Tonight’s MTV Video Music Awards began by with Nicki Minaj, who performed alongside Taylor Swift just a month or so after Swift clumsily inserted herself into Minaj’s pointed critiques regarding the racial makeup of this year’s nominees. It was supposed to be a Shocking VMA Moment but was entirely pre-packaged, which may or may not also be true about Minaj confronting Cyrus over her rather boneheaded comments about race.

Minaj was onstage accepting the award for Best Rap Video when she broke off her speech to call out Cyrus, who in a pre-VMA interview with Joe Coscarelli of the New York Times, said that Minaj’s brief beef with Swift was “jealous” and “disrespectful.”

“And now... back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press,” Nicki said. “Miley, what’s good?”

Miley’s responded by blaming the reporter: “Hey, we’re all in this industry, we all do interviews, and we all know how they manipulate shit. Nicki, congratulations.”

It seems pretty clear that Cyrus’ quotes were not manipulated—the Times printed what appears to be an unedited and, given the length of the story, relatively protracted discussion between Cyrus and Coscarelli about Minaj and Swift. Coscarelli tried to ease Cyrus off her comments, but Miley doubled and then tripled-down on her characterization of Minaj as boorish.

What is less clear is whether this Shocking VMA Moment was scripted, too. The primary argument in favor of it being pre-planned is that with the “surprise” Swift performance, Minaj had already participated in one meta acknowledgement of a VMA-related “controversy,” so what was another? There was also a flash of a smile, which could be interpreted several different ways, one of which is that Minaj couldn’t even be bothered to keep up the charade.

There’s also this image, posted to Instagram by MTV News (may the Lord forgive us), that hyped the clash and which went up suspiciously quickly.

On the other hand, MTV is insisting that nothing was in the works, though it would behoove them to play along. That said, an online-only shot of Cyrus watching seems to show her being taken aback by Minaj’s affront.

That interpretation is backed up by Jezebel’s Kara Brown, who was at the show and reported that “it definitely didn’t seem like Miley knew Nicki was going to say that.”

After Cyrus attempted to deflate the situation, Minaj stepped away from her mic and said “don’t play with me, bitch” a few times. Maybe that looked staged to you, or maybe it didn’t.

Regardless, I’m sure we’ll all get a chance to revisit this fascinating mystery at next year’s VMAs.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

This is the sound of dozens of rubber duck souls suddenly deflating and drifting down, down, down into a subterranean cavern of horrors in which they will dwell for all time. Although they’re now confined to the dank, stygian below, their screams yet echo in the realm of the living.

Dare you set them free and forgive their multitude of sins? I don’t think you want to accept that bargain, friend.

This has been Rubber Duck Nightmare Minute. Never again.

[h/t mashable]

Don’t forget: You can email us tips at tips@gawker.com, call them in at 646-470-4295, send them directly to any of our writers, or use our anonymous SecureDrop system. And like us on Facebook here!

In the middle of the show floor at PAX, a text message glared back with a brief message: Wes Craven had died. I stopped a moment, took a breath, and sighed. Few humans have made me laugh and scream the way filmmaker Craven did over the years, and I’ll miss him terribly.

Craven had apparently been struggling with brain cancer, though it was not something he talked about publicly. By all accounts, he was still a workhorse. Earlier this year, he signed deals to produce new movies, and one of his classics, Scream, had become a hit TV show over at MTV.

Granted, Craven’s creative output the last few years has not been great. Scream 4, which tried to put another set of twists on the already knotted up franchise, felt like a gasp at desperation. And does anyone even remember My Soul to Take came out?

But guess what? Who gives a shit.

The Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes, The People Under The Stairs, New Nightmare, Scream. Any director would kill for a resume that good, a slate of films that forever changed genres and created timeless pop culture icons. We were lucky enough to be around as Craven filled our dreams with nightmares that we were secretly thankful for.

Heck, without Craven, the world wouldn’t know who Johnny Depp is, since Craven gave the actor a shot with the first Freddy film, and famously killed him with the ol’ bed of blood.

Even within horror, Craven smartly reinvented himself over and over again. The filmmaker who created A Nightmare on Elm St. was far different than the one behind the lens for Last House on the Left. (A film that still continues to make me profoundly uncomfortable, years after seeing it! While most horror films are date-worthy, a reason to snuggle up with a significant other, Last House on the Left will probably leave you quietly sobbing into a pillow and closing your eyes.)

I’m not sure what there is to say about Freddy Krueger, in which Craven created a legacy that will long outlast his own name. The character got weird as the years went on, quickly abandoning terror for humor, in the way many horror sequels are forced to change approaches, with the element of surprise long since gone. (The third one, Dream Warriors, is easily the best sequel that Craven wasn’t personally involved it. So good!)

But some of my favorite Craven films didn’t come until his creations had become so embedded in the cultural landscape that he started fucking with us. New Nightmare, the last time he played with his best known character, is deeply underrated and genuinely frightening. In it, A Nightmare on Elm St. is a film series, but Freddy invades the reality of the actors involved. Not only was the meta premise a fresh twist on the character, but it allowed Craven to finally make Krueger scary again, and laid the groundwork for the more expansive meta horror film Scream.

And look, Scream is probably overrated, but it was so damn fun when it came out. It was a horror movie operating on several levels, only recently matched by riffs like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and Cabin in the Woods. If you were a fan of horror films, you delighted at how it acknowledged the genre’s tropes and subverted them. If you just wanted to be scared, Scream had plenty of that, too.

(The less said about Scream 3, the better, OK?)

One of my favorite moments from 2015 was when, for lord knows what reason, Craven decided to briefly talk to me. I had tweeted a fan-made drawing that imagined a Capcom-style fighting game with horror’s icons duking it out.

Somehow, that got back to him, and it resulted in this brief exchange.

