The Media Show

Email goes horribly astray when the new intern tries to help Weena with her… hamster problem. Lesson learned: You never know whose hands your message will fall into if you spell that address wrong. Even spell check can’t save you.

Tetanus, The Spider Who Spammed Me, has come over to the good side! Erna and Tetanus explain to Weena how pieces of code called “spiders” do the work of finding the web pages you’re searching for, to gather the text, images, and other stuff that make up your search engine results.

Music: unityspaceboat by Kermix

When someone says they are a hacker, what do they mean? Are they just big computer geeks? Are they doing illegal criminal things, breaking in and stealing passwords? Mitch Altman, inventor of the TV-B-Gone, tells us hacking is about thinking differently about the world around you. Featuring the folks at the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, who show off their projects with bikes, toys, clothes, food, electricity, and even outer space! (Thanks, Noisebridge! Thoisebridge!)

Music by Josh Anderson, Rob Vincent, and Gus Andrews, with affectionate respect to Charlie Tyson (“what’s it like to be in school?”) and Sesame Street.

When someone says they are a hacker, what do they mean? Are they a criminal? Do they have 31337 c0d!ng sk!11z (and do they have to write like that)? Is someone who runs a script to put graffiti on a website a hacker? Are Anonymous hackers because they can code? Erna asks Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of 2600 Magazine, what it means to be a hacker.

Ever feel like search engines keep turning up crummier and crummier results? Pages copied straight from Wikipedia, filled with extra keywords, lousy with links to pages that want to sell you something? Welcome to the world of content farms, where search engine optimization is king. We’re pretty sure they’re run by sock puppets being paid $6 an article.