When a Tennessee man hacked Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and wrote of his exploits on the forum 4chan, federal investigators asked the site’s founder Christopher “Moot” Poole for server logs. Court testimony from April and published yesterday shows that federal prosecutors had other pressing questions for Poole: for example, the meaning of “peeps” and “rickroll.”

Assistant to the U.S. Attorney Mark Krotoski questions Poole:

Q. Certain terms, have a meaning unique to 4chan?
A. Yes.

Q. Like “OP,” what is “OP”?
A. OP means original poster.

Q. Are you familiar these terms, having been the founder and administrator of the 4chan site?
A. Yes.

Q. What would “lurker” mean?
A. Somebody who browses but does not post, does not contribute.

Q. What do the words “caps” mean?
A. Screenshots.

Q. And is there any significance to “new fags”?
A. That is the term used to describe new users to the site.

Q. What about “b tard”?
A. It’s a term that users of the /b/- Random board use for themselves.

Q. What about “troll”?
A. Troublemaker.

Q. “404″?
A. 404 is the status code for not found. It means essentially gone or not found.

Q. Not found on where, the 4chan site?
A. 404 is the http status code for not found, a page not found by the Web server.

Q. In what about “peeps”?
A. People.

Q. “Rickroll”?
A. Rickroll is a mean [sic] or Internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users — it basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up.

Bonus humor points for the fact that the court reporter had apparently never heard the word “meme” before. The story went viral yesterday; we found it on Gawker’s Valleywag and the complete testimony on The Smoking Gun. Apologies to those hoping to find a reference to LOLcats: relevancy?

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Image: flickr /Andrew Dupont

Add one more job to the list–along with vacuuming floors and assisting in surgeries, now robots can try on clothes for you. The company Fits.me is developing a robotic torso for online shoppers that can morph to match shoppers’ body dimensions, creating virtual fitting rooms on clothing websites.

Men can try a demo version of the product on the company’s site. After entering measurements such as neck and waste size, and selecting from three torso types, the site displays what you might look like in a particular shirt. The torso doesn’t morph in real time; instead, the site pulls from a database of pictures–2,000 body size combinations, the company reports, systematically showing users if pinstripes in small, medium, or large will make them look fat. Shirt sellers Hawes and Curtis is already testing a version of the system on their site.

As reported by the BBC, the company next hopes to develop a version of the torso for women. Maarja Kruusma a professor of biorobotics at the University of Tallinn who helped the company develop the system, told the BBC that it’s a difficult task. Women’s clothing comes in more intricate styles, and their torsos are more complicated to model, she says:

“You can’t just take a male mannequin and put breasts on it. That doesn’t work.”

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Think picking a date on looks alone is a little shallow? How about picking your kids? The owners of the dating site BeautifulPeople.com have no qualms on the subject–they’ve launched a “virtual sperm and egg bank” where users can select beautiful people’s beautiful genetics by signing up for their beautiful gametes.

Though the company won’t perform egg extractions or accept sperm donations, they will serve as matchmakers and then forward the interested parties to the proper clinics. The company says its exclusive dating site–you can only join if other members judge you attractive enough–is a magnificent resource for those looking to breed up.

As reported by ABC News, the site has decided to generously offer its services even to the beauty-challenged.

“Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone–including ugly people–would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool,” company founder Robert Hintze said in a statement.

Everyone from bioethicists to the professionals who run clinics are concerned about site visitors skipping over the proper medical and psychological screenings. There is also concern about the participants’ expectations–and perhaps basic understanding of genetics. Just because biological mummy and daddy have good looks, it doesn’t necessarily mean their offspring will. If BeautifulPeople.com doesn’t make that clear, things could get very ugly.

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Image: flickr / alainelorza

It’s Optenet’s business to find porn and, apparently, they’re pretty good at it. In a recent press release, the company that offers family-friendly filters for your computer claims that one-third of internet is porn.

Ana Luisa Rotta, director of child protection projects at Optenet, says in the release:

“When you consider that more than one third of the Internet’s content is pornographic, combined with the overwhelming increase in young people now curiously visiting Websites with such ease of access, it is becoming increasingly imperative that adults take responsibility for the management of home PC security.”

