Amazon.com's 12-inch bear penis?

"Hi. I'm Mike Daisey, and I've just broken into Amazon.com, my former employer. I used false credentials and a few lies."

So begins the video tour, called "Rear Entry: An Unauthorized Expedition into Amazon.com." Daisey, it seems, just couldn't say goodbye to his old digs. The former Amazon.com customer service rep -- who is turning his dot-com experience into a theater piece in Seattle -- has decided to give Web users a tour.

There's not much to see at first: a dog, cubicles of laid-off dot-commers, a paper-cup-strewn cafeteria. Daisey, however, keeps the film moving with a few choice pranks. He doesn't break anything, doesn't rip the W key off the keyboards, for example, as Clinton staffers did just before leaving the White House. But he does write "666 Shout at the Devil" on a notepad, stamp a few areas "Confidential" and jump around on a table while screaming like a gorilla.

And he ends by taking a good, hard look at a particularly haunting dot-com decorating choice, one that shows the panache, the style -- the virility? -- of his former employer.

"In the main lobby of Amazon stands this skeleton of a pre-historic cavebear, which was bought by Jeff Bezos [Amazon.com's CEO]," Daisey says, the camera focusing on what looks like an 8-foot frame of bones. "The awesome majesty of this creature is only enhanced by the presence of a 12-inch penis bone which you can see emerging from the bear's groin."

"Mr. Bezos' reason for purchasing the well-hung bear," Daisey concludes, "I leave to the imagination."

Bezos was not available for comment. -- Damien Cave [3:15 p.m. PST, Jan. 26, 2001]

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The George W. Bush Store strikes back!

On Tuesday, delighted Dubya detractors discovered that the words "dumb motherfucker" plugged into Yahoo or Google would lead directly to the George W. Bush Store; the news had circulated the Net 12 times over by this morning. Today, however, visitors to the George W. Bush Store were met by this greeting: "Note: If you have arrived at this site through inappropriate references via a search engine, please be assured that we did not utilize this language in our site, our HTML, nor in our Internet promotion of this site. What happened was the result of a malicious act and we are pursuing remedies through the efforts of our staff and attorneys."

Can you say "litigious"? -- Janelle Brown [5:15 p.m. PST, Jan. 25, 2001]

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The Drudge Report's sterling reputation for journalistic excellence aside, Matt Drudge appears to be as prone to shortsighted technical errors as anyone.

Take, for example, a breathless bulletin posted Wednesday that claimed not only that Microsoft had been hacked but that "someone or something" had left behind a malevolent (if muddled) message at the domain-name registrar directory site Internic.net.

"The violators left behind a message, warning MICROSOFT that it should give up because the the Linux system 'is God,'" Drudge said.

But the fedora-ed One may have overreacted to network issues that began Tuesday and prevented some surfers from accessing a number of Microsoft sites, including Hotmail, Expedia, Carpoint and MSN.com. The software giant said it had fixed the problems late Wednesday, but site performance was still below normal Thursday. The so-called messages left by "violators," however, had nothing to do with whatever technical problems are assailing Microsoft.

At issue are the records called up when one searches for a particular name using the WHOIS tool for identifying the registration information for network addresses. As Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of the Drudge Retort parody site explains, "WHOIS will accept any valid machine name as a nameserver, and every name beginning with MICROSOFT.COM. will show up when you use WHOIS from a command line." In other words, it's trivially easy to concoct silly names like "MICROSOFT.COM. SHOULD.GIVE.UP.BECAUSE. LINUXISGOD.COM" for a given net-connected computer, and then have those names show up in response to a "whois microsoft.com" query. WHOIS pranks aimed at the likes of Microsoft and AOL have been a juvenile fad for at least the last six months -- but they have no connection whatsoever with actual technical attacks on Microsoft's infrastructure.

We're looking forward to Drudge's follow-up report. -- George Kelly [1:45 p.m. PST, Jan. 25, 2001]

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The jihad against BonsaiKitten.com

Who would have believed it? Another not particularly funny Web site has been taken too seriously by an advocacy group we would have thought had better things to do.

Once upon a time, someone got their little gray kitten to climb into a glass canister designed for, perhaps, coffee beans. It looked cute, that little kitten in that canister, so this person took a photo or three. Inspiration struck: Get that kitty on the Web and call it Kitty Bonsai!

This week the Humane Society issued a second update on its ongoing battle against the makers of BonsaiKitten.com, a site "dedicated to preserving the long lost art of body modification in house pets." The society has been sniffing around this one for some time now, and it has already had BonsaiKitten kicked off of two ISPs. But, alas, BonsaiKitten lives on, changing hosts about as often as Salman Rushdie under the fatwa. Not because it's funny, not because it's important, but because someone's trying to stop it and what better way to nurture a Web site than to try to make it go away.

The Humane Society, newly hip to this logic, is now telling members to just ignore BonsaiKitten. Sending complaint mail, pestering the ISPs -- all this, it says, is only encouraging these n'er-do-wells. And it's right.

Is BonsaiKitten.com tasteless? Sure. Would the Web suffer from having BonsaiKitten eliminated? Not really. But it's very, very hard to imagine how something like this could have any effect on the way people treat animals. With no indication of animal abuse (the Humane Society has done some detective work) and every indication of yet another dumb Internet-satire page, it's clear that BonsaiKitten survives on hype alone. -- Amy Standen [4:30 p.m. PST, Jan. 24, 2001]

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