Just looking at that puts tears in my eyes.

He started following me on Twitter, which I still can’t really get over. I had plans to reach out for an interview in October, but, well...sigh.

Writing about these films makes me want to pour a glass of whiskey and work through the man’s catalog again. I cannot wait for Halloween, when my wife and I can once again debate whether it’s really worth watching the terrible A Nightmare on Elm St 2: Freddy’s Revenge just to have a complete understanding of the series’ mythology in totality. (We probably will.)

If the value of a life well lived is the impact we have on other people, Craven had a full one.

Craven may be gone, but his creations ensure he’ll not be forgotten, especially when I’m asleep.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is new evidence that Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages, hoping to create the illusion of a vast playland of available women.

Today Ashley Madison released a statement saying that I couldn’t have figured out how many active women are on the site based on the data dump. The company is right about that. It may still be true that a relatively small number of women are active on Ashley Madison, but the evidence that I thought supported my claims means something else entirely—more on that below.

What I have learned from examining the site’s the source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud. The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager. Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site.

The Missing Data and the Bots

The Ashley Madison source code comes from the second dump released by Impact Team—at 20 gigabytes compressed, it was about twice the size of the first. Though partly corrupted, it did hold hundreds of readable company emails that revealed the company was paying people to create fake women’s profiles and to chat with men on the site. It also contained multiple git repositories, or containers for source code, that appear to go back to mid-2010.

The first thing I learned when I looked at the code was that the database Impact Team released on August 18, and on which I based my reporting about the number of active female users, was just a tiny portion of the actual member data collected by Ashley Madison. The code makes references to 550 data tables, but there are only 4 tables in the data from Impact Team. That radically changes the picture of what we’re actually seeing in the database.

When I first looked over the data, I wrongly assumed that I had all or most of the tables. As I wrote last week, I came across three columns in one of those tables called “bc_email_last_time,” “bc_chat_last_time,” and “email_reply_last_time.” After consulting with two analysts, and determining that these columns were the only ones with names typically used to track user activity, I concluded that the datestamps in those columns referred to the last time people checked their Ashley Madison messages, or tried to start a chat. And when I saw the radical disparity between numbers of men with a datestamp and the number of women, I interpreted it to mean that men were emailing a lot with bots, and women barely ever emailed anyone at all.

But I was wrong. It’s a lot weirder than that. Those columns in the data don’t record human activity at all. They record the last time a bot—or “engager” in Ashley Madison’s internal parlance—emailed or chatted with a member of the site.

What that means is that we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team. All we can see is when fake humans contacted real ones. In other words, the dramatic discrepancy between men and women is entirely because Ashley Madison’s software developers trained their bots to talk almost exclusively to men.

Two intrepid researchers came forward to tip me off to what those columns actually measured. Software developer Jake Perkowski and pseudonymous Gizmodo commenter Mr. Falcon had both pored over the code and realized that when bots called “engagers” talked to humans, they were programmed to make a note of it in the database under fields called “bc_chat_last_time,” “reply_email_last_time,” “or bc_email_last_time.” Once I’d checked the sections of code they pointed to, the evidence was undeniable. Those columns had been populated by bots, obediently checking in every time they talked to a human male.

Perkowski also pointed me to a column in the database called ishost. When ishost was set to 1, he said, it meant that the member was actually a bot. A quick search of the code revealed that indeed bots were using accounts with the value ishost=1. So I decided to delve more into what else these host accounts held.

Out of 70,572 hosts, 70,529 were female and only 43 were male. So we can say for sure that roughly zero percent of bots on Ashley Madison are male. The bots also tended to have ashleymadison.com email addresses, though other popular addresses included things like passthecake@hotmail.com, kimmakesprofiles@hotmail.com, and digital-romeo@hotmail.com. And finally, tens of thousands of the bots had IP addresses that suggested the accounts had been made by people working at the Ashley Madison office.

But where can we find human activity in the Impact Team dump? Apparently, nowhere. Looking at the code, there appear to be several database tables where the system keeps track of when humans chat or message with other humans. It also seems that Ashley Madison even keeps records of what each member says to the other in chat sessions. Had the Impact Team been more nosy, or had more time to dump the data, we might be looking at extremely detailed information on what humans said to each other as they flirted and planned their hookups.

So much for Ashley Madison’s guarantee that they’ll keep your affair hushed up. Right now, the company has reams of incredibly incriminating personal information about everything its human users are doing and saying.

But in the database dump from Impact Team, all we can see is the ample evidence that male users were contacted by bots pretty much constantly. Those data fields tell us that 20 million men out of 31 million received bot mail, and about 11 million of them were chatted up by an automated “engager.” And in the code, I discovered that for many members, these robo-encounters could come roughly every few minutes. At last, I was able to see how a group of engineers tried to create bots that would make men feel like they were in a world packed with eager, available women.

How to Snare Millions of Men with Web Bots

It’s not easy to sort through thousands of lines of code, but two things can make it faster. One is a simple but powerful search program called grep that can search text for any phrase you like. The other is a habit that engineers have of writing comments about what they’re doing in the code. Armed with grep, I could look for key phrases in both comments and the code itself.

I knew from the company emails that the engineers and managers used certain terms for the bots, including “hosts” and “engagers.” Perhaps one of the most poignant parts of reading the engineers’ comments in the code was when I uncovered a set of descriptions for how the engager bots should act. I found these in a database devoted to engager activity. Here are a few of them:

host bot mother creates engagers

birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!

randomizing start time so engagers don’t all pop up at the same time

for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager

These comments describe a bot being born and immediately turning to its one purpose in life: finding a man. Then the developer notes that it’s important that “engagers don’t pop up at the same time.” The engager bots are basically pieces of software. They operate by inhabiting, as a demon might, previously existing fake profiles that the company calls “Angels”—these are the profiles that Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman was pushing his people to create at scale in internal company emails. The Angels, also called “hosts” by the company’s engineers, lay dormant until a bot animates them and uses them like a skin to contact a male user. Which is why the engineers sought ways to prevent them from all grabbing the same identity at the same time. Basically, they look a lot less fake if there aren’t a zillion bot clones running around chatting men up. And finally, we learn that one of the rules was that every state with non-paying “guest” males—from Nunavut to California—should have a chat engager.

