LGBTQ news and entertainment
Australian remixer Pogo has turned samples of televangelist Robert Tilton ramblings into a dance track.
Very clever 🙂
Listen to it once and the hook gets stuck in your head – “Hoo ba ba kanda….”
According to Gizmodo, who took a serious look at the data dumb from the Ashley Madison cheater’s site, an enormous percentage of the “female” accounts were fake.
An ENORMOUS amount were fake.
Then, three data fields changed everything. The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.
The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.
Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.
The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.
So out of 5.5 million female accounts, the data shows only 1,400 or so had ever checked messages.
Whoa, bros. You got hosed.
You’ll recall back in June, I reported on Baltimore resident Julie Baker, who seemed to have received a nasty note from a neighbor complaining that her front yard was becoming “relentlessly gay.”
The story went around and the next thing you know a crowdfunding campaign was launched to help the woman make her yard even MORE “relentlessly gay” because, rainbows.
Well, now it seems there may have been more to the story. Or less, perhaps. Like, the truth.
From Queerty:
“Your yard is becoming Relentlessly Gay!” the note read. “Myself and others in the neighborhood ask that you Tone It Down. This is a Christian area and there are Children. Keep it up and I will be Forced to call the Police on you! Your kind need to have Respect for GOD.”
She quickly launched a fundraising effort to raise money to buy more rainbow swag for her yard, setting a goal of $5,000, which she exceeded by more than 150 percent in just a few days.
But it didn’t take long for some people to grow suspicious.
Shortly after her campaign went viral, it was observed that Baker’s GoFundMe page and the letter she allegedly received displayed the same improper use of capitalization. The letter incorrectly capitalized words such as “children,” “forced,” and “police.” Meanwhile, Baker’s GoFundMe page incorrectly capitalizes words such as “home” and “relent.” A closer look at her Facebook page found similar capitalization and grammatical errors in rants against right-wing Christians.
After being accused of lying, Baker suspended the campaign and issued a statement saying “the world is filled with hate and fear.” Now, she’s giving back all the money that was donated to her.
“It is with a saddened heart that all donations will be returned,” Baker wrote on the page shortly before deleting it earlier this week. She cited “taxes and an overabundance of resources” as her reasons for doing so.
She continued: “If a time machine were available, it would have all ended at the original requested amount. It was never about the money but being happy in the face of intolerance.”
So, in the end, we don’t really know if the whole escapade was true or not.
However, Baker has now requested that the funds be donated to charity.
A real one.
Have you seen this post on Facebook?
Clicking on the link takes you to a page where you are required to “Share” the link and also fill out a survey.
Turns out the whole thing was a scam. From Yahoo Tech:
Filling out this survey generates revenue for the scammers, and in the end you won’t see any kind of video for your trouble. The morbidity of listening to a depressed man’s private last words aside, there is no evidence that such a video exists at all.
Nevertheless, it appears the video has already been shared more than 24 million times on Facebook at the time of publishing.
The fake Robin Williams video is just another example of “social engineering,” the technical term for manipulating people into clicking malicious links. Spam like this always accompanies major news items, playing with people’s fear, interest, and morbid curiosity to generate quick cash.
“The scammers have no qualms about exploiting the death of a famous actor and comedian to earn their cash, and give no thought whatsoever to the distressed family he must have left behind,” writes security expert and blogger Graham Cluley, who identified the scam on the We Live Security blog by security company ESET.
However, it appears that one of the final videos Williams shot was for 21 year old Vivian Waller of Auckland, New Zealand, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January.
Meeting Williams was on her ‘bucket list’ of things to do before dying.