One blunder from a presidential nominee has transformed binders from humble paper holders to the newest symbol of the women’s rights movement. 

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comment on “binders full of women” during a question on equal pay for women caught like wildfire during Tuesday night’s debate and inspired thousands of tweets and multiple memes, parody accounts and blogs. Even the GOP got in on the action and posted their take to Facebook on Wednesday.

If you’re looking for a souvenir of the debacle, some clever Amazon reviewers are here to help you choose the right one.

Men and women alike have gone to the reviews section for binders sold on Amazon.com since Tuesday’s debate and overtaken comments on the quality and durability of a binder with sarcasm and wit.

If you were actually in the market for a binder, you’ll have to leap to page 27 just to find a review for the Avery Durable View 2-inch Binder about the binder itself. The majority of the comments posted more recently involve mocking Romney’s comment.

“Maybe it’s just my women, but they don’t seem to want to fit into the space I’ve designated for them in this binder,” Sabriel wrote in her scathing review. “They keep sticking out over the edges, even getting away in some cases. I thought using clear, glass-ceiling page protectors would help, but it doesn’t seem to slow them down anymore.”

Sabriel’s two-star review, titled “Not as useful as the Trap Her, Keep Her,” is currently the most helpful critical review on the Avery two-inch binder, which more than 1,800 people found useful.

The comments are a plethora of women in the kitchen jokes—a nod to Romney’s comment on making hours flexible for a female cabinet member who wanted to be with her children—and scathing comments on equal pay. One reviewer compared being in a binder to being available to perform every whim for her husband in one easy-to-organize location.

Some reviewers took the obvious approach: most of the binders sold on Amazon are just too small to hold women inside them.

“As an intern on the Romney 2012 election campaign, I was tasked with procuring binders for Governor Romney,” daveyclayton wrote on a review for a one-inch binder. “While these binders are well made, attractive and reasonably priced, and while I’m sure they would make an excellent choice for those wishing to store written or printed documentation in a secure and easily accessible manner, they are unfortunately too small to put women in.”

This is not the first time many have found humor and satire in a product review. Women turned on the snark when Bic released a set of pens “for her” in August and others took their frustration out on pepper spray after Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly called it “a food product, essentially,” last year.

Photo via Jinx!/Flickr

Bullies are after Amanda Todd even eight days after her death.

She's a dumb whore, they still say. She got exactly what she deserved. They write that she's a slut—that she only did it for attention.

More than one week after the 15-year-old Vancouver girl committed suicide on Oct. 10 because she couldn't shake a string of cyberbullies, they're still coming after her—vicious as ever, ready to evoke a string of pain and suffering on the soul of a girl who's no longer there.

Twelve hours east in Calgary, three women are trying to put an end to the abuse. They're one-time victims of bullying themselves; they know how bad it hurts. And on Facebook, they see how people talk.

Last week those three women—Lindsay Ulsifer, Christine Claveau, and Melissa Buck—started a Facebook group, We Are Against Bullying.

The group's mission is simple: They're out to put an end to cyberbullying.

"It's completely different now," Buck, 22, told the Daily Dot. "It used to be bullying by people talking about you and telling you rumors about stuff you did.

"Now it's a whole new level, and it's risky. It's everywhere. There's Facebook. There's MySpace. There's YouTube. There's Twitter. There are so many places that you can bully, and it's completely out of hand."

Buck would be one to know. When she was 16 and living in Utah, she was so severely bullied by her classmates that her family moved to Canada.

"School, church, recital. It was like Amanda Todd until my parents figured out what was going on," she said. "And then they decided to move me up here to get me into a better atmosphere.

"That's moving countries just to get away from it, so I can't imagine how bad it must be for other people today. Having access to the Internet, people don't even have to bully in person. They can go on and make any page that they want, and they can say anything that they want. They get the attention that they want, and then they delete it, and no one knows the source.

"It's not just that they can say you're fat. They can post it all over Facebook and make a page about it and share it."

It's those pages that Buck and her two cohorts have decided to go after. Since Friday, the W.A.A.B. brass and their ever-growing group of supporters (W.A.A.B. had grown to over more than 1,000 at press time) have collected the links to Todd-trolling Facebook pages and posters, reporting them for abuse of Facebook's nine-point Community Standards, which detail the billion-person community's policies on hate speech, threats, pornography, bullying, and harassment, among other things.

In one instance, the group has even sparked a professional firing. Earlier this week, an Ontario man named Justin Hutchings lost his job at a Mr. Big & Tall after Claveau saw that he’d written “Thank god that bitch is dead” on an Amanda Todd memorial page and reported him to the company’s CEO.

So far, the group has successfully helped remove more than 20 of those pages from Facebook—a great success when you consider that W.A.A.B. is hardly the only anti-bullying advocacy on the network— though they're not batting a thousand, either. Despite their efforts, and their convictions, Facebook is quick to remind good samaritans that "reporting a piece of content does not guarantee that it will be removed from the site.

"Because of the diversity of our community, it's possible that something could be disagreeable or disturbing to you without meeting the criteria for being removed or blocked. For this reason, we also offer personal controls over what you see, such as the ability to hide of quietly cut ties with people, Pages, or applications that offend you."

Buck said that's not enough. She professed that Facebook's a behemoth—a civilization as large as the entire populations of India or China—and tracking every abusive page or post simply isn't possible no matter the size of human resources. She said the company needs to take a stand and do whatever it takes to rid the community of trolls like these, of people who feast on abusing the ones who can't fight back.

"They need to make a button that says 'This person is bullying somebody,’'' she said. "Right now there's only an option that says 'Someone's harassing a friend.' We can do that, but [Facebook] may not take take it down because they know that we're not friends with Amanda Todd. Facebook needs to take a stand and make a button that reports on bullies."

Ulsifer took Buck's thought one step further.

"There needs to be some sort of moderator to see what the language is like in these groups. There needs to be someone watching the words that are made, the images that are used.

"It's not hard to create an application to scan for words. If I created a completely inappropriate page with some swear words, it should have to go through a database to make sure that anything terrible is in there."

Such a development is unlikely considering the length of Facebook's programming laundry list, but the sentiment stands. Right now, anybody can log on to the site and create a page that projects any type of message imaginable, from “Kill Mitt Romney” to “God Hates Fags.” That page can then be populated, published, and shared with barely a breath of verification procedures thisrequired.

After that happens, 5,500 people get a post on their news feeds with the word "Ragequit" attached to a picture of Amanda Todd.

