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Anatomy of a state-sponsored phishing attack: how the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:06:57 +0000

As I blogged earlier this week, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion's Twitter account and used it to post a bunch of dumb messages attacking Israel, the US, and the UN. Now, the Onion's IT administrators have posted a detailed account of how Syrian hackers used a series of staged and careful phishing attacks to escalate from a single naive user's email credentials to the password for the Onion's social media accounts.

Once the attackers had access to one Onion employee’s account, they used that account to send the same email to more Onion staff at about 2:30 AM on Monday, May 6. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials. Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all of our social media accounts.
After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.
At this point the editorial staff began publishing articles inspired by the attack. The second article, Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels, angered the attacker who then began posting editorial emails on their Twitter account. Once we discovered this, we decided that we could not know for sure which accounts had been compromised and forced a password reset on every staff member’s Google Apps account.

I'm impressed by the cleverness of triggering a "password reset" message from the IT team, then sending out fake password-reset messages to users who aren't on the IT team to get them to click on yet another link. Most of the recommendations the IT team make are pretty bland ("educate your users"), but these two reccos are good:

The email addresses for your twitter accounts should be on a system that is isolated from your organization’s normal email. This will make your Twitter accounts virtually invulnerable to phishing (providing that you’re using unique, strong passwords for every account).

and

If possible, have a way to reach out to all of your users outside of their organizational email. In the case of the Guardian hack, the SEA posted screenshots of multiple internal security emails, probably from a compromised email address that was overlooked.

How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion (via /.)

Onion gets hacked by Syrian propagandists, responds with funny article

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 May 2013 22:00:13 +0000

The Onion got hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, who proceeded to send out a bunch of tweets that could have been mistaken for actual Onion tweets making fun of the sort of thing that Syrian propagandists would tweet if they hacked the Onion's Twitter (see after the jump for the full list). But no, they actually did get hacked.

The Onion responded by putting up a post called Syrian Electronic Army Has A Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths At Hands Of Rebels, which matches the Assadists' bluster and is much funnier:

DAMASCUS, SYRIA—After hacking into The Onion’s Twitter account earlier today, members of the Syrian Electronic Army confirmed that the organization simply wanted to have a little fun before soon dying at the hands of rebel forces. “We figured that before they bust in here and execute every single one of us, we might as well have a good time and post some silly tweets about Israel from a major media outlet’s feed,” said a spokesperson from the pro-Assad group, adding that he and his cohorts “had a few good laughs” and are now fully prepared for their painful and undoubtedly horrific deaths in the coming days. “I mean, we definitely don’t have much time left, so we thought, hey, let’s just enjoy ourselves before getting blown away by rockets, decapitated, beaten to death, or hung during public executions. Why not, right?” At press time, violent screams and pleas for mercy were reportedly overheard as rebel troops broke into the Syrian Electronic Army’s hideout.

Twitter and information anxiety

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:06:03 +0000

"Sometimes at night I reach over and pluck my phone from my nightstand, press a little blue icon, and suddenly the whole world is in bed with me, talking," writes Mat Honan. "This is deeply unhealthy, of course, for my sleep patterns, my mental well-being, my marriage."

What walled gardens do to the health of the Web, and what to do about it

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:56:24 +0000

David Weinberger took great notes from what sounds like a barn-burner of a talk by Anil Dash at Harvard's Berkman Center on what has happened to the net, and where it's headed:

“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.
Less visibly, the laws is being bent “to make our controlling our data illegal.” All the social networks operate as common carriers — neutral substrates — except when it comes to monetizing. The boundaries are unclear: I can sing “Happy Birthday” to a child at home, and I can do it over FaceTime, but I can’t put it up at YouTube [because of copyright]. It’s very open-ended and difficult to figure. “Now we have the industry that creates the social network implicitly interested in getting involved in how IP laws evolve.” When the Google home page encourages visitors to call their senators against SOPA/PIPA, we have what those of us against Citizens United oppose: now we’re asking a big company to encourage people to act politically in a particular way. At the same time, we’re letting these companies capture our words and works and put them under IP law.
A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.