Of course, things didn’t always go as planned. In a patch, or edit, to the code, I saw this comment: “Stopped engaging gaymen.” That made me laugh. I imagined a frustrated developer, getting complaints from gay men who kept being assaulted by female chat bots looking for heterosexual love.

Based on what I’ve seen in the code, the chat bots were fairly annoying. First of all, they weren’t exactly smart. Here’s a verbatim list, taken directly from the code, of the random messages that the chat bot was programmed to spew—probably the repeats are in there to make it more likely that the bot would say them:

‘hi’,

‘hi’,

‘hi’,

‘hi (s)‘,

‘hi there’,

‘how are you?’,

‘hey’,

‘Hey’,

‘hey there’,

‘hey there’,

‘Hey there’,

‘u busy?’,

‘you there?’,

‘any body home?’,

‘Hi’,

‘Hi’,

‘Hi’,

‘hows it going?’,

‘chat?’,

‘how r u?’,

‘anybody home? lol’,

‘hello’,

‘hello’,

‘Hello’,

‘hello?’,

‘whats up?’,

‘so what brings you here?’,

‘oh hello’,

‘free to chat??’,

Once the man struck up a conversation, the bot would say things like this:

Hmmmm, when I was younger I used to sleep with my friend’s boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard although I could never sleep with their husbands.

I’m sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?”

It’s unclear what else the engager would say—either the bots really are this simple, or further chat phrases weren’t in the code. Most likely, based on what I saw from other bot code, the bot would urge the man to pay credits to talk further.

Mr. Falcon pointed out that there’s actually a special bot service, called “RunChatBotXmppGuarentee.service.php,” apparently designed just for interactions with customers who paid the premium $250 for a “guaranteed affair.” When I checked the code, I found Mr. Falcon was right. It appears that this bot would chat up the man, urge him to pay credits, and then pass him along to what’s called an “affiliate.” Likely the affiliate is a third party that provides a real person for the man to chat with. It might also be connecting him to an escort service.

Earlier this year, one Ashley Madison engineer spent a couple of days mocking up a possible system for paying actual human women for engaging the men. The code calculates a “FemaleValue” (percentage credited to the woman’s account) based on “MaleProfit” (amount the man pays to Ashley Madison). If the woman engages the man within 20 to 30 minutes of the time he buys credits, she’ll be credited with 5 percent of the profit. It doesn’t appear that this system was deployed, but it was obviously something Ashley Madison developers were thinking about.

Map via Jake Perkowski

We know from company emails that management constantly struggled to find people to create fake accounts in languages other than English. Bots needed to speak 31 different languages, and they chatted and sent messages to people in roughly 50 countries and 1,500 states or provinces. In the map above, Perkowski has visualized “the rate of engager accounts to total female accounts per country.” The darker the blue, the more ubiquitous robots are in your Ashley Madison dating pool. No matter where you are in the world, Ashley Madison probably has a bot that can say “anybody home? lol” in your native language.

Perhaps because of the company’s international focus, you can see ripples of geopolitical events in the code. I found evidence that a developer updated the system in May to change the handling of payments in Crimea. No doubt responding to the Russian invasion of that region, he changed the payment system language from Ukrainian to Russian. In another comment, a developer noted, “south african engagers can only engage pnums [members] of same race.”

Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money. I found a set of email templates called “mistress” which were sent out to urge men to spend money on Mistress Day, a pre-Valentines holiday on February 13. Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman did a huge publicity push for the holiday in 2014, doing interviews about it in the media and blasting out emails urging all members to buy more credits so they can find a mistress in time for the day.

Those email blasts were another way the bots hassled Ashley Madison’s straight men. One engineer comments in the code that bot mail blasts for new members are sent to straight men on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; but they’re only sent to men seeking men on Tuesdays, and women seeking women on Thursday.

The engagers are so annoying that developers had to write special exceptions to exclude their own bots from being nuked in spam sweeps. They also exclude several IP addresses in India and the Philippines, which suggests that they may have had a lot of people operating their host accounts in those regions.

The Humans

After I published my first article about Ashley Madison data, I got a several dozen emails from women and men who told me their stories about using the service. Some agreed with my assessment that the place is a sexbot farm. But many women described how they’d enjoyed the service for years, and men talked in glowing terms about all the amazing women they’d met, including some who fell in love and formed relationships after their “affair.”

Several women specifically urged me to investigate how “women seeking women” were handled in the database and code. Many had met other women for threesomes with men, or just for a lesbian romp outside their heterosexual marriages. I decided to take their advice, because now it was clear that a lot more women were active in the membership than I initially believed.

What I found was that there are over 770,000 women seeking women in the database, out of 5.5 million women overall, and none of them are hosts. That’s 14 percent, much higher than the estimated 1.5 percent of lesbians (and .9 percent of bisexuals) in the U.S. population. These may not be active accounts, but they don’t appear to be Ashley Madison engagers either. If there are real women behind these accounts, we know they aren’t getting bombarded with bot messages. Bots avoid women. And comments in the code reveal that “woman seeking woman” profiles aren’t shown to straight men. It would seem that the only members of Ashley Madison who aren’t inundated by spam and randos are women who seek trysts with other women or couples.

