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Anonymous posts anti-scientology videos on Youtube. They get canceled. They start a new account in order to try again and perhaps not get canceled this time. They get canceled.

Apparently Youtube policy is that if you've been banned, you get no second chances. Any new account you create will be destroyed…. Unless you're paying money as in the case of the Cult of Scientology.

And yet Scientology is back on YouTube. This time, it's paying for the account. It's also paying for ads on the site, looking to drive some traffic onto its new channel. "Get the facts," the ads say.

Bad play Lending Tree. Bad play.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

Apparently a Lending Tree employee gave internal passwords to external lenders without permission. This resulted in people being offered loans by lenders who shouldn't have been able to see their data. While Lending Tree doesn't believe that this particular activity is likely to lead to ID theft, it is a problem nonetheless.

I wasn't going to cover this story because it's so typical of what's happening recently, but this stuck in my craw. In a letter shared with the Consumerist by a reader, Lending Tree is recommending that people get fraud alerts on their accounts as a precaution.

Fraud alerts are practically worthless! Don't even bother. Get a freeze and you'll actually be protected.

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The last thing this cult wants is more exposure into their secret operating documents. Go Wikileaks!

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Even if you did everything right to keep you private photos and information private, a Facebook security flaw allows people to access it anyway.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened and I'd bet that it's far from being the last.

Who knows you're out of town and what will they do with the information?

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Here's a great example of how knowing something as simple as where someone lives along with when they're out of town is enough to make their life hell. While this poor guy was minding his business fishing on a lake somewhere, someone called to ask about the free stuff at his house. The thing is, he wasn't giving anything away at all.

Someone posted an ad on Craigslist.com stating that everything on his property was free and people came to rob the place blind.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

If you've heard of Rev. Wright (Barack Obama's pastor) and the things he's reportedly said, you should probably know that there's a video of the sermons where you'll find he didn't actually say what was reported.

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Josh discovered a mysterious $13 fee on his parents' phone bill, and as he tracked down the source of the bogus charge, he learned a lot about cramming. The FCC describes it as "the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill" by third party companies, who bank on you being too confused/distracted/annoyed by your hard-to-read bill to notice.

Read his story here.

My main reason for digging this besides warning (or reminding) you about this practice was the first comment after the article:

Just another example of the disparity between corporations and people. Corporations freely get away doing things that people would go to jail for.

Though the Virgina legislature examined payday lending, they only solution they brought forth was to limit them as far as interest rates and repayment periods. However, at least one small town has kicked out payday lenders via zoning laws. While this may not rate "big news" it is good news and caught my attention for this alone:

The sole proponent of amending the zoning was Randy Phelps, manager of the Advance America lending store in a nearby town. His company, whose Web site says it operates 2,800 stores nationwide, was seeking to open a cash advance store in a new strip shopping center, part of the town's new Wal-Mart complex. "We're not evil people," Phelps protested to the council. "We provide a needed service."

"We're not evil people"…. Doesn't that give you chills? If pretending to hold a hand out in friendship while stabbing someone in the back with the other hand isn't evil I don't know what is.

Currently they're planning to add children to the DNA database:

Home Office officials said plans to include primary school children on the DNA record would be kept 'under review'. The DNA database includes 4.5 million samples of genetic material, many taken from people who have been arrested but never charged with a crime. By next year, it is expected that 1.5 million of the samples will be from youngsters aged between ten and 18.

Bloody hell.

Don't worry, it's not real

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MIT is working on software that analyzes the surfaces in photos to see if the light patterns all match in order to detect fakes.

Many fraudulent images are created by combining parts of two or more photographs into a single image. When the parts are combined, the combination can sometimes be spotted by variations in the lighting conditions within the image. An observant person might notice such variations, Johnson says; however, "people are pretty insensitive to lighting."

Another technique is to check the grain of the photo for irregularities. When an object is placed within a photo, the new object will have differing grain from the original (though there are ways to reduce and eliminate this).

If you're wondering why this matters, check out these examples of how fake photos can be drastically harmful: