As the Internet desperately tries to figure out what the hell is going on with Weinergate, a new theory, first propounded on the liberal blog Cannonfire yesterday, is attracting a lot of attention on “the blogs.” In sum, it goes like this: There’s a feature on the photo-sharing website yFrog the one that Weiner’s maybe-wiener popped up on that allows you to post a photo to the site via e-mail. Send an e-mail to your personalized, private yFrog e-mail address (which consists of your Twitter name and some randomly generated letters), with a photo attached, and that photo will be posted to your yFrog account. If you put someone’s Twitter handle in the subject line of the e-mail @Gennettec, for example the e-mail will also tweet the photo to that person.
Cannonfire contends that someone — perhaps the one guy who noticed Weiner’s lewd tweet — did all of this on Weiner’s behalf after learning of his yFrog e-mail address somehow. A blogger for The Rachel Maddow Show, Will Femia, also posits that you can easily figure out a yFrog e-mail address’s string of random letters with a computer program, which we’d basically call hacking. One problem with this theory is that it doesn’t account for how this hacker/prankster would have acquired a photo of Weiner’s bulge in the first place — assuming that it is Weiner’s bulge. And based on his perplexing inability to rule it out yesterday, that is, indeed, what most people are assuming.
