PJ Vogt

The piece doesn't include any on camera interviews with critics of the NSA, and interviews with NSA employees were overseen by a team of minders.

Last Friday, I marveled at the news that an e-petition to the White House had actually created a policy change. 

NPR reported yesterday on a deal between the FCC and cell phone companies that will continue to allow consumers to legally unlock their cellphones. Unlocking had been legal, then briefly illegal, and now it's ok again. 

Last night, Twitter abruptly changed the way its block function works. 

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how the trend in revenge porn prosecutions (there's been more of them) seems like a good sign in the overall war on revenge porn. 

How to Handle an Inheritance of 860,000 hours of Taped Cable News

Randy Liedtke, the guy behind the Pace Picante hoax, has gone viral again. This time, it's because he's baked a bunch of cookies that look like iPhones so that he can get wrongly pulled over for driving while talking.

Kevin Bollaert was arrested yesterday in California.

If you still think funeral selfies need defending, at the very least this is no longer something you can blame on millennials. Also, someone needs to track down this actual selfie.

Someone went and created a fake Captcha generator. 

Last week, we threw up our hands in the face of the endless deluge of viral hoaxes. Then, we tried to make peace with living in a fake world and even found a lie that we liked. Well, ...

The Guardian reported this morning that the NSA and their UK sister agency, the GCHQ, are spying on gamers.

At Slate, Amanda Hess argues the internet ought to halt its quest to track down one guy's manic pixie dream girl. The guy in question is a New Zealander who met an American woman in Hong Kong on New Year's Eve last year:

Facebook announced plans this week to tweak their news feed algorithm to serve users more high quality content and less of what Facebook called “the latest meme.”

Finally, a hoax we can get behind!

Over at his tumblr Just North Of Something Important, writer Michael Barthel has a smart response to my post from yesterday where I said I don't feel very outraged about living in a world of peak hoax. 

So that Diane story, about a guy proudly live tweeting his bullying of an upset airline passenger, has turned out to be a fraud. 

Like a lot of people, I’ve loved JD Salinger since junior high. I grew up hanging out on a street corner in Wayne, Pennsylvania, down the street from Salinger’s old high school, Valley Forge Military Academy, which he seems to have based Catcher in the Rye’s Pencey Prep on.

There's an Infowars story that's beginning to circulate widely about a seemingly very Orwellian move by Facebook. 

Today, Goldieblox wrote an open letter response to the Beastie Boys open letter (relatedly, everyone knows you can privately mail a letter too, right?) saying that they have taken that "Girls" parody ad down.