Buck said the two want to get into offline anti-bullying advocacy after they make their impression felt online. They want to build a nonprofit organization and to visit schools to talk about bullying. They want to work with principals, administrators, guidance counselors, and parents to give them the roadmap for bullied children.

"I just want to help one person decide that there's people there to help them and they won't commit suicide," Ulsifer said. "That they're going to get the help that they deserve.

"I'll take all the negative messages if we can help just one."

Photo via Amanda Todd/Facebook

Just who do you think you are?

The news online this week has been all about revealing “real” identities.

In one major bombshell, Gawker revealed the real-life identity of violentacrez (pronounced “violent acres”), one of Reddit’s biggest trolls and most powerful moderators. He created or helped lead some of the most notorious forums on Reddit, including r/jailbait and r/creepshots. The first was dedicated to sexy pictures of underage girls and the second to provocative shots of women taken on the sly.

This incident of doxing—publishing an anonymous user’s personal identity—has shaken Reddit to its core. At least one other prominent moderator has deleted his account, and moderators in general are considering going on strike until Reddit beefs up its user protections. They’ve even given it all a catchy name: “Doxtober.”

It has upset mods for good reason. Michael Brutsch, the 49-year-old Dallas programmer who was the man behind violentacrez, was fired from his day job after the news of his online activities came out. Reddit has seen its share of witchhunts over the years, which is why the first of Reddit’s two rules forbids doxing. Doxing can, and has, led to on- and offline harassment, death threats, and worse—in addition to job loss.

Meanwhile, Redditors have rallied around Brutsch. When he announced on Reddit that he was fired, he said that his wife has not been able to work for a year, and he thought their savings would last about three weeks, without health insurance. In response, Redditors have started a campaign to raise money to help Brutsch make ends meet. As of Tuesday, they’d donated $110.

***

Also this week, a young girl in Canada, Amanda Todd, committed suicide after years of bullying—bullying that began online. Todd, like many teenagers, hung out on BlogTV, a video-chatting site popular with teens, at the impressionable age of 12. Someone she met told her how beautiful she was, how “stunning.” Then he asked her to flash the camera, and she did.

He took a picture.

That picture was circulated online and sent to her family and friends. She changed schools repeatedly, but the picture—and the shame—followed her. A boy convinced her to hook up with him when his own girlfriend was out of town, only to show up at her school with the girlfriend and friends a day later to publicly shame her and eventually beat her. She drank bleach, but was saved in the emergency room. Online, people said that she deserved it and hoped she wouldn’t screw it up next time.

She posted her story on YouTube and, a month later, killed herself.

The Internet, belatedly, rode to her rescue. Anonymous tracked down the alleged user who took that picture and doxed him. The media and the police showed up at his door—it was the wrong address.

The person that Anonymous accused, however, was already in police custody for other crimes. He said that he wasn’t the one who took the picture and started the bullying, but he knows who did.

Another group, We Are Against Bullies, started on Facebook in response to Todd’s story. They’ve already gotten one troll fired.

Sadly, this is a pattern that has repeated itself. Many teenage boys and girls have fooled around with a stranger in a chatroom and quickly found themselves blackmailed into much worse than flashing. One man, arrested after blackmailing a boy to have oral sex with a friend, confessed to having done the same to 100 other victims.

***

A man in England used Facebook to track down his wife’s alleged rapist. He told the rapist’s friends he was planning a surprise party and got his physical address, where he assaulted the man. His wife’s revelations about her rape came after arguments between the couple about the lack of intimacy in their relationship. The alleged rapist denies the charges.

A North Texas woman, angry at a cop who testified against her friend, posted his picture on Facebook. He was undercover. His picture was eventually posted in flyers after spreading on Facebook, and the poster has been charged with felony retaliation.

***

Brutsch described his life like this: “I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the Internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.”

The cardinal sin of Reddit is revealing someone’s personal information—their “true” identity. In Brutsch’s words above, there’s an assumption that what he was doing online, under his pseudonym, wasn’t his “real” life. It was a hobby. A joke.

After he drew heat for posting a picture of a large man beating a half-naked woman last year, Brutsch said, “People take things way too seriously around here.”

Is it really that easy? Can we really slip in and out of online personas as easily as we might change our clothes? Can we laugh off our worst behavior as a goof?

In Proverbs it says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” James Allen expanded on this notion, saying, “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.”

Brutsch chose to spend hours of his time in brutality and sexual victimization. He chose to diminish others. He may have thought his crimes were “victimless” because they lacked real world consequences. But they weren’t. He was the victim. Pretend as he might, violentacrez is not an account he can just delete. Whether he’s ever doxed or not, his truth is that he is as much violentacrez as he is Michael Brutsch.

And what of Amanda Todd’s tormentor, whoever he is? There was a real-world victim there, but does he tell himself the same thing that Brutsch does? Does he look in the mirror and say “I am Dr. Jekyll. mr_hyde is just a game. It’s not real. It’s not who I really am. If this girl killed herself, it’s because she took things too seriously. It’s not me”?

Even if the weapon was virtual—even if he did not put a gun to Amanda Todd’s head—he did destroy a person. Whatever he tells himself, Jekyll cannot shake off Hyde. In fact, what we choose to do when we think no one’s looking is, arguably, more true than anything else we do.

So his truth is this: He is a killer.

Amanda Todd, in her YouTube video, notes that once something’s on the Internet, it’s out there forever. Because it is infinitely reproduced in digital form, nothing can be destroyed. The same is true of ourselves. Whatever name we use online, how we spend our time is part of who we are, and every comment we leave behind, every picture we upload, every search we commit, even our browsing history reflects our true selves back to us—clearer, deeper, vaster, truer than any mirror.

When we finally dare to look there, may we each like what we see.

Photo by malias/Flickr

Beth Cook is a dating coach and throws private dating events for San Francisco’s most awesome and unattached. She also writes and draws about her own dating experiences. Want advice? Have advice? Send her an email.

A friend of mine just decided to try online dating and wrote me an overwhelmed note. "I wanted OKCupid to be a fun experience, but instead if feels more like work." Messages from OKC vultures fill her inbox to the brim every day. She’s not the only one struggling with how to make online dating a manageable, fun experience. People new to the game often wonder: how do I manage this quantity of emails? How do I know who's worth my time? Am I using the right service?

For of you out there who have just climbed aboard the online dating train (or never learned how to ride it), here 10 ways to have fun and stay sane while online dating. Choo choo!

