Whats going on with Twitter? First Fox News gets hacked, then Britney Spears. Is no one safe from this epidemic?

Who was the dark mastermind behind last January's Denial of Service attack that shut down Scientology.org for a little while? A teenager, obvs. 18-year-old Dmitriy Guzner, a self-proclaimed member of the 4Chan-related anti-Scientology group Anonymous has been busted by the Feds for his part in the shenanigans. The Verona, NJ, teen has plead guilty and could get slammed with ten years in prison. Ouch. Press release after the jump.

After a 4chan message board user broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account and posted screenshots of her emails online, conservative Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly went on the air and yelled about it. "I'm not going to mention the Web site that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites," said O'Reilly on his show. "Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him? " 4chan management responded by changing the banner atop its random image posting board so that it read: "DESPICABLE, SLIMY, SCUMMY." One of the site's members took a more aggressive course of action, and hacked into O'Reilly's subscription-only site, BillOReilly.com, and posted the names, billing addresses, email addresses and passwords of 205 paying subscribers to Wikileaks and 4chan. In a statement, Wikileaks expressed no sympathy for O'Reilly — calling his site's security "nonexistent" — but had plenty for O'Reilly's attackers: "The hack was a response to the pundit's recent scurrilous attacks over the Sarah Palin's e-mail story — including on Wikileaks and other members of the press."

Federal agents searched the apartment of a University of Tennessee student on Sunday they believe might be the hacker script kiddy who broke into Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's Yahoo account and then posted its password to the subversive discussion board site 4chan.org. The feds pinpointed the accused's IP address after contacting the proxy service he used in an attempt to disguise his identity. Gabriel Ramuglia, who runs the proxy service, told Portfolio that only one of his users had activity which matched what the feds were looking for: someone who "visited Yahoo Mail, 4chan.org, and the Web addresses that were visible in the posted screenshots."The authorities won't say, but consensus has it the Tennessee college student under investigation is one David Kernell, a 20-year-old whose father, Mike Kernell, is a Democrat in the Tennessee state legislature. His email address is rubicon10@yahoo.com, which matches the name of a 4chan user — Rubico — who posted a detailed confession of the hack on the site last week. Also, whoever broke into Palin's account first changed the password to "popcorn," which could be a pun on Kernell's last name.

Perhaps yesterday's Sarah Palin email hack reminded you of that brilliant engrossing story the New York Times ran back in July about 4chan, the juvenile message board community of hackers, trolls and sundry internet misanthropes that pulled it off? The writer hung out with that molestation victim who wrote the nasty fake blog about that thirteen-year-old MySpace hoax suicide case and got his identity stolen by a hacker with a Rolls Royce named Weev. Well, we found the writer, Matt Schwartz*, on the internet to engage in a brief exchange on hackers, trolls, and why the Lulz Generation hates Sarah Palin. He even gets Weev to weigh in on how he might have done it better! A full interview after the jump.SCHWARTZ: A few random thoughts: 1. The question of whether the email of public servants is public or private is an interesting question. Public servants now have reason to behave as if every email might be read aloud in court. This standard might not actually be in the public interest, in the long run. It might make it harder for public servants to do their job. 2. It appears Palin used passwords that were too weak, and didn't change them often enough. Passwords should not be real words. they should include at least three digits and at least one non-alphanumeric character. Example: foo&&b@x7978. That's what a strong password should look like. 3. Weev's take: i wish they'd done it properly screenshots? should have archived the mailspool and waited a few days for the logs to go away i figure someone is going to get seriously v& for this maybe not the person who actually did it but someone MOE: Uh, v&? SCHWARTZ: What? oh. I dunno. That's what he said. I'm guessing it means "fucked by the national intelligence establishment." If you run that please be clear that he is NOT taking credit. MOE: Pareene wrote that the /b/ hacker didn't really seem to know what he was looking for and should have probably figured that out before sharing the password with the world. Do you think this sort of demonstrates the limitations of 4chan, like, ideologically? This was maybe their chance to get mainstream attention for doing something with a potential public interest. SCHWARTZ: All this demonstrates is that 4chan knows how to break into peoples' email accounts. 4chan has no coherent ideology ... it's more like a series of memes/trends. It might have some sort of ideology but for the fact that it doesn't have a memory. It erases itself multiple times a day. Moot can't afford to archive stuff. Server space is too expensive. So it's really hard for people to follow 4chan for a long period of time. There's no institutional memory. People drop in and drop out. It's like a mosh pit. But I do thinks it's significant that you can have 4chan and other anonymous people breaking national news. MOE: I guess Sarah Palin is the ultimate meme generation politician. SCHWARTZ: What do you mean? MOE: Her absurdity lends itself naturally to Lulz. Her averageness. Her momness. To the kid who doesn't remember Ollie North or Reagan or hear in her rhetoric the echoes of the destructive Reagan-era "culture wars", she is just a clueless lady with a funny accent and a bunch of fucked up kids. And like, of course her password is something stupid, you know? SCHWARTZ: I guess you're right. She doesn't make me that angry, either. Nor am i especially interested in why she makes others angry. I was already angry. I've been angry for a long time MOE: Right, and if she doesn't make us that angry, she is definitely not making 4chan angry. SCHWARTZ: It's interesting that all these pols use Yahoo! Or that Palin does. She writes pretty long emails. Very different from say, [former Philadelphia mayor and federal probe subject] John Street. The Alaskan government seems to have a rather vital textual culture. It has yet to succumb to the shorthand of the handheld thumbwriting favored by John Street, Eliot Spitzer, etc. What her email tells me is: "I am a mom. I write real, substantial, long, single-paragraph email with sincere expressions of my feelings." MOE: Yeah, and those are just the earnest, near universally relatable sort of positive qualities 4chan CAN'T STAND.

