Quayle’s hilarious/scary ad may distract voters from recent revelations that he helped found the “gossip” website TheDirty.com.

The Dirty began as DirtyScottsdale.com, a repository of depressing “funny” commentary on depressing pictures of horrible people enjoying the Scottsdale nightlife. Three years later, it does this for cities across the nation. According to founder Nik Richie (real name: Hooman Karamian), Quayle helped found DirtyScottsdale and contributed to the site in its early days under the pseudonym “Brock Landers.” He seems to have, among other things, reviewed “chicks.”

Quayle originally denied having anything to do with the site. Then he admitted that he knew Richie and more or less helped him launch the site. But he still insists he’s not “Brock Landers.”

He acknowledges he spoke to the founder in the site’s early days, but says it didn’t contain the racy content it has now, according to MyFoxPhoenix. Quayle says he helped refer the founder to an attorney and made a “couple of comments” early on to drive traffic, but denied using the name Brock Landers.

(Quayle’s comment about the site not having the racy content it has now is demonstrably untrue, as a trip through The Dirty archives proves.)

Richie, for his part, went from encouraging readers to vote for Quayle to calling him a “f*cking liar.” He also mentions a story about a “crazy hooker” in Tahoe.

Quayle has previously gotten headlines for never having voted in Arizona and using children that aren’t his as props for a mailer.

allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

As countless commentators have already agreed, such a deal would mock something that Google has in the past adamantly maintained: the need for content-neutral treatment of what flows on the Net. It’s usually called “network neutrality,” and it means that Internet service providers — typically your cable and phone company for home broadband connections — should not get to decide what bits of data get delivered in what order and at what speed, if at all, based on who’s providing those bits of information.

That is, Verizon should not have the right to decide that it will delay what you see from, say, Salon or my personal blog if Fox News pays Verizon to put its content in the queue first. Why not? Because Internet access is an oligopoly business, creating unprecedented (at least in modern times) choke points for information.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has been making noises about doing more to make net neutrality a requirement, has been holding semi-secret meetings with many of the top players in the online world. If you and I have been represented at that table, it’s news to me, but this is how so much gets decided in our world. (UPDATE: The FCC has reportedly suspended the close-door meetings; good.)

Now we hear that Google — once the foremost proponent of net neutrality and a participant at those meetings — may be cooking up a deal with Verizon, which has also been at the FCC table. The scary thing is how plausible this is; Google is a huge company now with interests that may well be diverging from its previous commitments on the matter.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking yesterday at a conference, told reporters that the company isn’t backing away in the least from the core principalprinciple (thanks, pragma). Speaking about network neutrality, he said, according to CNET:

“I want to make sure that everybody understands what we mean about it. What we mean is that if you have one data type, like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. It’s OK to discriminate across different types … There is general agreement with Verizon and Google on this issue. The issues of wireless versus wireline get very messy … and that’s really an FCC issue not a Google issue.”

So is this about wireless or wired connections, or both? How does this square with the Times report saying that Google would pay Verizon to speed YouTube videos to users’ computers? The murkiness of the entire thing is disturbing, which is one reason it feels too early to declare the imminent death of the Internet as we know it, as some commentators have done.

While I’m not ready to hyperventilate about this alleged deal, I’m more than ready to say that the policy and corporate trajectories are going in the wrong direction. I don’t trust Google to do what’s best for me. I trust Google to do what’s best for its shareholders, and if throwing net neutrality under the bus is best for Google the company will do that in a heartbeat — if allowed.

Take it for granted that the telecom companies will keep pushing for the right to control the content in the data pipes. They don’t want you to remember that they built their networks in large part with the help of government-granted monopolies and other special help; that would make it harder to claim this absolute control.

The backroom dealing is a big part of the problem here. If the FCC wants to come up with the right policy, it should make transparency part of the method.

Schmidt is board chairman of the New America Foundation, a smart-thinking organization that has done a lot to elevate policy conversations in recent years. I hope he’ll read and heed what the foundation said today in a statement:

During the 19th century a handful of wealthy industrialists dominated steel, oil refining and railroads; striking agreements to receive favorable terms for the carriage of their goods, while subjecting farmers and competitors to unreasonable and excessive charges.

