In the old days, if someone ruined your reputation by spreading false information about you, you could sue them for defamation of character. Since the internet came about, however, finding those people who say horrible things about you is not always as easy.

Blogs, websites, Facebook profiles, etc. give everyone with an internet connection the ability to create their own stories and share them with the world. And they can do so without ever telling anyone their name. It happens on Juicy Campus every day, and on other sites all across the internet.

So what do you do when someone starts spreading rumors about you online?

Liskula Cohen, a model in New York, decided to fight back after one blogger anonymously called her a skank and an old hag. (Editor’s Note: Seriously? This woman is smoking!) Since she doesn’t know who it was, Cohen has decided to sue Google, the owner of the blogging site the comment was posted on.

Sure, it sucks when people call you a skank (welcome to my life as a CC blogger), but isn’t a lawsuit a bit much? It’s not like being a skank will prevent her from futhering her career, or that anyone is taking this blogger seriously. Plus, think about what could happen if Cohen wins; this could change the face of the internet and freedom of speech forever.

What do you think? Is Cohen justified, or is she just a bitter skank?

According to several tech sites, Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin reportedly had her Yahoo email acount hacked into earlier today, with screencaps leaked onto Wikileaks by a “hacking group” known as Anonymous.

From itWorld.com: “Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws,” Wikileaks wrote in a note accompanying the material. “The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism.”"

This post from Gawker has a ton of screencaps of the supposed emails, as well as a few family pictures and a ton of email addresses — should you weirdly wish to punk any of Palin’s pals.

Thank God nobody cares enough to hack my email…there’d be a whole lot more than some possibly incriminating business correspondences in my gmail trash, and I’d really like to keep that trial subscription to Playgirl (RIP!) a secret.

Let’s face it: We LOVE to gossip. We gossip about friends and we gossip about foes. Such idle talk allows us to convey information quickly, although not always accurately. This being said, it is no surprise that the website Juicy Campus has been increasing in popularity since it was founded on August 1, 2007.

When my friends first introduced me to Juicy Campus, I wrote it off as another place for people to share their college exploits online. But I quickly realized that this site was different; I actually knew the people that were being discussed! Friends, classmates, hookups—no one was free from the wrath of this critical group. Let’s just put it this way, if the “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was published online for all to see and comment on, I would imagine it would look similar to Juicy Campus.

The site was created by Mark Ivester, a Duke University Alum, with “the simple mission of enabling online anonymous free speech on college campuses.” (Editor’s Note: That’s a nice way to refer to sh*t talking!) There are currently 64 colleges listed on the site, including many prestigious institutions such as Harvard, UPenn, and Brown. The topics on the site range from the innocent (“Best Frat on Campus”) to the scandalous (“Sex with Professors”). Each post gets a rating ranging from 0% Juicy to 100% Juicy, so the juicier the gossip, the better the rating. Read More »

“Xenu, according to Scientology founder (and speculative fiction writer) L. Ron Hubbard, was the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Scientology holds that their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.” -Wikipedia

It sounds like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone, but it’s unnervingly something that a hell of a lot of people believe in. With an estimate lingering uncertainly between 50,000 and several million, Scientology is a popular rising “religion”, getting more followers by the day.

Like Will Smith and wifey Jada Pinkett Smith.

I heard this in passing a couple months ago, but it was right after the release of I Am Legend and I just dismissed it as a bad rumor. But PerezHilton seems to have picked up on it, too, and I can’t say that it doesn’t unnerve me.

For those of you know don’t know, Scientology has been around since the early 1950’s. It was founded by a sci-fi author named L. Ron Hubbard, who stated that the aims of Scientology were, “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights.” Read More »