A member of the 4chan online community going by the handle "rubico" has claimed responsibility for hacking into Alaska governor Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. Reports allege Rubico is a college student with a father in the Tennessee state legislature. In his post, Rubico explains that all he had to do was find Palin's birthdate on Wikipedia, her ZIP code using the US Postal Service Web site, and find the answer to a security question — where did Palin meet her husband? — using Google search. 4chan links are not permanent, so we've copied Rubico's account, below.

Did the internet just cause Sarah Palin to destroy evidence? The potential Veep is in a bit of trouble for conducting state business using her personal, unarchived email address (gov.sarah@yahoo.com) instead of her official account (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). Emails from that Yahoo account are already being sought in connection with the Troopergate investigation. Now comes word that Anonymous, the fun-loving Internet trouble-makers based loosely around the message board 4Chan, gained access to another Palin email account: gov.palin@yahoo.com. It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin's email? Ok, sad thing first: a good Samaritan reset the password and tried to alert Sarah. But he also posted the new password, causing multiple people to try to log in at once, freezing the account for 24 hours. And now, the account has been deleted! Which is, as we said, maybe destruction of evidence? So for now this is, we think, all we'll get to see from this email account (if anyone finds evidence of saved emails, let us know.) The full timeline of events, with corroborating evidence of the legitimacy of these screengrabs, is here. Here's why it all looks convincing:

Alaska governor Sarah Palin may be in even hotter water over a Yahoo Mail account she used to conduct state business. One can hardly blame her for using Yahoo Mail, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, to handle official state business. Everyone loves to complain about the email provided by one's employer, and evade it when can. But for a state official, now a vice-presidential candidate, the practice was always questionable. Yahoo Mail is not archived as scrupulously as official state email accounts, which are covered by laws requiring the retention of government records. And her advisors specifically discussed using Yahoo Mail to evade archiving requirements. Here's where things just got worse: Palin, according to a discussion on /b/, an Internet messaging board frequented by online troublemakers, used a second account, gov.palin@yahoo.com, whose password users of the board say they hacked. Emails, allegedly Palin's, are now circulating on the Net. The whole thing could be a prank. But both accounts are now gone — which raises a much more serious issue.In the aftermath of the supposed hacking, someone deleted both the gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com accounts. Emails sent from Palin's Yahoo account made up part of a government inquiry into the firing of a state police commissioner; deleting the account would wipe out any emails investigators haven't already obtained. Could this be considered obstruction of justice? (Original photo by jmedkeffphoto)

The seditious perverts on bizzaro community board 4chan got their grubby hands on Google's Chrome comic and now they're doing to it what they already did to cute cat pictures when they came up with LOLcats. We'd link to 4chan but their links don't stay static and a commenter tells us the images originated from Yayhooray anyway. Sure, more topical and certainly more earnest parodies of Google's Chrome Comic are already out there, but for my money they can't beat the sociologically-revealing collection of awkward non sequiturs we've gathered below.

Both Time and the Wall Street Journal have run articles in the past 24 hours about 4chan, the dirty little secret site that spawns many a Web fad — LOLcats and rickrolling among them. But you don't want to start surfing 4chan yourself. It's full of sophomoric poor-taste-on-purpose posts like the above image. Moreover, posts on 4chan rarely live more than an hour. They're automatically pulled once their comment threads go idle, rather than archived. Let the kids filter it for you. Anything really good on 4chan will turn up on your screen from somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal would like to inform you about 4chan.org, a "website" that starts "memes" such as "LOLCats," which is "humorous images of cats with loud text beneath them in a fake language," and the "Rick Roll," an "online bait-and-switch" that sends you to "the music video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," a hit song from 1988." The Wall Street Journal, by the way, is a "newspaper." And formerly anonymous 4chan founder Christopher Poole was on a self-revealing spree, because the same day, Time magazine ran a 4chan story as well. It's a LOL-MSM-MEME unto itself!

The forum 4chan is hardly known for its gifts to mankind, but the punks who hang out there do love to serve justice to pedophiles from time to time, in the form of public humiliation followed by ratting them out to the cops. And thats what they're doing right now on this thread about a man named "Reverend Ron Radford" (NSFW). (The chatters are debating whether this is his real name. I mean, it's too perfect.) Hurry and click before the thread disappears, as all 4chan threads do.

Today all the "featured video" links on YouTube's front page actually link to this video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," and thus the Internet's weakest prank (OMG I sent you a blank music video instead of what you wanted) dies its thousandth death. I checked 4chan, birthplace of the Rickroll, to see how they were handling the popular acceptance of their joke.

For even decent-seeming people on the web, all criticism is reduced to "FAIL!" Blogger Andy Baio explains the horror of FAIL and why the 250 think it's so cute to say it. Also, The Fail Book is due out next year, author's advance $500k. (Edit: That was a joke, people. Resume breathing.) [Waxy.org]

Tom Cruise has personally, PERSONALLY, been pwned. This weekend, an anonymous Internet group (named Anonymous — these are not masters of subtlety) started a war with the Church of Scientology by hammering the group's web site; Scientology.org is down after a brief traffic spike. This isn't the only group of Internet users unafraid of the intimidating cult; a whole range of sites has turned the Church into a mockery by doing what mainstream celebrity-coverage outlets wouldn't dare. Here's a guide to the war (and a creepy manifesto made by The Internet!).

"Please run a post explaining 4chan, /b/, the Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.," asks reader Gabe Roth. "I just have no idea what that stuff is about, and it makes me feel old." While Gawker commenters know every obscure web site or at least can fake it, regular readers may want an explanation of some of the Internet's most strangely influential sites, an explanation shorter than Wikipedia's 2200-word article about 4chan. So I'll define Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan, /b/, Something Awful, and YTMND.