Now, over a century later, history is in danger of repeating itself. After weeks of closed-door meetings sanctioned by the Federal Communication Commission, two of the largest corporations in the communications industry have reportedly negotiated an agreement on network neutrality. Though details of the agreement are not available, its terms are immaterial. It should not be the policy of the FCC to allow the largest companies to write the regulations that will determine the future of the Internet.

UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg wonders if the entire leak is just a head-fake, or possibly reflects dissent inside Google. Meanwhile, Google has put out a more strenuous denial, telling the Guardian, among others: “The New York Times is quite simply wrong. We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.”

During a very funny opening montage showing men all over the world enjoying varied forms of pornography from the age of black-and-white TV to the age of broadband, Houston businessman Jack Harris (Luke Wilson) explains this principle in droll, dry voice-over. But the joke is already on Jack, as he knows all too well: By that point he has abandoned his wife Diana (Jacinda Barrett) and their small children for a 23-year-old porn star named Audrey Dawns (Laura Ramsey), and he’s got to take a whole bunch of cash in a duffel bag to a fateful, and possibly fatal, late-night meeting with some Russian mobsters.

If the basic film-noir formula involves stupid people doing bad things and vice versa, with one decent or at least likable character dragged into the middle of it all, then “Middle Men” is a near-classic example. Hopscotching around in space and time and artfully, restlessly photographed by Lukas Ettlin, this is an ambitious if derivative work of pop cinema, splitting the difference between a Scorsese film (most notably “Goodfellas”) and a Coen brothers film (maybe “Burn After Reading”). As those models might suggest, it features lots of naked flesh, dangerous and/or unctuous villains galore and several hilariously unhinged supporting characters. If that sounds like a good time, you’re on the right track. But wash your hands afterward — and I’m not promising you’ll still like yourself in the morning.

Film theorists have sometimes proposed that noir has an unsettling or destabilizing effect on the audience precisely because that likable guy at the center of the story often turns out to be a darker and more complicated figure than we first presumed. That’s definitely an issue in “Middle Men,” which is presented as a highly fictionalized version of producer Christopher Mallick’s real-life ’90s experiences at the head of a porn gateway called Paycom. With his shrewd, narrow eyes, non-movie-star face and slightly thick-set build, Luke Wilson is a master at capturing seemingly sympathetic and ordinary dudes who hold just a hint of danger. But is Jack a decent suburban dad after all, or just an opportunistic shithead looking out for No. 1?

Jack has a perfectly adorable wife in the steel-magnolia mode (wonderfully played by Barrett) to go with a legitimate business career at home in Houston. But Diana doesn’t know about his past working with a kneecap-breaking Chicago mobster (that’s Robert Forster, in flashbacks), and neither of them knows where Jack’s decision to take over a friend’s failing Los Angeles nightclub will lead. First of all, that’s to a dubious, gravel-voiced attorney named Jerry Haggerty (James Caan), who knows a couple of drugged-out losers who have come up with that most precious of commodities, a moneymaking idea.

We’ve already met the paranoid, hirsute Wayne (Giovanni Ribisi) and his pal Buck (Gabriel Macht), who despite his bluff, dense, frat-boy demeanor is actually a cashiered NASA scientist. While hanging out one night in their coked-out, Beavis-and-Butt-Head crash pad and lamenting the absence of decent porn on the Web, Wayne suggests a blindingly obvious idea and Buck executes it: a simple piece of software code that enables secure Internet credit-card transactions.

As anyone over 35 will immediately recognize, this was a crucial innovation. Before that technology existed, the idea that you would willingly send your credit card number through the electronic ether to a total stranger seemed ludicrous. As Diana tells Jack at the Houston airport, when she begins to figure out what he’s up to, it’s the craziest idea she ever heard in her life. Of course we all do it virtually every day now — the software has been refined a bit since the late ’90s, but remains essentially the same — and the guys who did it first were just trying to sell secondhand dirty pictures they’d scanned out of porn magazines.