[berkman] Anil Dash on “The Web We Lost” (via Beyond the Beyond)

Embarrassingly obvious undercover cops take to Twitter looking for house shows

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 19:21:43 +0000

Internet-savvy indie musicians organize "house shows," which are pretty much what they sound like: a fan lets the band use her or his house for a performance, and other fans come by and hear it. The shows aren't legal, but they're pretty fun*.

Boston cops have taken to Twitter, posing as punk kids, trying to get bands to tip off the location of their house shows. As Slate's Luke O'Neil points out, though, they're really bad at it, totally tone-deaf. It's created something of an Internet sport of "spot the undercover," which is almost as much fun as the house parties.

“Too bad you were not here this weekend,” “Joe Sly” wrote. “Patty's day is a mad house I am still pissing green beer. The cops do break balls something wicked here. What's the address for Saturday Night, love DIY concerts.” He might as well have written “Just got an 8 ball of beer and I’m ready to party.”

Is it possible that Joe Sly is a real Boston punk? Sure, though if so he’s the first Boston punk in history to brag about drinking lame St. Patrick’s Day green beer. As one of the many amused music fans who scoffed at the screencap as it was shared around on Tumblr pointed out, “he/she said concerts ... concerts.” Anyone who's ever been to a concert like this knows that it's not called a concert. It’s a show.

The Massachusetts band Do No Harm also tweeted about receiving an email from Joe this month. “whats the 411 for the show saturday?” he asked, apparently using some sort of slang-filter translator from the turn of the century.

Of course, there may be really good undercovers trolling Twitter for house parties that we don't know about because of their perfect ninja stealth. If only disproving a negative was possible!

Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! [Slate/Luke O'Neil]

* Though I have some sympathy with neighbors who don't like the late night noise -- when an illegal, unlicensed hotel moved in next door to me and started drilling into my bedroom wall all night, and jackhammering against the wall for 8 hours straight on Christmas, it made me totally bananas.

Congressman boasts on Twitter about the money he got to support CISPA, then thinks better of it

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 18:39:10 +0000

CISPA is a bill before Congress that will radically increase the ease with which the government and police can spy on people without any particular suspicion. It is being rammed through by people like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), who received a small fortune in funding from the companies that stand to get rich building the surveillance tech CISPA will make possible.

What's more, Rogers admits it, and even tweets about it! Nicko Margolies from the Sunlight Foundation writes,

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), a co-sponsor and major supporter of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), deleted a retweet of an analysis of contributions to lawmakers from pro-CISPA companies. MapLight looked at the powerful House Intelligence Committee, where Rep. Rogers serves as Chairman, and followed campaign contributions to the members who are currently considering the bill that would allow companies to share more information on Internet traffic and users with the U.S. government.
Rep. Rogers, or possibly a member of his staff, retweeted the story that identified that members of the House Intelligence Committee "have received, on average, 15 times more money in campaign contributions from pro-CISPA organizations than from anti-CISPA organizations." He retweeted MapLight's tweet of this information from his iPhone and after 23 minutes thought better of it and removed it. Fortunately the Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops project caught it and archived this change of message and of heart. According to the MapLight piece, Rep. Rogers received $214,750 from interest groups that support CISPA.

The EFF has more info on CISPA, and ways you can help kill it.

Pro-CISPA Lawmaker Deletes Retweet about Money Received from Pro-CISPA Groups (Thanks, Nicko!)

The tweets you should follow in a crisis aren't necessarily the most obvious

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:27:26 +0000

Some interesting research based on the Arab Spring uprisings suggests that the best people to follow on Twitter during a crisis are often not particularly influential on Twitter outside the crisis. Likewise, they aren't likely to have had many followers before the event. Essentially, it's evidence supporting the common sense idea that, if you want the most accurate and relevant information, your best bet is to find people closest to the source, rather than relying on third-hand accounts.

Boxer announces he's coming over to his Twitter-troll's house "for a beer"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:44:41 +0000

A Twitter troll called @jimmyob88 sent a series of vile, taunting messages to professional boxer @woodhousecurtis, calling him lots of rotten names. Woodhouse tweeted back that he'd found out the Internet Tough Guy's home address and was headed over to his house "for a brew." After a series of "I'm getting closer" tweets, the troll had a change of heart and tweeted, "Didnt think you would be bothered thought you would take them as a joke" and "i am in the wrong i accept that." Apparently, it ended there. (via Techdirt)

Numbers stations on Twitter and other spook-y tweets

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:38:39 +0000

Ken Layne takes us on a tour of weird, possibly espionage-related Twitter accounts, from a "numbers station" that has tweeted 318,000 hexadecimal numbers since 2009 (possibly from Khabarovsk), to a "joke" CIA account that seems to have a lot of inside dope, to a massive cluster of accounts that tweet nothing but "Iowa City schools ask state for an audit," over and over again.

