Uber made a small splash last month when it hired Lyft's former COO Travis VanderZanden. Kara Swisher said the move "will surely increase tensions between Uber and Lyft, which are now pretty tense as it is." And she was right: Lyft is suing VanderZanden, alleging that he took company secrets along with him to Uber.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the complaint and reports that VanderZanden is accused of taking tens of thousands of confidential files with him after he left Lyft:

The lawsuit accuses Travis VanderZanden, Lyft's former chief operating officer, who left the company in August, of downloading important company information including financial data, information on future product plans and growth statistics. The lawsuit says that Mr. VanderZanden's personal online storage account contained more than 98,000 files and folders after he left the company, according to a copy of the filing obtained by The New York Times. Mr. VanderZanden joined Uber, Lyft's strongest rival, just two months after leaving Lyft.

"VanderZanden's conduct not only breaches the confidentiality agreement, but also breaches fiduciary duties of loyalty and confidence he owed to Lyft as an officer and employee," the suit said.

The lawsuit accuses VanderZanden of stalling his resignation from the company so he could make back-ups of company materials. He allegedly blew off an August 15th meeting with the company's co-founders, in which they were supposed negotiate an agreement, to make the back-ups:

According to the the Times, the suit claims VanderZanden had "second thoughts" before resigning from Lyft. In an email to the company's co-founders disclosed in the lawsuit, VanderZanden wrote "I love you guys like brothers."

His opinions have clearly shifted since then. In a series of tweets that began last night, VanderZanden denied the allegations and took shots at his former employer.

Lyft’s PR has lost it, the allegations in their complaint are ridiculous.

— Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) November 6, 2014

Just to be crystal clear, I did not take any confidential data to Uber.

— Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) November 6, 2014

VanderZanden went on to tweet that it was the company norm for employees to use their personal Dropbox account when collaborating on Lyft materials. He later claimed that Lyft's co-founders had not revoked his permissions to view company materials on Dropbox and he did so himself.

Update: Lyft emailed a Valleywag a copy of the lawsuit along with a statement:

We are disappointed to have to take this step, but this unusual situation has left us no choice but to take the necessary legal action to protect our confidential information. We are incredibly proud of the dedicated and people-powered culture that we've fostered to support drivers, passengers and the entire Lyft community and we will not tolerate this type of behavior.

You can read the lawsuit below.

This post, including the headline, has been updated to reflect comments from Lyft about the allegations in the lawsuit.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

[Photo: rileyjshaw/Instagram]

At first, Too Many Cooks seems like some forgotten laugh-track sitcom from the '70s or '80s. There's the cheesy theme song, the suburban house, the head shots of family members as they go about their day. But then something really weird happens. Or doesn't happen.

The credits never end. For 12 minutes, they go on, piling up characters, switching genres, looping, warping, rewinding, getting more and more bizarre and violent as they progress. According to The A.V. Club, Adult Swim has been airing the segment late at night recently, in a block of time labeled "Infomercials," so that viewers don't know it's coming.

Too Many Cooks is surely best appreciated when stumbled across in the bleary-eyed hours of the morning, but it makes for great YouTube viewing, too. I don't want to spoil the kicker, but you're encouraged to watch it to the end.

[h/t Waxy]

Snopes.com creator David Mikkelson has been calling out bullshit on the Internet for two decades. (There's no antifreeze in Fireball, people ... merely the makings of a very regrettable hangover.) We caught up with Mikkelson to find out where Snopes came from, and what's next for the site.

Above, photo of a Bigfoot sighting in Pennsylvania (Snopes debunked the "shooting" of Bigfoot in San Antonio last year).

Mikkelson named the site after an early Internet alias, itself a nod to the Snopes family of criminals and tenant farmers in several William Faulkner novels. With a long-planned redesign and expansion of the site finally in the works, he'll soon have an even better platform for disproving all those wild stories in your Facebook feed.

io9.com: When and why did you start the site?

David Mikkelson: It started about 20 years ago. I worked for a large computer company back in the days when only universities, the Department of Defense, and computer companies were on the Internet. I was a participant in an old Usenet newsgroup that had to do with urban legends. But in newsgroups, things would scroll off and disappear after a few weeks. So when the first graphical browser came out, I started writing up things for the web.

Since I was an early adopter, it quickly became the place where everybody sent every questionable thing they saw on the Internet. It took a left turn from what I was intending it to be. It became more of a reference and fact-checking site than just an urban-legends site.

What's it like, knowing you oversee the reference point for anyone needing to debunk anything online?

It's kind of interesting to be sort of anonymously famous. Everywhere you go, even in other countries, you run into people who know about [Snopes.com], but of course no one recognizes me! People are always trying to tell me that it has vastly more influence than I realize. [Laughs.] I hope not!

