While doing research for hack week, we ended up reading a ton of books and articles about hackers. Below are just a couple of our favorites.

Starting Monday and culminating with some stories in next week's episode, On the Media is going to be all about hacking. We're going to explore hacking's history and culture. We'll bring you interviews with hackers, and stories about how hacking is represented in the media. Check in every day with the blog or follow this link, which will bring you all a feed of all of our upcoming hacking stories. As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to let us know in the comments. 

Update: According to Vegasinc.com, Righthaven has warned that it might have to file for bankruptcy. The warning came in an emergency request for a stay on an order that it pay $34,045 in legal fees to blogger Wayne Hoehn, who successfully defended himself against a Righthaven lawsuit. (original article continues below)

Over the past year, we have reported a couple of times on a company called Righthaven, which buys certain copyrights on newspaper content and sues bloggers and aggregators who repost said content, either in part or in full. This week, several news outlets have reported that Righthaven is facing an existential crisis. Where did Righthaven come from, and how close are they to extinction?

Do you live in the New York area? Are you in school or a recent graduate? Would you be interested in a fall internship with On the Media? Well here's your chance!

There are no specific criteria for the OTM internship and past interns have come to the show from a wide range of backgrounds. While we do not expect new interns to have any experience with radio production, some journalism experience is preferred. Basically, we are looking for applicants who are motivated, avid media consumers, and excited about learning.

If you are interested in working with us, please send a cover letter and resume to Alex Goldman at agoldman@wnyc.org. Feel free to contact him if you have any questions as well. We look forward to hearing from you!

Typically, when companies file lawsuits are filed against people for infringing on their intellectual property, they don’t actually name the defendents. Instead, they sue a group of John Does, and subpoena the identities of the defendants from their internet service providers. This practice has always been controversial, and defendants are starting to challenge this method of identification in court.

As news about the impending hurricane continues to flood into the to the station (nyuk nyuk nyuk), it has become the sole topic conversation at the On the Media offices.

It's with no small amount of trepidation that I betray one of my most shameful internet browsing secrets: I find the talk pages and the history of Wikipedia articles far more interesting than the articles themselves. I can spend hours reading about a Wikipedia entry while completely ignoring the actual content of said entry.

In the wake of Ron Paul's narrow loss to Michele Bachmann in last weekend's Ames Iowa Republican straw poll, a media meta-narrative has emerged: why is the media deliberately ignoring Ron Paul? We took a look at reaction from around the web for some insight.

This week's uproar over Newsweek's Michele Bachmann cover reminded us of a piece we originally aired in 2008 about the ethical rules that govern journalistic portrait photography. As Bob puts it so eloquently in the piece "Where is the distinction between artistic prerogative and photo 'gotcha'? If a picture is worth a thousand words, who protects the subject - and the audience - from a thousand words manipulated or taken out of context?" Have a listen!

A lot of our producers are on vacation this week, so the staff picks are only going to be the stragglers who are hanging around. But what we lack in quantity, we make up for in quality! As always, feel free to tell us what you have been into lately in the comments section!

It's Monday.  Time for OTM staff picks. Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

On the most recent episode of This American Life, NPR's Laura Sydell and Planet Money co-host and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg spent the entire hour exploring the lucrative practice of "patent trolling." While On the Media has discussed "copyright trolling," a much less successful analogue of patent trolling, we were fascinated by this story, and how this practice could potentially be stifling the creation of new technologies. We asked Alex a couple questions about what patent trolling is, and the difficulties of reporting a story that had the potential to be...well, incredibly boring.

Last week, a team of scientists at Columbia University published a study that said thanks to our instant access to nearly unlimited information via the internet, the way that we remember is changing. And almost immediately, the blogosphere lost its mind (pun intended), posting articles with titles like "Is Google Ruining Your Memory?," "Poor Memory? Blame Google," and the Pièce de résistance,"Google Turning us Into Forgetful Morons."  But is the story really that cut and dry?

Sometimes it feels as though there's an element of moral panic to the introduction of any new technology. Video Games, Social media, any time there's an innovation, a small but vocal minority stands up to say "won't somebody please think of the children?"