1) Figure out what you want before you get online.
Before you turn that computer on, have a think about what you're looking for. A boyfriend, casual sex, a wife? Someone who is funny, an intellectual? It’s all out there, and it’s overwhelming to browse when you have no idea when you want. Make a short list and don’t get superficial (strike height and eating habits). This will help you recognize what you are looking for when you it in see him or her.

2) Join a couple of sites.
Diversify your efforts. OKCupid is great, but it's also free, which means any scumbag can and will crawl on there. If you're looking for someone who online dates for more than just a piece of ass, you might want to try sites like Chemistry, Match, JDate, or eHarmony.

3) Decide how much time you want to invest.
You'll wear yourself out if you go online looking at  a flurry of messages and matches every day. Decide on what’s reasonable and stick to it. My suggestion: pop in for an hour or two, a few times a week. Do it while you're eating lunch or watching TV. Don't make into a chore.

4) Respond to thoughtful messages.
If you receive a thoughtful personal message from someone you’re not interested in, sed them a quick note back: “Thank you so much for your sweet note. I don’t think we’re a fit, but I appreciate you writing me. Best of luck on your search.” It’s good karma. The sending messages into empty space thing gets old—it’s nice to know that someone actually reads the sentences you’re carefully crafting!

5) Reach out to people who interest you.
Don’t wait for people to come to you. You know what you want (and they don’t), so go after it! Set a goal, such as “Tonight I will reach out to three people.” Otherwise you’ll fall into a black hole of endless comparisons (sushi enthusiast vs. cat lover—who to choose?).

6) Be open-minded.
Don’t go bananas with advanced searching. In fact, I’d say avoid that button altogether. The person of your dreams isn’t going to come in the 5’8’’ curly brown hair package you’re imagining. Just search by age, and keep your range fairly wide.

7) Get on the date ASAP.
Don’t let someone sucker you into being their pen pal. You could have 15 exchanges with someone and never end up seeing their living, breathing face! And no matter how good someone looks on paper, you can only assess chemistry in person. Plan a date as fast as you can—during the first email exchange.

8) Wait for the hot sauce.
Here’s where that elusive chemistry thing comes in. Someone may be nice, gentlemanly or gentlewomanly, and cute, but you don’t feel that nervous ”OMG-I-can’t-wait-to-makeout-with-you” feeling. It’s like eating plain tofu: It fills you up but really needs something (salt, hot sauce?). Gracefully move on.

9) Check yourself.
If for any moment in this process you feel tired, bitter, or sad, take a break. You’re only going to do well online when you’re feeling well (same as real life).

10) Look offline.
Speaking of real life, don’t put all of your eggs into an Internet basket. Go out with your friends, take some classes, or join a club. OKCupid isn’t the only place where single men and women dwell.

And of course, avoid guys posting pictures of beer pong like the plague.

Good luck!

Photo by jimf0390

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Anonymous is a great daily source of many things: chaos, resistance, hacking, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, agitation, and (of course) lulz. Until now, they wouldn’t be your first choice for GIFs.

Until. Now.

Project Mayhem is Anonymous’ long-term culture jamming art project. It’s nebulous, but basically it seeks to present, through art of all kinds, a disruptive, creative alternative to quotidian Western reality. It’s billed as The End of Fear, and loosely inspired by the Project Mayhem from Fight Club. And as in Fight Club, you have to trust Tyler.

Imagine we purchase a USB drive.
Imagine we take it to our workplaces.
Imagine we pretend we have to work late hours.
Imagine we accumulate all sort of evidences about illegal deeds.
Imagine Conscientious insiders worldwide begin to expose all lies.
Imagine we code an extremely simple interface so that anyone can do it.

Imagine we all synchronize our clocks to act at the same Time, on the Winter Solstice, the 21st of December 2012 at eleven minutes past eleven local time.

From the 12th of December 2012, to the 21st of December 2012, people all over the world upload the evidence of illegality, corruption, and fraud they have gathered to TYLER.

Imagine we leak it all.

Imagine.

TYLER is Anonymous’ long-anticipated peer to peer sharing program, something like Napster, but encrypted and outside the reach of the RIAA. Of course, RIAA might have a different opinion about that. It officially launches Nov. 5 (remember!).

Project Mayhem aims to give people a new, empowering way to interact with their world. This text-rich beating heart GIF, The Anonymous Declaration of the United States of the World, is a start. Propaganda, after all, is the first line of offense.

If your friends look a little purple Friday, it’s for a good reason. It’s Spirit Day.

The second annual holiday brings together purple-clad supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) community to speak out against bullying.

Brittany McMillan started the celebration by posting a message on her Tumblr in October 2010 asking people to wear purple in honor the rash of suicides committed by gay youth. The goal’s to end homophobic abuse, which is the impetus for many of the tragedies.

“Purple represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you have with you: spirit,” she proclaimed. “Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality.”

McMillan created a purpled-hued picture with newspaper headlines talking about the deaths. It quickly went viral on Tumblr, racking up 30,000 notes.

Her declaration didn’t go unnoticed. The holiday gained prominence through social media mentions, celebrity endorsements, and recognition by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) as a national event. This year, GLAAD launched a dedicated webpage to spread word of the day’s purpose.

If you’re feeling the spirit, here are some more ways to celebrate the purple-colored day.

Facebook

GLAAD created a dozen graphics for fans to show their support. Splashed against a purple background, it reads “I am against bullying,” with a common identifier (i.e. mom, dad, lesbian, etc.).

Supporters can also had a purple glaze to their profiles using Twibbon or add a special Facebook cover photo that declares your support for Spirit Day. Also, you can like GLAAD’s Facebook page to keep up-to-date with the latest news. You can even RSVP to a rally being held in South Carolina by Internet personality Tyler Oakley.

Twitter

You will probably see a lot of people tagging their tweets with #SpiritDay. More than 19,000 tweets with the hashtag have been recorded to date, according to Topsy, a social measuring service. Supporters are also encouraged to change the color of the Twitter avatar to purple using Twibbon.

Celebrities on Twitter are spreading the word by announcing their support for their holiday, including Broadway star Bernadette Peters, country idol Reba McEntire, and actor Ian McKellen.

Tumblr

Prepare to see a lot of Glee star Dianna Agron in your Tumblr dashboard. She’s the Spirit Day’s ambassador, and GLAAD’s Tumblr is encouraging people to share an image of Agron’s inspirational quotes.