How have urban legends changed along with the Internet, now that so much "news" is disseminated via social media?

Technically all those [viral news stories] aren't urban legends, because urban legends are stories, narratives with a moral.

Like the killer with the hook!

Yeah! [Laughs.] It's pretty much, everything that's questionable gets turned into an urban legend. Of course, things spread much more quickly now. Debunkings never keep pace with the original false items, because the corrections aren't nearly as interesting. A lot has changed, even with what I do — it used to be, say, for a picture or video to go viral, people would forward it to each other by email, and it took weeks for it to build up. There'd be plenty of lead time to try and figure out where it came from, and whether it was real.

Now, it's much more ephemeral; things come and go so quickly. People post a funny video on Facebook, and 20 minutes later it's a headline in the New York Post or something. There's much less time to identify them and write about them.

Are people more gullible than they used to be?

No. Technology changes, but human nature doesn't. But perhaps it's made it a lot easier for others to exploit people's gullibility.

Do you still get most of your tips via email?

It used to be mostly seeing what people were sending in email, and seeing what terms people were entering into our search engine. But, again, that's greatly changed. We have to be scanning what's hitting on Facebook, and what's going around on Twitter. We can't depend on people coming to us, necessarily, so we have to know how to mine social media, Reddit, things like that, and see what's popular.

How do you go about debunking rumors (or proving them)? Is each post kind of its own exercise in investigative journalism?

It's a common question, but it's hard to say, because it can be quite different depending on what the nature of the item is. Some of it's just basic reading comprehension — like, someone's asking if there's a bill before Congress makes it legal to run over frogs or something. [Laughs.] If you actually read the text of the bill, you can determine that it doesn't actually say that.

Other items are fairly easy to research online. But other things, you actually have to track down people, email them or call them. Older stories might involve traditional methods, like books and magazines. It's pretty varied. But certainly things are a lot easier now — with, like, image search, you can trace back the origins of an image without having to hope you just stumble across it like we did 20 years ago. Really, there's nothing magical or surprising about it. People often seem to think that we have some mystical ability to divine the truth. A Magic 8-Ball or something. But it's all the kind of stuff you'd expect.

What changes do you envision for Snopes.com, now that you're adding more staff and planning a redesign?

Just in a design sense, in a cosmetic sense, hopefully it'll finally be more mobile friendly and faster to update and navigate, things like that. In terms of content, I suspect we're going to try moving from everything being textual to [using more multimedia]. I'm guessing that a lot of what we're covering right now is fake news — these sites keep popping up, and I'm expecting some technological development in the near future will eliminate that. Facebook tried that, with tagging certain things as "satire," but that seems to be kind of inconsistent and not closely followed.

We'll be trying to get back to more what I had envisioned [for Snopes.com], which was not being just a reference site where people come and they have something specific to look up. It would be more of a general entertainment-information site, where people come to find interesting things to read. Sort of more along the lines of Mental Floss might be a good analogy. That's where we started out, but those kind of articles don't get nearly as much attention as the latest political screed or fake news item. It's the challenge between art and commerce, I guess.

In your opinion, what was the most outrageous story that turned out to actually be true?

I hesitate to repeat any because I'm not sure you can print them! [Laughs.] There was one I just sort of dusted off and re-published, but it dates way back to when I first started. Back in the early days of the Internet, there was this text that used to circulate via email that was supposedly a medical journal article. It had to do with a doctor who treated a patient whose scrotum was all swollen, and discolored, and had metal bits in it.

They eventually coax the story out of the patient: he worked in a machine shop, and when everyone else went to lunch, he would use the belt sander or some piece of machinery to pleasure himself. He ended up catching his scrotum in the machinery and it tore open, but instead of going to the emergency room like most other people would, he picked up an industrial stapler and stapled his scrotum back closed, and didn't seek medical treatment for several days after that.

So, since this was way back when, I had to track down the medical journal to verify that the article had actually been published — which meant trekking out to UCLA, because those things weren't online yet. But once I verified it was a real article, I still had to eliminate the possibility that it was just something published as a joke, or something like that. I had to track down the doctor who had written it, who was retired back in Pennsylvania. I sent him a letter and he replied, saying that yes, he'd treated that patient, and that he'd seen the article tacked up on bulletin boards all over the world. That was one of the ones I did not expect to be true! There's also one about a deer tongue, which I will not repeat.

The Weather Channel has laid off 80 of its behind-the-scenes employees over the past two months, amounting to about six percent of its total staff. The company characterizes these cuts as the end of a "reorganization."