There are also about 345,000 men seeking men in the database, and we know from the patch I mentioned earlier that developers were working hard to prevent the engagers from harassing these guys too. It’s possible, as one person put it to me in email, that Ashley Madison was actually a pretty decent hookup site for gay people—but that was mostly because the system was designed to ignore them.

In fact, there are only 5 possible categories of desire allowed in the Ashley Madison code. Here they are, from a comment:

1: Attached Female Seeking Males

2: Attached Male Seeking Females

3: Single Male Seeking Attached Females

4: Single Female Seeking Attached Males

5: Attached Male Seeking Males

6: Attached Female Seeking Females

Note that you can’t be a single woman seeking attached women, nor a single man seeking attached men. Nobody building this source code thought very hard about options for gay people.

Nobody thought much about women either. Now that we know how rarely women were contacted by bots, it seems certain that any human woman on the site would have been able to meet human men with little difficulty or interference. There is a certain freedom in being the group that is ignored the most. Hiding in a haze of spam bots, women were connecting with each other and with men. We don’t know how many, nor how often, but we know they were doing it.

That said, a huge portion of Ashley Madison’s software development efforts are aimed at refining their fembot army, to make it seem that women are active on the site. Either they did this because the number of real women was vanishingly small, or because they didn’t want men to hook up with real women and stop buying credits from the company. Whatever the reason, it appears that the Ashley Madison money-making scheme was bots all the way down.

Art and data tables by Tara Jacoby

Thanks to the data researchers, anonymous and named, who helped me analyze this code.

Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 85E3 8F69 046B 44C1 EC9F B07B 76D7 8F05 00D0 26C4

Academy Award winner Halle Berry and her French husband Olivier Martinez recently celebrated their second wedding anniversary. How nice, you might be thinking in regard to this milestone and Halle Berry in general. But no, it is not nice. It is not nice at all.

Despite the fact that they have been married for a relatively short time, Halle and Olivier have been the subjects of tabloid divorce rumors for weeks. At the beginning of this month, Radar reported that a Halle-Olivier divorce was “imminent,” due to Olivier’s inability to control his “temper.”

Here is what we know about their relationship: it began in 2010, shortly after Halle broke up with her first child’s father, Gabriel Aubry (who is also French [Canadian]); Olivier once beat Gabriel up at Thanksgiving; Halle lost her engagement ring from Olivier a year and a half ago in Mexico and has yet to replace it.

But now, according to a new report from People, Halle and Olivier are “fine.” They are also “okay.” They even have breakfast together—or rather, they had coffee together one time, in the presence of paparazzi, this weekend. From People:

The couple, who just celebrated their second wedding anniversary in July, shared an al fresco breakfast at eatery La Conversation in Los Angeles on Saturday. Berry and Martinez, both 49, ordered croissants and coffee, according to an eyewitness...

[T]he couple returned to Berry’s nearby home in Beverly Hills after the meal and were both wearing their wedding rings, despite recent reports of relationship trouble.

So what was the vibe of this coffee date? One “witness,” who did not reveal himself to be an employee of La Conversation but did reveal himself to be someone who goes to La Conversation a lot—daily, even—said:

They used to be regulars, so it was fun to have them back. They seemed fine. Olivier ordered for them.

Another source offered:

They seemed okay and were affectionate.

Here is a paparazzi photo from the outing:

If I seem fine or okay, please know that I am neither; this update about Halle Berry’s marriage bummed me out.

Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

A Bill Bratton profile in this week’s New Yorker reveals little that we didn’t already know about the NYPD commissioner. What we do hear about, over and over, is the ongoing commitment of Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio to “broken windows” policing—which Bratton pledges will be around for as long as he and de Blasio are in power.http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/...

The mayor himself declined to be interviewed for the piece, but Bratton worked hard to convey that he and his boss agree that cops should aggressively go after subway dancers and squeegee men, and that any rumored clashes between the two men should be disregarded. “There’s nothing we’ve disagreed on in the months I’ve worked for him,” the commissioner told the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. “He’s done more for the police than any mayor I’ve served in thirty years.”

Bratton makes the case that his critics are wrong to claim that broken windows policing unfairly targets poor people and people of color, that it antagonizes the people it is meant to protect, that it has very little discernible connection to crime reduction, that it is stop-and-frisk 2.0. Rather than stop largely poor and black people on the assumption that they might be committing a crime, like his predecessor Ray Kelly’s NYPD did, Bratton’s cops arrest poor and black people whom they know are committing crimes—heinous ones, like turnstile-jumping and drinking on their stoops.

With stop-and frisk, “An officer has a reasonable suspicion that a crime is committed, is about to be committed, or has been committed,” Bratton told Auletta, whereas “quality-of-life policing is based on probable cause—an officer has witnessed a crime personally, or has a witness to the crime. It’s far different”http://gawker.com/goodbye-stop-a...

If New Yorkers are being stopped for crimes they actually committed, rather than on the vague biased whims of beat cops, that’s a good thing. But when black and Hispanic people are being arrested under Bratton for quality-of-life misdemeanors like criminal mischief and carrying weed at twice or more the rate of whites—despite despite constituting comparatively small slices of the city’s population—the distinction between reasonable suspicion and probable cause may be a mostly symbolic one.

For evidence of this, read Auletta’s bleak description of a day at Manhattan Criminal Court during which only one of the 31 defendants appearing on misdemeanor charges was white—and he was homeless.

Two of the defendants had been apprehended the day before as trespassers for using a Port Authority bathroom that the police said required that they show a bus ticket. “They threw me against the wall, completely searched me, patted and frisked me in front of all these people, and threw cuffs on me,” Wendell Moore, a thirty-two-year-old man and a father of seven children, told me. The police found a cell phone on him that they claimed was not his. He spent the night in jail, and the next day was charged and released. “Other people going to that bathroom they didn’t stop,” Moore said. “They only stopped two black kids. They didn’t know who had tickets.”

