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Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.

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Amid its traditional mixture of glossy celebrity and gritty reportage, the magazine Paris Match published this week a searing double-page spread on student poverty in France.

The excellent black and white photographs of students prostituting themselves or looking for food in dustbins won the magazine’s annual prize for student photojournalism. Student poverty certainly exists in France but the photos were entirely faked.

Before they received their trophy and €5,000 (£4,260) cheque at a ceremony on Wednesday, the prize-winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Rémi Hubert, read out a statement admitting to the hoax, stating that they had wanted to make a “powerful artistic gesture” attacking the “voyeurism” and gullibility of parts of the press.

The prize jury looked crestfallen but managed to applaud all the same. The two students, from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, were handed their €5,000 cheque, which was later blocked by Paris Match.

You can see the pictures here.

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Patent number 5255452, filed in 1992, shows how Michael Jackson and his dancers could lean at 45-degree angles during live performances of the song “Smooth Criminal”.

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You can see them perform the move in the below video; watch the guy on the right, as he has trouble disengaging his loafers after the move.

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Earlier this week, NASA released an amazing photograph of an eruption of Sarychev Peak Volcano, taken by astronauts aboard the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). Seeing that great photo prompted me to dig into the archives and see what other imagery I could find from recent NASA archives. Collected here are a handful of photographs of Sarychev Peak Volcano, and more, taken by astronauts aboard the ISS over the past few months. (35 photos total)

35
High above the Indian Ocean, astronauts captured these four images (animated here) of the Aurora Australis and surrounding airglow in the Earth’s atmosphere as the ISS orbits quickly past. (NASA/JSC) #

Just when you thought that iPhone users had exhausted all things they could get angry about AT&T

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The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000. AT&T is apparently claiming that Savage managed to download 9 gigabytes in Canada using his USB data connection (which he calls “frakking impossible“). What’s worse, the customer service rep Savage was dealing with was apparently a bit loose with their decimal points, telling Savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb”. Read that again — there’s a couple orders of magnitude difference there.

Now Twitter is in revolt. With over 50,000 followers Savage has a pretty loud voice, and his outraged tweets certainly resonate with a broad audience. In the end, he’ll probably get a pass from AT&T — nobody wants to mess with a man who blows things up for a living. But it’s clear that AT&T needs to work on letting its customers know when they’re spending exorbitant amounts of money on data charges.

And indeed, they waived the charges:

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AT&T guy on the phone with me:” apparently you’ve got enough Twitter followers to get our attention.” me: “50,000″. Him: “wow”.

And Adam knows that the average joe is still fucked:

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I agree with everyone: it shouldn’t just work for me. The data carriers MUST stop thinking in kilobytes and start thinking in customers.