40 of the layoffs occurred last month, with the remaining 40 taking place on Wednesday. A company spokesperson told TVNewser that the cuts were necessary to help The Weather Channel adjust to a changing landscape:

"The television business is shifting and in order for us to compete in the future, we need to reallocate and better focus our resources on what we know our audiences want," the spokesperson says. "The changes we are making today are necessary, difficult and the responsible way for us to move forward."

The network doesn't elaborate on how exactly the television business is shifting, but suffice it to say, that shift includes less weather and more reality shows. The network recently ordered a second season of Fat Guys in the Woods, which plops a couple of cubs in the forest to munch lichen while a survival expert talks down to them for thirty minutes (plus commercials and Local on the 8's, of course). The second installment of Scruffy Huffing Woodsfest will stand alongside their other quality programming, Highway Thru Hell and American Super/Natural, the latter of which posits pressing questions like "what is the dew point of a ghost?"

As WLKY meteorologist John Belski notes on the station's weather blog, The Weather Channel's ratings have fallen over the past couple of years down to around 214,000 daily viewers. The network doesn't even crack the top 25 most-watched cable networks, pulling ratings 79% lower than bottom-of-the-list Lifetime. The network's heavily-visited website has also slipped in recent years, falling to the 34th most-visited site in the United States according to Alexa, coming in behind Yelp (#31), Bing (#21), and Tumblr (#15).

The cuts don't include any on-camera meteorologists, thankfully.

[Image: The Weather Channel]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Last week, the anti-street harassment organization Hollaback released a video featuring a white woman marching through the streets of New York City for ten hours, and being catcalled by mostly black and Latino men. It frames the woman, an actress named Shoshana Roberts, as perpetually harassed and afraid. That video painted a grim picture of life for women in New York, and it served as a de facto cautionary tale: to avoid black and Latino men at every turn, because from the looks of it, they alone are loathsome predators.

It turns out that the video was edited to exclude most of the white men who hollered at Roberts that day. The video's producer, Rob Bliss, wrote an explanation on reddit: "We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera." For whatever reason they were edited from the video, that omission is powerful.

Additionally, black and brown women were excluded, as if we do not exist, or are not affected by street harassment when, in fact, we are more endangered by it. Black and brown women, women of color of size, and trans women are among our society's most vulnerable. Black women are at a greater risk of domestic violence. For trans women, even leaving the house can be fraught with emotional and physical violence. Women of color, regardless of gender expression, have an extra layer of fear and anxiety when walking down the street. The Hollaback video's omission of white men, and the omission of black and brown women, worked together in an sinister alchemy to reinforce centuries-old stereotypes about who needs to be saved and protected and who needs to be feared and controlled.

After much criticism, Hollaback apologized for its overrepresentation of men of color, and stated that the money raised from the video would be put towards creating videos that were more inclusive: "We agree wholeheartedly that the video should have done a better job of representing our understanding of street harassment and we take full responsibility for that."

Their apology recognizes the racial bias of their video, but did nothing to acknowledge its erasure of black and brown women. So l ast weekend, I took to the streets of New York to speak to some fellow black and brown women about their experiences with street harassment.

As (bad) luck would have it, while we were shooting a video about how women of color were affected by street harassment, one of our interviewees was approached — totally unsolicited — by a white man who asked her for a kiss.

No editing necessary.

Collier Meyerson is a writer and producer living in Brooklyn.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit became the first circuit court to uphold state bans on same-sex marriage with a 2-1 decision Thursday afternoon. Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee all had their gay marriage bans struck down at the district level, but those rulings have now been overturned.

Although the Sixth Circuit is in the minority—the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth and Tenth have each overturned bans on same-sex unions—the decision is significant because it creates a split that will likely send the issue to the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in September that there would be "some urgency" for the SCOTUS to make a decision on state gay marriage bans if the Sixth Circuit didn't fall in line with rulings from other jurisdictions.

Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and allowed a California court to block a same-sex marriage ban in that state. And just last month, the Justices declined to hear appeals from five states that wanted their own bans upheld, effectively making gay and lesbian marriages legal in those states.

"Any day now, we could get an opinion from, say, the Sixth Circuit which could change things again," Michelle Dean wrote on Gawker at the time.

Well, fuck.

[Photo: AP Images]

Deadspin Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weaponry | Gizmodo Amazon's Echo Might Be Its Most Important Product In Years | Jalopnik You Can't Get A Cheap CarMax Range Rover Warranty Anymore | Jezebel A Hollaback Response Video: Women of Color on Street Harassment | Kinja Popular Posts

Aksana Kuzmitskaya of Manhattan's Upper West Side lived through every tenant's nightmare according to a lawsuit alleging that her landlord installed webcams in her apartment, then used them to spy on her showering, going to the bathroom, and having sex.