The Spirit Day tag will also be good to follow, too. Similar to National Coming Out Day, Tumblr users will be in the festive spirit by writing personal notes and posting pictures. Of course, McMillan’s Spirit Day Tumblr blog will be updated frequently with the day’s news.

YouTube

McMillan recently released her own “It Gets Better” video, where she shared her touching story of depression, struggling with her sexaulity, and her high school experience.

Other Spirit Day videos to get you in the mood include a statement from Ellen Degeneres, a video from GLAAD on why its important to wear purple, and a three-minute video from “gaymer” Foodacky.

Photo via GLAAD/Tumblr

Warning: This story contains descriptions of child pornography and may be upsetting to some readers.

There are still few answers in the case of Amanda Todd, the Canadian teenager who committed suicide Oct. 13 after years of harassment and sexual blackmail. But one thing is clear: Her tale of online abuse was hardly an isolated incident.

Todd was just one of many kids harassed and tortured by a cadre of pedophiles and creeps who lurk in the Internet’s underbelly and make games out of sexual abuse.

Earlier this week, Anonymous promised it had broken the case wide open after digging into Todd’s online footprint and, using online screen names and public records, linked her to 19-year-old Dakota (“Kody”) Maxson from Vancouver, Canada.

But Canadian police have since cleared Maxson and called the hacker group’s allegations “unfounded.”

“If I was a tormentor I’d be in police custody,” Maxson told the Vancouver Sun. “None of it’s true.”

He claimed he did indeed know Todd in a “sense,” and that she’d even come to him for help. He didn’t blackmail her, he said—but he knows who did, someone who went by the online handle “Viper.”

That admission shows that Anonymous, which has been widely criticized for releasing Maxson’s real name, was on the right track. There’s a sinister backstory here that connects Todd, Maxson, and “Viper” with a dark world of blackmail and sexual exploitation run by shady group of child porn aficionados who called themselves “cappers.”

Two years ago, Todd was hanging out in a video chat room when she flashed her breasts for the camera. She was only 12. Someone had taken image of that moment, however, and a year later messaged her Facebook, threatening to release the picture to everyone she knew unless she gave in to his demands and “put on a show.” When she refused, the blackmailer made good on his promises, sending Todd in the downward spiral of depression that would ultimately end in her suicide on Oct. 10.

There’s something particularly disturbing about this type of behavior, because it combines both sexual abuse and the torment of blackmail—a threat of shame amongst family and friends that can shatter a fragile teenager’s sense of self-worth and identity.

The cappers’ name is derived from their preferred method of blackmailing: pressuring teens into exposing themselves online, surreptitiously screen capping an image, and then threatening to spread the pictures to the kids’ friends and family unless they reveal more. The cappers were highly active around the time Todd was blackmailed in 2010, and a fair amount of circumstantial evidence ties her case to the group.

So who are they? The group operated like a kind of parasitic fandom, stalking teenage girls who frequented video chat sites like BlogTV, Stickam, and TinyChat, goading and coercing them to strip, then taking to obscure Web forums to gloat and share the pictures. When a teen showed skin or did something else explicit for the camera, they called it a “win.”

The cappers’ digital footprint is surprisingly large for a group purveying in such highly illegal content. All told, it comprises dozens of episodes from a self-produced animated news show, as well as three issues of a digital magazine that chronicled their conquests.

The videos are a creepy mixture of cheap animation and screengrabs from girls’ videos, all narrated by a cartoon host who speaks in a computerized voice (the kind of text-to-speech programs used by hackers). The show, called the Daily Capper, ran from 2009 to 2011 and divvied out awards every year for “camwhore of the year”—slut-shaming “awards” for teenage girls —as well as a “blackmailer” of the year. The awards were represented by a gold-plated webcam.

The group’s August 2010 production provides perhaps the most shocking example of the explicit child pornography cappers encouraged and filmed.

What happens when a 13-year-old baby sitter goes on blogtv junior with an 11-year-old girl? They go to Ustream and end up having oral sex while 300 people watch. Because Tinychat mods have cracked down so much the last couple of weeks, it was hard to find a place where these kids could have sex where they wouldn’t get banned. They got banned on Ustream and soon were blackmailed by perso pete for deleting their account. If you want to know where you can get the video just message the person who blackmailed them, luvyashawty on YouTube. (That account has since been deleted.)

While the videos have received the most media attention, the group’s magazines provide a more candid look into this weird, exploitative world. Whoever designed the publication has a gift for the atrocious, both in terms of design and content. One section of the March to April 2010 issue, titled “Back Alley Babes: Prostitutes of Tomorrow,” includes dozens of images of scantily clad girls, as well as text blurbs gleefully describing the sex acts they’ve performed for their Web audience.

One, which accompanied an image of two teen girls who appear to be topless, read:

"Letsplay13 proved in March that they were born to work the back allies in the future! They have the look and the attitude! Shortly after rewatching their own porn, these 13 year olds went into the room of Anonib Global Moderator Chair to share what most certainly was not their first girl on girl experience.”

A page from the same issue was called “highlight reel” and laid out four sets of female eyes in a kind of quiz format. The caption asked:

“You’ve fapped to their bodies but can you recognize these young girls just by looking into their eyes?”

That’s just a sampling of the depravity you can find in the magazines. You can read them in their entirety here (but it’s not recommended).

As the Daily Dot reported Monday, Amanda Todd’s oblique connection to the group can be found in two videos, dating from Dec. 19 2010 and Dec. 10 2010. Importantly, the capper crowd didn’t seem to know Todd very well. The first video, which announced her appearance on the scene, calls her a “mystery girl” and wonders if the video might have been recorded and set on a loop.

A mysterious BlogTV girl named Amanda is said to flash her tits randomly at low view counts when she "feels horny." She flashed twice this Thursday, the second one when she had over 90 viewers. Her account, which is named b33 has lasted for over a year and according to the stats she has over 33 live shows under belt … After she got off BlogTV chatters voiced their suspicions that Amanda was actually a video loop. Her repetitive unvaried movements and lack of sound certainly seem to support that suspicion. As does the fact that she disconnected before the chat, as one would do when one was changing from one loop to another. [Emphasis added]

The second video claims Todd has left BlogTV after being “IP banned” multiple times.

Though Todd’s precise relationship to the group is unclear, her story bears parallels to other tales of blackmailing on the site.

