Posts tagged twitter
BREAKING NEWS: Cyber-terrorists have hacked into Donald Trump’s Twitter account, cutting off America’s primary supplier of douchebaggery…
“Is It Time For Dogs To Have A Social Network Of Their Own?” - AKA: The Reason Why Your Local News Channel Sucks…
Facebook = A shitload of people posting shit they give a shit about for people that couldn’t give a shit about it…
CISPA Is the New SOPA
CISPA is the new SOPA. Today marks the opening of a week of action in opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which would obliterate any semblance of online privacy in the United States. It’s up for a vote later this month.
CISPA demolishes existing barriers between the government and the private sector — and between government agencies, including the military — that restrict casual data sharing. It would effectively allow information about Americans’ use of the Internet to slosh back and forth uninhibited.
The Center for Democracy and Technology says, “CISPA has a very broad, almost unlimited definition of the information that can be shared with government agencies and it supersedes all other privacy laws.”
Corporations like Facebook could share information about their users with other corporations and the government, so long as it’s justified by a concern fitting the overly broad conception of cybersecurity threats: alleged piracy or the “degradation’ of a company’s network, for instance. That data could then be used towards nearly any end, from surveillance to hocking products to Internet users.
And according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, CISPA would accomplish much of the job that Hollywood and other content owners couldn’t get done off via SOPA earlier this year:
An ISP could even interpret this bill as allowing them to block accounts believed to be infringing, block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.
You can join nearly 90,000 other Internet users by using Demand Progress’s action page to urge your lawmakers to oppose CISPA.
Does Facebook really care about Internet users’ rights?
.
CISPA represents the first notable rift within the coalition of organizations and businesses that helped lead the charge against Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA’s opponents came together in a kumbaya moment, with almost anybody who cares about the Internet — as user, activist, or profiteer — lining up against the bill.
Facebook struck an aggressive posture in opposition to SOPA, and at the time Mark Zuckerberg asserted:
The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.
He was right, but it wasn’t hard for Facebook to oppose SOPA: Its passage would have hurt Facebook’s bottom line — and probably forced it to alter basic business practices — by forcing it to aggressively to police alleged piracy.
And now the profit motive is causing Facebook to support CISPA, at the expense of its users, because it would relieve certain regulatory burdens and provide attractive immunities for the company.
Internet users were able to push GoDaddy to withdraw its support of SOPA. Now it’s time to make sure Facebook knows we’re furious:
Courtesy of David Segal RI State Representative, Former Congressional Candidate, Demand Progress Exec Director for The Huffington Post
The Bad Business Idea Of The Week…
The service, called Shitter, will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and print those tweets on toilet paper you can then display and use proudly in your favorite restroom.
The company’s tagline: “Social Media has never been so disposable.”
Shitter allows you to have a roll printed with your own personal tweets, your timeline, favorites, or tweets from a specific list you’ve created or follow on Twitter. If there’s someone on Twitter you think has particularly crappy things to say, you can opt to have his or her feed printed on a few rolls.
Priced for use in high-end powder rooms, Shitter rolls are priced at $35 for a pack of four. That, you may reasonably surmise, is money down the drain.
So, do the math, and if Shitter’s rolls of TP have the standard 75 sheets you’d be shelling out about 8.5 cents a sheet to drop your latest tweets off at the pool.
Courtesy of Emily Price
Big Brother Is Watching Your Tweets…
It started with businesses concerned about their brands. Intelligence agencies have moved into it, raising alarms among privacy advocates. And many other government agencies are just beginning to explore its potential. It is social media analytics.
Companies and government agencies alike are using tools to sweep the Internet — blogs, websites, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter feeds — to find out what people are saying about, well, just about anything. The companies are generally interested in complaints about products or looking for sales leads. Intelligence agencies are looking for, among other things, warnings about potential terrorist threats.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation posted a Request for Information last month calling on IT companies to demonstrate their ability to design software for monitoring, mapping and analyzing social media.
The RFI, posted to the government’s Federal Business Opportunities website in January, reveals the FBI’s desire for software capable of monitoring social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to provide alerts and analysis for publicly posted information. The software would require the ability to:
- “Geo-spatially locate bad actors or groups and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations and possible adverse actions”
- “Detect instances of deception in intent or action by bad actors”
and
- “Develop pattern-of-life matrices to support law enforcement planning and enforcement operations.”
In fact, the FBI is not the only US government agency currently working to monitor online social media;
- In October 2010 the Electronic Frontier Foundationobtained documentson social network surveillance under the Freedom of Information Act showing that the Department of Homeland Security has established a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” for the collection and analysis of online public communications.
- Last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center obtainedmore FOIA documentsregarding the DHS social media surveillance, showing that the department has contracted General Dynamics to monitor social networks and even the comment sections of various news websites for “media reports that reflect adversely on the US Government [or] DHS.”
