The Zetas—a Mexican drug cartel believed to be responsible for numerous beheadings, murders, and acts of mayhem—got on the wrong side of the hacker collective Anonymous after allegedly kidnapping one of their members in Veracruz. Now Anonymous has issued an ultimatum: Release our man by November 5, or we'll expose your identities, addresses, and allies. More »

Since late 2007, an obscure Twitter account has been automatically tweeting a single word every half an hour. The ultimate goal: to tweet every word in the English language. We spoke to the guy behind Everyword. More »

Facebook is getting complicated. The social network just introduced the category of "trusted friend," not to be confused with the prior categories of "close friends," "acquaintances," "restricted" buddies, and authorized stalkers. Trusted friends are like super-friends. They have special powers! More »

Laura Chavez, a 60 year-old New Mexican, was drinking and playing a nice game of Monopoly with her grandson and her boyfriend, Clyde "Butch" Smith. When Chavez suspected Smith of cheating, she sent her grandson to bed and proceeded to hit Smith over the head with a bottle and then stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife. More »

Facebook just announced plans to build a giant data center 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Of course. Any evil, world-dominating corporation worth its salt must have an Arctic Doom Base. More »

H&M announced that it plans to create a line of clothing based on hacker-goth princess Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. Don't they already sell her entire wardrobe at Hot Topic? More »

Isn't it frustrating when some furry cat goes and leaves its hair all your clothes, complicating your efforts to present a cleaner and tidier You? Doesn't it make you want to just, I don't know, murder the cat with a pen, or choke it, or both? No? More »

There is only one Apple. It is big and powerful and it rules our lives, elegantly. So don't fuck with them. That's what the owners of Apfelkind, a small, family-owned café in Bonn, Germany, have come to learn. More »

A rotten tooth John Lennon had removed in the '60s hits the auction block next week. The reserve price has been set at $16,000. NBC New York reports: More »

Memeified chanteuse Rebecca Black is still at it. She's recording a new video today, with random people she found on Twitter. Will anyone still care about this video, seven months after "Friday"? That's like 8 in meme years. More »

This man, identified as Libyan rebel Senad el Sadık el Ureybi, claims to be the person responsible for fatally shooting viral video sensation Muammar Gaddafi the other day. "We grabbed him, I hit him in the face. Some fighters wanted to take him away and that's when I shot him twice, in the head and in the chest," reports Ynetnews. The man shows off a gold ring and a bloody shirt that he claims had belonged to Gaddafi, but that's some pisspoor lighting and camera work going on there, so who really knows. More »

Today in the Indian state of Maharashtra, about 285 girls received certificates, little bouquets, and—most importantly—brand-new names that don't mean "unwanted." Because that's what their names were, until today: Unwanted. And you thought Florida was a terrible name for a girl! More »

A Swedish court just acquitted two men who pulled down an 18-year-old woman's shirt while she was passed out from too much drink and, without her knowledge, photographed her bare breasts. Apparently this photo, which shows the men celebrating their conquest, was pretty much irrelevant, because photographing naked people without their knowledge or consent is still totally legal in Sweden, The Local reports. More »

Do you "like" these Keds? Think they're #cute? Want to +1 pair to your sneaker collection? Well, unfortunately, you can't — not at the moment, at least. They're just concept kicks, created by graphic designer Lumen Bigott. They're also not-yet-available in Wikipedia, Flickr and YouTube styles. It's only a matter of time. (Click image to get a better look.) [Social Media Shoes by Lument Bigott via Copyranter] More »

Everyone else wanted Steve Jobs to move quickly against his tumor. His friends wanted him to get an operation. His wife wanted him to get an operation. But the Apple CEO, so used to swimming against the tide of popular opinion, insisted on trying alternative therapies for nine crucial months. Before he died, Jobs resolved to let the world know he deeply regretted the critical decision, biographer Walter Isaacson has told 60 Minutes. More »

Someday, when historians try to explain the cultural milieu that led Occupy Wall Street (assuming future people even care about OWS?) they will point to this Wall Street Journal dispatch from a party where Kim Kardashian literally eats cake while discussing the plight of the protest's unwashed masses: More »

Libyan dictator-turned-fashion-forward fugitive Muammar Gaddafi died today after being wounded during today's fighting in his hometown of Sirte, say Libyan officials and Reuters. Gaddafi reportedly suffered wounds to both legs and was captured after being discovered in a hole. He reportedly begged a fighter not to shoot him. More »

First came the email ghostwriter. Then Oprah and Saturday Night Live and a new mansion. Now Mark Zuckerberg has moved up to the next celebrity accessory, his own security guard. More »