When Jack Harris comes along to play cool-headed Mr. Fix-It, Buck and Wayne have already made and spent millions by making and selling Internet porn. They’re holed up in a suite at the Hard Rock in Vegas, not so slowly drowning in drugs, hookers and a large unpaid debt to their business partner, a Russian mobster named Nikita Sokoloff (Rade Serbedzija). Jack grasps immediately that there’s plenty more oil in this particular well, more than enough to re-grease all the wheels and make everyone rich and happy. He sees a future where the whole thing is clean, clear and legal: Pay off Haggerty, pay off Sokoloff and build a company based on Buck and Wayne’s innovation that serves only as a “middle man,” bringing porn purveyors, porn consumers and their credit cards together in the magical nowhere of cyberspace.

That’s what happened, more or less. But “Middle Men” is also true to the film-noir formula in being relentlessly moralistic, or rather — and this is an important aspect of the formula — being titillating, cynical and moralistic all at the same time. You can’t wade into the swamp of porn and money and keep your hands clean, at least not in this universe, and pretty soon Jack is hopelessly addicted to a high-rolling, private-jet lifestyle, complicit in a number of significant felonies, and shacked up in Santa Monica with the lissome Audrey, who informs him, in uncomfortably graphic terms, that she understands exactly why he’s there — she’s younger, hotter and, let’s say, more physically compact than his wife.

Yeah, I know: Ick. Not long after that, Jack tells Audrey: “You know, sometimes I think there’s a part of ourselves we just switch off.” He means the part of ourselves that protests that it’s wrong, wrong, wrong to make millions of dollars selling Asian-lesbian-schoolgirl fantasies to lonely guys perving out in the rec room. This is the moment where the contradiction or hypocrisy that always lies within this kind of movie — if you ditch your wife, you’ll get an amazingly hot chick! But then you’ll wish you’d never done it! — begins to eat the story from within. Audrey, who seems like an interesting character at first, eventually retreats into soulless porn-star stereotype. I wish I could tell you she pitches her glass of Sauvignon Blanc in Jack’s face and says, “Maybe you should have had these profound insights before you bailed out on your family and committed a bunch of crimes, douche bag!”

There’s a ludicrous terrorist-related subplot during the final act of “Middle Men” that must be based on reality, because it’s entirely too stupid for Gallo and Weiss to have made it up. But even as this film unravels into incoherent, self-justifying moral instruction, it never becomes boring to watch. Gallo, who remains best known as the writer of “Midnight Run” 22 years ago, makes a bid here to become a big-time, high-style Hollywood director. With this highly entertaining, flawed, ripped-off-and-reassembled carnival of sleaze, he may get there.

Then there were the others.

“‘Thanks for the fuck, should do it again sometime,’ should be the ending to this dumb video,” wrote one commenter. “Holy fuck was this gay,” wrote another. “This is fucking stupid,” wrote another. “OH YOU ARE HAVING BABIES? YOU MEAN YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING THAT BILLIONS OF PEOPLE HAVE DONE THROUGHOUT HISTORY? Big fucking deal. I fucking hate kids.”

The protective force field of anonymity — or pseudonymity — brings out the worst in some people. They say things they would never say in the presence of flesh-and-blood human beings. You see this phenomenon all over the Internet, including Salon, which, despite having some of the smartest and most articulate commenters on the Web, has also attracted its fair share of vitriol. And it’s not just in articles about lightning-rod public figures such as Barack Obama or Rush Limbaugh, whom you would expect to inspire heated, sometimes obscene or hateful comments, but in the comments threads of online material that is, in the great scheme, inconsequential, as deserving of bile, profanity and wanton viciousness as a smiley-face button or a paper flower. “It amazes me how easy it is to sit behind a computer and launch a heap of self-righteous cynicism at something as harmless as this,” said one commenter in the “Star Wars” birth announcement thread. “Get over your smarmy selves.”

Easier said than done.

Some media outlets have decided they’ve had enough of the endless juvenile trolling and hate-mongering, and have either adopted a stricter moderation policy (such as Politics Daily’s calling for a “civilogue”) or forced would-be commenters to fill out forms supplying information that would make it easier to track their identities and ban them if they run afoul of the site’s rules. The Attleboro (Mass.) Sun-Chronicle recently began asking for commenters’ names and charging 99 cents for the privilege. (Salon requires users to create an account before posting, routinely deletes offensive letters and encourages letter writers to flag them themselves.)

