The @dinalohan account on Twitter, supposedly written by the reality-TV star mom of Lindsay Lohan, was exposed last weekend as a hilarious fraud perpetrated by a Matt Cherette, a 24-year-old Michigan man. But Handler and her guest commentators seem unaware that it's not actually Lohan behind the tweets. Handler was completely taken in by Cherette's main schtick — writing tweets which bump up against Twitter's 140-character limit, which the imaginary Lohan attributes to "censorship" by Twitter's "tech support."

Earlier today, we wondered whether Dina, the mother of Lindsay Lohan, was tweeting for real. The constant complaints about "haters" and deranged defenses of her daughter, not to mention the sheer volume sustained over the past two weeks, seemed nearly impossible to fake.

The key word being "nearly." Cherette, a relative newcomer to Twitter, seems to have quickly learned the potentials of this new storytelling medium. One thing the Lohan impostor quickly figured out: By pretending that Dina didn't get the service's 140-character limit on posts, he'd be able to draw a small army of enraged Twitter nerds eager to correct Lohan's gaffe.

According to our tipster, who says he's privy to some of Cherette's private postings on LiveJournal, Cherette has been posting comments crowing about his coup. Here are screenshots:

Assuming this prank doesn't have yet another layer to it, congratulations, Matt. You have endless opportunity ahead of you getting paid to pretend you're a celebrity.

Update: We just heard back from Cherette, who's admitted to the stunt and demonstrated that he controls the Twitter account. "What would you like to know?" he asks. Leave questions for him in the comments. Cherette also says he's the person who created Rosie O'Donnell's fake Twitter account.

Well, OK, they only profile a few people, mainly a magazine editor and a prissy French designer who gets the joke but only sort of.

From the inelegant English of designer, Lloyd Klein, caught unawares at Studio 54:

I go backstage to try to find my manager to ask 'Who the hell is this person?' But I stayed very cool with the situation ... I know the way French people react because I am French. They don't have a big sense of humor. They're very bitter, so I think it will be a tough one.

From Marie Claire (high fashion!) editor Joanna Coles, who got Bruno'd in Milan last year:

We literally didn't realize it was Bruno. We said—thinking it was just some Italian tagalong—'You can't come in, we don't have a ticket for you!' If we'd realized it was him, we'd have totally taken him in—why not?

Cohen fooled lots of other people too, like Stella McCartney—apparently he waved a tampon around at the designer's Spring '09 show in Paris—and supermodel Tom Brady-dater Gisele Bündchen, of whom Bruno claimed to be an old friend ever since they met one time in Los Angeles. To her credit, Gisele didn't try to fake that she remembered him. Most of these high-nosed fashion waifs were pretty okay about it and found it funny. You know, after the fact. At least they took it better than those cage match attendees. Though, I hear that Jonathan Antin can really throw down.

Now Wired's Threat Level blog has the inside story of how it all went down. The hacker's handle is GMZ (no relation to the AOL dirt-hub), a clever 18-year-old who used a rather primitive but effective system to break in. Noticing that Twitter allowed unlimited login attempts, he fashioned a program that would feed English words into the account of a frequent Twitter follower named Crystal. The next morning, "happiness" did the trick, but GMZ learned he hadn't just hacked into any account—Crystal was a Twitter staffer with full administrative access.

Realizing he had access to reset any account's password and login, GMZ did the responsible thing: He threw it open to hacker forum Digital Gangster, offering access to any account by request:

President-Elect Barack Obama was among the most popular requests from Digital Gangster denizens, with around 20 members asking for access to the election campaign account. After resetting the password for the account, he gave the credentials to five people.

He also filled requests for access to Britney Spears' account, as well as the official feeds for Facebook, CBS News, Fox News and the accounts of CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez and Digg founder Kevin Rose. Other targets included additional news outlets and other celebrities. Fox won the hacker popularity contest, beating out even Obama and Spears. According to Twitter, 33 high-profile accounts were compromised in all.