Kuzmitskaya began living and working as a housekeeper and maintenance person in the building at 7 West 82nd in 2013, The Real Deal writes, and was given free rent on her unit in exchange for her services. Her lawsuit, filed this week in New York's Supreme Court, alleges that landlords Eli Kadoch and Michel Kado entered her apartment to install cameras in the bedroom and bathroom, maintained a live feed, and saved 70 images of her in various states of undress and intimacy, including at least one in which she was "engaged in a sexually explicit act."

According to the suit, Kuzmitskaya complained to police immediately after she discovered the cameras and moved out in July of this year. A grand jury indicted Kadoch on 10 felony counts regarding the recordings last week, The Real Deal reports, and Kuzmitskaya is suing him and his partner for loss of wages, damages, and attorney fees

Kuzmitskaya allegedly caught on to the scheme after noticing a camera in her bathroom clock, and found the 70 stored photos when she dismantled it. One of them showed Kadoch himself lurking in her apartment, apparently adjusting a camera.

[Photo via Anton Prado/Shutterstock]

Some wealthy guy—could be anyone, but I'm going to assume Chris Christie until proven otherwise—recently threw down $300,000 for a carb-loaded Bruce Springsteen experience.

The day-long affair was auctioned off at a benefit Wednesday and begins with a guitar lesson from Bruce, which—all things considered—is pretty dope. But then things get kind of weird.

According to the AP, the Boss will then drive the lucky winner around beautiful New Jersey in his motorcycle sidecar, and hopefully it is Chris Christie, because that is just a delightful image.

Rolling Stone also reports the sidecar trip was the most popular portion of the package, inspiring two bidders to throw in an extra $50,000. Which makes sense—if you're rich enough to drop a quarter of a million on lasagna, why not also make Bruce Springsteen your chauffeur?

Finally, Springsteen and his charitable friend will retire to Springsteen's home for the much-hyped lasagna dinner. (It's not clear from the auction materials whether dinner will be homemade or takeout.) And then what? Bruce begins exaggeratedly yawning? The winner holds out for dessert until Bruce politely asks him to leave? Chris, c'mon man it's late. You're not too drunk to go home, my driver will take you.

And as it turns out, there are a lot of people trying to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sidecar ride: Bruce reportedly auctioned off his $300,000 pretend friendship to at least two fans, who may or may not be Chris Christie and Chris Christie wearing a pair of fake-nose glasses.

[h/t AV Club, image via AP]

Homemade sparkling red wine: great in theory, extremely messy in practice.

One poor kid recently learned this the hard way when he tried to make his own red wine spritzer on a Sodastream. Aided by an off-screen adult—who does absolutely nothing to avert the impending crisis—the young YouTuber proceeds to unknowingly assemble a wine bomb in his kitchen.

"Wine does stain your clothes," he warns prophetically, screwing the bottle into the carbonator.

"It's gonna explode," he says, forcing more gas into the bottle.

"Okay, that's good," he tells the audience, and then destroys his parents' kitchen.

[h/t Tastefully Offensive]

According to police in Wales, a woman was "murdered in an act of cannibalism" at the Sirhowy Arms Hotel this week. Police reportedly found newly released prisoner Matthew Williams, 34, eating the eyeball and face of an a 22-year-old woman named Cerys Marie Yemm.

The Telegraph reports that police broke down the door of the room Williams and Yemm were in, found him eating her remains, and fired a taser to stop him. Shortly after police arrested Williams, he died.

"The woman, aged 22 from Blackwood, was located with injuries and was pronounced deceased at the scene," Gwent Police said in a statement released to Agence France-Presse. "A Taser was discharged and a man was arrested...Whilst under arrest, the man became unresponsive."

The wire service reports that the hotel also serves as a hostel for the homeless and criminals on bail. And according to the Telegraph, Williams, also known as "Fifi," was released two weeks earlier after spending five years in prison for attacking his partner. Williams and Yemm, the BBC reports, were believed to be in a relationship.

Jill Edwards, who lives near the hotel, told the paper that Williams was an "animal." "Security said they told him no girls in his room and he didn't answer, when they opened his door he was eating her face," she said.

[Image via Telegraph]

Skeevy dating coach Julien Blanc was forced to end his speaking tour of Australia more than a month early after immigration canceled his visa in response to protests, the Guardian reports.

"We can confirm Julien Blanc left Australia overnight. His assistant is also due to leave shortly," Victoria Police tweeted Thursday evening.

Blanc had to cancel or relocate a number of his speaking engagements this week after widespread protests erupted against his sexually aggressive pickup methods, which include choking women and forcing their heads in the direction of his dick.