But the most damning indictment of Bratton’s broken windows theory is the case of Eric Garner, who was stopped for allegedly selling loose cigarettes before his death at the hands of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo. The crime that Garner committed is a “classic broken-windows offense,” Auletta writes. If Pantaleo weren’t acting on an explicit directive from the department to prioritize low-level, nonviolent offenders like Garner, he would likely still be alive today.

Bratton admitted that the widely circulated video of Garner’s death was “certainly disturbing,” but maintained that neither he nor the progressive mayor who appointed him would be doing anything about the ideology that caused it. “Quality-of-life policing is not going away. Not so long as I’m commissioner, and I don’t think so long as Mayor de Blasio is mayor,” Bratton said. “He understands it. He believes in it. We are committed to it.”

Image via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp are in for a treat, is apparently what museum management was thinking with their most recent purchase: a brand new outdoor shower sprinkler (at Auschwitz). After all, who wouldn’t love a nice, refreshing shower (at Auschwitz)? The answer, of course, is everyone.

The offending misters appear to have been put up just this past weekend. And people were less than thrilled. As one visitor told The Jerusalem Post, “As a Jew who has lost so many relatives in the Holocaust, they looked like the showers that the Jews were forced to take before entering the gas chambers.”

After complaining to management, the visitor was told that the showers are “a good way for people to cool off on a very hot day.” Which, while true, also ignores the fact that they just effectively installed a makeshift Schindler’s List set at Auschwitz.

To their credit, the museum did take to Facebook earlier today to try to explain the mess.

See, everything’s fine. Those showers were fake! These are real. The outdoors doesn’t even have a ceiling, you idiots.

After all, as Auschwitz said, “Something had to be done.”

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via Instagram.

Early this morning, a wealthy NYC real estate developer allegedly crashed his Porsche into a pole, left his dying friend on the ground without calling for help, and drove off, only to be captured by police a less than half a mile away.

The New York Post reports that Sean Ludwick, 42, was speeding through Sag Harbor with his friend Paul Hansen when Ludwick crashed into a pole across from Hansen’s home, where the 53-year-old real estate agent lived with his wife and two children.

Police say Ludwick left Hansen on the ground—he was apparently ejected from the car—and continued driving with a couple of flat tires. Not long after, he was pulled him over and arrested; police followed the wreckage back to the accident scene, where they found Hansen’s body.

Ludwick, who is a managing partner Blackhouse Development in Manhattan, has a long and exciting criminal background. From the Post:

Last year, he was arrested on charges he broke into his former mistress’ Tribeca apartment and, in a drunken rage, drew penises on the artwork, which he’d originally painted himself and given to her.

He eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges of disorderly conduct.

He has also been in trouble in Martha’s Vineyard. In March, he admitted to assault and battery and property destruction after a fight with his girlfriend in a hotel.

Ludwick has been charged with driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a fatal accident, and may face an additional charge of vehicular homicide. He’s being held on $1 million bond.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

As everyone knows, the annual Video Music Awards (which aired Sunday night on MTV) is a veritable who’s who of the red carpet—mostly because you’re literally asking yourself WHO? every time someone new walks on stage.

While watching last night’s pre-show, I made a point to note every celebrity attendee that I didn’t recognize. My list was very, very long—either because I am no longer in MTV’s target demographic (true), I don’t know enough about YouTube celebrities (also true), or because I kept thinking that one generic-looking blonde girl in a sparkly cropped top was actually multiple people (probably true).

For the sake of education, here’s is a gallery of last night’s WHOs, along with—for the sake of education—a brief description of what it is that these fresh-faced young people do.

From left to right: Brett Davern, Beau Mirchoff, Jillian Rose Reed, and Molly Tarlov. All of these people are on the MTV show Awkward, which has been on for several seasons and is fairly popular. Maybe I should know who they are. Maybe I’m the issue here.

Amanda Steele (left) is a 15-year-old YouTube star who makes lifestyle videos about makeup and fashion. She reportedly has a net worth of $1.5 million. Nash Grier (center) is a teen Vine celebrity. He once said some very fun homophobic things, but has since apologized. His Vine account has also led him to a movie deal. Holland Roden (right) is an actress on MTV’s Teen Wolf.

I had never heard of singer Chanel West Coast (left) before today, but here’s what I know about her now. Gigi Gorgeous is a YouTube star who made waves after she came out as transgender and documented her transition on her YouTube channel. Last in line, Austin Butler is an actor who has apparently been in a wide variety of things ranging from the CW’s Life Unexpected to the CW’s The Carrie Diaries. He will soon be starring in the MTV show The Shannara Chronicles. You will need a different explainer to tell you what that is.

Tom Maden, Carlson Young, and John Karna are all stars of MTV’s new Scream adaptation. MTV is making a Scream adaptation? Yes. [Ed. Note: It has been airing for months.]

Vic Mensa—decked out in an anti-police, pro Assata Shakur design—is a musician signed to Roc-A-Fella Records and Roc Nation. He has collaborated on songs with Kanye West, Chance The Rapper, and Damon Albarn of Gorillaz. When I told Julianne that I didn’t know who Mensa was, she replied, “You need more teen friends!!!” So, uh, hey, if there are any teens out there who want to befriend me, shoot me an email. The man in the middle photo is not Nick Jonas’ body double. He is a singer named Shawn Mendes. Jake Foushee is a YouTube and Vine star who gained popularity doing impressions of various celebrities (mostly Seth MacFarlane characters). He frequently collaborates with fellow Vine star, Nash Grier. Cool t-shirt, Foush.

