it was directly involved for the leak, claiming the website shut down its database immediately after the security breach was discovered.

Snapsaved also alleged that that the hacker does not have the necessary tools to create a searchable database of the hacked images, as anonymous 4chan users claimed when they announced the hack last week.

“The recent rumors about the snappening are a hoax. The hacker does not have sufficient information to live up to his claims of creating a searchable Database,” the statement says. (Considering how difficult it is to find verifiable leaked Snapchat videos and photos, as Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post points out, and that the searchable database of hundreds of thousands of hacked Snapchat photos promised by anonymous 4chan users last week has yet to come to fruition, it’s starting to look like there’s some truth to this explanation.)

While the hacker was able to access the photos stored in the server as a result of the breach, Snapsaved said that they were not able to access user information such as names and phone numbers. “As soon as we discovered the breach in our systems, we immediately deleted the entire website and the database associated with it,” the statement says. “As far as we can tell, the breach has effected [sic] 500MB of images, and 0 personal information from the database.”

You can read the whole statement from Snapsaved on its Facebook page.

H/T TechCrunch | Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III