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Manti Te’o Sort of Admits to Knowing About the Hoax – Ronaiah Tuiasosopo Confesses to Being the Voice of Fake Girlfriend, Lennay Kekua

Notre Dame star linebacker Manti Te’o, during an interview with ABC News’ Katie Couric, has confessed to at least having some knowledge of the fact that his girlfriend Lennay Kekua was fake. At least in the end. And in an even more bizarre turn of events, one of the hoax perpetrators, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, has admitted through his attorney that he was the voice of Lennay in phone calls to Manti.

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Did You Get a “Warning: Please Slow Down” Captcha When Messaging Someone on Facebook?

The Facebook security check warning says “Warning: Please Slow Down. It looks like you’re using this feature in a way it wasn’t meant to be used. Please slow down, or you could be blocked from using it.” This is what some people are seeing when they try to send, or reply to, a message within the Facebook messaging feature. The only problem is, people who rarely send messages at all are seeing it.

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Facebook Privacy Hoax Lulls Users Into False Sense of Security by Using Facebook Status to Declare Copyright on Contents of Their Facebook Accounts

A Facebook hoax has, yet again, monopolized Facebook status updates, as panicked users have been advised, by the hoax, to declare copyright in response to Facebook privacy changes. Of course, if simply declaring something on your Facebook status made it so, then the color of your bra strap would have cured breast cancer, Casey Anthony would have been found guilty, and a simple relationship status change from “married” to “divorced” would save thousands in lawyer fees.

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Is GoDaddy Down? Yes, GoDaddy Goes Down, Anonymous Ally Claims Responsibility

With one simple tweet, “#tangodown godaddy.com…Hello everyone who wanna me to put 99% of the global Internet in #tangodown?” one lone hacker, with the Twitter handle, “AnonymousOwn3r,” took down internet giant GoDaddy.com, causing an outage to the GoDaddy site, 1000s, if not millions, of sites that have GoDaddy-hosted sites, and their DNS, GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts, and GoDaddy phone service. #tangodown is taken from a military term, meaning a target was successfully attacked. Hackers also use it when it means that a website has been taken offline.

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Facebook Allowing Marketers to Target YOUR Facebook Account by Uploading Email Addresses and Phone Numbers to Match to Facebook Users

Well, Facebook has finally done it, they’ve found a way to allow unscrupulous marketers to spam your Facebook account. Facebook will allow advertisers to target users based on personal information such as phone numbers, user IDs, and email addresses. In a confirmation to PCMag.com, Facebook relayed their new marketing program which will begin next week, targeting ads to their “existing customers.”

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The Facebook “Get Started” Tab

With Facebook’s upcoming $5 billion dollar IPO, they must figure that they can do anything they want (like they didn’t before?). Of course, now that they will have stockholders they are going to have to focus even more on earning money, more than anything else, and of course they do that on the backs of their users.

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Study Finds News Sites Taken In by Internet Explorer (IE) IQ Hoax Have Lower IQs than Other News Sites

A random, non-scientific survey of Internet Patrol staff members has found that people believe that Internet news sites that were taken in by the recent AptiQuant “study” finding that Internet Explorer (IE) users have a lower IQ than other browsers users, themselves have a lower IQ than other Internet news sites. “Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid, Study Suggests” exclaimed the PC World article. “Internet Explorer users ‘have below-average IQ’ ” blared The Telegraph. Business Insider and many other sites picked up the story as well.

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Meeting Women on Craigslist is Downfall of New York Legislator Chris Lee

It seems that meeting women on Craigslist is a lot like Lays Potato Chips – betcha can’t meet just one. Meeting women for casual sex on Craigslist is so easyso addicting – that it seems to cause all reason and logic (not to mention fidelity, honor and decency) to fly out of men’s heads. In fact, we fully expect to see Craiglist Rehab Clinics dotting the nation within the next few years. The most recent public downfall related to Craigslist cheating through Craigslist personals is that of New York Republican Representative Christopher Lee, who resigned this week after it was reported that the married Lee was trying to meet women through Craigslist.