Jeannie Mai (left) is a makeup artist who appears as an expert on various daytime talk shows. She is also the host of Style Network’s How Do I Look? and USA’s Character Fantasy. Arden Cho (center) is a singer and actress. She, like everyone else at this award show, appears on MTV’s Teen Wolf. Kelsea Ballerini (right) is a country singer. She has a song called “Love Me Like You Mean It.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here is a band called Walk the Moon. Moving on!

Matt Cutshall (left) is a man on Vine, Arielle Vandenberg (center) is a woman on Vine (she’s also appeared in a few TV shows) and Matthew Espinosa is a boy on Vine.

And finally:

Some grandpa.

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

All images via Getty.

Today is the last day of meteorological summer, and it’s been a long, boring three months. Save for a couple of tropical storms and a derecho or two, there weren’t many weather events that commanded attention. The big story has been the heat and humidity, and that’s what will continue through the first half of September.

Summer will slowly begin to wind down over the next month or two, but like winter, it’s hellbent on going out with a fit that will make us sweat a little longer.

Average high temperatures take a steep dip between the first and last day of the month, with most major cities listed above seeing about a ten degree drop in their average high over the course of September. New York City’s average high is just 70°F on September 30, with cooler weather typical in the Midwest. Even Mobile down in Ala-freakin’-bama starts to cool off to bearable levels once October rolls around.

Out with the heat goes the humidity, and in just a couple of weeks, it should start feeling nice just about everywhere. We just have to slog through at least one more heat wave, which will hopefully be the last before cooler temperatures arrive for good.

The culprit is a big ridge in the jet stream across much of the northern United States and Canada, which is building in ahead of a sharp trough digging into parts of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Ridges of high pressure foster calm, warm weather, and with low-level winds blowing from the south, this air will not only be warm, but it’ll be muggy, too.

(That trough over the Pacific Northwest, by the way, should keep the region cool and moist through the rest of the week. That should help firefighters control the wildfire situation a little bit.)

How warm is warm? It depends on your heat tolerance, I guess, but objectively it’s going to be much warmer than normal. Tomorrow’s forecast high in Washington D.C. will be around 93°F according to The Weather Channel, which is nine degrees warmer than average for September 1. The high in Minneapolis will be 88°F, which is a full eleven degrees above normal. This ick will stick around through at least the first week of the month before finally (and slowly) cooling down from north to south.

Here’s some data from this morning’s run of the GFS model, showing the temperature trend over the next two weeks. Don’t focus on the exact numbers here—this is just a model forecast, and predicting high and low temperatures requires forecaster experience and knowledge. This product exists to show you trends more than anything else.

If current model trends hold true, abnormally warm conditions will stick around in Minneapolis through this weekend before nature flips the atmospheric switch on the lee side of Labor Day and temperatures turn downright gorgeous. I keep using Minneapolis as an example here because it’s a bastion of those crisp, fall temperatures that we cool weather people love to imagine as we stick our heads in the freezer. (But I digress.)

It’ll take a little longer for the moderation to dip farther south. Here’s the same model trendcast for New York City:

...and Washington D.C....

...and Memphis, for a change of pace:

Just about everyone is tired of the heat and humidity, and we’re almost to the point where it’s cool enough to open the windows. Temperatures will fluctuate and storms will boom and fizzle, but fall will come soon enough. Before you know it, we’ll be changing the clocks back an hour for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That’s something to look forward to!

[Model images via WeatherBell and Tropical Tidbits | Chart’s background image by Kimberly Vardeman via Flickr]

Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

If you enjoy The Vane, then you’ll love my upcoming book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which comes out on October 6 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

While promoting her line of shoes for Chinese Laundry last fall, Kristin Cavallari assured potential buyers of the timelessness of her designs. “Everything in my line, for the most part, is a staple,” she said. “They’re all classic shoes that you’ll wear forever.” Guess what Kristin’s got for you this season?

Another staple.

In ad copy posted last week on Zappos.com, Kristin introduced six of her new designs that will be available for purchase this fall. She explicitly stated that one of these designs is a “staple that will be with you forever.” Below are the classic names Kristin bestowed upon her heels. Can you guess which one is the staple?

• “Chance”
• “Candyce”
• “Liam”
• “Chandy”
• “Calissa”
• “Charm”

It’s Liam. It looks like this:

This slouchy, stacked-heel boot with the toes cut out is a staple, says Kristin. It will be with you forever.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty, Zappos]

Last July, an 18-year-old Massachusetts man named Conrad Roy III killed himself by placing a gas-powered water pump in his pickup truck and letting the carbon monoxide consume him. Prosecutors say that Roy’s girlfriend, 17-year-old Michelle Carter, spent months convincing Roy to commit suicide, and text messages between the two entered in court make a compelling and sad case that she did.

According to prosecutors, as outlined by writer Abby Pillip in an extensive Washington Post story, Carter and Roy had known each other since 2012. Their romance was mostly an online one—according to Carter’s lawyer, the two had met each other in person just a few times. Per Phillip, Roy had tried killing himself in the past, and though his family thought he might be putting that behind him, by 2014, his conversations with Carter returned frequently to his suicide, often under her direction.

Here are some of Carter’s texts to Roy, and a few of their conversations, as highlighted by Phillip:

“You always say you’re gonna do it, but you never do. I just want to make sure tonight is the real thing.”

“You can’t keep pushing it off, though. That’s all you keep doing.”

“There isn’t anything anyone can do to save you, not even yourself.”

ROY: How was your day?

CARTER: When are you doing it?

After Roy had told Carter that he had a good day:

CARTER: Really?

ROY: Yes.

CARTER: That’s great. What did you do?

ROY: Ended up going to work for a little bit and then just looked stuff up.

CARTER: When are you gonna do it? Stop ignoring the question???