A clip from the group’s magazine detailed the “one year anniversary” of the blackmailing of a girl named Lauren. "She has definitely come a long way since then and has not slowed down since!” the magazine reads reads. “Though one year later, Lauren still receives threats and harassment from users on Stickam.”

And while neither Viper nor Kody have direct connections to Todd, both are, crucially, accused (or in the twisted morals of the cappers, lauded) of blackmailing other girls. In one Daily Capper video, a 14-year-old girl named Peyton directly accuses Maxson of sexual extortion.

Narrator: Peyton claims she is free of her blackmailers’ clutches. She went on BlogTV to share her story of how Kody blackmailed her. She even got her mom to cuss him out …

A month ago he recorded me for the first time, and then I was stupid enough to keep doing it because he said he’d never do it again, and he was stupid and he didn’t want to ruin our relationship. And he just used me and he stopped calling me, stopped calling me and just wanted me out of his life because I gave him what he wanted. I have his address. He lives in Canada, i know his cousins’ names, his family. His full name is Dakota William Shain Maxson. I know his phone number. I was just like, liking the attention he was giving me.

(Earlier this week, Maxson appeared in Vancouver, Canada court, on charges he sexually assaulted a minor—something police say is unrelated to the Amanda Todd case.)

“Viper” also make appearances in the videos and magazine under the screen name viper2323. Anonymous New Jersey has tied him to a man in Wisconsin, though it’s worth pointing out that much of their original information on Maxson, including his age and home address, turned out wrong.

From the digital traces left by the cappers, Viper appears to be a kind of black sheep of the group—a winner of both the “most annoying” award and, along with Maxson, the “Blackmailer of the year” award in 2010. The Daily Capper details his year-long obsession with a girl named “Verica,” and specifically his travails in obtaining “caps”—presumably nude photos—of her.

The actual identities of the cappers as a group are nebulous. We don’t know who produced the videos or magazines. Were the Daily Capper producers simply observers of the crimes, or participants? In one of the videos, a 32-year-old man with a Canadian accent calling himself Avery000 detailed his path to becoming a capper. Around 2006 he began taking video of adult performers on the professional site LiveJasmine, before a friend introduced him to other amateur sites. He soon became a leader in the raiding and blackmailing forums frequented by the group and was nominated for “capper of the year” in 2010.

I reached out to multiple people included in the magazine and awards list—based on screen names tied to social identities elsewhere on the Web, including both the girls and the alleged blackmailers. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear back from a single person. A tweet from Maxson’s account includes a screengrab of a message chat with someone called “Peyto.” I called that number, hoping it was Peyton, the girl who’d accused Maxson of blackmailing her. It had been disconnected.

In a YouTube video Todd published days before her suicide, she described years of harassment, including bullying from classmates not directly related to her sexual blackmail. Depression and suicide among teens are complex mental health issues, and it’s impossible to pinpoint a single event that launched Todd on her tragic path. But while media attention has focused largely on bullying, it’s missing another insidious problem: sexual predators who prowl video chat sites. As Vice’s Patrick McGuire noted: “more mainstream awareness needs to be focused on this form of extortion that is designed to destroy the lives of girls like Amanda Todd.”

Like the rest of their Web presence, The Daily Capper’s Twitter account is now silent, last active on July 11, 2010. What remains are links to old TinyChat rooms, where presumably the cappers staged raids on unsuspecting girls, waiting them to make the mistake that would ruin them. Those rooms are long-dead.

Where have the blackmailers gone?

Photo via TheDailyCapper/YouTube

MTV reality star Diem Brown is giving a raw and personal look at a world that often kept behind closed doors: the physical and emotional turmoil during chemotherapy treatment.

Brown, who starred on Real World/Road Rules Challenge, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer for the second time at age 30. This time around, however, she wanted to try something a little different.

When Brown was originally diagnosed at age 23, she tried to find a video of someone in her situation while she went through treatment, but she only found dramatic, reactionary posts or celebrities who shaved their head for a movie or due to a breakdown.

It wasn’t until she found musician Melissa Etheridge’s story that she even came close to finding someone with her situation.

“I remember studying [Etheridge’s] picture on the Internet, amazed and proud she didn’t throw on a wig ... she was bald, beautiful and strong!” Brown wrote in a blog post for People. “She had no fear, and her picture made me want to give early 20-somethings another image they could Google if facing cancer.”

Starting at around two and a half weeks after her carbo/taxol chemotherapy infusion treatment, Brown recorded herself brushing her hair, which she did bi-nightly.

“You go through waves where sometimes you’re fine and then sometimes you get upset because it’s frustrating,” Brown said. “It’s not the freaking hair so much as it’s more and more realization that you’re sick.”

In the video, Brown remains calm as her hair falls out before her eyes, but she breaks down during one brushing ritual as a large clump of her dirty-blond hair falls out with a single brush.

She hopes that her video will help future cancer patients understand what will happen to them when they undergo treatment.

“I just wanted to make my Google search contribution, so that future patients Googling hair loss during chemo can see exactly what happens when you don’t shave it off,” Brown wrote.

Photo via Diem Brown/YouTube

It may be a cliche, but Winnie the kitten finds comfort in the bottom of a tub of ice cream.  After a recent break up with her boyfriend — an American Shorthair named Merv — Winnie drowned her sorrows in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked.

“She was really broken up about it,” said roommate Jenny Hertzwiler. “Phase one is ice cream, phase two is breaking all his CDs and then she’ll be able to get a little perspective.  She’ll get through this.”

According to Hertzwiler, Winnie had a bit of a tummy ache after the ice cream binge, but it was “preferable to heartache.”

Via cassidy3.

Monday is International Caps Lock Day on the Internet, and that means your friends and family might grab that shift key and HOLD ON. But clearly, that’s a one-day gimmick. Why not follow the masters, the people keep their caps lock on all year?

Here are five Twitter accounts who you can trust to be on point for Caps Lock Day, since they’re on point every day.

1) Drew Magary ALLCAPS (@drewmagary_RANT) // 1,082 followers

Those familiar with Drew Margery, the sports/comedy/gentlemen’s issues writer for Deadspin and GQ, know that his rants often surge into ALL CAPS PHRASES when he wants to make fun of somebody’s wrongheaded viewpoint. That’s inspired one noble soul (we don’t know his or her identity except that it’s one of the 7,073,577,165 people on Earth who are not Drew Magary) to create @drewmagary_RANT, a Twitter account devoted to spitting out each of those all caps phrases, and nothing else, devoid of context.

