Self-promotion on social media is an embarrassing and undignified business. One Lenovo PR exec boldly refused to pretend otherwise, approaching "top tier journalists" with arms outstretched: flattery in one hand, bribery in the other.

Airbnb has been losing control of its brand in recent weeks, with headlines dominated by squatters and their new boob-butt-balls brand. But the sharing economy startup is trying to shift the story back to their favor, and they're employing corporate America's favor PR trick to get there: greenwashing.

The Startup Swindlers have a long history of running scams. A Valleywag tipster alerted us to another lawsuit filed against the Pashanin brothers. This time, it's a 2009 lawsuit in which pair were accused of squatting a San Francisco SRO hotel room for three months, once again refusing pay rent or vacate the premises.

Tinder is not really a startup. The tumult-filled dating company is owned by IAC, and answers to it like any subsidiary. So why is Tinder CEO Sean Rad telling the New York Times his app is "self-financed," among other nonsense?

Jack Halprin may be the head of Google's armada of eDiscovery lawyers, but he's becoming an serial evictor back in San Francisco. After purchasing a seven-unit building in the Mission District in 2012, he quickly began illegally evicting his tenants. But now four of his tenants are suing him for violating a litany of laws, and Halprin is trying to elude the lawsuit.

Two years ago, students at ITP, NYU's "high-tech funhouse," built a fake Kickstarter to warn viewers about the possibility that crowdfunding platforms might eventually be used for warfare. That bit of online performance art turned out to be prescient. Earlier this week, a campaign on Crowdtilt successfully raised $22,000 to buy battle gear for the IDF's 97th Battalion, according to the description on the site.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the celebrity role-playing game from the Seinfeld of reality stars, is currently the fifth most popular free iPhone app on Apple's charts. It's also the fifth-highest grossing. One analyst predicted revenue of $200 million this year. But how many of the fame gamers that put it there have any idea what they spent to get on the C-list?

The Airbnb squatters want to make sure their "10/10, would squat again" experience lasts as long as possible. Forcing their "host" to undergo months of expensive legal work to evict them was only the beginning. Now the startup swindlers are reportedly wearing disguises to avoid being served an eviction notice.

In 2011, Justine Tunney was an anti-establishment organizer within Occupy Wall Street, exhorting class warfare on the sidewalk. Today, it appears that Tunney spends her time ranting against the poor, advocating for the overthrow of American democracy, and not least notably, working at Google's New York branch.

Westboro Baptist Church, the reviled homophobic hate group, has found a new target to protest: every company in Silicon Valley. Congratulations, you just found the quickest way to make the tech industry look hella sympathetic. The enemy of these lunatics is everyone's friend.

What do we do if Evan Spiegel wasn't just arrogant, but right? What if Snapchat turned down $3 billion in order to someday make much, much more? A new report out of Bloomberg says the app's valuation is in the stratosphere.

With Google Bus protests failing to generate the same impact they carried eight months ago, San Francisco's housing activists shifted their energies towards peer-to-peer hoteliers Airbnb and VRBO today.

San Francisco already fought off the scourge of predatory parking apps, successfully getting MonkeyParking and ParkModo to suspend their parking spot auctioning services. But the Street Parking Arbitrage Revolution is just gaining steam on the East Coast, and Bostonians are fucking pissed.

Three years ago, the powerhouse tech investors at Sequoia Capital announced they were putting $10 million into The Melt, a small chain of grilled cheese sandwich restaurants. Today, The Melt is not only still around, but somehow dumber than ever.

For the first time in the company's history, Twitter is profitable.

Google just tied its all-time lobbying record, spending "$5.03 million on lobbying from April through June." Reportedly, Google lobbied Washington on issues ranging from "cybersecurity, patent reform, tax reform and immigration" to "autonomous vehicle technology."

Yahoo may have cemented its reputation as a dumping ground for failed mobile startups, but Walmart is staking out a similar renown with shopping startups. Over the last few months, the nation's favorite predatory retailer has been buying up some Silicon Valley e-commerce cruft.

Pavel Khodorkovskiy's father was, at one time, the richest man in Russia. As the head of the now-bankrupted oil giant Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky amassed a $15 billion fortune before being jailed by the Russian government in 2005. But his father was recently pardoned by President Vladimir Putin following international backlash, and now the younger Khodorkovskiy is building his own energy company: a cleantech startup.

Uber has been connected to a number of sexual assaults and kidnappings this summer. The latest comes from Washington D.C., where an Uber driver stands accused of molesting a drunk passenger.

One very real risk associated with never shutting the fuck up on Twitter is that you set yourself up to be humiliated on the global stage. It finally happened to the man who deserves it above all.