Eventually, the talk about Carter’s suicide progressed so far that the two began discussing methods in which he could end his life. According to Phillip, Roy proposed suffocation via carbon monoxide, but then thought it might not work, at which point Carter revealed how much research she had devoted to her boyfriend’s potential suicide:

Roy thought about using a tube to channel the exhaust from his truck’s tailpipe into the vehicle but realized that the diesel engine emitted lower levels of carbon monoxide that might make failure more likely.

Carter was confident that it would work and told him why.

“If you emit 3200 ppm of it for five or ten minutes, you will die within a half hour,” she told him. “You lose consciousness with no pain. You just fall asleep and die.”

But, Phillip writes, Carter was suspicious of the plan to run a tube from the exhaust into Roy’s truck because she thought it would be too easy for him to chicken out:

But Carter didn’t love that idea, either, because she feared that Roy would make up an “excuse” to explain why it didn’t work.

“I bet you’re gonna be like ‘oh, it didn’t work because I didn’t tape the tube right or something like that,’” she texted him. “You always seem to have an excuse.”

Eventually the two thought he could use a generator to produce the carbon monoxide, and when Roy told Carter that he hadn’t procured one yet, she texted him, “WELL WHEN ARE YOU GETTING IT?” Phillip writes that when Roy found his father’s broken generator, she encouraged him to get it repaired. If that failed, Carter thought Roy could just do it some other way: “I’d try the bag or hanging. Hanging is painless and take like a second if you do it right.”

Early on July 12, 2014, Carter and Roy were once again discussing the deed. “You can’t think about it. You just have to do it,” she wrote. “I’m gonna eventually,” he said back. “I really don’t know what I’m waiting for but I have everything lined up.”

According to Phillip, Carter suggested that Roy take Benadryl to make the process easier, and that he think about going to an empty parking lot before the sun came up. At some point later that night, he did just that. He parked at a Kmart, flipped on the water pump sitting in his truck, and died.

In texts from that night with a friend, Carter says that she was talking to Roy as he sat in his truck, and could have told him to stop if she had wanted to. Carter says that at one point Roy got out of the truck as the fumes billowed out of the pump but she told him to get back in.

“Like, honestly I could have stopped it,” Carter texted Samantha months later. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car” because the carbon monoxide was working, she said. She added that she “told him to get back in.”

Carter’s attorney, for his part, is arguing that this narrative is backwards. He says that Carter was “persuaded” by the older boy, and that eventually he got her to “endorse his plan.” Publicly, Carter tried to put a good face on the story, too. Phillip reports that on Facebook, Carter wrote, “Even though I could not save my boyfriend’s life, I want to put myself out here to try to save as many other lives as possible.”

But text messages from Carter appear to belie that version of the events. There are the texts in which Carter says she “could have stopped it.” Phillip also writes that Carter asked Roy to delete their text conversation before he died. In a text to another friend, Carter seemed to understand that trouble awaited her: “[If the police] read my messages with him I’m done.”

[image via AP]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

On Monday, Frazier Glenn Miller was convicted of murder and other charges in last year’s shooting deaths of three people at two Jewish community centers outside Kansas City, the Associated Press reports. As the jurors filed out of the courtroom, Miller, 74, raised his arm in the Nazi salute.

The jury of seven men and five woman took just two hours to find Miller, who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s, guilty on one count of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and assault and weapons charges. (Miller is also known as Frazier Glenn Cross—the name he was given in 1990 after turning federal informant to get out of prison.)

The Aurora, Missouri, man admitted to killing three people—William Corporon, 69, Corporon’s 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, and Terri LaManno, 53—in the Passover eve shootings at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park and the nearby Village Shalom retirement center. However, he plead not guilty, because he said it was his duty to stop genocide against the white race.

Last fall, Miller told the Kansas City Star that he decided to carry out the attacks after he went to the emergency room in late March, unable to breathe because of his emphysema. “I was convinced I was dying then,” Miller said. “I wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died.”

According to the AP, during his closing arguments, Miller, who has been representing himself since firing his attorneys in May, said, since the killings, he has been “floating on a cloud.” Earlier, when District Attorney Steve Howe said that Miller wanted to kill as many people as possible, Miller interrupted: “I wanted to kill Jews, not people.” None of the victims were Jewish.

Before deliberations, Miller encouraged the jurors to “show great courage” and acquit him. “You have the power in your hands to inspire the world,” he said. “You can become a man or woman your forefathers will be proud of for your bravery.”

After the guilty verdict was announced, Miller, who faces the death penalty, said, “The fat lady just sang.” As the jurors left, he told them, “You probably won’t sleep tonight.” The judge reminded Miller that the jurors he was speaking to were the same who would decide his sentence. Sentence proceedings are expected to begin Thursday.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Tyga has a new video for his song “Stimulated,” featuring his girlfriend Kylie Jenner, who up until three weeks ago was 17. The song is an ode to the fact that the youngest Kardashian is barely legal and too young for the 25-year-old rapper. It’s the anthem of a predator. We get it. Enough already.

“Stimulated” (yes, meaning, like, sexually) does not leave anything to the imagination. There is no hidden meaning you have to go hunting for, because the “Rack City” rapper just puts it all out on the table. Here’s the hook:

Why the fuck you so opinionated?
Sayin’ how you do it but they ain’t did it, baby
You need a demonstration
This is how you get richer, baby
I’m stimulated
I’m at the bank, I’m penetratin’
I’m puttin’ in, I’m penetratin’
I’m gettin’ big, I’m stimulated
I touched the bitch, she disintegrated
Up in flames, I’ve been the flamest
I’ve been the hottest, you’ve been the lamest
I’ve been on the plane, you’ve been complainin’
Fuck the codefendant, pistol-whip the plaintiff
Hit the mall, then we skip arraignment
They say she young, I should’ve waited
She a big girl, dog, when she stimulated

“She a big girl, dog, when she stimulated,” but also, she was 11 when you were 18! This song would be gross if it were about a thoroughly legal woman. Statutory rape is not something to brag about. There are way less medical and more romantic ways to talk about sex than “penetratin’,” and might I add that “penetratin” and “stimulated” do not even rhyme.

