weinergate

The Hot New Weiner Theory Sweeping the Internet

As the Internet desperately tries to figure out what the hell is going on with Weinergate, a new theory, first propounded on the liberal blog Cannonfire yesterday, is attracting a lot of attention on “the blogs.” In sum, it goes like this: There’s a feature on the photo-sharing website yFrog — the one that Weiner’s maybe-wiener popped up on — that allows you to post a photo to the site via e-mail. Send an e-mail to your personalized, private yFrog e-mail address (which consists of your Twitter name and some randomly generated letters), with a photo attached, and that photo will be posted to your yFrog account. If you put someone’s Twitter handle in the subject line of the e-mail — @Gennettec, for example — the e-mail will also tweet the photo to that person.

Cannonfire contends that someone — perhaps the one guy who noticed Weiner’s lewd tweet — did all of this on Weiner’s behalf after learning of his yFrog e-mail address somehow. A blogger for The Rachel Maddow Show, Will Femia, also posits that you can easily figure out a yFrog e-mail address’s string of random letters with a computer program, which we’d basically call hacking. One problem with this theory is that it doesn’t account for how this hacker/prankster would have acquired a photo of Weiner’s bulge in the first place — assuming that it is Weiner’s bulge. And based on his perplexing inability to rule it out yesterday, that is, indeed, what most people are assuming.

CASE CLOSED! CONGRESSMAN WEINER WAS FRAMED! (An important update to “The Weiner affair: Close to solution (but I need your help!)” [Cannonfire]

The Hot New Weiner Theory Sweeping the Internet