- Also last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New Yorkissued a Request for Proposalfor “Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Monitoring” software. The request called on companies to develop software to monitor social media such as tweets, Facebook posts and YouTube comments to analyze what people are thinking and saying about the United States’ privately-owned central bank.
- In February of last yearit was revealedthat the US Air Force had solicited “persona management software” from contractors through an FBO request. The contract called for vendors to develop software which could allow up to 50 users to manage 500 online personas, which would be created “with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.” The request also called for virtual private servers in specific geographic locations that could allow the social media persona to appear to be from a different part of the globe. When news of the proposal broke and several large websites began to draw attention to it, it was quickly taken offline.
- Last July, DARPA, the Pentagon’s research project wing, announced a “Social Media in Strategic Communication” program. The announcement included language specifically calling for the ability to “influence operations” in “the environment in which [the Pentagon] operates,” meaning that it will be used to launch “countermessaging” campaigns online, supposedly to combat the spread of information harmful to the Pentagon’s interests.
- Last month’s FBI request for information, too, crosses the line from passive monitoring into active operations. One of the desired attributes of the software that the FBI wants to develop is the ability to “predict likely developments in the situation or future actions taken by bad actors” by analyzing patterns and associations in the target’s online communications.
- Once envisioned as ascience-fiction scenario, America’s top law enforcement agency is now attempting to integrate pre-crime detection into their social media analysis.
Currently, according to the law, government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements. And now, our government is planning to monitor your speech and track your activities using social media analytics.
.
This is the bizarre — and scary — fact that now applies to the world in which we live. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, recently decided the government can monitor you virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant. And the same may very well apply to government’s monitoring your activities via social media. Certainly, it is obvious that our government will soon have (if not already) the ability to track everything you do on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare and the like.
.
It is clear, that when government is provided with a tool that allows it to spy on it’s citizens, that tool is abused to the detriment of the people 100% of the time.
.
So, the next time you feel like posting information to your Facebook page or your Twitter feed, know that Big Brother is will be watching.
FaceBook Is Not Your Friend
This Week’s Reason To Unfriend FaceBook
Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided. Let’s just begin with the very basics. Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). Facebook might try to argue that these terms are just protecting Facebook’s interests, and are not usually in practice, enforced, but in the context of their many other activities, such a defense is pretty weak. Simply put, there’s no good reason whatsoever to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, Facebook sees their customers (meaning you) as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.
Since Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior, there’s no reason to trust that Facebook will do the right thing when it comes to your personal information. From the very beginning of Facebook’s existence, there have been numerous questions about Zuckerberg’s ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, Zuckerberg used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise disturbing questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world’s largest social network. They’re particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook itself.
As a matter of fact, Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, in defense of Facebook’s privacy changes last January stated;
”People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: “… the default is now social.”
Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that Facebook can’t be trusted in the first place…
Is Facebook Turning Us Into Psychotics?
- Who takes a photo of every meal they eat to show to everyone they meet?
- Who offers up their newborn babies to strangers they’ve never met?
- Who drags their cats and their dogs around with them everywhere they go?
Well, a person afflicted with psychosis (a psychotic) certainly does…
And, thanks to Facebook, so do you….
In fact, thanks to the wonderful world of social media and networking sites, (the primary culprit being the omnipresent social gorilla known as Facebook), we’re only paying attention to the things we want to pay attention to. And that leaves us increasingly disconnected from our friends, family and co-workers as we simply turn to our devices when a conversation no longer interests us.
And that, apparently can be the cause of psychosis which, according to the American Heritage Science dictionary, is “a mental state characterized by the loss of contact with reality and the ability to think rationally.”
This mental state (a psychotic person often behaves inappropriately and is incapable of normal social functioning) has been attributed to frequent Facebook usage.
Case in point. Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, distributed surveys to 1,000 urban adolescents and his own 15-minute observations of 300 teenagers that were studying.
Among his findings were;
- Teenagers who use Facebook more often show narcissistic tendencies while young adults who have a strong Facebook presence show more signs of other psychological disorders, including antisocial behaviors, mania, and aggressive tendencies.
- Daily overuse of media and technology has a negative effect on the health of all children, preteens, and teenagers by making them more prone to anxiety, depression, and other psychological disorders, as well as by making them more susceptible to future health problems.
- Facebook can be distracting and can negatively impact learning. Studies found that middle school, high school, and college students who checked Facebook at least once during a 15-minute study period achieved lower grades.
There’s certainly plenty of data that supports Dr. Rosen’s findings. Surveys showing that we’re increasingly suffering from a variety of psychiatric ilnesses directly linked to the use and over-use of social media have become commonplace.
So, what’s to be done about it? Well, obviously it’s long overdue for us to actively pursue a more self-aware and well-adjusted relationship with technology, the internet and social media.
