Erin Andrews

Stalking and secretly video taping Erin Andrews will get you two and a half years in prison, reports TMZ.

Michael David Barrett, 49, made a peephole video of the hottie ESPN sportscaster while she was brushing her hair and primping while naked in her hotel room. According to the Smoking Gun, Andrews was just one of 16 female reporters he targeted. But she was the only one of whom he got naked footage, clips of which went viral — and virus-laden — online.

Prosecutors had asked for a 27-month sentence for Barrett for violating Andrews’ privacy and causing her distress, but the judge decided on 30 months. Andrews wanted $335,000 in restitution for costs incurred during the investigation. The judge was not as generous with restitution as he was with prison time, ordering Barrett to pay just $7,366, according to the L.A. Times.

Barrett had tried to defend himself by saying he wasn’t actually a stalker:

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From Oddee

Anyone following the coverage of ChatRoulette will not be surprised to hear that there are many penises — or peni — to be found there. What you may be surprised to hear is that those penises could get the site into serious legal trouble.

The site now specifies that users must be 16 years of age, though it does not confirm that in any way, i.e., requiring users to enter a birth date before they hit “Play.” Based on my spinning of the ChatRoulette wheel, I have anecdotal evidence that youngsters under 16 are on the site.

Pair that with the fact that the wheel often lands on a naked person — when Web Ecology did a survey of the game, 5% of the users encountered were “genitals” — you’ve got a problem. The site is possibly running afoul of the laws that have developed over the past 15 years to protect kids from seeing porn online and adults from distributing child porn…

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Facebook is getting its Fourquare on, reports Nick Bilton at the New York Times.

Starting next month, the more than 400 million Facebook users could begin seeing a new kind of status update flow through their news feed: the current locations of their friends.

Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss unannounced services.

via Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

Apparently the Please Rob Me folks did not make an impression on Facebook. But, supposedly, this will be an opt-in feature.

Snap decision: Too much, Facebook. Too much.

These images are fake.

Update: Gizmodo fixed the post today.

Another update (March 10): Fast Company used the images today, and the author of the post, Kit Eaton, has the gall to claim that he knows they are a hoax, writing in the comments of the post: “But that’s basically the point, since it’s not *too* dissimilar to the imagery these things produce, which taps neatly into the privacy issues.” Um, yes, they are very dissimilar, and it is completely unethical to use the images without acknowledging ANYWHERE in your article that they are fake.

I am able to track my traffic and its sources here at True/Slant. Over the past month and a half, I’ve been getting steady traffic to this post: These TSA porn photos would be alarming — if they were real.

In it, I debunked some supposed TSA porn photos that the Drudge Report and Gizmodo had posted, falsely showing what could be done with images from full body scanners.

These images, at right, are not images from a TSA scanner that have been “inverted.” They are part of a hoax that both Gizmodo and the Drudge Report fell for. The photos are of a nude model, taken from a German website and Photoshopped to look like they came from a whole-body imaging machine. Read more here.

But bloggers around the Web continue to post these photos in the belief that they are real, usually linking to Gizmodo as their source. There’s been a fresh round of posts using the images thanks to the TSA’s recent decision to install the whole-body imaging scanners in 11 more airports.

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Conan O’Brien is re-emerging after the Tonight Show debacle. He’s producing a new show for NBC and recently joined Twitter to much fanfare. Within less that two weeks, he picked up half a million followers. But he was following no one.

That changed today.

O’Brien chose one of his followers at random. He decided on Sarah Killen, a.k.a. LovelyButton. She is from Michigan. Her Twitter bio says:

“I love to have smile and have fun in life. I think that anyone and anything can be forgiven and we should all just love and be.”

Says Conan:

Killen is honored, tweeting back at him: “Having a lame ass day, Russell Bigos is an idiot. And Conan O’Brien is THE SHIT.”

I’m proud to be her 3,511th follower. I hope she invites Conan to her upcoming wedding.

Update: MTV interviews Killen by webcam (in the new computer a company has bought for her as a promotional stunt).

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