Here are some of the 38 followers of an inscrutable account called @googuns_staging—many of these are obvious fraudulent accounts with randomly generated profiles such as, "I like Jonathan Richman/The Modern Lovers to listen and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The to watch. I'm brave and chivalrous." Well, of course you are!
GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the "Region of Khabarovsk." This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?
There is an iOS game called GooGun with its own website and a dubious iTunes graphic with the words "No Longer Available" over it. "Space robots are attacking," says the promotional video showing game play on this game that is not available to play.

The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter [Ken Layne/The Awl] (via Wil Wheaton)

U.S. Senator quits writing interesting tweets

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:09:23 +0000

U.S. Senator and septuagenarian Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was a much-loved presence on Twitter, thanks to offbeat musings left refreshingly unpasteurized by PR hacks, political whips and the responses of haters. They eventually got to him, unfortunately, and he hasn't posted anything interesting in weeks. Buzzfeed's John Stanton interviewed him and found him sadly on-message: "I try to be more policy-oriented now than I used to be, not every little personal thing."

How many tweets are possible?

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:30:08 +0000

Randall Monroe's latest "What If?" explores the total number of possible English-language tweets:

Based on the rates of correct guesses—and rigorous mathematical analysis—Shannon determined that the information content of typical written English was around 1.0 to 1.2 bits per letter. This means that a good compression algorithm should be able to compress ASCII English text—which is eight bits per letter—to about 1/8th of its original size. Indeed, if you use a good file compressor on a .txt ebook, that’s about what you’ll find.

If a piece of text contains n bits of information, in a sense it means that there are $2^n$ different messages it can convey. There’s a bit of mathematical juggling here (involving, among other things, the length of the message and the concept of unicity distance), but the bottom line is that it suggests there are on the order of about $2^{140\times1.1} \approx 2\times10^{46}$ meaningfully different English tweets, rather than $10^{200}$ or $10^{800}$ .

Now, how long would it take the world to read them all out?

Reading $2\times10^{46}$ tweets would take a person nearly $10^{47}$ seconds. It’s such a staggeringly large number of tweets that it hardly matters whether it’s one person reading or a billion—they won’t be able to make a meaningful dent in the list in the lifetime of the Earth.

Twitter

Crazy copyright bot threatens those who tweet tiny poem

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:09:54 +0000

This has to be some kind of brilliant hoax: a Twitter 'attribution troll' is showering threats on anyone who tweets a popular one-line poem.

On Press Inc., supposedly a division of Knopf Publishing (according to its Twitter profiles), was running a search of its own and issuing tweet after threatening tweet to anyone who dared publish a short (really short -- under 140 characters) poem by reclusive poet, Shaun Shane, without attribution. The entire poem reads as follows: "If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak."

The threats--which have apparently escalated to imaginary police investigations over Amazon reviews, too--are baseless, writes TechDirt's Tim Cushing. Even if a tweet-length poem meets the expressive requirements for copyright protection, experts say it's unlikely to generate a credible lawsuit.

I tried it and it worked like a charm:

Twitter suspends account of Somali Islamist militants linked to Al-Qaeda

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 04:50:01 +0000

Two days after a group of Somali islamist militants vowed to execute Kenyan hostages, and tweeted a video of a captive pleading for the Kenyan government to help free them, the Al-Shabaab Twitter account @HSMPress was suspended. A Google cache is visible here. Warning: includes gruesome photos. The group took a French intelligence officer hostage, then apparently murdered him after an unsuccessful attempted raid by the French military which the US assisted). An @HSMPress press release about that killing is available on Twitlonger.

The Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Twitter account has been around since 2011, promoting the group's vision of strict sharia law in Somalia, 140 characters at a time. The US State Department was reportedly looking in to shutting it down ages ago. Wonder what took them so long?

