The filing alleges that Gawker is “flagrantly” violating the court order, which Gawker has appealed.

In a post called, “A Judge Told Us to Take Down Our Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Post. We Won’t,” Gawker’s John Cook wrote:

It requires us to remove the video as well as “the written narrative describing activities occurring during he private sexual encounter, including: (a) all descriptions of visual images and sounds captured on the Sex Tape or any other video of this private sexual encounter, and (b) all direct quotations of words spoken during this private sexual encounter and recorded on the Sex Tape or any other video of this private sexual encounter.” Campbell, who represented the parents of Terri Schiavo in their effort to portray their daughter as conscious and alert and was appointed to the bench by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, described her order as serving “the public interest.” She stated very clearly during the hearing that she had never watched, and did not intend to watch, the video that she was ordering us to remove: “I’m not going to look at the tape. I don’t think at this point in time I need to look at the tape.”

We publish all manner of stories here. Some are serious, some are frivolous, some are dumb. I am not going to make a case that the future of the Republic rises or falls on the ability of the general public to watch a video of Hulk Hogan fucking his friend’s ex-wife. But the Constitution does unambiguously accord us the right to publish true things about public figures. And Campbell’s order requiring us to take down not only a very brief, highly edited video excerpt from a 30-minute Hulk Hogan fucking session but also a lengthy written account from someone who had watched the entirety of that fucking session, is risible and contemptuous of centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence.

Here, you can see the latest filing in its entirety:

Where this goes from here is anybody’s guess.

Image: Gremlins Wiki

The digital world has not been immune to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, as some sites went down thanks to the storm. Two major forces on the web, Gawker (which includes Gawker, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, DeadSpin, Jalopnik and Jezebel) and BuzzFeed, both saw outages.

Buzzfeed appears to be back up and running, but still has more work to do. A message on the site says, “We’re Up! But still recovering from Sandy…” The site points you to its Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook pages, but there is fresh content coming in on the site.

Gawker sites, on the other hand, are still down, displaying a message that says, “Our New York City data center is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site, but in the interim you can view updates at http://updates.gawker.com.” For other Gawker sites, replace updates.gawker.com with updates.nameofsite.com.

Both BuzzFeed and Gawker have relied on Tumblr to post content for its users. Gawker’s “updates” sites are on Tumblr, and the actual sites are redirecting to their Tumblr counterparts, where they continue to post fresh content.

Mathew Ingram wrote a few days ago about “what Tumblr can tell us about the future of media.” It was an interesting piece, but I don’t think this is what he had in mind. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy has proven another point about Tumblr. It’s a way for publications to reach readers even if their primary platform is unavailable.

Of course, that requires Tumblr to be up and running too. Last week, the service had some downtime of its own.

In a statement, Clem said, “I am now convinced that Hulk Hogan was unaware of the presence of the recording device in my bedroom. I am convinced [Hulk Hogan] had no knowledge that he was being taped…It is my belief that Hulk is not involved, and has not ever been involved, in trying to release the video, or exploit it, or otherwise gain from the video’s release in any way.”

The lawsuit came about when the sex tape was released on the news site Gawker, and Hogan is currently involved in a lawsuit with them, as well, for upwards of $100 million. The site posted an article about the incident and included a snippet of the tape itself earlier this month.

On April 10th, The Fox Mole debuted his first column with Gawker. He detailed how he had taken a job with Fox News as a resume builder, fully intending to use it to springboard to bigger and better things – at least things that “didn’t make [him] cringe every morning when [he] looked in the mirror.” He described how a particular article on Fox Nation, which he described as an “unholy mashup of Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and a Klan meeting, had been the last straw for him. And with that, he began “John McClane-ing that shit,” working as a mole for Gawker. His first big piece of insider information was a clip of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity talking before an interview, where Romney talks about his wife Ann’s love of dressage.

The next day, he wrote another article detailed life at Fox News. On the same day, he outed himself as Joe Muto and told us that he’d been discovered and canned.

A few days later, Gawker published a letter from Fox News attorney’s to Nick Denton. In that letter, Fox threatened legal action, saying,

“Be advised that Muto’s admission are admissions of likely criminal and civil wrongdoing on both his and Gawker’s part, which will be the subject of further extensive investigation. Fox News will pursue its rights and remedies in the appropriate legal forums.”

Oh yeah, and that article came with a nice picture of Bill O’Reilly on a boat with a topless woman.

And today comes the search warrant on Muto:

Apparently, the leaked video of Romney talking about dressage horses pissed them off quite a bit:

Muto later takes a swipe at some of the UK issues facing Rupert Murdoch:

Gawker COO Gaby Darbyshire told Poynter that Muto is still a Gawker employee and that they will be “will be providing him with legal support.” She said that Gawker doesn’t expect to be served with a search warrant.

One of the columns bashed Fox website Fox Nation, in which Muto called it “an unholy mashup of the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post and a Klan meeting.” After someone at Fox discovered that Muto’s computer login accessed two of the videos posted on Gawker, he turned himself in and posted a statement about the incident on Gawker.