“Home PC security”? Was that a subtle reference to Homeland Security? We don’t know, but according to Optenet we’re all in danger. Their study, which looked at “a database of hundreds of millions of URLs,” churned out these stats:

-Pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet
-Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212%
-Websites that contain violence have increased by 10.8%
-Websites that contain terrorism content have increased by 8.5%
-Websites that contain illegal drugs purchase have increased by 6.8%

An excellent point made on the blog Geeks Are Sexy, which broke the story:  if these numbers only reflect the total number of sites in each category, then an increase doesn’t really mean much of anything. If the whole internet is getting bigger, then of course the number of each type of page on the internet is also increasing.

One wonders if that huge database also showed an increase in more wholesome websites–for example, corporate pages for porn filtering businesses.

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Just how fast is Google’s Web browser, Chrome? According to a new video from these absurd and talented Google people, this is how fast:

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On Facebook, the Farmville updates are impossible to avoid–someone is looking for a cow, someone else is watering their crops. People who have never played the game may not understand how addictive it is, but here’s some proof. The game can not only suck away large portions of your day, it can also, as one councilmember in Bulgaria’s second largest city found out, get you demoted.

While many distracted politicians twiddle their thumbs during meetings or frantically jab at their Blackberries, city councilors in Plovdiv were apparently playing Farmville during budgetary debates.

The Escapist writes:

Council Chair Ilko Iliev “strongly scolded the eager internet farmers,” who nonetheless continued to spend time on their farms while attending council meetings.

Finally, during a meeting last Thursday, in order to send a message to the rest of the Farmville-playing community, one councilmember was given the boot.  Councilor Dimitar Kerin was voted off the budget committee, said fellow councilor Todot Hristov, because “he needed more time for his virtual farm.”

The Escapist added:

But he’s not leaving without a fight. “The troubled councilor has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants,” according to a report by Novinte.com. “He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.”

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What’s the best way to get the attention of Google, so that the wonder-company will choose to rig your town for experimental high-speed internet? Some people think that shameless groveling might do the trick.

That must be why Topeka, Kansas changed its name to “Google” for a month; the city hopes it will be chosen as a test site for Google’s new fiber-optic network, which would give Topeka residents Internet speeds 100 times faster than what average Americans have.

On Monday, the Mayor of Topeka announced that the city shall, henceforth, be referred to as Google, Kansas, through the month of March. Google is accepting entries from communities looking for an Internet upgrade till March 26th, after which it will decide which communities will get a bump up.

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In what looks like an act of conveniently looking the other way, social networking site Facebook doesn’t seem to mind that a new Facebook fad is violating the site’s terms of service.

If you are a self-respecting Facebooker, you must have come across a bunch of people changing their profile pictures during “Doppelganger Week,” in which people change their picture to that of the celebrity they think they resemble.

While this is allowing a busload of people to unabashedly proclaim that they resemble the world’s hottest celebrities, it also flies in the face of the Facebook terms of service. As CNET reports, the legalese states explicitly:

“You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law… We can remove any content or information you post on Facebook if we believe that it violates this Statement.” So unless you took that celebrity photo yourself or bought the rights to it, it’s probably infringing on someone’s copyright.

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It’s official. Even people in space are tweeting. NASA announced today that astronaut T.J. Creamer on the International Space Station has become the first person to tweet directly from space, making use of a brand new direct Internet connection. Creamer tweeted: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! More soon, send your ?s”

Yay. Space tweets. Sweet.

In the past, astronauts could use email and twitter–but they had to relay their messages to ground control in Houston, who then sent them on. But now, thanks to the new system of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts can take advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and browse the Web directly.

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“The internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes,” former Republican Senator Ted Stevens explained back in 2006.

And now, thanks to that series of tubes, you can watch a bear give birth. We don’t know what Stevens would make of this, but here comes the bear-cam.

The BBC reports that for the very first time, a webcam has been placed inside the den belonging to a pregnant wild black bear named Lily, and the “bear-cam” will stream live images to the web as she gives birth.

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