Month: September 2007

  • Meg White sex tape fake yet still “news”

    Meg White sex tape fake yet still “news”

    Well here’s some sloppy reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), with the SMH website reporting that Meg White, “drummer” of the White Stripes, was the ‘star’ of the latest celebrity sex video doing the rounds.

    As of writing this, the SMH “Meg White sex video claim” story is the second most viewed story on the SMH website. The story was first published on the SMH site at 12.30pm on the 26 September. The article signs off with:

    “Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine.”

    “Meg White sex video claim“, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 26, 2007 — 10.30pm.

    I have to say, it’s an attention grabbing story, I guess the only problem is that it’s not all that accurate.

    What’s wrong with the story you ask? Well, anyone with access to Google, which I’m assuming is readily accessible by the people at SMH headquarters, can tell you within about 30 seconds that the “sex video” is a fake. In fact, it took me all of 30 seconds to find a statement from The White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh:

    “Some people have a very twisted sense of humor and this prank is in particularly bad taste. The tape circulating on the internet as featuring Meg White is fake. It’s definitely not Meg.”

    Statement released by White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh, quoted here, here and here (amongst many other publications).

    You can also find similar sentiments on the PitchFork Media website, and countless others if you can be bothered surfing around for more than 30 seconds!

    Now did you pick up on the date that The White Stripes publicist released the statement? Yahuh, the 24 September 2007. Now even when you take into account the timezone difference, SMH went ahead and published their story stating that “Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine” almost two days after the publicist came out and said that the video didn’t feature Meg White. So yes, very sloppy effort SMH!

    Actually, if anyone from SMH reads this, here is the story behind the now infamous – not actually Meg White – sex tape. It all started with a guy (‘Itsmecraig’) who was a frequent visitor to the Hipinion internet forum. This guy posted a video at that forum, with the post title “MEG WHITE SEX TAPE” (WARNING: not everything on that page is ‘work safe’). So this happens on the 17 September. For the next day or two a few of the frequent forum visitors posted the obvious jokes that you might come to make (eg. “that can’t be Meg White, that girl can keep rhythm”).

    It wasn’t long before the thread was “wiki’d” and not long after the sex tape story was picked up as ‘fact’ by a number of outlets. Things obviously snowballed from there.

    Then on the 24 September, “Itsmecraig” checked back in on his one week old thread:

    oh sh!t dudes,

    i found this video through random wank mining efforts and put it up here cause i figured you guys would have a laugh. it had nothing to do with meg white when i found it.

    So there you go, a random guy, posts a random porn video, labels it as a celebrity, and it gets picked up and run worldwide as news. It’s both funny and sad that news outlets didn’t bother to check if the story was based on fact at all! So the Sydney Morning Herald fail on two counts. They published old ‘news’ that had already been proven false. Sometimes the quality of Australian print media is laughable, I guess you could file the Meg White “sex tape” as exhibit A.

  • Silverchair & Powderfinger (Across the Great Divide Tour) 19 September 2007

    Silverchair & Powderfinger (Across the Great Divide Tour) 19 September 2007

    My ears are still ringing from last nights Silverchair/Powderfinger double bill, Across the Great Divide show at Rod Laver Arena. From where I was, the stadium appeared to be at near capacity.

    Support act for the night was Expatriate. They put on an entertaining half hour or so of music, but I have to say, playing the support slot must be one of the toughest gigs in music!

    Silverchair and Powderfinger both played full sets with Silverchair coming out first. They played quite a few songs from their latest album, Young Modern, as well as a mix of their older stuff. The tracks from Young Modern really stood up well live. Young Modern is an eclectic album, musically it jumps all over the place, and before hand I wondered how they’d be able to pull off tracks like Thieving Birds live.

    Powderfinger followed with their set consisting largely of songs from their new album Dream Days at the Hotel Existence. They also played a few tracks from Vulture Street and Odyssey Number Five.

    At the end of the show Powderfinger were joined onstage by Silverchair to blast out a quick rendition of the Who song, Substitute.

    I have to say Dream Days is not my favorite Powderfinger album, so their reliance on material from that album means that I’d have to hand the battle of the bands title to Silverchair.

    In my opinion, Silverchair really stole the show. There is so much more light and shade in their music, which really stood out in comparison to Powderfinger’s more ‘meat and potatoes’ style rock. That’s not to say that meat and potatoes is bad, just that Silverchair had a far more varied library of material to draw from, which I would argue, made for the better show.

    If you get a chance to catch the Across the Great Divide tour, I’d highly recommend getting along (if you can find a ticket!). It was definitely entertaining, and also fantastic value for money. Two of Australia’s biggest bands, playing full sets, all for the price of one!

    Now I think it’s time I caught a little more shut eye…

  • How I stopped a bandwidth thief

    How I stopped a bandwidth thief

    As you may have read, a few days ago I found that I was having a few issues with bandwidth theft with people hotlinking to images on my automotive blog without permission. I decided I’d have some fun for a couple of days by replacing the hotlinked images with some non-auto related, border line inappropriate, images.

    Yesterday I decided I’d had enough fun and started doing some research into how to prevent hotlinking through editing the htaccess file. I “google’d”, asked questions of people smarter than me, and scratched my head. All the usual stuff. I’d became quite partial to one of my bandwidth thief banners, and wanted to implement a solution that would incorporate the banner somehow.

    The solution I settled on (see code below), was to block requests for images from outside sources, and serve up the banner of my choice in place of the actual request.

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domainName\.com/ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/bandwidthThief.jpe [L]

    In other words, if anyone attempts to hotlink to any images (jpg, gif, bmp, or png) on my server, instead of displaying the requested image, they will instead display my banner of choice.

    Simplifying it further, the bandwidth thief thinks they are getting an image of a Subaru WRX STi, but are instead served up a massive set of bulls testicles (see below). I love the internet. If you want to use the “Bull Balls” solution, feel free to copy the image below (NO HOTLINKING!!) 😛 A link back would be appreciated.

  • Turning up the heat on the bandwidth thief

    Turning up the heat on the bandwidth thief

    Well it’s been over 24 hours since I identified the ‘bandwidth theft‘ occurring on one of my other sites. It was the first time I’d found this happening, so I thought I’d conduct an experiment, firstly, to see what sort of images I could display on the offending site, and secondly, to see how long it would go on for before the dumb ass responsible figured out what was happening. Well that was 24 hours ago, my bandwidth theft images were still online, so, I’ve decided to raise the bar a little.

    Five minutes ago, I replaced my bandwidth theft banners with all new, possibly even more disturbing, bandwidth theft banners. As you can see from the screen shot below, I decided to stick with an “animal” theme.

    Yup, two rhinos humping, and a set of massive bull balls. All class. I’ve done the .htaccess research, so I’ll fix that up soon, in the meantime, I think I’ll leave the offender with the bull balls for a little longer.

    As an aside, I’ve also learned another very valuable lesson from all this. Never do a Google image search for “bull balls” with “safe search” switched off.