When Eric was in Egypt's land....
... let my people tweet.
Coat, nothing more need be said....
'Vacuous' - Twitterati hail Eric Schmidt's midnight tweet
Google boss Eric Schmidt has commented on the goings on in Egypt - vaguely, very quietly, and, possibly, in the middle of the night. Schmidt is quite frugal in his tweeting, not surprisingly, given he'd previously slapped down the service as "poor mans email." However, at around 2.30 GMT today he wrote "Egypt: people plus …
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 15:31 GMT Mike Flugennock
I finally broke down and got a Twitter account...
...after the FBI tried to shake them down for information on users who were following Wikileaks. I got that account for the express purpose of following Wikileaks... you know, like, "I am Spartacus". As I recall, when that news first broke, the number of users following Wikileaks immediately went up by something like 12,000.
I keep my "following" to a minimum... some fellow cartoonists, a few news sites, a few bloggers whose blogs I read, that's about it. I logged on regularly and kept it running while the shit was breaking loose in Egypt in order to follow the Al Jazeera feed.
It's pretty funny, though... I hadn't had my account active for more than ten minutes before I picked up a "follower" -- some goddamn' bot pretending to be a cute, single chick inviting me over to look at her pictures. I have maybe fifteen followers, tops, and they're all either people I know personally, or people who I share interests and work with. Still, at least once or twice a week, I have to check my "followers" page and shit-can the spam bot accounts; there's usually at least one.
Whenever I go to their home page to log on, I can see why Twitter has the reputation it has; in the box where all the "top tweets" go scrolling by, it's always some useless, inane shit from celebrities, or some dumbass' banal homilies, or some crank yammering about Jesus or not sweating the small stuff, or some shit.
I think the key to effective use was to train myself to keep my goddamn' fingers off the keyboard unless I have something substantive to say, or some important news to pass along.
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 15:36 GMT NoneSuch
Dictatorships...
...demand that any system of communication that is encrypted must be accessible to them for "lawful intercept" per the recent RIM ban threat(s).
"'Can't @Google design a DIY freedom software kit of anonymous, encrypted communication, gateways, dial-in etc?' asked mpawlo." Yes they can, but unless they give governments back doors to that encryption that traffic will be banned, tracked or otherwise denied. Of the one hundred and ninety-five countries, more than forty are dictatorships. In some of those countries simply using encryption is a death sentence. Of the rest, the majority want encryption access as a matter of course.
Freedom of Speech is an American right, not a global right and even the Yanks want access to your encrypted comms.
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 20:29 GMT Matt Morgan 1
the delay is excusable
He's not going to tweet that while his employee is in custody. Nor would he have done it while the outcome of the protests was still in doubt. Like it or not, he's a really high-profile figure and he wouldn't express support for a revolution while the US was still keeping its thoughts pretty quiet.
Why he had to tweet anything I don't know.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
