NYT profile of Party Poker online gambling is technically illegal in the U.S., but nobody seems to mind their $600m earnings in 2004 #

Tom Cruise Kills Oprah

On Tuesday, I posted a link to my local copy of the Tom Cruise Kills Oprah Quicktime video that I found on an unnamed file-sharing site. Since then, the clip’s exploded in popularity. It’s been linked from MSNBC, USA Today, b3ta, and every Livejournal and message board on the planet. Right now, I’m serving about 200 gigabytes of the 4.1MB video every day. Yesterday, it was downloaded over 52,000 times and 60,000 times the day before. (Watch my bandwidth implode in real-time.)

Does anyone know the origins of the video? (Update: Found! Read the update below for details.) I know that it was later used to create the YTMND page, but nobody seems to know the source of the original video.

Between his crazy Scientology ranting, his war on psychiatry and anti-depressants, creeping out Hollywood starlets, frenetic couch jumping, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the brainwashing of Katie Holmes, it seems like Tom Cruise is the new Michael Jackson. Sounds good to me.

Update: Leonard’s hosting the video for a while until traffic dies down a bit. Thanks, Leonard!

June 27, 2005: An anonymous commenter admitted to creating the movie using audio from a downloaded version of Star Wars Episode III. He adds, “The video was created using Adobe Premiere for the shot and sound editing and Adobe After Effects 6.5 for the lightning using the ‘advanced lightning’ feature.”

I can confirm that my source originally found it on Shacknews, so this makes sense.

Flickr Montager automated photo mosaics using Flickr; it must be hammering their servers, though (via) #