Most recently, Blanc's assistant, Maximilian, was forced off a boat by police and protesters while filling in for Blanc at an event. The talk, on "how to be a very assertive man," occurred on a cruise ship because multiple hotels had already pulled out of hosting events for Blanc's company, Real Social Dynamics.

"The matter was raised with us and we had it investigated and this fellow looked at," Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison told Sky News.

"This guy wasn't putting forward political ideas, he was putting forward abuse that was derogatory to women and that's just something, those are values abhorred in this country."

Blanc had originally scheduled pickup artist events in Australia through Dec. 20.

The #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign, started by activist Jenn Li in response to Blanc's video on picking up girls in Japan, has launched a petition to keep Blanc out of that country as well.

[Photo: RSDJulien/Instagram]

I learned French in bars getting hit on by weird men. Also: in subway cars and public parks, in internet cafes looking for apartments, and shopping for cheap kitchenware at outdoor flea markets. At first, I didn't understand anything they were saying to me, but eventually, I picked up patterns. Ça va ("What's up") was innocuous—usually fine to ask the person for directions or even a metro ticket. Vous êtes charmante ("You're charming") was best ignored. Anything resembling "tu suces" (not to be confused with marché aux puces, a landmark near my apartment) meant I should walk away as fast as possible.

When I moved to Paris, I had a hunch that not knowing anyone would force me into the kinds of awkward situations where I would naturally pick up the language. I was right. But I didn't predict it would turn my day-to-day existence into something a lot like that Hollaback! video, except it wasn't edited together for dramatic effect. My first day in the city, I actually spent ten hours straight walking around different neighborhoods, with two suitcases and only the vaguest of plans. The next few months were similar. Until I could build the components of a private life—job, friends, an apartment—I spent a huge portion of my existence in public, and consequently, getting hit on by men in a language I could barely understand.

Last week, the internet erupted in debate about what it's like to be a woman in public, and the verdict was overwhelmingly negative. In the video that went viral, actress Shoshana Roberts walked around New York, in her words, "shoulders hunched... with a serious face and not making eye contact," silently submitting to a barrage of unwanted comments. (As many first pointed out, these comments appeared to come mostly from black and Hispanic men; it was later revealed that the white men were edited out of the video.) There have been viral street harassment videos before, but few generated as much debate as this one, perhaps because, rather than showing a woman confronting her harassers, the Hollaback! video encapsulated the experience of being passively under what seems like a sustained attack.

I relate to this experience, as many women do. But as much as my first few months in Paris looked like the Hollaback! video, my lived experience of them was different. Actually, it was largely thrilling. My life prior had always been comfortable and safe, and when I showed up, I was riding an 18-year-old's adrenaline high of having just told her horrified parents she was buying a one-way ticket to a foreign country. My average day looked a lot like this: hand out a resumé to a tourist hellhole of a restaurant who might not care that I only spoke English, scurry to a one-off babysitting gig, and drag my suitcase to a Craigslist sublet. At night, I went to parties alone that I read about on the internet. If I wanted to talk to someone, I chose between the random strangers (almost always men) who approached me and were typically willing to speak to me despite the fact that I could barely participate in conversations.

These interactions started, for the most part, as standard street harassment fare: sexual invitations couched in various degrees of creativity and politeness. Sometimes, they were worse—insults, verbal abuse, and once, a groping. But, occasionally, they also turned out to be interesting. Two men who introduced themselves with a Vous êtes charmante showed me to how play a didgeridoo months later. I learned about the only store in Paris that sold peanut butter (a sorely missed item) from a dude who insisted on badgering me about my bread and cheese lunch as I ate on a park bench. None of these interactions turned into lasting friendships, but that doesn't mean they weren't useful or thought-provoking.

Eight years later, now living in New York City, I still talk to men on the street, and I still find the experience interesting. When one of them says "hey," I often say "hey" back, before I've determined whether or not the greeting has a sexual undercurrent. That doesn't mean I'm nice to everyone, or that I never respond with silence, a "fuck off," or a police report when I feel they're fitting. It does mean that I'll occasionally find myself talking on the subway with a guy sitting next to me while a female friend watches on uncomfortably. Or, when a construction worker asks me how my day is going, answer and ask them the same question, because I want to know. In Paris, I talked to strange men because it was the only way to break out of linguistic and social isolation. Now, I do it because I'm curious. I'm not going to learn a new language, but I might get a window into another person's thoughts. If they're not good thoughts, I can walk away.

