Reuters editor faces charges of helping "Anonymous" hack site when he was with Tribune.

McKee Foods picks up Drakes brand from Hostess.

Chevy chooses McCann for global advertising account.

Boeing strongly defends Dreamliner.

Center for Science in the Public Interest blasts Nickelodeon for airing junk food ads.

Coke seeks world peace via vending machines.

Disney develops unique approach to India.Continue reading...

Jeep today became the second major brand in as many days to have its Twitter feed hacked, with the perps joking that the brand had been sold to Cadillac. The message was similar to Monday's Twitter hack of the official Burger King account which said that McDonald's had taken over its rival.

"We're aware of it and working quickly to resolve" the situation, Chrysler Group spokesman Rick Deneau told brandchannel on Tuesday afternoon. The Twitter feed was restored and the erroneous postings and content removed.

Chrysler had managed to restore some elements of its official Twitter site by mid-afternoon but not all. In the hack, the background image of Jeep's official Twitter account was swapped out to show the Cadillac logo and an old sedan was painted with McDonald's logo and colors. That specific "creative" would imply that the same party hacked Jeep and Burger King.Continue reading...

It has to hurt when your chief competitor tweets, "We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts. Rest assured, we had nothing to do with the hacking."

The LulzSec pranskster hacktivists are claiming credit for Monday's hacking of the official Burger King account, which entailed subbing in McDonalds' golden arches and changing the name of @BurgerKing to McDonalds at a little after noon ET on Monday. BK confirmed to the Associated Press that it asked Twitter to take its @burgerking account offline while it repaired the damage.

Update: @BurgerKing went back online around 10pm EST Monday night, leaving a few of of the hackers' retweets intact:

Other fake BK tweets during the hack included, “We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you," and the background picture changed to McDonald's new Fish McBites menu item. And subsequent tweets used the hashtag #OpMadCow and, "if I catch you at a wendys, we're fightin!"Continue reading...

Would you buy a T-shirt with a Latin Kings gang symbol on it? How about a backpack with the Bloods gang sign? Would you even try and trademark such a symbol? The branding of illegal activity is usually done underground, consisting of tattoos and graffiti mostly. So why French company, Early Flicker, would try and trademark the Anonymous logo and slogan is un peu bizarre.

Tweeted by @Asher Wolf yesterday, it appears Apollinaire Auffret from Early Flicker applied to the Institut National De La Propriete Industrielle (INPI) to protect the logo and slogan. The hacktivist group's logo consists of a headless man in a suit with a question mark for a head, standing before a globe and a wreath. The slogan reads "Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." Early Flicker is an eBay store that has a range of different product categories, including t-shirts, handbags, and accessories.

The little e-tialer is taking on a big dog with its latest bid. Anonymous condones crime by illegaly releasing protected IP and temporarily bringing down large corporate and brands' websites, but don't like any legal moves that impinge on their rights. So, naturally, Anonymous has already issued this response:Continue reading...

Wikipedia is going offline on Jan. 18th as part of the mass online protest against SOPA: The Stop Online Piracy Act.  As the site explains:

The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made.Continue reading...

Lowe’s caused an uproar when the DIY chain pulled its ads from TLC’s month-old reality show, All-American Muslim, which follows the adventures of five Muslim-American families that live near Detroit. That action caused plenty of anger to surface about the company as well as a call to boycott its stores by California State Senator Ted Lieu.

Now travel website Kayak.com is getting similar treatment. The site announced that it had decided to discontinue its ads mostly because it felt that the producers of the show hadn’t been totally upfront about its content.

“Any reasonable person would know that this topic is a particular lightning rod,” Kayak’s chief marketing officer, Robert Birge, wrote on the company’s blog. “We believe TLC went out of their way to pick a fight on this, and they didn't let us know their intentions. That's not a business practice that generally gets repeat business from us.”Continue reading...

A protest is scheduled today, 5PM Pacific Time, at the Civic Center BART Station in San Francisco. BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) finds itself in an escalating conflict with online "hacktivist" group Anonymous, in a newly minted digital challenge over First Amendment rights (see video above).

The protest began in retaliation for shutdown of cell phone service by BART Thursday night at several stations, a measure taken to disrupt planned demonstrations over a BART police shooting July 3 of a homeless man whom police said wielded a knife.

"We are Anonymous, we are your citizens, we are the people, we do not tolerate oppression from any government agency. BART has proved multiple times that they have no problem exploiting and abusing the people," said the hackers' website.Continue reading...

Pfizer was compelled to take down its Facebook page after being hacked July 19th by U.K. hackers, The Script Kiddies, who claimed responsibility for the social misdeed on Twitter. The group's grievance, apparently, is that (in their words) the pharma giant is “A Corrupt Corporate American Company guilty of cutting corners and killing people.” Such are the charming times we live in.

A screenshot of the hacked posts shows the Pfizer logo smeared in red (above) and information about Pfizer's $2.3 billion settlement of a U.S. investigation of its drug-marketing practices in 2009. 

Hackers have been targeting government agencies and major corporations in the past several months — if you haven't read about Operation Shady RAT, Vanity Fair has a good backgrounder — so the fear is this attack is just the tip of the online iceberg for Big Pharma, an industry that was already tiptoeing (read: reticent) to embrace social media.Continue reading...