4-Eared Cat Breeds Legion of Fans

(NEWSER) - A Florida man has been arrested on charges of possessing child pornography, but he claims the cat did it, reports WPBF-TV. Keith Griffin told police that his feline companion would habitually mash the keys on his keyboard while he was away from his computer, causing strange things to appear. More than 1,000 images of child pornography were found on his computer. More»

British paper turns Bush into laughing-out-loud stock

(NEWSER) - By now you’ve probably encountered “LOLcats,” the photos of cats with superimposed text designed to make people “laugh out loud,” as the kids say. Now, the fine folks at the Guardian have turned some highlights from President Bush’s visit to Beijing into “LOLBushes” ... and dragged daughter Barbara and Henry Kissinger into the fray. Click the link below to see what England thinks of the Commander in Chief. More»

Animals + semiliterate captions = unstoppable online phenomenon

(NEWSER) - From humble origins—a photo of a hungry feline—the website "I Can Haz Cheezburger" has grown into a hot destination, seeding the Web with "LOLcats" and appalling grammar and spelling. The Journal tracks down founder Eric Nakagawa, who was out of work when inspiration struck and says the site now generates "more than enough to pay my bills." More»

New ones are being laid around Atlantic in mammoth engineering projects

(NEWSER) - Our Internet age didn't just happen; it required thousands of miles of cables crisscrossing the ocean like veins and arteries (or, as Neal Stephenson put it years ago in Wired , turning the Earth into a computer motherboard). After a huge boom-and-bust cycle in the 1990s, the world's telecommunications cables are full, so once again ships are braving the oceans to lay new batches of the mammoth fiber optic wires that undergird the modern economy and allow you to order all sorts of useless stuff. Author Andrew Blum, who has a new book on the subject (Tubes), offers an overview in the Wall Street Journal . More»

Despite $70M project, access still terrible

(AP) - It was all sunshine, smiles, and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age. But more than a year after the February 2011 ceremony, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the much-ballyhooed $70 million project, but nobody has explained exactly what happened. More»