For its part, Al Shabaab blames its "Christian enemies" for suspending its Twitter account. And they do sound rather miffed about being blocked on the popular social networking platform.

From Reuters:

"The enemies have shut down our Twitter account," al Shabaab's most senior media officer, who refused to be named, told Reuters. "They shut it down because our account overpowered all the Christians' mass media and they could not tolerate the grief and the failure of the Christians we always displayed (online)."

You know what's most surreal about their (now-suspended) account? Not the Christian infidel media stuff, or the terror-threat-y stuff, or the images of bloated corpses and prancing soldiers with Kalashnikovs. One expects all of that from an al Qaeda-linked Somalian terror organization.

No, what's weirdest are the tweets that sound like they were lifted from a j-school ethics debate.

How much of the gruesome details of war should be published without detracting from the accurancy and credibility of the event?

Why is it that questions and ethical concerns are usually raised only when the Mujahideen publish images of their enemy combatants?.

A photojournalist wins the Pulitzer Prize for a blood-spattered shot of an Afghan girl, but the fairly clean shot of the French is "graphic"

Noted.

The Tweets of Rupert Murdoch, as letterpress greeting cards

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:16:47 +0000

Artist Michelle Vaughan's “100 Tweets” is a hand typeset letterpress project printed at The Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For “100 Tweets”, I spent months combing my Twitter feed in search of 100 comments which fit into the vision of the project as a whole. Because Twitter allows 140 characters, building a template for typesetting was a straight forward procedure. In the beginning, I collected snarky, throw-away tweets mostly centered on banal and mundane comments. This eventually evolved into a more personal project, as I looked for tweets which mirrored my own opinions and thoughts, but were well-executed by the author. “100 Tweets” also records pockets of time and history in short observations.
The process was laborious but satisfying.

Her first series of five 5x7 greeting cards were tweets by Rupert Murdoch from early 2012.

"The typeface is Perpetua and they are printed with various shades of Pantone reds and pinks on Italian Magnani stock."

They'll be available starting in February, 2013. (via @felixsalmon)

The Fickle Fame of Twitter

Michele  Catalano — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:00:52 +0000

The Fickle Fame of Twitter

A million followers is nothing. Voice is everything.

By Michele Catalano  - Share this article

It was April of 2009 when everything changed. I had been on twitter almost two years at that point, as @abigvictory, using it mainly as a platform for crude jokes and observations about sports.

I was at the Verizon store. I just bought my first smartphone. A Blackberry. Finally, email on my phone! No sooner had the Verizon clerk set up my email than it blew up. Five, ten, twenty, one hundred emails. All of them twitter notifications that someone new had followed me. The faster I read them, the faster they came in. Soon I stopped reading and just started deleting. I had convinced myself that someone I offended on twitter was playing a technological joke on me, had set up some kind of bot to make it look like all these people were following me.

By the time I got home from the store I had received over 1,000 notifications. I penned a hasty “What is happening to me?” post at tumblr and finally, in the midst of all the notification emails came a piece advice from my friend Jason Sweeney (@sween). “Look at twitter’s suggested follower list. Then turn off your notifications and never look at your follower number again.”

Mr. Sweeney would know. The same thing happened to him just the week before. “Suddenly, I had fifty new emails,” Sweeney told me.” Which was crazy! And they were all notifications of new followers. I scrolled to the bottom and saw the message ‘Load More Messages’. I pressed it and suddenly another fifty showed up! And there was the message again! And then again. With the image of my roaming plan depleting before my eyes, I quickly closed my email I went to Twitter to turn off my new follower notifications. It wasn't until a few days later that I was able to figure out I had been put on the Suggested User list. And then a few days, later Oprah had her big show on Twitter and it just got crazier.”

I followed his advice and sure enough, there I was atop the suggested user’s list sandwiched between celebrities, sports stars and @sween. If someone told me a few days earlier I was going be put on a list with Ashlee Simpson, Fred Durst and Dane Cook, I'd have assumed I did something terribly wrong and was about to be stoned to death. But this was something good, right?

Right. Sort of.

What happened after I went from 1,000 to 28,000 followers in a week to the magic one million followers just a few months later?

