LONGREADS

Ultra-Orthodox Jews Take a Hard Line on the Internet at Rally of 40,000 Men (And Me) In which our intrepid reporter sneaks into Citi Field in drag. 

Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set It's the end of the world as we know it, and they feel fine.

The Battle Over Revenge Porn: Can Hunter Moore, the Web’s Vilest Entrepreneur, Be Stopped? Victims and hackers are on the case.

Meet Betabeat's 2012 Tech Insurgents Ambiable agitator Anil Dash, Tumblr's Mad Man Rick Webb, and the merry pranksters of OkFocus.

Jonah Peretti’s Meme Streak Making viral happen inside the factory at BuzzFeed.

THE YEAR IN HEADLINES

Uber Bulldozes Its Way into New York City's Taxi Market Before all the bureaucratic setbacks, CEO Travis Kalanick revealed his grand plan.

Flash Dance! Luxury Flash Sales Sites Regroup After Layoffs Can Gilt Groupe cross the IPO finish line without scuffing the lacquer on its Louboutins?

How to Avoid Being Pushed Out of the Company You Founded Insiders dish on Naveen Selvadurai's defoundering.

Records Point to Credit Card Fraud by Silicon Swindler Shirley Hornstein She used her friend's credit card to buy a plane ticket in her name. Twice. 

Investors Wonder About the Future of TechStars New York Will TechStars New York maintain its prominence?

OP-EDS

We Need to Make Tech Uncool Again A call to arms for the idealistic nerd in us all.

Friends Investing in Friends: When It Comes to Startups, Is the Fix Already In? Is Startupland an insider’s game?

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Why We’re Definitely in a Bubble The social media bubble is real, and it's spectacular.   

Social Media Companies Have Absolutely No Idea How to Handle the Gaza Conflict War in the time of social graphs.

Area Blogger Worried People Will Think Reality Show Is Real A little perspective on Bravo's version of Silicon Valley.

TINY GEMS

Diary of Two Snapchat Addicts We just can't help ourselves.

Google Says ‘Gchat’ Is Not a Word Ubiquitous noun/verb is totally unofficial.

What Y Combinator Startups Actually Do, Based on Their (Unpronounceable) Names Zapier: Birchbox for swords?

Tortoise & Blonde Thought ‘We Want To Sit On Your Face’ Was a Good Idea for a Slogan "This was a family decision."

In Which We Went to Bravo’s Casting Call for the Real Wantrepreneurs of Silicon Alley The first tech party where someone tried to yank up our skirt! 

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Israel and Hamas may have agreed to cease hostilities on "land sea and air" but that may not stop the cyberwar. On Wednesday the ZCompany Hacking Crew (ZHC) hacked apart the online life of Israel's Vice Prime Minister, Silvan Shalom. ZHC took over Mr. Shalom's Facebook, Twitter account, his blog--just about everything. ZHC tweeted that their control was almost total:

ZHC will be publishing Zine including details of #SilvanShalom contacts,screenshots. docs tomorrow. Watchout #OpIsrael #Gaza #FreePalestine

— ZCompanyHackingCrew (@Z_H_C_) November 21, 2012

In a Pastebin post, ZHC attempted to clarify a few things about who they are, writing, "We are not part of Anonymous although we support OpIsrael."

The crew also posted multiple screengrabs of what appear to be the vice p.m.'s Gmail account as well as his defaced social media pages.

Anonymous issued a statement Wednesday afternoon in which they indicated the agreement between Israel and Hamas had prompted them to "stand down immediately from all further cyber attacks upon the IDF or Israel so as not to risk this delicate and perilous cease fire arrangement."

Anonymous stated that they also encouraged "all those cyber groups who have joined with us to also cease and desist now from aggressive acts, and give this cease-fire a chance."

Hacktivists like ZHC may continue their activities in spite of Anonymous's request. As they stated in their release of some of Vice Prime Minister Shalom's data, "Our Recent Hacking of social media profiles of Israel's VPM Mr Silvan Shalom was motivated by his recent statement in which he threatened to blow up Gaza. Gaza is not just in Palestine we are all Gaza."