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Tree Octopus Given New Lease on Life Thanks to Connecticut Middle Schoolers

The Tree Octopus has been given a new lease on life, thanks to a study in which 25 Connecticut 7th-graders participated.

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Philadelphia Levies $300 Blog Tax on Bloggers

The city of Philadelphia has taken that age-old pastime – trying to get blood out of a stone – to a new high tech high: trying to get money out of a hobby blogger. Philadelphia may be the ‘city of brotherly love’, but it’s certainly not the city of bloggerly love, especially not with Philadelphia charging bloggers what amounts to a $300 blogging tax. Oh sure, Philadelphia officials call it a “business privilege license”, but when you require it of someone who hasn’t monetized their blog at all, well, that’s not much of a business model, is it? Of course, it’s a dandy business model for Philadelphia, right up there with states charging an affiliate sales tax.

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Jenny Quits Job by Whiteboard a Big Fat Hoax

If you spent even a few hours this week on the Internet, you probably couldn’t help hearing about “Jenny”, the girl who quit her job by whiteboard, meaning that she took a series of 33 pictures, each of herself holding up a dry erase board with a different message written on the whiteboard in each picture, which she then emailed to all of her co-workers. The gist of the messages on the whiteboard was that she was quitting after hearing her insufferable boss call her a HPOA (for “hot piece of *ss”, although he was so lame he said “HOPA”). She also outed him for spending far too many work hours each week playing Farmville on Facebook. Instantly, Jenny became the hero, and lust object, of people around the world. What guts! What creativity! What bollucks!…because it turns out that “Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office” was a big fat hoax. In fact her name isn’t even Jenny, it’s Elyse Porterfield, and she’s an actress from LA. (Some are looking for Elise Porterfield or even Else Porterfield, but it’s Elyse Porterfield, we promise.)

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Mac Logic Board Replacement WILL Lead to Issues with Time Machine and iTunes

Here at TIP we are a broadly Mac shop, and we do love our Apple computers. But that doesn’t mean that they never fail, and recently we learned the hard way that there are some known issues with certain repairs – Mac gotchas, if you will – that will get you every time. Such is the case with having your logic board replaced, which will cause problems for you with Time Machine and iTunes, because it changes your computer’s MAC address, on which Time Machine and iTunes rely to authenticate your computer. The biggest issue we see is that Apple knows about this, and doesn’t warn the customer before swapping out the logic board. A simple warning from Apple before replacing a logic board could save Apple customers hours – days even – of stress, heartache, and futile searching and effort; but Apple doesn’t give their customers that warning. So, we are giving you that warning – here’s our word to the wise.

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Journalists Caught Using Wikipedia as Primary Source

An Irish college student has proven that journalists are using Wikipedia as a primary – and indeed only – source for their stories, without doing any fact checking whatsoever. By inserting and then tracking a fake quote in the Wikipedia entry for French composer Maurice Jarre, who died in March, 22-year old Shane Fitzgerald determined that even such august media outlets as the BBC are susceptible to the “it’s on Wikipedia, it must be true” fallacy.

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The Paypal Dispute and Claim Gotcha – Escalating Your Claim Gets It Dismissed

Here’s something that we just learned the hard way – from direct personal experience. If you file a dispute with Paypal – and then escalate it to a claim, as Paypal encourages you to do – there is only one situation in which Paypal won’t then immediately dismiss your claim, making it a win for a non-compliant, non-responsive, or just plain sleazy seller.

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Using Free Starbucks Wifi Hoses Your RSS Feeds – Replaces Them with AT&T URLs

It’s still winter break in Boulder, and so most of the independent coffee shops in Boulder are closing early until school is back in session. As a result, I found myself all dressed up and with nowhere to go to sit and work over a cup of joe last night. In desperation, I turned to the local Starbucks – even they were closing early, but not as early as the other coffee shops. And besides, I was curious to try Starbuck’s free wifi.