They're baaack! Both Mark Sanford and Benghazi made triumphant returns to the national consciousness this week, as Sanford won the special election in South Carolina and career diplomat Gregory Hicks testified about what happened in Libya – testimony that pleased Republicans, displeased Democrats. Meanwhile, NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving are still seeking their own redemption.
It's hard out here for a black man the Internet accidentally thrusts into the limelight. Those 15 minutes ain't no joke.
Charles Ramsey, the Cleveland man who helped Amanda Berry escape from her captor and free her fellow captives, is already a full-fledged Thing On The Internet, primarily owing to a live local television news interview. During that interview, Ramsey proved himself a fantastic storyteller, and he kept it extra-extra-real.
What made Ramsey really blow up on the Internet was his observation at the end of the interview.
"Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," Ramsey told a local TV reporter. The local reporter quickly pivoted away.
(He's not lying: Cleveland is one of the 10 most segregated cities in the U.S., according to a study from two researchers.)
Like Ted Williams, the homeless "man with the golden voice," Antoine Dodson of "Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife!" fame, and Sweet Brown of "Oh, Lordy, there's a fire!" — three other poor black folks who became unlikely Internet celebrities in recent years — Ramsey seemed at ease in front of the camera. And of course, he's already been Auto-Tuned.
Very quickly, they went from individuals who lived on America's margins to embodying a weird, new kind of fame. Williams ended up being offered work doing voiceovers for radio. Dodson leveraged his newfound notoriety to get his family out of the projects. (Our colleagues at Tell Me More sat down with Dodson a little while back to talk about blowing up and moving out of the 'hood.)
This new notoriety mimics the old, familiar trajectory of celebrity. We start to learn all sorts of things about these regular people that "complicates" them. Their foibles become part of the story. Williams' history of drug abuse and petty crime quickly came to the fore; he would go on to appear on Dr. Phil to talk about his estrangement from his family. Dodson would later land in the news for run-ins with the law for drug possession. (Just this week, Dodson announced that he was joining a nationalist religious order called the Black Hebrew Israelites and renouncing his homosexuality.)
But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That's still weird and chuckle-worthy.
On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald's — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.
"I have a feeling half the ppl who say 'Oooh I love watching him on the internet!' would turn away if they saw him on the street," the writer Sarah Kendzior tweeted.
Dodson and Brown and Ramsey are all up in our GIFs and all over the blogosphere because they're not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing on our TVs. They're actually not the type of people we're used to seeing or hearing at all, which might explain why we get so silly when they make one of their infrequent forays into our national consciousness.
Eight people in New York have been charged as part of what prosecutors say was a global ring of cyber-criminals who stole $45 million by hacking into prepaid credit card accounts and then using the data to get cash from thousands of ATMs around the world.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch described the alleged scheme as "a massive 21st-century bank heist that reached across the Internet and stretched around the globe. In the place of guns and masks, this cyber-crime organization used laptops and the Internet."
Prosecutors say the eight suspects being charged, one of whom is now dead, were the New York cell of the operation that involved people in 26 countries.
Here's how the scam allegedly worked:
— Criminal hackers accessed computers handling transactions of prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit cards issued to customers in the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
— Once inside the system, the criminals harvested PINs and erased withdrawal limits on the cards.
— So-called "cashers" or "mules" encoded magnetic stripe cards, such as gift cards, with the stolen data so that ATMs would accept them.
— Using the stolen PINs, the cashers coordinated a time to make hundreds or thousands of large withdrawals en masse.
What isn't immediately clear is how prosecutors think everything was coordinated and how everyone allegedly got paid.
Those charged are Jael Mejia Collado, Joan Luis Minier Lara, Evan Jose Pea, Jose Familia Reyes, Elvis Rafael Rodriguez, Emir Yasser Yeje and Chung Yu-Holguin, all residents of Yonkers, N.Y. The eighth defendant, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pea, also known as "Prime" and "Albertico," was reportedly murdered on April 27 in the Dominican Republic.
