Wily old Rupert Murdoch. His media conglomerate, News Corporation, is in talks to merge its social network site, MySpace, with Yahoo, reports the Wall Street Journal. Why is this so clever?

The American Family is Under Attack. Homosexuals, liberals, Europeans, celebrities, immigrants—all seek to undermine our nation's moral code. Marriage, parenthood, even chaste teenage courtship are embattled and probably doomed. Movies about children having children out of wedlock, gays trying to marry gays, and wife-stealing media moguls are just symptoms of a deeper moral rot in our culture. Here, we present to you, exclusively, three of the greatest dangers to your family unit that you are sure to face this February—and beyond!

To "rickroll" is to entice someone to click on a link that unwittingly leads them to a clip of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up." It was attempted, IRL as the kids say, at one of those ridic "anonymous" Scientology protests last weekend. Retarded and awesome clip below.

Finally! Everyone but us will stop paying attention to Julia Allison. [Reuters]

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey denied benefits to two minors because they have eating disorders. Eating disorders, the insurance company claims, are emotional, not biological. It gets more fun: Horizon has demanded access to the kids MySpace and Facebook accounds, to "shed light on the causes of the disorders, which determines the insurer's responsibility for payment." So think twice before you make your Facebook status something lame and emo: it could be used as evidence that you're uninsurable. If you can even afford it! [Law.com]

"Click here for a slide show about 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction videos." Jon Friedman was right! Slate is the web's only hope for decency and intelligence. [Slate, Related]

Monday night on Fox's breakout hit show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah and her teenage son traveled forward through time from the late 1990s to the present day. Naturally, they had to have the events of 9/11 explained to them. By a shirtless Latino gang member. It looked like this. Treasure this gif and use it wisely. [Max Silvestri]

Internet sensation Ron Paul beat former New York Commandant Rudy Giuliani in last night's Michigan primary. In fact, the government-hating congressman received more than twice as many votes as America's Mayor. Paul also beat Giuliani in Iowa and beat Fred "Die Harder" Thompson in New Hampshire. Also he has a goddamn blimp. All hail Ron Paul! Digg this post! Let's elect the internet! Ron Paul/Corey Delaney '08! [LATimes]

The New Yorker's lengthy, depressing story on the MySpace prank that became a tragic suicide is up. If you're looking for a bright spot to a story of adults driving a depressed 13-year-old girl to suicide, it might be author Lauren Collins' description of how that whole MySpace thing works: "MySpace has a pliant grammar, and its users manipulate lowercase and capital letters for visual effect. 'Z's trump 's's, so that 'Miss Honey Love' becomes 'Mz.Hon3y Luv.' A boy named Shane writes his name '$h@NE,' in the pasteup style of a ransom note." Little old ladies from Dubuque are presumably thankful for the brief. (MySpace would like you to know that they're holding a press conference at 11 today about "security" with "Hemanshu Nigam, Chief Security Officer, MySpace and Fox Interactive Media and others.") [New Yorker]

Feast your eyes on the trailer for upcoming thriller Untracable. The high concept: "People visit a website that is livestreaming a murder — an increase in traffic speeds up the process of death." The film's erratic killer has "no vision beyond page views." [Filmoculous via Kottke.org]

Would you like to buy a life-like action figure modeled on popular internet-based "marketing guru" Seth Godin? Yes? Then please never, ever introduce yourself to us. [NerdApproved]

Google, the world's most wonderful or evil company, has greylisted popular web host company Dreamhost, even while it claims that levels of spam are dropping overall. (Dreamhost is a ten-year-old company that hosts more than half a million websites on more than 1500 servers.) The greylist (which means that mail sent through Dreamhost to Gmail is delayed by hours or days while it is assessed for mass-spamming) was imposed more than two weeks ago by Gmail; it was triggered because so many Dreamhost users forward their mail to Gmail, which made Dreamhost look like a spammer. Dreamhost announced the problem on November 17, and has talked with Google support, and yet it's still not resolved. This seems like evidence that Google's infrastructure has major trouble—how is it possible that it takes more than two weeks to remove a legitimate source of mail from a greylist?

Staten Island, home to that one thrift store we went to once, is sometimes called "the fifth borough." But not on popular social networking site "Facebook.com", which, according to the Richmond County Young Republicans Club, doesn't recognize the hellish fake-tanned monster island as a town or city.

Let us bow and say thank you to the gods of Silicon Valley for everything that's not in this 1994 version of "24."

Tired of know-it-all meteorologists telling you what the weather might be like today? Sick of their uppity "scientific forecasts" and "Doppler maps"? Why not let the internet predict the weather! Thanks to a new World Wide Web site called "Cumul.us" (see what they did there?), now you can! The wisdom of crowds will tell you if you need a jacket! Or "the wisdom of clouds"! (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE?)

The best thing on the TV ever was the mid-'90s Comedy Central cheap-looking cowtown puppet show Mystery Science Theater 3000. From, let's say, 1990-1995, it was both a totally brilliant show (that I still enjoy thanks to Rhino Home Video and BitTorrent) and also an integral part of my childhood. And now the internet is going to ruin it.

Should striking WGA members really be writing on the internet over at HuffPo—in other words providing free content for new media? We say no, mostly because the majority of the striking writers blogging over there are so God-awful boring compared to the drama on the streets of Hollywood. [HuffPo]

"The Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes poll found that 24% of Americans said the Internet could serve as a replacement for a significant other." Poor television! Forty loving years of companionship and it gets dumped for slash fic and never-ending Hentai. [463 Communications]

The House of Representatives has approved a four-year extension to a ban on Internet taxation (it still has to make it through the Senate). Since 1998, Americans have enjoyed tax-free access to the Internet and its brick-and-mortar-less stores — at least when the latter are based out of state. A plea to the Senate: Please don't reinstate taxes that have yet to exist. Instead, work on rationalizing the nation's insane sales-tax structure. [News.com]

Like the creators of The Onion before them, the sideburned jokesters responsible for those "Chad Vader" YouTube videos are trying as hard as they can to escape from Madison, Wisconsin. They're represented by William Morris! They're flying out to New York to participate in something called "Battle of the Internet Superstars" (uggghh)! And as long as they keep pumping out lame Star Wars parodies, people will continue trying to figure out how to make money off of them. Is it wrong, though, that we'd kinda rather subscribe to the YouTube channel of militant North Carolinian jihadist Samir Khan?