2) Gregory Erskine (@gregerskine) // 5,012 followers

@gregerskine, apparently helmed by an occasional cartoonist named Greg Erskine, fits firmly into the category of weird Twitter. That means its tweets tends to evoke little vignettes that are short, funny, adolescent and, well, weird.

3) Daniel Manitou (@ActualPerson084) // 7,072 followers

Daniel Manitou claims to be a “real person,” one who “ who enjoys riding bicycles, music, and Twitter,” and not a “metal ghost in devil box,” but the tweets emanating from @ActualPerson084 suggest otherwise. He’s created a unique style of evoking hellish, Lovecraftian, horror-movie landscapes that he juxtaposes with real-life mundanity—like a nightmare interrupted by a commercial.

4) Various Hulks

Just like in the comics, there are many iterations of the Hulk on Twitter—Film Critic, Drunk, Grammarian, Feminist. While their appeals vary (Jaded Punk Rocker is pitch-perfect to anyone with a working knowledge of classic punk scenes; NewfieHulk probably only works if you’re into Newfoundland-specific humor), at least all of them have the decency to type in all caps.

5) ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER (@ZODIAC_MF) // 8,856 followers

Possibly the greatest champion of “ownage” on the Internet, ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER is a consistent Internet personality, split somewhere between caricature and anonymous real person, that’s been around for years on Twitter, the A.V. Club, and Deadspin. Though we know little else about him, MOTHERFUCKER is open about his penchants: for on-screen violence (both in his deep breadth of cinema and his love of shaky YouTube fight videos), video games, drinking, Detroit, and women.

Photo via Gregory Erkskine/Twitter

Former NPR reporter Andrea Seabrook wants to revitalize political coverage in Washington, D.C. To do so, she’s left NPR and tossed her mic into a much more entrepreneurial ring. She’s become a podcaster.

Even as Seabrook began raising funds, she reported and released three episodes of DecodeDC: “House of (mis)Representatives” on how difficult it is for citizens to make their voices heard in Congress; “Mind Control” on the “neuroscience of party politics”; and “The Political Stage,” on the secrets of political stage management.

Seabrook funded her new, independent reporting venture with a Kickstarter campaign that ended on Friday. She pulled in donations of over $100,000, which surpassed her goal by $25,000. The original goal would have kept her “broadcasting” for a year. But now, Seabrook and her team will be able to produce more or less weekly in-depth “radio” reporting. She hopes it will go beyond the “scorekeeping” reporting that characterizes so much of political coverage. Instead of pitching play-by-play, she’s running color coverage.

What is the meat of the matter? What are the implications of legislation? What are the motivations behind its sponsors?

“Toxicity,” Seabrook told the Daily Dot at the start of her Kickstarter campaign. That’s why she left NPR. But the adventive moment was the “debt ceiling debacle during the summer of 2011.

“For three months I and the other Washington reporters covered the debt ceiling debacle,” she said. “It was grueling. Every day that nothing happened was a day closer to calamity and therefore a news day and yet we had nothing to say that was different than the day before.”

Seabrook said she’d known she was being played by the politicians she covered, but “when the shit hits the fan” (as with the debt ceiling issue) “and when all they’re doing is talking through you to your political opponents, it was almost a slap in the face.”

Seabrook initially worked with NPR in developing the DecodeDC idea. After a break to report with the Planet Money on a series for This American Life called “Take the Money and Run for Office,” she came back to NPR with serious budget issues.

“They asked me, can you wait until next year? I can’t, I said. I can’t stomach it. It’s served me to leave and get my head out of their editorial game.”

DC was a “serious game of currying favors to get interviews,” Seabrooke said. “The important thing, you see, is for journalists to have connections. If you get up and look at things from different angles, it will upset people. They will blow you off and get away with it! Being a ‘legitimate journalist’ is knowing what the unspoken rules are, so your editor thinks you’re on top of it. We’re all politicians now.”

The shift into podcasting was a natural next step for Seabrook.

“Podcasting is the most pared-down, basic, entrepreneurial form of journalism. I don’t need much to broadcasting my content. Now that we’ve demolished the traditional broadcast hurdles, the only thing that matters is how good your content is.”

Although podcasting may still seem on the fringe of mainstream news, she does not believe that marginal position will last too long.

“Radio is going to have a hard time once everyone has internet radio on their cars.”

Seabrook is not relying on her Kickstarter money alone, though without it the enterprise would have been impractical. Mule Radio Syndicate, her distributor, is selling ads against her content. They also provide the delivery structure and syndication. NPR has indicated a desire to license some of her content. And the German audio startup Soundcloud has made her a Community Fellow. They are providing a monetary award, tech support, PR and a built-in community to tap.

“Our first goal is one year’s worth of shows on a schedule,” she said. “Our second is to establish a freelance budget for unconventional journalists to cover government as a whole, not necessarily just DC, civic affairs overall.” 

Photo via DecodeDC

Those sex noises are coming from inside the house.

Just in time for Halloween comes a tale so bizarre and entertaining that it might have been cooked up by R. L. Stine for an adult edition of Goosebumps.

A group of London flatmates were in for a surprise over the weekend. An amorous couple from a party down the hall stepped into their abode, found an empty room, and started bonking.

The others inside the converted peanut factory residence, those who actually live there, shared the incident with the rest of the world through a series of tweets and YouTube videos, all dropped into a Storify for posterity.

The saga is so bizarre we have to wonder if it’s just too good to be true, especially when a resident of the apartment starts blasting “Gangnam Style” in a bid to evacuate the lovebirds.

Recounting the tale beat by beat would remove some of the sexy magic. That said, the occupant of the banging burglars’ temporary boudoir has an unfortunate surprise awaiting him when he returns home.

Photo by yellow book/Flickr

A self-portrait meant to make a statement about natural beauty has exposed a lot of peoples’ ugly side.

NYU student Stella Boonshoft is a plus-sized woman who posted a shot of her bikini-clad body on her Tumblr blog, The Body Love Blog. This weekend, however, the photo got a much larger audience than Boonshoft intended.

After being snapped for street photographer Brandon Staunton’s Humans of New York Facebook page, she told him about her sizeism project. She didn’t expect the photographer to pick up her bikini photo instead—for his 631,000 fans to see.

“I expected him to post the CLOTHED picture of me, and link to my blog, so anyone who was interested could check it out,” she wrote. “So needless to say I was a little surprised when I saw my half-naked self on Facebook, getting thousands of likes every minute.”