Muto says that the site has become the “seedy underbelly of the Fox News online empire” and that one incident in particular pushed him over the edge towards becoming a mole.

“The post that broke the camel’s back might be familiar to some of you, because it garnered a lot of attention and (well-deserved) ridicule when it hit last August,” he wrote on Gawker. “The item was aggregating several news sources that were reporting innocuously on President Obama’s 50th birthday party, which was attended by the usual mix of White House staffers, DC politicos and Dem-friendly celebs. The Fox Nation, naturally, chose to illustrate the story with a photo montage of Obama, Charles Barkley, Chris Rock, and Jay Z, and the headline “Obama’s Hip Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs. The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on. It came close on the heels of the Common controversy, which exhibited a lot of the same ugly traits.”

Muto goes on to say that rather than quit his job, he wanted to stay on and gather as much information as he could to expose the company and its employees–particularly the higher-ups–for what they are.

“So why not just leave Fox News?” you might ask. Good question!,” he writes. “I’ve asked myself that same thing many times. And I am leaving. Sooner rather than later, I’m guessing. But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s the fun in that? So I’m John McClane-ing this shit. I’m inside the building, crawling through the air vents, gathering intel, and passing it along to Carl Winslow. (Note: Please don’t misunderstand, and take my Die Hard metaphor as a threat of violence. Like most left-wingers I abhor actual violence, but am still hopelessly enthralled by the Hollywood machine that glorifies it. Also, that was a 20th Century Fox movie. Synergy!)”

Fox News says they are exploring legal action against Muto. Meanwhile, rumors are circulating around the web that Muto will get a book deal from all of this.

That doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter because that’s the law of the land according to the manual used by the live content moderators that comb through Facebook’s gobs of material to identify what gets deleted and what stays. The manual, which the super-sleuths at Gawker were able to get their hands on, contains a dizzying list of guidelines that determine what content moderators are to leave posted on Facebook, what they need to delete, and that stuff in the middle that requires the input of Facebook. Facebook has to be consulted on some of those latter matters because they aren’t actually involved in the immediate process of content moderation. As in, Facebook doesn’t actually moderate the content in-house. Instead, Facebook outsources the menial task to a company called oDesk, who pays people a commission to pour through Facebook in search of speech and images uploaded by users to make sure none of it violates Facebook’s community standards.

The gruesome yet confusing photo I described at the beginning of this article is actually an acceptable image according to the abuse standards used by the moderators. Here’s a sample of what else you can and can’t get away with on Facebook:

Have a look at the full Abuse Standard section below to see what else will get you flagged and what else will just make you an offensive jerk to all of your Facebook friends.

Abuse Standards 6.2 – Operation Manual

The redesign (like many redesigns) was met with plenty of user backlash, and many expected it to drop the sites’ pageviews dramatically, leading to some questioning the business sense of the move. In early March, traffic was down by nearly 25%. Now, however, founder Nick Denton has tweeted the following graph, indicating that pageviews are up:

That bit about @fimoculous paying up is in reference to a bet Denton made with Rex Sorgatz. The wager is reported to be somewhere around a grand.

In related news, Gawker Media has reportedly hired Andrew Gorenstein, Senior Executive Director of Digital Sales at Condé Nast as its new chief advertising officer.

“This is no print dinosaur,” Denton is quoted as saying in an internal Gawker email, alluding to the fact that Gorenstein spent his entire time at Condé Nast on the digital side of things, where Denton admits to being jealous of the publisher’s ad sales.

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton revealed today that the company’s traffic is down by nearly a quarter as a result of the recent widely publicized redesign. 

The design, explained by Gawker here, took a fresh almost tablet-like navigation approach to serving up content – where articles are loaded onto the screen without actually leaving the page. 

Many thought the move would have a huge (and negative) impact on Gawker’s pageviews, which it seemingly has so far. There have also been plenty of complaints among readers, but that’s to be expected with any redesign. You can’t fault them too much for trying something different than the norm. 

Joe Pompeo at Yahoo News reports on an interview Felix Salmon did with Denton at the PaidContent event today:

"We’re probably down by about 25 percent," Denton told Reuters blogger Felix Salmon during a Q&A session. "I’m pretty confident we’re gonna be coming back."

As for revenues: "We set the targets flat on last year so the sales people wouldn’t be demoralized by the inevitable disruption," he said. "We knew this was going to be traumatic." Nevertheless, he notes that "our overlying business is pretty strong."

In a memo to Gawker staff (published by Business Insider), Denton said, "Obviously, the reduction in traffic from Google — as from most design changes — has been significant. It doesn’t affect readers of the site — but it does have a disproportionate effect on uniques. Search optimization of the new layout is a top priority."

Much of the memo also addressed performance issues, so it’s possible that could have played some role, even if minor, in the search traffic. Google, as you may know, counts site speed as a ranking factor now. 