So close to this, you guys. (Photo: Pinterest, duh)

Actually, being in the billion dollar startup club kind of sucks. [New York Times]

Any person with children who purchases a computer in the U.K. will be forced to apply anti-porn safety controls to it, because there's absolutely no way kids who want to look at porn will be able to get around that. [Daily Mail]

Cisco balls so hard they just dished out $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a wifi startup. [TechCrunch]

How did nerds impact the election? Turns out 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President Obama linked to a voter registration page in his AMA. [The Atlantic]

According to U.S. search results, Americans care more about Twinkies than the Israel/Gaza conflict. We are all the worst. [Virtus Machina]

Bank of Jerusalem site before its database was deleted. (Google cache)

As part of Anonymous's #OpIsrael, it appears the hacktivists have wiped the Bank of Jerusalem from the web. The site currently loads a mostly blank page with the message, "Couldn't connect to the database server." A tweet appearing to tie the site outage to Anonymous's support of the people of the Gaza was posted on @YourAnonNews:

Bank of Jerusalem database has been deleted | bankjerusalem.co.il| #OpIsrael #Anonymous

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) November 16, 2012

Anonymous quickly mounted OpIsrael after the Israel Defense Force tweeted a declaration beginning of Operation Pillar of Defense, an offensive targeting Hamas. Israel calls Hamas an "Iranian proxy for terror attacks" against them.

Most of the top-trending pastes on Pastebin are related to OpIsrael, including this message, which says in part:

Anonymous does not support violence by the IDF or by Palestinian Resistance/Hamas. Our concern is the for the children of Israel and Palestinian Territories and the rights of the people in Gaza to maintain open lines of communication with the outside world.

In a new statement released Friday evening, Anonymous defended its actions by repeating that it did not support violence and insisting "Anonymous has not used any anti-Semitic language during our campaign. Nor have we vocalized any support for Palestinian military operations or resistance groups. Our goal was to protect the rights of Palestinian people who are threatened with silence as Israel has made attempts to shut down cell phone and internet service throughout Gaza."

The Bank of Jerusalem is Israel's seventh largest financial institution and is listed among Dun & Bradstreet Israel's 100 Largest Enterprises. In addition to taking the Bank's site offline, Anonymous has also struck Tel-Aviv's city page an Israeli government commerce site and Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just to name a few.

(Screencap: Twitter)

After announcing their intention to attack Hamas on Twitter, the Israeli Defense Force began military operations in Gaza yesterday. The Alqassam Brigades, Hamas’s military arm, also has a Twitter account, and the two have been engaging in a sparring match on the platform that elevates typically meaningless Twitter tiffs into the stuff of WWIII nightmares.

Aside from updating their followers on the death toll and the status of military strikes, both accounts have tweeted photos of children (warning: both links are graphic) injured or killed in the conflict. The IDF is letting no social media channel go untouched. They've been uploading photos of their operations to Flickr and Pinterest and publishing status updates to their official Facebook page. They also just started a Tumblr account that is littered with pro-Israel propaganda, including a photo showing a cartoon of an Israeli family in the crosshairs of a Hamas target with the message "Israeli civilians are Hamas's target."

Spreading information and even propaganda through social media channels in times of violent conflict is new territory for internet companies. The Arab Spring is often cited as Twitter's defining moment. In that case, Middle Eastern citizens used the service to communicate with each other and the press in order to foment revolution against totalitarian governments.

But this time, it’s different. As Peter Kafka of AllThingsD noted, Israel is, in essence, "using the Internet as weapon," employing the same tactics as dissidents in the Arab Spring to spread a message without a middleman. There is something grotesque and disturbing about two parties with a long history of conflict live-narrating the launching of bombs that kill civilians and destroy communities. There is no empowerment or revolution here: just a dark, sinking feeling as we watch the bloodshed unfold in real time.