Or, you could just go on adding more photos to your collection of idiotic cat pictures on Facebook…
How To Make Facebook Friends In The Real World…
You are a student at Arizona State University…
You have 3 actual “real life” friends who tell you that you have the social skills of a South American Tree Sloth…And yet, according to Facebook, the world’s largest social network, you are a superstar with 5,000 Facebook friends….
You spend your days studying physics and alternate your evenings playing World of Warcraft (you are a level 80 Night Elf Druid) and posting photos of your pet gecko “Bilbo”, while randomly poking your small army of Facebook friends. (which is just too much poking really…)
Of course, you lead a completely normal, well-adjusted life…..
Until, you are invited to an “Event” in Downtown Tempe by one of your Facebook friends who invites people to events like a hyperactive spider monkey on Ritalin…
Friday night. 9pm. Mill Avenue.
You are standing in the middle of a crowded bar with a very large pink fizzy glass full of an unknown mixture of alcohol, crushed ice and food coloring…
You fail to comprehend why Tuesday would be considered fatter than any other day…
You spy a pretty blonde girl at the end of the bar. You approach and ask her if you were to “poke” her, would she reciprocate in kind and “poke” you too?
You are lying spread eagle on the floor of the bar. There is pink fizzy goo all over your brand new Star Wars T-Shirt. You feel the side of your face where there is a large red welt…
Remembering that “you only get a once in a lifetime opportunity so many times”, you make your way back over to the same pretty blonde girl and ask her if she would like to check out your “post”. You tell her that everyone likes your “post”, and you are sure that she will enjoy it too…
You are flying…flying into the cold night air…
The last thing that you see before landing onto an old homeless guy panhandling outside the bar on the sidewalk is the angry face of an extremely large man.
That angry face belongs to a man who is a bouncer and who curiously resembles a level 68 Goblin Warlock…
You wonder if the pretty blonde girl will ever comment on your “post”…
The homeless guy has a dog. It chews on your ankle.
As you walk down Mill Avenue, you see a short haired girl dressed in overalls. She looks just like a farm-girl. So, you ask her if she’d like to help you harvest your virtual corn. Or, you tell her, that you have a great pickle patch, if pickles are the type of tuber that she likes to pick.
You don’t understand how this girl expects you to “get lost” when you have Google Maps. So, you tell her that you’ll just follow her. In fact, you tell her that you are really quite good at following. You like to follow people. Following people is fun. You decide that you are definitely going to follow her…
Two very large and unpleasant Policemen escort you to a private jail cell…
Apparently, there are certain people who interpret excessive following behavior as “stalking”…
You do not want to poke or follow anyone here…
You decide to check in with FourSquare and discover that you are the “Mayor”…
You are the Mayor of the Tempe City Jail…
That is almost as cool as Farmville…
lol…
#MCO435
Stop Paying Facebook’s Taxes…
According to Citizens for Tax Justice’s new report, Facebook’s raking in many extra millions because of tax loopholes that let them pay nothing.
Through a ridiculous corporate loophole, Facebook could avoid paying income taxes for an entire generation. In 2012 alone, the social network is poised to receive a $0.5 billion government refund instead of paying its fair share.
Enough is enough. These unfair corporate tax loopholes need to come to an end, and there’s something we can do about them right now. This news about Facebook is a chance to get lots of Americans fired up about meaningful corporate tax reform.
This article is the first in a two-part series tracing the development of the amorphous online community known as Anonymous, pranksters who have become a force in global affairs.
Late in the afternoon of Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice website vanished from the Internet. Anyone attempting to visit it to report a crime or submit a complaint received a message saying the site was unable to load. More websites disappeared in rapid succession. The Recording Industry Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of America. Universal Music. Warner Brothers. The FBI.
By nightfall, most of the sites had come back online, but the people responsible for the outages had made their point. They’d landed what they hailed as the biggest blow yet in an escalating war for control of the Internet, and in one of their online command centers, “Phoenix” and his associates were celebrating.
Phoenix, a college student, is a member of Anonymous, the loose coalition of hackers, pranksters and other creatures of the Internet who have made headlines over the last 13 months for attacks on the computer systems of a wide range of targets: MasterCard, Visa and PayPal; the San Francisco public transit system; a Texas think tank; Sony; a host of computer-security companies; authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt.
Phoenix wouldn’t call himself a “member,” of course. Much like Occupy Wall Street, a movement with which it has many ties, Anonymous technically has no official membership, hierarchy or specific agenda. Some “anons” do wield more influence than others and the resulting resentments have led to bitter internecine feuds, but its overall lack of an official power structure is essential to its identity and perhaps its survival. As Anonymous put it in a taunting statement to NATO, another recent object of its unfriendly attentions, “You can’t cut off the head of a headless snake.”