That means that the poet behind the Britney vagina tweet was not the same author as the minimalist O'Reilly entry, in case you had trouble rectifying their wildly differing voices. Let this be a lesson to you all: a word in the dictionary is not a secure password. Make it eight characters, mixing letters and numbers—otherwise anyone can break in to your account and pass off outrageous statements like "Fred 62 is so good" as your own.

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker [Wired]

First, it must be acknowledged that Clooney is a smart man. He's not a grown-up version of Ashton Kutcher, an airheaded frat boy pulling practical jokes that a team of writers dreamed up. Clooney may be a frat boy type and a practical joker, but he knows exactly what he's doing. He has a very solid reason for every career-related move that he makes; look at the crafty, political way he chooses his movies. Except that new one about the old-timey football thing—who knows what that's all about.

The point is, Clooney sees the big picture. Recall his response to the original unveiling of the "Gawker Stalker" map. While lots of celebrities moaned about the intrusion into their privacy and imagined ridiculous implications for their personal safety, Clooney actually had a plan: he told a bunch of entertainment publicists to flood the site with false tips, thereby rendering it useless. It turned out that the Stalker maps are hardly a threat to anyone, and the flood of outrageous fake tips that Clooney inspired eventually disappeared. But he did prove that he was thinking about how to fight back against the celebrity-industrial complex, and even came up with an effective strategy—more than you can say for Brad Pitt, whose decision to fire his publicist will (prediction!) fail to magically allow him to disappear from the eyes of the media.

The problem is that Clooney is a CORNERSTONE of that very same complex. A man who ambitiously rose from a bit part of "The Facts Of Life" to a place in the pantheon of outrageously famous movie stars is hardly a credible spokesman for the cause of anti-publicity. On top of that, the press that Clooney gets is, by celebrity standards, pretty positive. It's impossible to argue that the very same paparazzi and tabloid media that he deplores have not, on balance, been a boon to his career.

And look at it from the poor, poor entertainment reporter's perspective: without some effort at critical coverage, they are bound to feel like nothing more than tools of the equally powerful movie marketing machine. Sure, staking out every nightclub, restaurant, and dwelling place of a celebrity is not really hard-hitting, or even socially redeeming, reporting. But Clooney, whose father was himself a newsman, should understand that it's all part of the package of being a star—a deal that he surely enjoys.

The actor would doubtless say that he supports real journalism, which is all well and good. So do we! But Americans have an unfortunate taste for the minutiae of the lives of their big screen heroes. So perhaps some sort of bargain can be struck. The tabloids can promise to take Clooney's earnest projects seriously, and in return, he can throw them a bone by accepting that his social life will always appear in the gossip pages and on the blogs, until he chooses to retire into obscurity. Besides, even if he were to enlist each and every one of his celebrity friends in his cause of punking the media, it would never work—that story in and of itself would be covered to death, resulting in a level of scrutiny that's equal to the one that the Hollywood types already receive.

So let's all just get along, in the words of famous celebrity Rodney King. Except, of course, for those pranks on the paparazzi. Go right ahead with that. Nobody can stand those guys, anyhow.

LUKE Wilson had to change his cellphone number this weekend, thanks to an annoying prank by his pal Johnny Knoxville.

The "Jackass" star found out Wilson was going to hang out at the Polaroid Beach House in Malibu for the Boost Mobile party Saturday and hired a plane to hover above the place with a banner that read: "Luke Wilson's phone number 3105000082." Apparently, it was his real number. It's now out of service. But Wilson decided not to hang at the beach, probably because he had to deal with all the annoying calls.

Luckily for Wilson, the nightmare period in which he was deluged with calls from random beachgoers wondering if he'd be willing to "take a look at my script—it's sort of Idiocracy meets Vacancy," was over once his mobile provider arranged for a new number. There's no guaranteeing Wilson's original number won't eventually be recycled, however, resulting in a celebrity telecommunications fiasco similar to the UCLA student who was assigned Paris Hilton's number—only, we hope, without the strange, Greek-accented men calling at ungodly hours to ask, "Baby girl, how are you?"

• SKY-HIGH PRANK [NY Post]