What ensued was this: A little freaking out, a lot of stage fright and performance anxiety. I felt the need to tweet often even though I had just weaned myself from about 100 tweets a day to 15. Then I worried what I should tweet about. Do I just continue tweeting toilet humor? Do I just tweet a couple of pithy remarks during the day and leave it at that? Do I have to watch what I say? I’d never before in my life had been popular. I was that kid, the one picked last for sports teams, the one at the far end of the lunch table picking at her sandwich while she sat alone. Here I was with a million people listening to me, waiting to see what I would say next. I was overwhelmed with this sudden thrust into the internet limelight.

What did this all mean?

“Well, it’s just twitter,” people said. “Why does it mean anything?”

Because suddenly, I had an audience. Where before I had friends and acquaintances who shared my love of a good tampon joke, now I had a million strangers watching every word I tweeted. What should have been a “Wow, this is exciting!” moment for me became a moment of sudden terror instead. I felt like I suddenly moved into a glass house and all my neighbors were armed with rocks.

“Who are you?” was the most common question thrown at me, as if I could not be just a regular person and have this amount of followers. I had to be somebody. I had to be a celebrity. I was Miley Cyrus. I was J.-Lo. I was Lindsay Lohan. And I was, because of my avatar featuring Paul Newman as his Slap Shot character Reggie Dunlop, a hockey player, a male celebrity. Paul Newman. I was Paul Newman! Explaining to people that I was not a dead movie star was futile. They believed what they wanted to believe. They just couldn’t believe I was nobody. People were disappointed that I was just me. Most of them unfollowed when they found out I wasn’t anyone interesting or important, that I was a nobody to them.

Truth is, I was nobody. I was just a commoner who happened to be inexplicably looked on with favor by someone at twitter. And now I was in the unenviable position of having to defend myself, my follower count, my sense of humor and my very existence.

I was also at the same time trying to figure out how to parlay this newfound popularity into something. How could I translate this to life outside of twitter? What value did it hold? I had fantasies of sashaying into a crowded restaurant, past the line of people waiting for a table. “Table for two, “ I’d say. “@abigvictory.” And everyone would gasp, the lines of people would part as a place was set for me at the best table in the house.

Or maybe, in a more reality-based fantasy, I would be able to use twitter to get a freelance writing career off the ground. Surely all I would have to do is tweet that I was a writer and editors would rush to ask me to write for them. I’d be able to sell my novel! Agents would notice me talking about it and immediately DM me to say they would represent me!

The reality of it is, nothing happened. Unlike Jason Sweeney, who used his twitter popularity as a springboard to a new career, having a million followers did not afford me new opportunities. It did not make my life richer or make my teeth brighter. It did quite the opposite. It made me more self-conscious than I already was. It made me feel riddled with self-doubt. As more people questioned why I had so many followers I began to shrink back from twitter, sure that the never ending need to fulfill the ideals of a million people was starting to wreak havoc on my mental health.

As I tweeted less and less, sometimes going days without tweeting, my follower count started to wane. Where Jason was still gaining followers because he was able to keep his tweets fresh and funny and not let the numbers behind his account get to him, I was bleeding followers because I couldn’t handle the pressure. I forgot why I joined twitter. I forgot how much I used to enjoy stuffing a joke or some news commentary into 140 characters before I felt like I was being judged.

How was Jason able to handle the twitter fame that was seemingly crushing me? “It is a weird kind of circular fame,” he says. “It's amazing how many people ask me what I did to get so many followers -- people can't understand how someone could be popular on Twitter *because* of Twitter.   There were times I've wondered if I should change what I tweet because of the large number of who follow me. But then I realized -- I was put on the list because of my voice. So my job is to stay true to it.”

Where @sween stayed true to his voice, I lost mine.

At some point after I all but ditched twitter, I realized I missed it, and had a little heart-to-heart with myself about it. What good was twitter for me? What did I enjoy about it before the million followers (which had now “dwindled” to about 920,000)? What was twitter good for.

Well, it was good for making friends, meeting new people, discovering how many talented people are hanging around the internet, getting to do stuff with some of those talented people, having friends to visit wherever we travel, telling offensive, horrible jokes and letting a million people know when I’ve gotten my period.

There it was. I joined twitter for the conversation, for the ability to connect with people who enjoyed the same warped sense of humor, people who liked hockey and baseball, people who enjoyed talking about music and people who liked to banter back and forth, to engage.

