By Cory Doctorow at 6:42 am Friday, May 25
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Tor.com reports on Pulitzer Winning novelist Jennifer Egan's latest project: a tweeted science fiction story in the New Yorker's fiction feed:
This is part of the launch of the forthcoming first-ever science fiction issue of The New Yorker. The installment will appear starting tonight between 8pm-9pm EST, and will last for ten nights. The entirety of “Black Box” will appear in the next issue of The New Yorker, which will release this coming Monday. The story involves a character from A Visit from the Goon Squad and will be a kind of spy narrative.
Twitter Story to Launch The New Yorker’s Science Fiction Issue
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Thursday, May 24
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The Space Hijackers' Twitter account for their Official Protesters of the London 2012 Games has been suspended, following a complaint from the London Olympic committee:
Twitter. That harbour of free speech, undaunted by various Arab dictators. However, it seems that a quick word from LOCOG, the unelected body in charge of the 2012 Olympic Games, is enough to encourage Twitter to suspend our account. Apparently there's a danger people might think we're part of the Olympic delivery team. We're sorry if you were enjoying our tweets, we hope to be back up and running again, as soon as Twitter gets the joke. In the meantime, you might want to look at this website to get some background...
Twitter actually has a pretty clear policy on this: parody and protest accounts just have to have some indicator that they aren't the official item (e.g. "FakeCoke" or "CokeSucks" but not "OfficialCoke"). My guess is that Twitter's suspension of the account was on that basis. If so, it should be pretty straightforward to get it back up and running.
Oi! You Can't Protest Here!
(Thanks, LDNBikeSwarm!)
The NYT's Nick Bilton compares
Facebook and Twitter to the tortoise and the hare. "Facebook exploded because it slurped up endless amounts of data about its users," writes Bilton. "This race is not judged by speed, but a stopwatch with a much longer lifespan, one that is tied to trust."
— Xeni
There are
11 Ways You're Annoying On Twitter, reports
Buzzfeed's Katie Heaney. And not a single one more!
— Rob
By Xeni Jardin at 10:49 am Friday, Apr 20
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Something weird happened on Twitter yesterday. It was annoying and upsetting at the time, but now it's meaty fodder for behavioral analysis discussions.
Ethan Zuckerman wrote a blog post about it that extracts some of the more interesting questions raised about social media and activism.
* Postscript: I've since traded tweets with the two guys behind the stunt, and we're cool.
By Rob Beschizza at 5:16 pm Thursday, Apr 5
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Twitter, on its blog, declares legal war on companies providing tools to spammers.
This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.
Good for them.
By Cory Doctorow at 5:08 pm Friday, Mar 23
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Denise sez, "Update on the trial of Byron Sonne, arrested in Toronto on explosives charges in advance of the G20 in June, 2010. This week, the Crown pulled up information off of Sonne's harddrives, including tweets from Clay Shirky and Oxblood Ruffin, 50-year-old U.S. military manuals and photos of goats. Much time was spent discussing why Sonne used a goat as his username/avatar."
On Monday, Nadeau also pressed Ouelette for his personal understanding of why there were photos of goats (one labeled “drunk goat”) on Sonne’s hard drive, and why the accused had used “Goatmaster” and “Toronto Goat” as his online usernames. Peter Copeland, one of Sonne’s lawyers, objected, saying that Ouelette wasn’t an expert on acronyms. Spies decided to hear the argument as “voir dire,” meaning she will decide later if it’s admissible as evidence. So, Ouelette opined that “Goat,” stood for “Greatest of All Time,” based on his knowledge of hockey, nicknames, and Wayne Gretzky.
Read more about Sonne's kafkaesque encounter with Canadian law.
Miles to go: Byron Sonne trial Continues (Thanks, Denise!)
BB editors Xeni and Maggie feature on
Time Magazine's 140 best twitter feeds. Adds Xeni: "they picked a tweet I wrote last night while utterly baked out of my fucking mind on medical cannabis."
— Rob
By Xeni Jardin at 9:06 am Thursday, Mar 8
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Use Twitter? Don't give a crap about the annual shindig in Austin?
Eliminate references to SXSW from your Twitter stream.
(via @johl)
Gawker's Adrian Chen tracked down the man behind
@horse_ebooks, the fascinating twitter spambot.
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 8:24 am Friday, Feb 17
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The @Vikileaks30 account on Twitter has been publishing embarrassing personal information about Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is pushing for a domestic spying law that would require ISPs to gather and retain your personal information and turn it over to police without a warrant. The Vikileaks account kicked off with excerpts from the affidavits from Toews's very ugly divorce, including his ex-wife's allegations about his abuse of his official government expense accounts. The account created a nationwide stir over the domestic spying proposal, and has caused a rare (and possibly strategic*) climbdown from the majority Conservative government.