A new biography of Vincent van Gogh, which is getting a featured segment on 60 Minutes this weekend, posits that the post-Impressionist master didn't commit suicide by shooting himself in the abdomen, as previously believed. More »

Earlier this month we told you how Napster founder Sean Parker tipped a West Hollywood waitress $5,000 during a big night out with friends. Turns out Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was one of those friends, and the night ended with him and Parker in a drunken "screaming match." More »

To make your own version of the world's most expensive dessert, go to Costco and pick up a two-carat diamond, a squeezable bottle of champagne jelly (they sell an economy-sized version now), champagne caviar, bitter dark chocolate, orange, peach and whiskey-flavored Belgian chocolate, "a light biscuit joconde" (not this kind of joconde but this kind), a gold ring, some pink things, and several sheets of gold leaf. More »

Oh, maybe: "What we are really seeing as a company as we look 10, 20, 30 years down the road—if conditions continue as they are—is a potentially significant risk to our supply chain, which is the Arabica coffee bean," says Jim Hanna, the sustainability director at Starbucks (a bottom line-focused coffee chain whose name you might recognize). More »

Doctors are baffled at the case of Nguyen Thi Phuong, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman who says that an allergic reaction caused her skin to sag and wrinkle, effectively aging her 50 years in just a few days. More »

We are now living in a time in which the first generation in history that never experienced life before the internet is coming into cultural power. And it is awful. More »

Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks helped make him the world's most recognizable CEO. But the Apple co-founder wouldn't have worn them if his employees had accepted the nylon jacket he proposed as a corporate uniform instead. Before he died, Jobs himself explained his sartorial signature to biographer Walter Isaacson, in an interview published for the first time below. More »

Mohamed Bishr not only has to deal with people on the street harassing him for looking like Saddam Hussein—he also has to evade the Iraqi gang that's trying to kidnap him and force him to star in their porn movies. And you thought you had problems. More »

Brandlink Communications is a nationwide PR firm with a minimum of two employees who are astoundingly inept: the one who sent the blogger the stupid celebrity pitch, and the one who called her a "fucking bitch," without apology. More »

Facebook user Benito Apolinar, who hails from the great state of Texas, had posted a loving status update to his Facebook page on the anniversary of his mother's death. Then he waited for the "likes" to roll in. You know how that is: One finds a strange sense of fulfillment in near-meaningless clicks of approval from friends and acquaintances and friends of acquaintances. More »

Yeah, so, here's a counterpoint take on Steve Jobs' death, from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, screamed to thousands of fans at a concert in Lima one year ago. I won't repeat what he said here, but it's pretty horrible and shocking. It happens at 2:10 in the video above. More »

Herbert Chavez, a 35-year-old man from the Philippines, really, really loves Superman. So much so, that since 1995 he's undergone a variety of plastic surgeries in order to look just like his favorite comic book hero—including a nose job, chin augmentation, lip injections, and thigh implants. And he's still not done: As he told ABC CBN News, he plans on getting even more surgeries—the most ambitious being an operation that would make him taller. Superman doesn't transform in a phone booth, but in a doctor's office. More »

Arianna Huffington found the name "PopEater" tacky, so she threw everyone overboard and shut the AOL entertainment site down. That, at least, is the unauthorized message Huffington's former minions published to the world via Huffington's servers. More »

The Sean Parkington Post? Seanster? Blogify? It's not clear what former Facebook president Sean Parker will call his forthcoming blog, but it's clear the famed tech hustler is serious about the endeavor: He's hired a firm to build buzz, and is already running ads and planning to hire writers. More »

Hollywood is the most glamorous place on earth. Except when it comes to unpaid internships: They are just as shitty there as everywhere else. More »

It started, innocently enough, with a lobster. Then Mark Zuckerberg killed a chicken. By the time the Facebook CEO escalated to a pig and a goat — "he cut the goat's throat with a knife," a friend reported — the media took notice. But it was too late. More »

The sun is shining bright for Tumblr today. The microblogging platform raised $85 million and was heralded as "bigger than Wikipedia." But Tumblr's explosive growth has been driven by huge quantities of porn and spam, and that seems to make the startup uncomfortable. More »

The Obama administration has launched a new website for people to submit petitions, because, well, the government's broken, so why not see what the internet is up to? And what the internet is up to is, as usual, demanding the legalization of weed. More »

No doubt, that guy who sounds a hell of a lot like Freddie Mercury was pretty impressive. But Javier Diaz, who hails from Santiago, Chile, sounds exactly like Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder. As in jaw-dropping, OMG, holy shit, unreal. More »

WTF “@i_vp: What was Nokia thinking!?? #fb (via Brian Hall's blog)”

yay, holocaust victims do what was done unto them: #fb