Alex Goldman

Banana attacks, fake python rescues, and sledgehammer-weilding cyclists seem like they're just par for the course in Florida. Journalist Will Greeniee explains why.

TorrentFreak sounds like a place to download stuff illegally, but it’s not. It’s actually a news site whose focus is internet piracy, copyright, and filesharing. I read it a lot - as an On the Media producer I find it to be an invaluable source of information. The UK disagrees. On Friday, the site published an article saying that it had been blocked by Sky, the UK's largest internet provider.

See the picture that leads this article? It's pretty intense, right? Techdirt shared a story this morning from a couple weeks ago about an anti-immigrant conservative Florida political group that posted this image on its Facebook. The only problem is that the image was lifted from the video game Bioshock Infinite, and was specifically intended to parody uncritical nationalism.

Yesterday, the Ottawa Citizen posted a link to a website that featured a scandal-tainted Canadian Senator named Mike Duffy doing a fundraising pitch. Given ongoing accusations that Duffy was misappropriating government funds, it was an interesting piece of web-arcana that the conservative party certainly wouldn't want to draw attention to. But what made it amazing wasn't the pitch.

Millions of Americans don't use the internet at all. Some don't have access because of poverty, geography, or age. But some just never logged on. OTM producer and TLDR co-creator Alex Goldman goes on a quest to find someone who never made it online.  Programming note: Take a look at TLDR -- OTM's new blog and podcast. 

Being the nerdier half of the TLDR boys, I'll totally cop to having an interest in the arcane complexities of the internet. Not just the technical stuff and the cultural stuff, but also the legal stuff.

Over the past couple of weeks, we ran a contest where we gave away a hat knitted by our host and managing editor Brooke Gladstone to one randomly selected new subscriber to our weekly newsletter. Here's a picture of one of Brooke's hats being modeled by Radiolab's Jad Abumrad. Doesn't it flatter?!:

Daniel Drucker's father died earlier this year. Daniel was excavating stuff on his Dad's computer when he found a file called JOKES.TXT. It was filled with thirty one punchlines to jokes, but not the jokes themselves. So he turned to the internet for help.

As we all know, the government shutdown took effect October 1st, leaving vital services offline, suspending the pay of millions of federal workers, and disrupting things like food safety programs. But for some reason, the media seems preoccupied with the interruption of The National Zoo's beloved "Panda Cam." Seriously. Everyone mentions it. It's bananas. So, since this seems like a matter of pressing national importance, we've decided to put up our own makeshift panda cam, so that everyone can focus on more important things. Enjoy!

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Consider this a mini-episode. The final update to episode 1 of TLDR. We all found out on Monday that Pronunciation Book (along with the Twitter account horse_ebooks) were part of a collaborative stunt between Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender to promote their art project Alternate Reality Game, Bear Stearns Bravo. The Daily Dot's Gaby Dunn, who we spoke to for our original story, figured out that Bakkila was the guy behind Pronunciation Book months ago. In order to convince her not to publish her story, Bakkila manipulated Dunn with a very elaborate series of lies. Weirdly, many of the people in her life were in on those lies, in varying capacities. We did a follow-up interview with Gaby about living her own personal version of the Truman Show, and you should listen because it is bonkers.