And the platforms that are allowing both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades to spread their messages? Faced with a new frontier of social media manipulation, neither YouTube or Twitter really knows what to do.

(Screencap: Tumblr)

It's difficult to nail down whether or not the content disseminated by both the Hamas and IDF accounts violates Twitter's terms of service. One Twitter rule explicitly bans the “direct, specific threats of violence against others," which certain IDF tweets do seem to violate. The Daily Dot reports that the IDF Spokesperson Twitter account was temporarily suspended for about 40 minutes today, but was then reinstated. As Twitter doesn't comment on the status of individual accounts, it's difficult to suss out what the reasoning behind this was; perhaps it was automatically suspended after being flagged for removal by users. Whatever the case, it's back up now, tweeting about the rockets flying between Tel Aviv and Gaza. (A fake account, @IDFSpokesman, has been suspended.)

YouTube, meanwhile, also temporarily banned a video uploaded by the IDF that shows a "pinpoint strike" that killed Ahmed Jabari, one of Hamas's military leaders. The video was put back up after AllThingsD pointed it out. YouTube told them:

“With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

As one social media analyst told the BBC, the actions of both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades on Twitter put the service in a difficult position. "They want to preserve their position as a carrier service that doesn't editorialize," he said. "On the other hand, they have terms and conditions that must be adhered to."

"This is not a decision a couple of hundred engineers in North California want to be making," he added.

And yet, as hashtagged insults and news of bombs continue to fly across these services, it's a decision social media platforms may have to make sooner or later.

(Screencap: Falcon-s.co.il)

Yesterday, the Israeli Defense Force announced on Twitter it would begin military operations on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Though social media has long been used as a tool of dissent that can help foment revolution, declaring war on Twitter is a first, and it's a move that raises serious questions about war and propaganda in the age of the internet. Now Anonymous, the loose collective of hacktivists, has set its sights on the IDF, launching #OPIsrael in response to the country's decision to shut down internet service in Gaza.

According to a press release published to Anonpaste.me:

When the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way - we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the "Occupied Territories", and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.

Anonymous has already begun defacing multiple pro-Israel websites, including Falcon-s.co.il and Advocate-israel.com. They've also compiled an Anonymous Gaza Care Package, which contains basic safety and surveillance avoidance information, as well as instructions for how to jigger an internet connection if Israel takes down Gaza's servers. Another document posted to Pastebin outlines how to connect to dial-up in the event of an internet outage.

A Google doc, also being circulated by Anonymous, provides information about protests across the globe in response to the IDF's military operations. A Facebook event for a protest at the New York Israeli Consulate on 42nd St. and 2nd Ave. already has over 1,000 people registered as attending.

Meanwhile, through its official Twitter account, the IDF continues its own attempts to win hearts and minds to the cause. "Good morning to our friends in #America," reads a recent tweet. "While you were sleeping, 3 Israelis were killed when a rocket hit their house." The spokesperson also retweeted a photo of a baby injured by a rocket attack in Israel.

The IDF's Twitter banner. (Screengrab)

In what is surely a weird moment for Twitter, bastion of cat-fights between tech bloggers and hashtag memes entirely devoted to stupid crap people do when they drink, Israel's Defense Forces today announced a major operation against Hamas. As Fast Company noted, this "was the first confirmation made to the media of an official military campaign" via Twitter.

The IDF's announcement is serious business. The tweets speak for themselves:

The IDF has embarked on Operation Pillar of Defense.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

All options are on the table. If necessary, the IDF is ready to initiate a ground operation in Gaza.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

The IDF has embarked on an operation against Hamas, an Iranian proxy responsible for terror attacks on Israel. #Iran #Gaza

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

Earlier Wednesday the IDF tweeted that it had struck it's "first target," Hamas military leader Ahmed Al-Jabari.

Hamas confirmed Al-Jabari's death and according to the Telegraph, said the official's death had "opened the gates of hell."

At 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Hamas was a top-trending topic on Twitter in the United States, just behind "Marlins."