What's fucked up about public dialogue is that, for many women, it's one-directional. Today in New York, I'm still not always comfortable initiating conversations with men, even if I might take the chance of responding to them. Meanwhile, women hardly ever engage each other in random public conversation, one of the more overlooked ramifications of a culture of street harassment. As a result, we're obligated to assume based on past experience that the vast majority of conversations we have with strangers—whether they turn out to be enlightening or creepy—start because someone viewed us as sexual objects. For many women, that's a good enough reason to label any uninitiated public comment from a man—including those ambiguous "hellos"—as harassment, and call for their annihilation.

It's a murky area to navigate. Yes, it's unfair for women to bear the burden of evaluating any comment or gesture from a man for potential risk, a feat of mental calculation that's time-consuming and anxiety-inducing. We shouldn't be obligated to do this every time we walk down the street. But, I personally find that doing so can be worthwhile. Sometimes, it's even empowering. For so much of history, women were excluded from engaging in any dialogue in public spaces. When I choose to say "hey" back, I'm claiming my right to public speech, as well as to explore unknown experiences.

In a way, it's a little like deciding to move to Paris on a whim. And, like that choice, it can sometimes get you into trouble. But what's especially awesome about saying "hey" back is that, unlike moving to Paris, when things go badly, you can say "fuck off" and walk away. And that feels pretty empowering, too.

Alice Hines is a writer in New York covering fashion and culture. Say "hey" to her on the street in Fort Greene, or follow her on Twitter.

[Image by Tara Jacoby]

Actress Keira Knightley agreed to pose topless for an Interview magazine feature on one condition: She didn't want her body modified with Photoshop.

After her unedited shoot with fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier hit newsstands, Knightley explained to the Times,

I've had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it's paparazzi photographers or for film posters. That [shoot] was one of the ones where I said: 'OK, I'm fine doing the topless shot so long as you don't make them any bigger or retouch.' Because it does feel important to say it really doesn't matter what shape you are.

...

I think women's bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame.

Knightley's stance on photographic nudity may come, at least in part, from having been burned before.

"They always pencil in my boobs," she told Allure in 2012. "I was only angry when they were really droopy... For King Arthur, for a poster, they gave me these really strange droopy tits. I thought, well if you're going to make me fantasy breasts, at least make perky breasts."

Hence Knightley's new rule: No more fantasy breasts. Her policy regarding the real ones is slightly different, though:

"I don't mind exposing my tits [on screen] because they're so small — people really aren't that interested," she said in that same Allure interview.

But people are definitely interested. Her Interview shoot is all over Twitter and Facebook, and Interview's site seems to be bogged down from all the attention.

On the other hand, Knightley's anti-Photoshop stance may be driving more traffic than her naked breasts alone. The topless image has been online since August, but it only became a phenomenon this week.

[Photo: Patrick Demarchelier/Interview]

We're all about to freeze to death at the hands of an angry Alaskan sea bomb! Or, that's what it sounds like when you scroll through Twitter, anyway. What is this "bomb" everyone is talking about? Just how cold will it get and for how long? That question and more, answered below.http://thevane.gawker.com/arctic-plunge-...

What's going on?

Let's go back a few days. The western Pacific saw a pretty strong typhoon earlier this week, named Super Typhoon Nuri (pictured above). The storm reached the equivalent of category five status as it stayed east of land; the fact that it didn't make landfall anywhere is why you didn't hear about it unless you're a hardcore weather geek.

As previously explained on The Vane (1, 2), many tropical cyclones eventually undergo a transition late in their life cycle from a tropical cyclone to an extratropical cyclone. Extratropical cyclones are the common low pressure systems that we see almost every day in North America—they create cold and warm fronts, and they're responsible for most of the interesting weather that occurs over the continental United States.

While tropical cyclones derive their energy from intense thunderstorms that forms around the storm's eye, extratropical cyclones strengthen by tapping into strong winds on certain sides of the jet stream.

Nuri is experiencing its extratropical transition as it approaches a very strong streak within the jet stream, allowing the storm to further intensify into a monster. The latest run of the GFS (American) model shows the storm's minimum pressure bottoming out at 929 millibars, which is what one would typically see in a category five hurricane.

The monster-formerly-known-as-Nuri will produce winds well in excess of hurricane force, along with waves 50 or more feet (!) high, as it spins in the Bering Sea.

Is this that "meteorological bomb" I've heard about?

Yes. A "bomb" in weather terms refers to a process called "bombogenesis," or the explosive intensification of a low pressure system over a short period of time. Bombogenesis occurs when an extratropical cyclone's minimum pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours. If a storm's minimum pressure drops from 980 millibars to 956 millibars over the period of one day, it underwent bombogenesis—it bombed out, or was a bomb, as they like to say.

This particular system deepened from 990 millibars last night to 962 millibars this morning, and the pressure will continue to drop through tomorrow.

