To the government, Kevin Mitnick was "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history." To the data-shuffling dimwits at AT&T, he's just a confused and annoying customer, who is totally making things up about his phone being hacked.

Twitter continues to be flaky today. Par for the course on the overcrowded microblogging service, right? But Twitter claims it is the victim of elaborate hack attacks that "appear to have been geopolitical in motivation." That's actually true!

A DDoS attack is one of the oldest, simplest, and lamest ways to "hack" anything, but lost in the news of recent attacks on Gawker and Twitter has been this even lamer "hack" of Congressional websites.

Well here's your last (Hopefully!) technical difficulties update: According to a memo sent out tonight by our IT team, the recent Gawker Media server problems were the result of a DDOS attack against Consumerist. [Image via]

Everyone got upset earlier because it looked like AT&T had banned notorious website 4chan for hosting tasteless content and maybe for inventing annoying memes. But no! The site was blocked for a purported hack attack against AT&T.

AT&T, for reasons unknown at this point, has blocked user access to portions of 4chan, the online hangout for the world's most notorious cyber-terrorists. And they thought iPhone customers were a pain in their ass! This will end badly.

For three years, Twitter made no money. But the microblogging company will supposedly be taking in more than $1 million per month by the end of this year and twenty times that much in 2010. Ah, the miracle of spreadsheets.

British authorities are launching an investigation into allegations that Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers paid more than $1.5 million in hush money to try to cover up the fact that they were illegally hacking into cell phones in pursuit of stories.

Remember North Korean's deranged little troll leader, Kim Jong Il, the one firing missiles into the Pacific lately like a ten year-old with bottle rockets on New Year's Eve? Well, he's been hacking into American and South Korean government computers!

Security experts have to admit they kind of admire him, the hacker who is bizarrely attacking every last boring part of the U.S. government, online. His mysterious army is living the American Dream, really.

After enduring vicious hate attacks by David Letterman, Barack Obama and random Photshop-wielding bloggers, Sarah Palin caught a moment to remind everyone, via Twitter, that tomorrow her email "hacker" stands trial in Tennessee. Remember him? He was so terrible!

Is your company's Web server hosed again? Give your beleaguered sysadmins and programmers a break and blame hackers. Preferably Iranian hackers. It's all the rage! Just ask The Atlantic and Boing Boing.

Earlier tonight I received an email from Gawker's eagle-eyed publisher Nick Denton (Seriously, nothing gets by this guy!) with an iPhone screengrab that contained an ad for naked webcam action on the Times' Twitter feed.

The White House has tapped two D.C.-area techies to run the government's tech infrastructure. His CIO, Vivek Kundra, turned out to have a rap sheet. Now his CTO Aneesh Chopra, has a drug problem.

Oh no! There's a site which tricks you into handing over your personal information for its own nefarious, moneymaking schemes! It's called Facebook. Oh, also, people are all upset because FBstarter.com is stealing their passwords.

Hackers have broken into Salma Hayek's email, revealing the actress's iPhone-app obsession, designer-clothes habit, travel plans, and more. (Her billionaire husband, François-Henri Pinault, who's throwing a second wedding for her this weekend, pays the bill!)

In your hacked Wednesday media column: Rachel Maddow's less fascinating, 4Chan's smarter than Time, online news fails, and newspaper layoffs reported not in newspapers:

After gay-themed titles disappeared from Amazon.com's search results this weekend, everyone looked for someone to blame. One hacker took credit. Some faulted an Amazon engineer in France. One source thinks it was the Conficker worm.

Twitter had a big tizzy yesterday over Amazon.com's supposed censorship of gay and lesbian titles, did you hear? Just one problem: A well-known hacker has come forward and claimed the whole thing was his prank.

For months, we've wondered what the makers of the Conficker worm, which was set to activate on April 1, were up to. An evil plot to destroy the world? Nah — they just want money.