In an interview in The Wall Street Journal's Tech Europe blog yesterday, Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, illustrates how moral panic over technology is almost as old as technology itself, and "it is always played out in the bodies of children and women." In studying moral panics of the past, she has developed a three point formula for what technology will cause this kind of fierce backlash.

This weekend, we covered the News of the World phone hacking scandal on our show (for the second time). This story has been developing so quickly that it's been hard to keep up. Fortunately, in yesterday's New York Times, Sarah Lyall took a fascinating look at the tense relationship between British Parliament and the British Tabloids, explaining that recent criticisms of News of the World are certainly uncommon in the British Political firmament.

Over the past 9 months, writer, director, and editor Kirby Ferguson has been releasing episodes of Everything is a Remix, a video series about how appropriation, borrowing, and adaptation are inherent in, well, everything we as a culture create. The third installment of the four-part series just came out last week, so we thought we'd ask him a few questions about the project and his personal opinions on copyright and fair use.

4Chan, the website that spawned Rickrolling, LOLcats, Over 9000! and even Anonymous, has been around for the better part of a decade at this point. It makes you wonder, then, why it's taken so long for a study about the culture of the website and its broader influence on the web. Well wonder no more. Researchers from MIT and the University of Southampton have released a study on the anarchic message board that, according to Slate's Michael Agger, attempts to uncover a method behind the madness:

...there's a Darwinian struggle to make the best wisecrack, to tell the most disgusting story. It's not unlike a high-school cafeteria table. Knowing that all of the threads will disappear creates an incentive to contribute to and improve good threads. The best ones stay current, popular, fit. Michael Bernstein, one of the authors of the paper, explained the ecosystem this way: "Even a single dedicated person can't force a meme to spread on /b/; there's too much content and people will ignore it. The result is that if you want success (replies), you need to produce content that will grab people quickly, and encourage them to respond or remix it."

The lack of archives spurs the uploading of fresh images. It also has the secondary effect of forcing /b/ regulars to save their favorite threads on their own computers. They will often reintroduce memes onto /b/ after a few days or weeks, which generates further variations, remixes, or complete hijackings in a different direction. The need to save stuff also acts as a powerful "selection mechanism" that sees 4chan ephemera get posted in other places, or combined with other memes, like the fake Successories poster.

Personally, I am just a tiny bit ambivalent about having the process of meme selection at 4Chan demystified, but both Agger's article and the study itself make for compelling reading.

(via slate.com)

This week, we're rebroadcasting our special hour on video games. In celebration of the occasion, the Supreme Court (huge OTM fans), struck down a California law that would have levied a $1,000 fine to against retailers who sold violent games to minors on Monday.

"video games qualify for First Amendment protection.  Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in the court's opinion in Brown v. The Entertainment Merchants Association. "The basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary' with a new and different communication medium.

"California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence," Justice Scalia wrote, "but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion that stated the existing California statute was simply too broad as currently written, skirting the First Amendment argument altogether. Dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer both wrote their own dissenting opinions. Stephen Totilo of the video game blog Kotaku has posted a concise summary of the key points of each of the opinions.

Bo Anderson, CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association, said in a press release on their website "We are gratified that our position that the law violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression has been vindicated and there now can be no argument whether video games are entitled to the same protection as books, movies, music, and other expressive entertainment." Other video game trade associations have made similar statements in support of the ruling.

Leland Yee, the California state Senator that authored the law, also posted a response to the ruling on his website, saying "As a result of [the Supreme Court's] decision, Wal-Mart and the video game industry will continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of our kids’ mental health and the safety of our community. It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children."

Trying to out an anonymous Senator.

On December 22nd, hours before the end of the 111th congressional session, a Senator used a ‘secret hold’ to stall a piece of legislation called the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, that had previously passed both the Senate and the House, and had made its way back to the Senate for reconciliation. The bill would have strengthened protections for whistleblowers who face reprisals from their employers for exposing government malfeasance. Since the hold was placed so close to the end of the congressional session, it effectively killed the bill, which will need to be reintroduced in this new session if it is to become law.

But not all hope is lost. This past Thursday, as part of a series of reform votes meant to ease Senate gridlock, the Senate voted 92-4 to make new rules governing the secret hold, making the practice significantly harder.