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Dusty

This has got to be my favorite story recently. Probably for the past six months or a year I've been reading /b/ on 4chan. First out of curiosity about the place that made lolcats, Rickrolling, and the always cautious Admiral Akbar, then from sheer enjoyment. It's not for the squeamish, but for me it's a perfect representation of what's best about the internet: near anarchy.

So, when I try to describe /b/ to people--people who don't spend that much time online--it's a little difficult but the best I've come up with is that it's a website where people chat and post porn and cute cat pictures. If you can imagine the intersection of such interests, that's close enough. Saturdays begin with an angry cat demanding that cat pictures be posted:

From there, hundreds of cats+wackiness images are uploaded and commented upon with the mandatory =^_^=. These people love their cats and this made a completely unfortunate situation for Kenny Glenn when he, anonymously, uploaded a video of himself masked and cruelly torturing his pet cat Dusty. Sunday morning the internets got wind of this and 4chan, Reddit, and Digg all posted their vows of vengeance. That being said, nobody does vengeance like /b/ and they quickly put up an irc channel to coordinate efforts to track down the evildoer (in a rare moment, I chose not to watch the video after reading the warning; it sounded grimmer than most of the shock stuff that gets posted). A day later, after geek forensics of the video and the YouTube account, all crowdsourced through irc, the kid was arrested.

Here are some of the relevant references for this weird-yet-happy story (Dusty is on his way to adoption):

• Kenny Glenn.net was quickly put up to track the progress and subsequent justice.
• There's a similar page called neverforgetdusty.com
• Reddit's discussion of the events is fascinating. Notable is the entry where sites' different responses were compared.
• Of course, the NSFW++ site Encyclopedia Dramatic has a page for Kenny Glenn. Do not pity him.
• Weirdest: Back in August 2008, the Wikipedia disambiguation page for Dusty had an entry added that stated Dusty is a Texan tabby who is most known for giving birth to 420 kittens during her lifetime. There could be possibly more. The only subsequent change was a [citation needed] link; otherwise, it still exists in that form today. I can't make this shit up.

I like the internet even more today.