The original photo shows a smiling Boonshoft in her skivvies with a hefty disclaimer:

“WARNING: Picture might be considered obscene because subject is not thin. And we all know that only skinny people can show their stomachs and celebrate themselves. Well I’m not going to stand for that. This is my body. Not yours. MINE. Meaning the choices I make about it, are none of your fucking business. Meaning my size, IS NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS.”

Unfortunately, even in 2012, the concept that not all women are model-perfect is still a controversial position to take. Hundreds of thousands of people commented on Boonshoft’s photo on Staunton’s Facebook page. And for every “You go girl!” there was also a derogatory comment.

Boonshoft said her first thought was to “burst into tears.” But after talking with Staunton, she decided to leave the photo and her blog up.

“I know what I am trying to do, which is help young women struggling with their body image and expose the hypocrisy and cruelty that is sizeism, is SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT whatever feelings I may have about myself,” she wrote on Tumblr.

On Sunday evening, Boonshoft wrote the Facebook experience had even inspired her to change the direction of her blog to focus less on her personal experiences, and more on body positivity in general.

“Over the course of the next few weeks, me and my friend Brandon (who you all know from Humans of New York) are reinventing this blog,” she wrote.

Photo by Brandon Staunton/Facebook

The pulse of our nation can be found in the search terms we use on Google.

Take our infatuation with Paul Ryan, for example, that dapper and daring senator from Wisconsin who's running to be Mitt Romney's vice president. He's got broad shoulders and a nice head of hair, controversial policies, and a much-maligned selection of songs on his iPod.

He's the most tabloid-friendly candidate running on a nationwide November ticket—Star would have paid millions for shirtless photos!—and he should be looked up on the Internet as such.

So it should come as no surprise that the New York Times reported Sunday that Google searches for "Paul Ryan shirtless" outnumbers Google searches for "Paul Ryan budget" by nearly 10 times.

It should come as no surprise because the Internet is more or less the digital transposition of the magazine rack at the grocery store checkout counter. Kardashians, Britney Spears' upskirt photos, Lindsay Lohan mug shots… What's the difference?

So it's not the fact that "shirtless" trumps "budget" that should have the people talking. It's what they'll find inside.

Googling "Paul Ryan shirtless" yields a hodgepodge amalgamation of scandal and source.

There's the ABC News report that TMZ found Ryan’s P90X workout photos in August, and the Washington Post's analysis of the incident, as well. (That report noted that "Paul Ryan Vice President" was still more popular than "Paul Ryan shirtless" as recently as August.)

There's also the blockbuster TMZ story—the one simply titled "THE SHIRTLESS PHOTO"—and a thorough analysis of said photo from popular YouTuber and all-around shiller-of-SFW-smut Philip DeFranco.  

What is surprising is that a search for "Paul Ryan shirtless" initially yields zero actual photos of the Wisconsin warrior wearing no shirt.

For that, indulgent Americans will need to click on the little "Images" tab at the top of their screens.

There, they'll find more than 2.6 million photos waiting at the ready, including this one, which gets us every time.

Photo via @hazzakiss/Twitter

On Oct. 10, 15-year-old Amanda Todd committed suicide after years of sexually explicit coercion and blackmail. She was an unwitting victim of the seedy and clandestine world of cappers— individuals who pressure teenagers into exposing themselves via webcam, photograph them, and then use the lewd pics for blackmailing.

Sadly, Todd is not alone.

A new investigation reveals that the majority of sexually explicit images and videos of young people and children on the Internet are stolen or obtained without the subject’s permission.

The study, conducted by the British advocacy group Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), revealed that 88 percent of all self-generated and sexually explicit content featuring teens was stolen from their original sources by “parasite websites.”

Researchers for the IWF spent a combined 47 hours over the course of four weeks analyzing 12,224 images and videos on 68 different sites. Of these, 7,147 were images, 5,077 were videos, and 5,001 were both.

The study discovered that 10,776 photos and clips—88 percent— were found on “parasite websites,” pages that are “often created for the sole purpose of offering sexually explicit images and videos of young people.”

“This research gives an unsettling indication of the number of images and videos on the [I]nternet featuring young people performing sexually explicit acts or posing,” states IFW CEO Susie Hargreaves.

She continued:

It also highlights the problem of control of these images— once an image has been copied onto a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account. We need young people to realise that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely.

The study also provides anonymous first-hand accounts of teens whose self-generated content has appeared in such sites. One specific individual tells of how their name was affixed to the stolen content and would therefore show up whenever someone googled them.

One explicit image I took when I was young but cannot be specific to if I was 15 or 16 because it was long ago, and I never posted it to the internet... It is coming up on the first page of [search engine] also if my name is searched and on [search engine] images for my name which could jeopardize any future career I have or if any family/friends come across it.

Another teen explains how the stolen content led to depression.

I endured so much bullying because of this photograph and others... I was eventually admitted for severe depression and was treated for a suicide attempt.

The numbers are staggering but unsurprising. In fact, there have been multiple instances in which sexually explicit content taken without the user’s consent has made the front page news.

The most glaring example is r/jailbait, a Reddit subgroup that featured photographs and videos of scantily clad underage girls. The existence of the subreddit first gained national attention in late Sept. 2011, when CNN anchor Anderson Cooper did an exposé of the group on his television program. R/jailbait was subsequently shut down in early Oct. 2011 after site administrators discovered that a redditor was using the platform to provide nude photographs of an ex-girlfriend.  

Similarly, Gawker wrote about a different subreddit, r/photobucketplunder, whose users were using a practice called “fusking” to scan hosting site Photobucket to find sexually suggestive photographs of women to post on the subcategory. Following the Gawker article, Photobucket sent a takedown notice threatening legal action to the subreddit’s moderators. The mods agreed to take down /photobucketplunder on the grounds that they used the site’s name without authorization, but proceeded to open r/photoplunder, a different group that displayed the exact same content.

Finally, there’s the case of Is Anyone Up (IAU), a “revenge site” created by Hunter Moore that’s stocked with nude photos submitted by spiteful exes without the subject’s consent. Much like r/jailbait, Anderson Cooper exposed IAU in public. The site eventually shut down, but not because Cooper report. Moore claimed he was tired of filtering out images of underage teens from his page.

As for the IFW, it advises teens to abstain from “sexting.” Young people remove the risk of being victimized by not creating the content in the first place. Much like abstinence, that idea is great in theory but not in its implementation, particularly given that “sexting is becoming the norm with that age group. And, surely, putting the onus on the victims isn’t going to fix a thing.