According to Wired:
"The gang first struck December 22 when hackers targeted a credit card processor that handled transactions for prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued to customers of the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC, or RAKBANK, in the United Arab Emirates. They handed off the stolen card data to cashers in 20 countries who withdrew $5 million in cash in more than 4,500 ATM withdrawals.
"The eight charged in New York ... were responsible for allegedly siphoning at least $2.8 million from more than 750 Manhattan ATMs in 2.5 hours.
"The second round of the operation struck on February 19, beginning around 3pm and continuing until 1:30 the next morning. It targeted another bank card processor that handled transactions for the Bank of Muscat in Oman. Within 10 hours, cashers in 24 countries had made about 36,000 ATM withdrawals totaling about $40 million."
Let's start with a brief tour of streaming television online.
For quite a while, streaming television meant sitting and watching it on your computer. It wasn't ideal, for obvious reasons. Then, it got easier to sit and watch it on your phone. That wasn't ideal, either, if you liked the living-room experience. Tablets do a better job than phones of delivering a portable but less tiny experience.
But people who want TV to seem exactly like TV, the solution is either a smart TV, or some version of a set-top box. A set-top box might be your existing game console (like an Xbox or a PlayStation), your existing Blu-ray player, or a standalone device — most popularly (for the moment) an Apple TV if you're an Apple person or a Roku or Boxee device if you're not.
A set-top box uses your internet connection (some are wireless; some are wired) to stream content directly to your television, where it looks ... just like watching television. They can give you access to what you get from Hulu and Netflix, and they both have well-established purchase/rental outlets for things that don't stream free: on Apple TV you can use iTunes, and on the Roku, you can use Amazon Instant Video or Vudu, to name two.
Set-top boxes, depending on the one you pick, also have a bunch of other channels where you can get all kinds of other stuff, some of which is free, some of which requires a separate paid subscription (like MLB TV, which shows baseball), and some of which requires that you prove you have an existing subscription (like HBO GO, which will give you HBO content if you sign in as a cable subscriber who has HBO already). If you want to see how complicated this can get, look at this comparison chart, which is a year old but demonstrates the degree to which everybody's got a different collection of material.
As if this isn't all complicated enough, Apple will also let you get some content to your Apple TV by using apps on your iPhone or iPad and then beaming it from there to your television — that's how people with Apple TV get HBO GO, for instance. It's also how people with Apple TV have been able for a while to get the PBS programming that's available on the network's iPad app. PBS also streams lots of stuff on its regular site, but of course, that means sitting in front of your computer.
But this week, PBS unveiled a sprawling Roku channel that brings a massive haul of programs — science, drama, music, films, kids' stuff, and many of the other goodies public television has to offer — directly to the TVs of Roku users who have compatible boxes (apparently, not every Roku will work, but Engadget has a list of the ones that are compatible). There's a great deal of content here: a bunch of the documentaries I keep bothering you to watch (including the Wonder Woman one), some of Ken Burns' stuff, pieces from Great Performances, NOVA, Austin City Limits, and lots (and lots) more.
Cord-cutting (the industry term for getting rid of your cable subscription and getting everything through streaming) isn't yet a boom of any kind; it's happening steadily but is still a relatively unusual thing to do, as The New York Times reported recently. It's not clear, from the point of view of pure pragmatism, what the path is to breaking down the cable-bundle business model, given the intertwined content and cable universes (Comcast/NBC, most conspicuously). So far, you can't get HBO GO as a standalone, for instance, unless you subscribe the old-fashioned way — you theoretically can't, anyway.
But people are begging for it, and it's awfully hard not to notice as a consumer that if you have an average cable bill of $80 a month or so, you could at the moment subscribe to Netflix streaming and Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, and you could purchase four other episodes of television a la carte per week in HD (that's on top of everything you can already stream on many broadcast and cable networks' sites) at three dollars a pop, and you'd still spend less than cable costs. And with Netflix making its own stuff now — including the upcoming new Arrested Development episodes — there are things you can't even get with your big cable bill.
And the easier it gets to pull great things from the internet to your television (not to mention the fact that a not-insignificant number of us can still simply pull broadcast channels in with an antenna), the more you can hear the tense creaking of these deeply bowed business models, which certainly feel like they've got to snap sometime.