Whatever the policy, the intention is always the same: to make it possible for substantive discussion to occur in comments threads, unimpeded by a constant flow of illiterate and often mindlessly provocative brain farts, many of them TYPED IN CAPITAL LETTERS and punctuated with childish ad hominem attacks. The logic behind this cleanup effort is basic, its animating truth self-evident: If a person’s real name and/or ISP address were emblazoned across the top of every comment he or she left, the Internet would become more sane, wise and decent overnight.

But for all the downsides of comments-thread anonymity, there’s a major upside: It shows us the American id in all its snaggletoothed, pustulent glory, with a transparency that didn’t exist before the Internet. And in its rather twisted way, that’s a public service.

There’s a reason old media outlets were called “the Gatekeepers.” Once upon a time, back in a soon-to-be-vanished era when publications were printed on paper that was manufactured from things called trees, if you wanted to send an irate letter to the editor of a publication, you had to take the trouble to write your thoughts on paper, fold the paper, stick it in an envelope, stamp it and put the envelope in a mailbox. This process was itself a kind of filter. Each step gave the writer another reason to think about the subject matter and wording of the letter, and whether or not he actually wanted to send it. Most publications wouldn’t print letters without a verifiable phone number and address (“Hi, this is Janine from the Small Town Times. Am I speaking with Heywood Jablomy?”), and they tended to round-file anything with profanity, ad hominem attacks or language that suggested the letter writer owned an entire collection of tinfoil hats. What ended up on the “Letters to the Editor” page didn’t represent the full spectrum of reader response, just the part that wasn’t hateful, crazy or indulging a sad fantasy of being John Bender from “The Breakfast Club.”

Now you push a button and the comment appears online, unless there’s moderation, but many of the larger sites don’t bother with moderation because reviewing comments takes time, and time is money.

There are few filters online. That means that just about anything that gets typed into the little “comments” box gets posted. In addition to comments directly addressing the topic of a piece, you may also see tangential rants about whatever group the commenter happens to be obsessed with: women, men, blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, born-again Christians, Mormons, pagans, short people, Scientologists, movie actors, rappers, guys who wear loafers with black socks. And you’ll see the usual suspects riding their pet hobbyhorses through every comments thread on the site: Democrats/Republicans are scum, Bush/Clinton is responsible for the mess we’re in, Obama is a racist Muslim foreigner, 9/11 was an inside job. (Of course, the motivation behind many of these rants may also be to get a rise out of other commenters — a self-perpetuating cycle.)

Whenever a website publicly debates whether to keep allowing anonymous comments or start aggressively moderating (or instituting a more elaborate sign-in process), people in the comments thread beneath the announcement rail against it. Their logic is often some variant of, “Making people leave comments under their own names, or otherwise trying to verify their identities, restricts free speech and discourages lively debate.” Maybe that’s true — if by “restricts” you mean, “requires that people take responsibility for,” and if by “lively debate” you mean, “the impulse to act like a swine or a fool.”

Restricting or eliminating anonymity discourages gratuitous jerk behavior, just as the invention of caller ID turned prank phone calls into nostalgic memory. Ninety-nine percent of arguments against anonymous commenting are self-serving rationalizations. Few commenters desire anonymity because their sentiments urgently need and deserve protection. Chances are they’re not blowing the whistle on a corrupt boss or a murderous government or going against the grain of their hidebound company or expressing philosophies that are truly heretical. More likely they’re people who in daily life get argued with, shut out, stepped on or otherwise treated with less than the reverence they believe they deserve. So they wade into comments sections to act out power fantasies — the righteous truth-telling antihero, the schoolyard bully, the class clown — with some assurance that their wife or mom or kids won’t find out and ask, “What on earth is wrong with you?”

And yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. They show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening.

It’s impossible for anyone who reads unmoderated comments threads on large websites to argue that racism, sexism or anti-Semitism are no longer problems in America, or that the educational system is not as bad as people say or that deep down most people are good at heart. Unmoderated comments threads are X-rays of the reptilian brain — indicators of the dark stuff that rattles around in the id and that would get blurted out in the home or workplace routinely if the superego didn’t intervene. Mel Gibson’s rants are no more ugly than sentiments that get expressed thousands of times a day all over the Internet.