The snake seems to have a certain sense of direction, however, as the Jan. 19 attacks suggested. The inciting incident took place earlier that day in the hills outside Auckland, New Zealand, when local police landed two helicopters on the lawn of a man who calls himself Kim Dotcom and owns Megaupload, a hugely popular online service that enables people to share and store movies and other media for free.
Authorities shut down the site and arrested Dotcom and six colleagues, accusing them in a 72-page indictment of engaging in acts of “massive worldwide online piracy” that inflicted $500 million in damages on copyright holders while bringing in more than $175 million in profits.
The news spread quickly. A message went out on Anonymous Twitter accounts exhorting people to attack the Justice Department and several piracy-fighting trade groups. By clicking on a link, they could launch a page that asked them to identify a target. Thousands typed in the address of the Justice Department site and clicked enter, bombarding it with a fusillade of meaningless commands. Overwhelmed, the site froze and dropped offline.
In the chat network where Anonymous coordinated the attacks, the virtual warriors declared victory with a military phrase: “TANGO DOWN.”
Part war, part game. Given the culture of the Internet, it’s reasonable to assume that many of those who responded to Anonymous’ call were teenagers. The software used to fire these Internet missiles was the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a name lifted from the video game “Command & Conquer.” Yet the consequences of firing it were real — a major law enforcement agency’s web site was temporarily crippled, leaving the agency to observe that there had been a “degradation in service.”
Last year, 14 anons were arrested in the United States for using the Ion Cannon to attack PayPal. Some now face the possibility of 15-year prison sentences.
Phoenix wasn’t around when the Jan. 19 attack went down, but later that night, I found him in an Anonymous chat room and asked him to explain the motivations behind it.
“You’ve heard Anons say before that this is a war,” he said. “A full scale information war. That’s not mere propaganda, many regard that as a perfectly accurate description. And the stake at play is, simply, ‘Who will control access to information? Everyone or a small subset?’”
In case it wasn’t clear, he then labeled that subset: “The government.”
THE WAR
This struggle for control of the Internet goes back years, but it reached a crescendo just the day before the attack on the Justice Department, when Wikipedia went dark in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the controversial anti-piracy bills that were working their way through Congress. Google collected 4.5 million signatures on a petition against the bills. Mozilla redirected traffic from its sites. And thousands of other protesters, from Tumblr and WordPress to Some Guy with a Blog, blacked out their sites, took to the streets and posted messages opposing the legislation, saying it would hurt their business and amounted to censorship.
Across the battle lines stood film studios, music labels, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses intent on defending their copyrighted property from illegal sharing at a time when the Internet has made it possible for, say, a digital copy of “V For Vendetta” — an anon fave and the source of their iconic grinning Guy Fawkes masks — to travel from an iPad in the United States to a piracy site in Brazil to another viewer’s laptop in Korea.
These companies have faced a tricky problem: How do you sue a piracy site when it’s based in another country, especially one with looser intellectual-property laws? The bills’ answer: You don’t. You go after their enablers — websites that drive traffic to the piracy sites by posting links to them, even if they only do so inadvertently. Critics argued that the cost of getting rid of these links would drive smaller sites out of business.
Two days after the protests, in the face of public outrage and lobbying efforts from the tech sector, Congress shelved SOPA indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean the war is over. As one Anonymous tweet warned about SOPA: “It can be brought back anytime. The bill must be KILLED.”
Like the web companies involved in the protests, anons tend to argue that anti-piracy legislation could send the Internet down an ever-tightening spiral of government control. Many anons go further, portraying such bills as deliberate assaults on the right to free speech. They say they oppose anti-piracy efforts on idealistic grounds, not that they don’t enjoy a bit of pirated entertainment from time to time. In general, obeying the law isn’t their priority. “The Internet is the Wild West,” Phoenix said on the night of the attacks, “and Anonymous will fight against any attempt to tame it.”
That conversation with Phoenix was not my first. All of our communications took place online, mostly in the networks of chat rooms where anons plan their attacks, and I had come to think of him a messenger from the Internet underworld: He had one foot in the world of “hax0rs” — hacker-speak for hackers — and one in the world of capital letters and correct spelling.
He was like a hacker Hermes, moving freely between the realms of the living and the dead, except that in this case the realm of the dead was a dominion of cyberspace in which the dead possessed an unusual degree of expertise in massively multiplayer online video games and porn.
Altogether, I spoke with more than 30 anons, and in some respects, their attitudes couldn’t have been more different, but one thing seemed to hold them together. They saw the Internet as their homeland, their home. Among them were Phoenix, Xyzzy and Gregg Housh. Together, their stories roughly trace the rise of Anonymous and the battles leading up to what Phoenix calls the war……..
.
Click Here to Continue Reading…….
.
Courtesy of Saki Knafo of the Huffington Post