That was it. The engagement. When I got all those followers, I started thinking of myself as a one person twitter stand-up show (albeit one where the audience was often armed with tomatoes) and I forgot about the social engagement.

So I went back to twitter with a renewed sense of how I was going to use it. I was going to go back to the way I was before I was put on that list. After all, wasn’t that kind of engagement and banter what got me put on the list in the first place? I would go back to using twitter as a place to hang out with friends and acquaintances. And I would recognize that while I had 920,000 followers, about 800,000 of them were bots, marketers and SEO specialists who followed ten thousand people and would never read a word I tweeted.

The pressure was off and the fun was back on.

I’ve since used my twitter – which was changed to @inthefade last year - for self-serving good by promoting my freelance writing, but I’ve also realized twitter’s potential for worldly good by utilizing it to launch to a toy drive for children affected by Sandy. That – five years after I joined twitter – was probably the moment in which I realized what a vast social media reach can be used for.

I have a different reaction now when people ask me “Who are you?” in regards to the number of followers I have. “I’m Michele Catalano,” I tell them. “I’m a writer, a civil servant and just a regular person. Thanks for following.”

Whether they stick around or not is their choice. But I’ve learned enough about myself and how people see me on twitter to know they are missing out if they don’t.

After all, who doesn’t love a good menstrual cycle joke?

How Twitter figures out the world with machine intelligence and Mechanical Turks

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:12:33 +0000

On Twitter's engineering blog, a fascinating description of how Twitter uses a blend of machine intelligence and Mechanical Turk tasks to figure out, in real time, what is going on in the world:

Before we delve into the details, here's an overview of how the system works.
First, we monitor for which search queries are currently popular.
Behind the scenes: we run a Storm topology that tracks statistics on search queries.
For example, the query [Big Bird] may suddenly see a spike in searches from the US.

As soon as we discover a new popular search query, we send it to our human evaluators, who are asked a variety of questions about the query.
Behind the scenes: when the Storm topology detects that a query has reached sufficient popularity, it connects to a Thrift API that dispatches the query to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and then polls Mechanical Turk for a response.
For example: as soon as we notice "Big Bird" spiking, we may ask judges on Mechanical Turk to categorize the query, or provide other information (e.g., whether there are likely to be interesting pictures of the query, or whether the query is about a person or an event) that helps us serve relevant Tweets and ads.

Finally, after a response from an evaluator is received, we push the information to our backend systems, so that the next time a user searches for a query, our machine learning models will make use of the additional information. For example, suppose our evaluators tell us that [Big Bird] is related to politics; the next time someone performs this search, we know to surface ads by @barackobama or @mittromney, not ads about Dora the Explorer.

Improving Twitter search with real-time human computation (via Waxy)

Science, confidential

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:56:54 +0000

We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper. (Ostensibly, that's the boring part.)

If you want a quick laugh this morning — or if you want to get a peek at how the sausages are made — check out the Twitter hashtag #overlyhonestmethods, where scientists are talking about the backstory behind seemingly dry statements like "A population of male rats was chosen for this study".

Social media turns into boring old media

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:24:11 +0000

Warren Ellis, always a shrewd observer of online media, supposes that we've reached peak social media, the point at which exciting new communications forms ossify into dull media titans:

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.
This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

His closing remark is "I wonder if anyone’s been thinking twice about giving up their personal websites." Good question.

The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle

Machine-learning algorithm develops heuristics for trustworthy tweets in time of emergency

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 01:49:40 +0000

In "Credibility ranking of tweets during high impact events," a paper published in the ACM's Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media , two Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology researchers describe the outcome of a machine-learning experiment that was asked to discover factors correlated with reliability in tweets during disasters and emergencies:

The number of unique characters present in tweet was positively correlated to credibility, this may be due to the fact that tweets with hashtags, @mentions and URLs contain more unique characters. Such tweets are also more informative and linked, and hence credible. Presence of swear words in tweets indicates that it contains the opinion / reaction of the user and would have less chances of providing informa- tion about the event. Tweets that contain information or are reporting facts about the event, are impersonal in nature, as a result we get a negative correlation of presence of pronouns in credible tweets. Low number of happy emoticons [:-), :)] and high number of sad emoticons [:-(, :(] act as strong predictors of credibility. Some of the other important features (p-value < 0.01) were inclusion of a URL in the tweet, number of followers of the user who tweeted and presence of negative emotion words. Inclusion of URL in a tweet showed a strong positive correlation with credibility, as most URLs refer to pictures, videos, resources related to the event or news articles about the event.