Photo via Todd Kravos/Flickr

Here’s two obnoxious gender-based stereotypes: “Men like sports, but women don’t” and “Ditto regarding computer-based stuff.”

Now, ESPN (more specifically, espnW, which bills itself as “ESPN’s online destination for women”) hopes to kill two stereotypical birds with one stone via espnW Hack Day 2012, an event which will bring women who happen to be sports-loving technophiles together to collaborate on a suite of digital sports-related products.

Hack Day–which takes place Noy. 9 and 10 at Stanford University–is a combination contest and networking event. Teams work to produce APIs for a variety of platforms, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others, with prizes for the best in each category.
 
The judges include Facebook software engineer Sophia Chung (who has written for the Huffington Post about the stereotypes she faces every day, as a woman in her profession); Sara Haider, software engineer at Twitter for Android; Danielle Tiedt, a former Bing executive  who is now Chief Marketing Officer at YouTube; and Rob King, ESPNs senior vice-president for digital media, with additional judges possibly to be added.

It’s not only women who would benefit by the smashing of stereotypes; software companies hoping to hire the best talent available would do well to recruit from the entire population rather than focus exclusively on the XY-chromosome half of it. That’s probably why the other Hack Day sponsors include Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, YouTube and Mashery.

Registration and admission are free, with various sponsors and participants announcing their involvement or recruiting new participants with the Twitter hashtag #hackespnw .

Photo via Mike Licht/Flickr

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Industrial Aesthetic meets Steampunk Sensibility. Gears meat Ganesh. Paisley meets Power Train. Not quite a Fractal, not quite a Fluid.

Lumine Sentience invites you to get lost in the mellow sepia swirls of this mesmerizing GIF. While Steampunk and Industrialism in general can be dehumanizing, this particular image somehow manages to be both reassuringly mechanical and smoothly zoological.

At the nexus between the brutally mechanical and the oozingly organic is this warmly sepia, elegant GIF of an eternal energy factory. To date 12,370 have signed in for a shift.

Julio at Google supports marriage equality, and he wants you to know that his employer does, too.

In a new video produced by Google, employees explain why the marriage equality bills on the ballot in four U.S. states personally matter to them. Voters in Minnesota, Maine, Maryland, and Washington are facing referendums next month about the legality of gay marriage.

The one-minute clip features Googlers describing how their fight for marriage equality is not only political, but very personal. An engaged, male employee said he is finding it very difficult to get married to his partner, calling the laws restricting him “kind of tough.”

Other Googlers called this the “civil rights issue of our generation,” and added that civil rights should “never be up for a vote.”

“But the fact that is is, means that we have to get people behind the cause as much as possible,” said one purple-clad employee.

The search giant has made no secret of its gay-friendly views. In July, Google announced a worldwide campaign called “Legalize Love,” to combat anti-gay laws in countries where the company has offices. Removing restrictions on same-sex marriage would help Google attract any employee it wants to hire, regardless of orientation.

Google’s latest pro-marriage campaign is a collaboration with TheFour.com, a social media-based campaign raising awareness for marriage equality. The organization previously created videos featuring gay couples in the four states with marriage laws on the ballot this November.

Photo via LifeatGoogle/YouTube

As residents of Kuwait took to the streets to protest changes to an electoral law, Egyptians shared advice and comments on the demonstration via Twitter.

Amir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah froze parliament in June and decreed last week that citizens vote for one candidate instead of four in elections. Kuwaitis, angry that the decision was made without citizen or parliamentary input, gathered at the weekend following a call to action by the Twitter account @KarametWatan (which means “A Nation's Dignity”). An estimated 150,000 Kuwaitis marched.

Egyptians, of course, are no strangers to mass protests against political figures, following a number of demonstrations since early 2011’s Arab Spring. According to Global Voices, they offered some words of advice. Many of the tweets were written in Arabic.

Samah Anwar gave a tip to Kuwaiti men on their attire, urging them not to wear the commonly used thobe, claiming it’s “not suitable for revolutions.” She also warned citizens to not “destroy the country,” adding that their standard of living was higher than in many other countries.

On the flip side, @MahmoudANnaJJar questioned the need for a protest: “Why would you have a revolution when the youngest child amongst you is richer than an Egyptian minister?”

Kuwaiti @Barcelonya hit back at such claims, contending that it was a protest and not a revolution along the lines of the one that toppled former Egypt president Hosni Mubarak.

According to Al Jazeera, Kuwaitis have been subjected to crowd control measures like tear gas and stun guns as authorities attempted to carry out what government opposition described as a "constitutional coup."

Photo via StarNews24x7/YouTube

The Williamsburg hipster-cam—that hidden webcam which filmed hipsters in the wild, unbeknownst to them, and broadcast everything for the world to see—may have already been located by an astute Dot reader. But will Brooklyn residents who walk past the spot stay away?

Perhaps not; but the word is definitely, erm, on the street.

Dot reader Queen TEE offered their best guess as to the location of the secret camera, which films passersby and uploads them in real-time to a voting site, sometimes with awkward results. Queen Tee’s verdict? The hidden cam is lodged in a window at 234 North 7th Street:

I found it using google street view, looking for the bright green house in the background.  The green house and the one to the right of it match up, and across the street is construction on the sidewalk.  looking at the angle the pictures are taken in relation to the construction points to 234 across the street, and zooming in shows a fence identical to the one in the foreground of the photos.  looking at the angle of the fence in photos shows the camera is in the bottom floor/basement window.

... zoom in on the fence, then rotate around and look for the green building across the street and the car. the color in the photos is more saturated, making the green building look brighter than on g.s.v. but if you have any doubts look closely at the fences in front and you will find a perfect match.

Commenters at the Gothamist also found the street, and at New York Mag, reader DetroitGirl noted, “This problem could be very quickly solved with a well-placed stone.”

Not all reactions have been focused on the privacy invasion, as some Williamsburg hipsters find the spot and give it their approval. Then again, others are less congenial.  And still others drew the comparison between the fashion cam and New York City’s regular hidden surveillance cameras.

“Neither is something I want on the street, but I’d prefer a camera observing me for internet lulz over a camera observing me for secret police state ‘security reasons,’” Tumblr user saezutte wrote.

Correction: this article originally attributed Tumblr user saezutte's comments to a different user. We apologize for the error.

Photo via Syleblaster