From MetaFilter:

"In 1999, 23-year-old singer-songwriter Bree Sharp recorded "David Duchovny," a fangirl ode to the male star of The X-Files. After the demo tape proved popular in Duchovny's trailer, two X-Files assistants created a celebrity-filled music video as a gag for the show Christmas party. A grainy bootleg of the video quickly went pre-Youtube-viral among X-Philes. Twelve years later, a high-definition version of the David Duchovny video sees daylight for the first time."

As someone who has had that grainy bootleg on my hard drive since the days of usenet, I am both ridiculously excited and completely earwormed by this.

The MetaFilter post contains the list of celebs who appear in the video and all kinds of Bree Sharp trivia. And the final paragraph is worth the price of admission:

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE MONOTONE
David Duchovny currently stars in the Showtime dramedy Californication. At age 51, he continues to be brooding and comely.

New York Magazine's Vulture blog has the exclusive but can't tell if it will be a true remake of the Verhoeven film or something more faithful to the book. Comments range from the clueful to the failtastic.

Hey, folks. SOME FUN NEWS FOR YOU via people on twitter and I can't be buggered to go back further than @cleolinda and @nikkifinke for figuring out who linked it first.

CBS developing modern Sherlock Holmes.

Also, something called Mommy-Track Mysteries.

( The text! )

Why Have Hackers Hit Russia's Most Popular Blogging Service?

If the hacker attacks that hit Russia's top blogging service, LiveJournal, this week are anything to go by, the unwritten rules of cyber warfare no longer apply. Instead of the focused assaults hackers often used to force down the websites of their ideological enemies, these attacks look more like online carpet bombing. Their victim is not one voice but the entire cacophonous world of the Russian blogosphere. And the motive, as close as experts have been able to figure, is to erode the virtual infrastructure of free speech itself...

But this week, the second barrage against LiveJournal — the site's owners called it "an all-out war" — broke away from the familiar pattern. The onslaught, coming from an army of remotely controlled computers, had no ideological rhyme or reason. The victims included dozens of Russia's most popular bloggers, ranging from a sentimental fiction writer to a banking tycoon, as well as the LiveJournal homepage. Even the blog of President Dmitri Medvedev, a self-styled techie, came under attacks so powerful that it was inaccessible for several hours on Wednesday. On Thursday, Medvedev ordered police to launch an investigation.

"This kind of attack is something totally new," says Marina Litvinovich, a former government spin doctor who went on to create Russia's main aggregator of blog posts, BestToday.ru. "It is an attempt to uproot not one user but the entire LiveJournal community, which appears to have become too influential, too strong in setting the political agenda of the day."

Indeed, with around 5 million Russian accounts read by some 30 million people per month, LiveJournal has emerged as the country's last truly free and public space for political debate, a chaotic kind of intellectual clearinghouse and the source of not only gossip, conspiracy theories and pro-government propaganda, but also countless revelations of corruption and official incompetence. In terms of the sheer variety of opinions expressed and defended on LiveJournal, it has been leagues ahead of Russia's other media.

On the one hand, yay free speech. On the other, why must my flist suffer for Russian politics? *sad kitty*