Hackers post on PBS Web site
Hip-hop fans rejoice: Tupac Shakur lives! Or not.
Early Monday morning, the PBS Web site featured a story, since removed, asserting that the rapper, who was gunned down in 1996, had been found alive and well in a New Zealand resort town, living with rival rapper Biggie Smalls (also deceased).
Sadly, it was just a work of Internet mischief, perpetrated by hackers who had busted into the network’s site, reports the Los Angeles Times. Along with the fabricated news story, the group, called LulzSec, posted a some graffiti-like Web pages and made public a huge cache of phone numbers, logins and passwords, apparently for PBS member-station Web sites.
Why beat up on poor old PBS? Apparently the hackers were upset over what they perceived as a critical portrayal of the document-leaking WikiLeaks site on an episode of “Frontline.” “Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed,” the attackers wrote. “We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further . . . perusing.”
Md. man wins Cliburn contest
While the rest of us were strolling the boardwalk this weekend, Ellicott City gastroenterologist Christopher Shih was in Fort Worth winning the Van Cliburn Foundation’s sixth annual international amateur piano competition — beating out 69 competitors. With his performance of Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Shih, 38, took home the $2,000 prize plus a pair of Cliburn custom spurs from Luskey’s/Ryons Western Stores.
Shih, whose professional practice is with Maryland Digestive Disease Center, a division of Capital Digestive Care, has now won four major amateur competitions, in Texas, D.C., Boston and Paris. “It’s the minor league for piano competitions,” said Shih, whose wife, Maya, is a violinist on the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. In the finals, he was up against a Formula One race-car designer from Oxfordshire, England, and a database programmer from Fort Worth.
So, when does Shih, with a full-time medical practice and “a full-time family,” get time to practice piano? “After we get the kids to bed.”
‘Beautiful Girls’ singer injured
Auto-Tuned crooner Sean Kingston has been hospitalized following a jet-skiing accident on Sunday.
“Sean was heading west from the MacArthur Causeway and Miami Beach Islands when his personal watercraft collided with the bridge, and he and his female passenger ended up in the water,” Jorge Pino, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, told People magazine.
The singer, 21, known for his 2007 hit single “Beautiful Girls,” is in stable condition.
Wills and Kate to visit Canada
The royal newlyweds, just back from an opulent honeymoon in the Seychelles, are packing bags once again, this time for a visit to Canada, People magazine reports.
The recently minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will spend the first week of July touring the land of Tim Hortons coffee-and-doughnut emporiums. Among their stops: Montreal, Quebec City, Calgary and Yellowknife.
On July 8 they’ll head south for a stay in Los Angeles. This will be Kate Middleton’s first trip to North America.
— Aaron Leitko,
from staff, Web and wire reports
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