The less obvious bad part of this song, besides the fact that it is about a man in his mid-twenties bragging about sex with a teenager, is that most of the video centers around Tyga sitting thoughtfully in front of a notebook, writing his bars about sex with a teenager. Agonizing over how he’s gonna brag about sex with a teenager. Plotting it out, each word, carefully selected. It’s bad. Then cut to Tyga making out with his gal, so you know what’s going on. What’s the statute of limitations for this kind of thing?

Tyga is a predator. Might I add, he’s also done porn. Porn is fine, but from all accounts, Tyga is a bad person, who doesn’t pay his debts, doesn’t pay his rent, and does it with teens and turns it into a brag. We get it, Tyga. Now go away.

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Police said on Monday that Shannon Miles, 30, who is accused of shooting and killing Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Goforth, has a history of mental illness, the Associated Press reports. After an arrest in 2012, he was sent to a state mental hospital for several months.http://gawker.com/sheriffs-deput...

According to the AP, Miles, charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after getting into a fight at a homeless shelter over a remote control, was found to be mentally incompetent in October 2012. He was sent to North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, Texas. There, in February 2013, he was declared mentally competent—prosecutors at the Travis County District Attorney’s Office offered him a plea agreement of seven years in prison—but the charge was dropped when the victim could not be found.

Miles is charged with capital murder and is being held without bond. In a court hearing on Monday, Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson said Miles ambushed Goforth and shot him 15 times:

Surveillance video from the gas station showed the 10-year law enforcement veteran had just come out of a convenience store when Miles got out of his red truck, she said. “He runs up behind Deputy Goforth and puts the gun to the back of his head and shoots. Deputy Goforth hits the ground and then he continues to unload his gun, shooting repeatedly into the back of Deputy Goforth,” Anderson said.

Goforth was shot 15 times, Anderson said, and shell casings match the .40-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun found at Miles’ home. Miles’ next court date is Oct. 5.

The killing evoked strong emotions in the area’s law enforcement community, with Hickman linking it to heightened tension over the treatment of African-Americans by police. Goforth was white and Miles is black.

Anderson refused to speculate about Miles’ motive. Asked whether it had anything to do with the aforementioned heightened tensions, Anderson said, “I have no idea whether it does or not.” Authorities said there is no evidence that Goforth and Miles knew each other.

One of Miles’ two court-appointed attorneys, Anthony Osso, told the AP that his client means to plead not guilty.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Last night at the MTV VMAs, Taylor Swift and Kanye West came full circle—not because they finally and publicly made amends after the 2009 VMAs incident when Kanye interrupted Taylor’s acceptance speech, but because Kanye, once again, got Taylor mad.

Radar reports:

Playing off of their rocky VMA history, MTV slated Swift to present Kanye with his award — but not without a detailed plan! “They had agreed to his talking points as part of the agreement of her presenting the award,” the insider told RadarOnline.com. “And then he went ‘in a whole different direction.’”

As Kanye launched into his free-form acceptance speech, which included references to his status as one of music’s most hated and misunderstood artists, as well his plans to run for president in 2020, Swift began to panic. With no chance at getting Kanye’s speech back on plan, she and her handlers took action, starting with Swift getting the heck away from Kim Kardashian West! “She said she went into tunnel vision when he started going off script and that she tried to put distance between her and Kim,” the source said. “Her publicist had them kill planned shots to her once he went off course.”

But in the end, she had nothing to worry about. “(Swift) said ‘it could have be worse’ but luckily it wasn’t about her even though he had agreed to apologize but didn’t,” the insider revealed

~He’s so small and stoned as hell! He’s so bad but he does it so well.~

[Radar]

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Kim Richards will not be serving jail time for her assault on a police officer and drunk and unruly conduct at the Beverly Hills Hotel because she’s a white lady. Instead, she will “attend 52 Alcoholics Anonymous classes and complete 30 days of community labor, which would include jobs such as cleaning up the freeway,” according to Page Six. [Page Six]

Kathy Griffin reignited her years-long feud with Demi Lovato last night by tweeting critically about Demi’s VMAs performance.

“Demi’s live singing was very obviously live if you know I’m saying. And then the rest of the track or tracks. #atleastshesang-ish #VMAs,” Kathy tweeted, prompting Demi to respond, “Happy 2 see ur still stanning me @kathygriffin. Dont worry, my new album is out Oct 16. But u prob already knew that.”

For background on their feud, read this ONTD link or cut to the chase by sticking your head into a barrel of snakes. [ONTD]

• Lena Dunham isn’t a fan of the new Justin Bieber song. [THG]
• Breaking: Anna Kendrick did some basic housekeeping. [E!]
• Isn’t it funny how R. Kelly says so many quirky things/has never been held accountable for the serial sexual abuse of young girls? No. I guess it’s not. [EW]
• Guy in a Christian cult mad at other guy in a Christian cult. [Gossip Cop]
• Hey, guys! Did you hear that Miley Cyrus likes weed? [NYDN]

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty.

“Taylor Swift Went To Africa To Film A Music Video And There’s Only White People In It.” And how very white they are!

After entertaining two perspectives on whether the Black Lives Matter movement should be categorized as a “hate group,” Bill O’Reilly decided, “They’re a hate group.” Well! Glad that’s settled. Just kidding—there’s always more: “And I’m going to tell you right now, I’m going to put them out of business.”

Hmm. Is he going to do that through a comprehensive program of racial justice and police reform? Tune tomorrow night to find out.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.