Of course, this is all non-adversarial: no one is trying to trick a filter into mis-assessing a false account as a true one. It's easy to imagine an adversarial tweet-generator that suggests rewrites to deliberately misleading tweets to make them more credible to a filter designed on these lines. This is actually the substance of one of the cleverest science fiction subplots I've read: in Peter Watt's Behemoth, in which a self-modifying computer virus randomly hits on the strategy of impersonating communications from patient zero in a world-killing pandemic, because all the filters allow these through. It's a premise that's never stopped haunting me: the co-evolution of a human virus and a computer virus.

Credibility Ranking of Tweets during High Impact Events [PDF] (via /.)

Modern Seinfeld Twitter account pitches episodes for the Facebook age

Jamie Frevele — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:53:45 +0000

What's the deal with texting? Are you being sarcastic? Are you mad at me? Are you typing this while on the toilet? I don't wanna be a meme! Did you ever stop to think about how incredibly perfect Seinfeld would be in today's social media-crazed world? Thanks to the newly formed Modern Seinfeld Twitter account, you can get a 140-character (or less) idea at what a current episode of the "Show About Nothing" would cover. And when you consider all the "nothing" we do all day and how much awkward human behavior it causes, Seinfeld could probably find enough material to last twenty years. (via Twitter)

Monkey in a smart coat visits suburban Ikea

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:06:17 +0000

A monkey in a nice coat escaped from a cage inside its owner's car, opened the car door, and strolled into an Ikea in North York, a suburb of Toronto. The monkey was removed shortly thereafter. I have been stuck in that Ikea and I can testify that whatever your feelings about the ethics of keeping a pet monkey (or sticking it in a cage in your car), it is certainly a mercy to remove the monkey from that Ikea.

in the future, humour = twitter account creation
— Ikea Monkey (@IKEAmonkey) December 9, 2012

The incident spawned two parody Twitter accounts: @IKEAmonkey and @Ikea_Monkey, the former being more prolific (and having made overtures of peace and cooperation to the latter, without, it seems, any success).

At around 3 p.m. ET, the diminutive primate was spotted in the store’s upper parking lot, where it was cornered by several Ikea staff members, who also called animal control to come retrieve the monkey.

Mysterious monkey in posh miniature winter coat found alone at Toronto Ikea [National Post] (via MeFi)

(Image: Umm saw a monkey in the #ikea parking lot. by #broniewyn)

Wild birds tweet by pecking at unsalted fat spread on an outdoor keyboard

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:45:13 +0000

Latvian magazine Ir created a Twitter account written by local birds by covering the keys of an outdoor keyboard with unsalted fat, and using the birds' pecking to generate 100 tweets a day to the @hungry_birds account.

///////2```P/PP``2///``2///////////1///////'/11/1//111111111/``//1'1`'111212;``////////////////////11/'1//111///11111//1/1/1/1/1// @irlv
— Hungry Birds (@hungry_birds) March 17, 2012

Everyone has the right to be heard - that is the main principle of Ir, weekly magazine from Latvia. That´s why we have fixed the biggest internet injustice of all times and gave Twitter back to original twitterers, the birds!
What you see here is being streamed live from Sarnate, a small village on the west coast of Latvia.
We put a layer of unsalted fat on a keyboard. Eating the fat helps the birds to survive the harsh winter days and nights when the temperature can drop to 20C below zero.
@hungry_birds are awake from 05.00 until 16.00 GMT, but they have other daily activities and duties besides eating, so be patient and have fun!

Birds on Twitter

Fake William Gibson novels, tweeted

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 04:54:49 +0000

Australo-Prussian tugs in LEO scuttled to avoid capture by Hardee's exoatmospheric weapons & chicken division. Zürcher calfskin watchbands?
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 3, 2012

@AuthenticWmGibs is a funny fake William Gibson Twitter account, which tweets plausible-sounding precis of imaginary Gibson novels (or, as the Twitter bio has it, "Synopses for William Gibson novels that are definitely 100% real, but only in a timeline with greater authenticity than this one.")