Now The Ottawa Citizen newspaper has tricked the person behind the anonymous account into visiting a website that it controls, and have traced back the IP address used in the trap to the House of Commons, suggesting that Toews's nemesis works for the federal government. The Citizen claims that the IP address has also been used to "frequently" edit Wikipedia "[give] them what appears to be a pro-NDP bias" (the New Democratic Party is the left-leaning opposition party in Parliament).
While it's impossible to say who is actually the using the address without a full-scale investigation undertaken by the House of Commons, a trace of the IP address shows it is also used by an employee of the House to post comments on a website for fans of the musician Paul Simon.
When reached by phone, the employee said that while he frequents the Paul Simon website he has nothing to do with the Vikileaks30 Twitter account.
A spokeswoman for the Speaker of the House of Commons said she is not aware of any investigation into whether any House IP addresses are behind the Vikileaks30 account. In order for an official government investigation to begin a complaint would have to be filed by a Member of Parliament.
Vikileaks30 linked to House of Commons IP address
* "Possibly strategic" because it looks like they're rushing this to committee, which is likely to go closed-door, exclude skeptical expert testimony, and speedily conclude that the bill is just fine as-is while maintaining a low public profile
(Thanks, Colin!)
Canadian MP Vic Toews is pushing bill C-30, a domestic spying bill that requires ISPs to log your online activity and give it to police without a warrant. He says that if you don't support this, you "
stand with child pornographers." Canadians are giving MP Toews what he wants: on Twitter, Canadians are flooding his account with the hashtag
TellVicEverything, spilling the intimate secrets of their lives: "Had impure thought,"
Jeremy Klaszus.
(
Thanks, pbrstreetgang!)
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 9:55 pm Tuesday, Feb 7
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Sky News has issued guidance to its reporters on their Twitter use. Under the new policy, Sky reporters are prohibited from retweeting from rival journalists and the public (though they are allowed to retweet each other). They are also not allowed to tweet about subjects that aren't their beat. Finally, they're prohibited from "personal" tweets in their professional accounts. The leaked memo describes the rubric for this as "ensur[ing] that our journalism is joined up across platforms, there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information going out on all our stories."
Sky News has cultivated a reputation for digital innovation and has used Twitter to break news on events including the Arab Spring uprising and England riots. Journalists at the broadcaster expressed shock and dismay at the new guidelines, which they claim are a retrograde step.
...[The memo] added that "on a number of occasions" those guidelines have been flouted "resulting in us running different information on Twitter other Sky platforms or the news desks learning from Twitter details that should have been first passed on to them".
Sky News clamps down on Twitter use
(via Memex 1.1)
By Rob Beschizza at 6:50 am Monday, Jan 30
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Two U.K. tourists landing in L.A. were detained and deported because of tweets joking about "diggin' up" Marilyn Monroe and "destroying" America.
According to DHS paperwork, Leigh Van Bryan was matched to a "One Day Lookout" list, placed under oath, and ultimately denied entry and put on a plane back to Europe.
"[He wrote] on his tweeter[sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe," DHS officials wrote on his charge sheet. "Also on his tweeter[sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America."
Interviewed by highly-respected British newspapers such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, Leigh Van Bryan says that the tweet — "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America" — referred merely to partying. Added a friend: "He would not hurt anyone. He is gay."
Bryan has now made his Twitter account private, thereby ending the DHS's ability to track his terror plans.
UPDATE: Ted Frank says we're "racial profiling" in this post. [Via Glenn Reynolds]
"Boing Boing correctly points out (via Alkon) that this is silly—but the reason we know this is silly is because you and I and Boing Boing are racially profiling."
We've run countless posts similar to this one, about detained travelers of all ethnicities — but this one involved racial profiling!
We know the deportation is silly not because of Van Bryan's innocuous whiteness—that's in your head, Ted—but because the methodology is dumb. It's silly because search alerts for keywords on Twitter will never catch a terrorist on his way to the airport; it will merely impose pointless burdens on travelers regardless of national origin.
This poses an interesting question: of all our posts on DHS shenanigans, why was it this one that got noticed today by some conservatives? Actually, it's a boring question: it's because it offered them an opportunity to project their inclination toward racial profiling onto others. It creates the impression that everyone is at it regardless of agenda, and that inconvenience to innocents is therefore the price of our collective failure to recognize that racial profiling is common sense. "We want [the] DHS to have the flexibility to detain hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist Mohammed Abbasi if he were to make a similar threat on the Internet that is less likely to be a joke," writes Frank.
On the contrary, I don't want the DHS wasting its time on any of this nonsense.
(Frank also mistakenly attributes the non-sequitur "He is gay" quote from Van Bryan's friend to us. Why? Perhaps, like the DHS, his attention is tuned in to the wrong things.)