When a person comments anonymously, we’re told, they’re putting a mask on. But the more time I spend online the more I’m convinced that this analogy gets it backward.

The self that we show in anonymous comments, the fantasy self, the self we see in the mirror when we fantasize about being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences: That’s the real us.

The civil self is the mask.

The main article begins by describing the eerily granular information that online surveillance and marketing companies have learned about Ashley Hayes-Beaty, a 26-year-old woman in Nashville, without her direct knowledge or permission. Then we are told:

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen — tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks — competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests. The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.

As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

To be sure, the Journal’s coverage is lurid — more so than necessary to make the point. And the series, at least so far, doesn’t address the disturbingly huge amount of information collection and sales by the shadowy offline industry that combines our credit-card, banking and other information into a gigantic data bazaar over which we have little or no control.

That said, the Journal’s coverage is valuable in at least one respect: It explains just how pervasive the surveillance has become and with what indifference the people doing the surveillance view your privacy.

 They will say, with some truth, that it’s all in the interest of creating advertising and services aimed at your interests. Why, then, do they cloak what they do in such opaque ways?

My friend Jeff Jarvis, who leads an unusually public life, says the Journal is telling us nothing we don’t already know. Granted, the fact that websites have put cookies and other user-observation mechanisms on our computers is not news. But do we all know that tracking systems have become not just ubiquitious but also disturbingly interlinked? I pay fairly close attention to this field, and the Journal series has opened my eyes a bit wider; for those who have a vague idea of what’s going on, the stories may well come as a nasty shock.

I’m closer to what another friend, Doc Searls, concludes: This is creepy, and we need to turn it around. Doc, a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, writes:

There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers.

For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Doc is working on a project to create “Vendor Relationship Management,” turning on its head the idea that sellers should manage customers. Rather, he says, we should be the ones in charge.

At best, getting there from where we are will take years. What do we do in the meantime?

It’s encouraging to see that venture funders have “spotted a new market opening and are pumping millions of dollars into privacy-related start-ups,” as the Journal reported last month. What we need, sooner than later, are tools to manage our own privacy.

When I browse I use several extra tools in the browser that help me block unwanted spying. In particular, Firefox has a well-developed add-on ecosystem including BetterPrivacy (for “super-cookies like Adobe’s irritating Flash plug-ins) and NoScript (lets me specify by domain). Whatever browser you use most, you’ll probably be able to find ways to block at least some unwanted behavior. I’m testing Abine‘s tools, which go much further than others (too far, by some accounts), as well.

One thing I don’t do is block cookies from host sites. I don’t mind at all if a website I use regularly — especially a site offering me services at no charge — wants to keep track of what I do there, or ask me to register. These are entirely fair tradeoffs.

What I mind a great deal is when that information becomes cross-referenced with what other sites and services learn about me. What I do at the Journal’s site (which I pay for, making further data collection even more outrageous, in my view) is emphatically not the business of, say, Dictionary.com, or vice versa. Yet I have no clear idea if they or third-party data collectors are sharing or cross-referencing, or what they’re doing with the data if they are.

The alleged transparency efforts by data collectors is an illusion of openness. Read the various privacy statements and disclosures, not  just on the sites you’ve visited but the third-party trackers they don’t always tell you about, and if you can decipher it all you’re a lot smarter than the rest of us. It’s obfuscation and plainly designed to be.

A few years ago, when supermarkets started offering frequent-shopper cards that provided discounts in return  for creating shopper databases, some people I knew came up with a clever idea. They met once a month and put their cards into a hat, then drew someone else’s card out of the hat and used it. This clearly violated the spirit of the bargain, and probably the letter, too. But it reflected a wise mistrust of the corporate motives behind the shopping cards, especially because it was not clear what would happen to the data.

I suspect we’ll need to do things like this on the Web, too. Until we have vastly more transparency from the companies collecting, massaging, renting and selling this information, I’ll be inclined to mislead the marketers.