Unknown weirdo creates pastiche of iconic SF author, constructing textual Cornell boxes, filled with snippets of cyberpunk microplots...
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 12, 2012

...internet dorks disappointed that it's not a whirring, molybdenum-cased Markov robot pecking the keys of a 1892 Blickensderfer typewriter.
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 12, 2012

@AuthenticWmGibs (via IO9)

Donald Trump calls for revolutionary overthrow of American government

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 08:19:03 +0000

He deleted it, but Wil Wheaton saved it for posterity.

Miguel Bloombito: the incredible Spanish of Michael Bloomberg

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 01:33:34 +0000

After consultingo con el Runner de Calle club, los advisoros, y Captain Obviouso, yo decidero to que cancelo elmarathoño
— Miguel Bloombito (@ElBloombito) November 2, 2012

The @ElBloombito Twitter account is a running -- and hilarious -- sendup of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's terrible Spanish. Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams profiled Rachel Figueroa-Levin, the mastermind behind the account.

In the past two days, El Bloombito’s pidgin Español Twitter stream has been a balm to disaster-scarred New Yorkers, a bracingly funny respite from the ravages of Sandy. Prior to the storm, it was Bloombito who warned New Yorkers, “Cuidado! El stormo somos about to que vamos el lañdfall! Batteño los hatches!” and “Por favor to remaiño insidero until notice de furthero. Peligroso!” Afterward, it was Bloombito who reminded, “El floodo agua esta still todos los everywhere. Necesitos los gearo de scuba y el flipper!”
Speaking to Salon while her toddler daughter takes a post-Sandy afternoon nap, Figueroa-Levin says El Bloombito originally “gave me something to do while I was stuck inside” during Irene. As it happened, the account attracted an instant following — and the attention of Mike Bloomberg himself — who admitted last year that “Es difícil para aprender un nuevo idioma.”
“I don’t know why he does it,” Figueroa-Levin says. “Not that my Spanish is that fantastic, but I live in a neighborhood where it’s common. I grew up hearing it. I’m Puerto Rican. And I don’t know who he thinks he’s talking to. In fact, last year I had an elderly Dominican neighbor tell me he thought Bloomberg was Italian.”

Meet the woman behind “El Bloombito” (via Making Light)

Twitter planning to add annoying photo-filters to compete with Instagram's annoying photo-filters

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 13:44:21 +0000

Great news, you guys! Soon, you'll be able to tweet iPhone or Android snapshots of your sandwich in sepia, without even having to download Instagram. Nick Bilton at the NYT got the scoop.

If Twitter was like Facebook

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:04:52 +0000

People give Twitter plenty of guff, but at least its promoted tweets program is straight-up advertising--unlike the awful "pay to reach your own followers" stunt that Facebook is pulling.

Everyone's talking about weird twitter

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:58:52 +0000

Read Nick Douglas for a human perspective; knowyourmeme for the tl;dr.

Mondrian cake

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:42:33 +0000

Last December, Nicole J Caruth posted this photo of a "Mondrian cake" to her Twitter stream. What a fabulous piece of work!

Finally trying the Mondrian cake

#InsurancePoll: Amanda Palmer wants to know about your experience with health insurance

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 02:53:04 +0000

Amanda Palmer was musing about the messed up state of US health insuranceso she took to Twitter, writing about it under the #InsurancePoll tag ("quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?"). The tag's blown up, trending across the USA, as people weigh in with their insurance horror stories. Then a volunteer statistician came forward to compile a report on the data generated by the poll. They're looking for lots more people to step forward and participate.

i’ll post the gathered data as soon as it’s ready. the results, as DM’d to me a few hours ago by @aubreyjaubrey:
– preliminary info from first 156 responses indicates 24.5% of US respondents do not have insurance because of cost.
– 31.4% of responses were from outside of US. all but one person had some kind of compulsory of government supported healthcare – (that one person was denied)
– 24.4% of those abroad have some employer/private insurance for optometry and dental. individual costs from $45-$90/month. around $250/mo for a family.
– based on responses, Germany appears to be the only other country with extortionate health care costs.
a few hours ago aubrey posted she was off to bed but would continue today and that so far, 240 sets of data had been entered. nice.

runaway twitter insurance poll & the power of social media & sharing stories