Since we're all sensitive to hype, let's get this out of the way: calling a storm a bomb isn't really hype if A) it fits the definition, and B) the article or newscast goes out of its way to define what the term means for viewers. Just as the polar vortex is an actual meteorological phenomenon, bombogenesis is a real thing that has the potential to be taken out of context.

What does this have to do with our weather in the U.S.?

This storm will set off a chain reaction in the jet stream, as the Capital Weather Gang characterizes it, that allows a deep trough to dig through the United States. When the jet stream dips south during the cold months, it can allow cold Arctic air to spill south into Canada and the United States.

Over the next week, a series of low pressure systems over Canada will work together to help drag down this cold air from the north. An intense area of high pressure will build in thanks to the cold air, locking it in place for an extended period of time.

The cold weather will begin on Monday in the far north, with the chill working its way south through the week. The cold front should pass through the eastern states on Wednesday and Thursday.

Of course it's cold, stupid. It's November. No big deal, right?

Models are forecasting high temperatures 10 to 20 degrees below normal for this time of the year. November has a reputation for getting cold, sure, but it's still a shock to the system for many that highs won't climb out of the 30s or 40s for an extended period of time. Highs in Chicago, for instance, could sit in the low- to mid-30s from Wednesday through Sunday and possibly longer than that.

For a more extreme example, this Sunday could be the last time Minneapolis sees the north side of freezing for a week or longer. Of course, the record low maximum (coldest high temperature) in the month of November in Minneapolis is 4°F above zero set in 1985, so highs not budging out of the upper-20s or low-30s for a week or longer is a cakewalk. It's all relative.

In any event, if you live east of the Rockies and away from the Gulf Coast, expect a prolonged period of relatively cold temperatures. It'll feel like winter. It's unusual for this time of the year, but it's been worse before.

Is this the polar vortex?

No.

Why is there so much coverage of this storm?

It's an interesting story and people are always interested in unusual and extreme weather. Plus, after the polar vortex panic last winter, people are going to be super sensitive to cold snaps this year. Measured articles talking about the facts are beneficial to the conversation—people are hyping and panicking enough, as it is.

Am I really going to die?

Some day, yes, but unless you get hypothermia, use a grill or generator inside and pump your home full of carbon monoxide, or slide off the road because of ice, probably not.

[Images: Peanuts Online via YouTube, CIMSS, NWS EDD]

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Google caused a sea-crazed frenzy when the press discovered mystery barges floating off both US coasts. But the company dismantled the giant showrooms before their public unveiling over pesky public safety regulations: Google had no good answer when authorities asked if their retail barges were floating fire hazards.

According to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal under the Freedom of Information Act, Google halted the barges' construction after the Coast Guard "repeatedly raised fire-safety concerns."

Emails obtained by the Journal indicate that Google had low expectations for their buoyant

boutique—the company told the Coast Guard that only 1,200 customers a day were expected to board the structure. But regulators were still concerned people would have to jump overboard in a fire.

"I am unaware of any measures you plan to use to actually limit the number of passengers," [the Coast Guard's Robert Gauvin] wrote in the [March 27, 2013] email about fire safety. He criticized the effort by Google and [construction contractor Foss Maritime] to seek quick approvals. "While I understand there is a sense of urgency, I am concerned that significant work has already been performed without full consent of the Coast Guard."

To obtain approval, Google went with the dependable method of dazzling officials. But unlike the easily-impressed politicians, seaside regulators were not swayed by Silicon Valley splendor. Emphasis added:

Google wooed government officials, including organizing field trips. "The good folks at Google want to give us a tour of the barge that is currently under construction (it's almost done) at Treasure Island," wrote Rich Hillis, executive director of the nonprofit Fort Mason Center to National Park Service managers on Aug. 19, 2013. "They can pick us up in a special Google speed boat."

But the fire-safety issue remained unresolved. "The vessel's design doesn't incorporate certain fire safety features typically required," the Coast Guard wrote to Foss on Aug. 22, adding "we cannot determine if evacuation of disabled persons has been considered."

The concerns about the barge's safety were raised in early 2013—months before CNET first discovered the "big and mysterious" structure parked off San Francisco's Treasure Island. Six days after media reports began swirling, the Coast Guard officials privately admitted to themselves that they screwed up agreeing to keep it secret.

Despite the project being both literally and figuratively dead in the water, Google kept pretending their seaborne Android showrooms would become a reality. Finally, this past August, the company gave up and sold their Maine-based barge for scrap.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: AP

Arianna Huffington, the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, routinely meddles with the work of HuffPost reporters who criticize her friends. According to a new report in Capital New York, the Greek-American multi-millionaire recently picked up an even worse habit: Suspending reporters who write negative but otherwise completely factual articles about any of her pals.