Denton recently made a bet with Rex Sorgatz that Gawker’s pageviews will increase with the new design. Denton recently addressed this on Twitter:

It will certainly be interesting to see if Gawker can recover. Denton seems pretty intent on keeping the design around for a while, and he also mentioned that he won’t be selling out to a big corporation anytime soon. 

Now stories about brands like about Gawker, Yahoo, Twitter, McDonalds, and Walgreens are dominating the headlines. Last weekend, in case you haven’t heard Gawker was hacked, and passwords were taken. One of the biggest problems with this is that these passwords are often used at other sites around the web, and depending on which sites the perpetrators get access to with these passwords, the ramifications could potentially be disastrous for those whose passwords were stolen. 

For example, if abusers were able to get into email accounts, there is no telling what kind of personal information they would gain access to – passwords to other sites, credit card info, etc. 

According to the BBC, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo have all asked users to change their passwords to be safe. If you had a Gakwer account, you may want to consider changing all of your passwords, at least at any critical sites (banks, e-commerce sites, social networks, email accounts, etc.). 

Arik Hesseldahl at NewEnterprise shares the following statement from Yahoo: "As part of our ongoing security measures we issued a password reset to some users. Yahoo! does this periodically to ensure the security of users." Hesseldahl speculates that this was directly related to the Gawker attack, however, as he had a Gawker account.  

He also reports that Blizzard Entertainment, which makes the enormously popular World of Warcraft, sent an email to users, which said: "We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised…To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password."

McDonald’s was recently hit. Hackers reportedly broke into a database containing email addresses and birthday dates for consumers who signed up for the company’s promotions.

Mark Darvill of security firm AEP Networks tells WebProNews, "High profile hacks such as the breach of the McDonalds database highlight the need for greater data protection. This breach follows a long strike of attacks on websites in light of the release of the WikiLeaks cables and companies across the world will be wondering what website will be next on the hackers’ list."

"In this instance, McDonalds has lost nuggets of customer data rather than reams of sensitive personal information," adds Darvill. "The sad fact is, hackers will always have their eye on how they can steal sensitive personal data. Personal data is valuable as it aids identity theft and can prove a valuable source of income for hackers. This breach highlights the need for organisations to double check what security measures third parties have in place to protect their sensitive data.  Data protection is no longer just about protecting data when it is on your premise."

Walgreens also sent an email to users recently saying:

We recently became aware of unauthorized access to an email list of customers who receive special offers and newsletters from us. As a result, it is possible you may have received some spam email messages asking you to go to another site and enter personal data. We are sorry this has taken place and for any inconvenience to you.

We want to assure you that the only information that was obtained was your email address. Your prescription information, account and any other personally identifiable information were not at risk because such data is not contained in the email system, and no access was gained to Walgreens consumer data systems…

Incidents like these are bound to make consumer uneasy about online shopping at the worst possible time of the year. Still, online holiday spending in the U.S. alone reached nearly $22 billion during the first 40 days of the season according to comScore.Update: now that spending has reportedly hit $23 billion. 

The FBI is reportedly investigating the Gawker attack. 

Original Article: Former NFL player and ESPN analyst Sean Salisbury has seemingly made some big waves in the blogosphere by threatening to sue Gawker Media-owned sports blog Deadspin (not to mention ESPN itself).

Deadspin has posted a slew of what the blog claims is messages from Sean Salisbury, sent from his iPhone, in which he threatens legal action (in a very grammatically incorrect way). By slew, I mean a seemingly never-ending chain of tantrum-fueled, vengeful, threats. Interestingly enough, the whole thing is aimed at restoring Salisbury’s reputation, which he claims has been tarnished in large part by Deadspin, who has referenced alleged incidents from the past in which Salisbury showed cell phone pictures of his penis to employees of ESPN.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of such allegations, but if these messages to Deadspin really are from Salisbury, I have to say, he’s not doing a very good job of managing said reputation. If he sent them, he would have had to assume they would end up being posted at the site (from the same company that produces Valleywag, mind you). To get an idea of what we’re talking about here, read Deadspin’s posts here and here. I would provide a sample, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. There are so many of them.

Meanwhile, people on the web seem to be having a good time at Salisbury’s expense:

Now because of the rantings, people are talking about Salisbury more than they ever would have otherwise. He is even showing up on Google’s Hot Trends multiple times. It’s certainly putting him in the spotlight, but if it’s his reputation he’s worried about (again, assuming these messages really did come from him), he’s got a thing or two to learn about online reputation management practices. I wonder how long it will take to recover his reputation after this. Now it’s not going to be only articles about him showing his penis showing up in Google results. It’s going to be articles about him showing his penis and articles about him raving like a madman (regardless of whether or not he ever showed his penis to begin with).

Currently, the top two natural results on Google are Salisbury’s Wikipedia entry, and a Deadspin article called "If Sean Salisbury Asks You to Look at his Phone, Don’t do it." It doesn’t get much better after that. By the way, the Wikipedia article also mentions the penis incident.