Sources tell Capital’s Joe Pompeo that Huffington ordered the temporary suspension of five newsroom staffers—three editors and two reporters—over a pair of recent articles. The first piece, published in August, documented the most recent plagiarism allegations against CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria. The second article, published in late October, concerned yoga clothier Lululemon’s controversial donations to the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education.

The only thing the articles have in common: Arianna Huffington’s well-known connections to one or more of their subjects. Huffington regularly appears on Zakaria’s CNN show, and has personally interviewed the Dalai Lama for her site.

The articles themselves contained fairly minor transgressions. The author and editor of the first item failed to obtain comment from Zakaria, who is infamously difficult to obtain comment from, before publication. His misdeeds, however, had been well documented by various other publications—and the Huffington Post’s bread and butter has always involved aggregating others’ reporting. The second item initially included negative anonymous quotes obtained from Lululemon’s company blog. Suspending staffers over these kinds of errors, which are not really errors, is ludicrous.

To her credit, Huffington doesn’t deny punishing four staffers who committed the sin of writing negative things about her friends:

Huffington also emphasized that she is, after all, the editor-in-chief, and that it is part of her job to exercise control over the content of the site and preside over disciplinary measures.

If you have any other stories about Arianna Huffington interfering with editorial operations at The Huffington Post, please get in touch or comment below.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear King v. Burwell, a case challenging tax subsidies provided to states running their own health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. If successful, the New York Times reports, the suit could ultimately destabilize and "doom" Obama's flagship legislation.

A man living in upstate New York recently learned that if he wanted broadband internet access in his home, he'd have to pay for installation fees totaling $20,000. Even worse: his only option is fucking Time Warner.

Jesse Walser lives in Pompey, New York, a town of about 7,000, and the closest broadband wires sit about a third of a mile away from his house. City dwellers take Time Warner Cable's terrible customer service and maddeningly unreliable internet for granted, but in less densely populated areas, smaller opportunities for profit mean providers may be more reticent to install the necessary equipment, leaving residents like Walser to choose between old-school dial-up or an expensive and limiting wireless plan.

Walser built his home ten years ago, he told Ars Technica, and was told at the time that it would cost $5,900 to extend Time Warner's lines to the house. He declined, opting for dial-up, and then switched to a wireless hotspot plan capped at 20GB per month. When he re-contacted TWC about broadband in 2012, he got the staggering estimate:

Estimates rose through the years and TWC came up with a $22,826.80 figure in an April 2012 letter that Walser shared with Ars. (TWC later revised the figure down closer to $20,000.)

Walser is still fighting for wireline broadband access that doesn't cost more than $20,000, but he has nearly exhausted his options. "I have contacted my state senators, my state legislator, US senators, I've contacted the FCC," he said. "I'm going to continue to do those things, but at a certain point you get onto the watch list."

Walser's home has landline phone service from Verizon, but isn't equipped for DSL or FiOS.

New York state has given Time Warner more than $10 million to provide internet access to underserved areas upstate, Ars notes, but Walser's area does not fall under that program. (The company did eventually offer him a $3,643 discount). At one point, he says, a TWC rep told him: "It's your decision. You're the one who wanted to live in the country."

The father of two says he has petitioned the town of Pompey to file for broadband grants, but for now, that isn't happening, and there's no law that says Time Warner has to hook him up. Even if he does decide to pony up the $20k, he'll still have to deal with a monthly bill, and he'll still have awful Time Warner internet.

Michael Barbaro—"Political reporter for the New York Times, inveterate gossip, Upper West Sider"—has taken the old transit adage of seeing something and saying something to heart. Today he saw something in the underpass at 41st Street and 7th Avenue and said something about it on Twitter. Can you identify the danger in the photo he snapped below?

Situation at 123 underpass at 41st and 7th Ave has become dangerous and unacceptable @MTA pic.twitter.com/QehZITdoMP

— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) November 7, 2014

After a careful, minutes-long study of this photograph with our Gawker-branded microscope, we failed to identify any dangerous weapons (nunchucks, bombs, knives, firearms, et al), slick liquids covering the floor that might cause slippage, or risk of falling debris. One might run a risk of tripping over the stray styrofoam cup pictured middle-right, but as long as one is not iPhoning while walking one should be OK. Otherwise the lighting in the underpass appears to be good, the walls are gleaming, the floors need a touch-up but what can one expect from one of the subway system's busiest arteries?

We would like to ask Mr. Barbaro: What is, exactly, dangerous in this photograph?

Thank you.

[Top photo via AP]