Tag: facebook

How Ed Snowden helped Russia get a good choke hold on its own online dissidents.

‘Inadvertently.’  How droll. How abso-[expletive deleted]-lute-ly droll.

Let me set the scene: Russia – which has comfortably settled back into the patterns of bureaucratic autocracy that has more or less been its operating methodology for a millennium – has a problem.  It’s that pesky Internet, which was created by those pesky Americans, and our pesky stubborn insistence that people have rights and needs that trumps the State’s. Worse, an American’s instinctive response to foreigners insisting the we shut up on the Internet traditionally involves a bodily function, a rope and directions on how do the former upon the latter. You can do that, when all the servers are on your soil. Sooo…

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, this was intolerable. In his mind the solution was simple: force the platforms — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Apple among them — to locate their servers on Russian soil so Russian authorities could control them.

The challenge was how to do it.

Continue reading How Ed Snowden helped Russia get a good choke hold on its own online dissidents.

The New York Times needs to get all of their people off of Facebook.

All of them: the rot has set in. To summarize… Marc Cooper, a journalism professor at USC (Annenberg), asked on Facebook what seems to be a fairly reasonable question: if the New York Times doesn’t think that Islamist fanatics killing a dozen people over the publication of satirical cartoons justifies showing said cartoons… hold on a minute.

charlie

Moving on… Marc Cooper asked: if the current number of murdered cartoonists, staffers, and cops weren’t enough to justify the NYT doing its job, then just how many murder victims would be sufficient? – Apparently, this question cooked off the NYT’s executive editor Dean Baquet, because Mr. Baquet went on Facebook to literally call Mr. Cooper an a*shole. Continue reading The New York Times needs to get all of their people off of Facebook.

Facebook/Google: Barack Obama is the kindest, warmest, bravest …

…most wonderful person that they’ve ever known in their lives. Slate, of all organizations, summed it up best:

 

Basically, it looks for all the world like Google and Facebook got some sort of recommended talking points memo designed to end this hullabaloo by giving them something suitably vacuous to say that would allow them to, I think, progress past this issue and move on.

…OK, I’ll stop now.

Moe Lane

Wait, this needed to be explained?

Sheesh.

Anyone signing up to Facebook agrees to their terms and conditions (which can be read here). In the same way that posting your own hotchpotch rental agreement in your lounge window makes no difference to your landlord once he’s got your original signed contract, neither does this status update amend your agreement with Facebook. You simply can’t retroactively alter the mutually-agreed terms by making a Facebook post.

So what should you do if you’ve already amended your Facebook privacy settings and you’re still unhappy with the site’s policies? Other than renegotiating your terms with them, your options are limited to this: lump it or leave.

It’s a miracle that everybody under 30 isn’t in jail for various forms of intellectual property rights violations.  What the hell were they teaching these kids instead of respect for property rights, anyway?

:pause:

Yeah, that was a loaded question, huh?

Via:

AP: Facebook can’t tell anti-fracking fanatics from spambots.

Just thought that I’d rewrite this title (“Facebook’s spam program catches innocent users“) into something a bit more accurate. Executive summary: anti-fracking* activists – and more general environmental… types… – have been discovering that their regular posting and commenting patterns on Facebook has been winning them two week spam-bans from Facebook.  Now, Facebook obviously doesn’t particularly want to give out its anti-spambot protocols, but you can pickup some clues from the (somewhat confused, in a hilarious sort of way) complaints. It turns out that if you go on Facebook and: Continue reading AP: Facebook can’t tell anti-fracking fanatics from spambots.

The Obama Facebook thing today.

Let’s establish something, right from the start *.  Tim Pawlenty has a reason besides the stated one in calling for submissions for awkward questions to ask President Obama at today’s gelded Facebook ‘event.’ For those who don’t know, the President is using Facebook to… use Facebook, apparently.  Shows that the President’s hip to this entire social media thing, because nothing shouts ‘responsive’ and ‘new media’ by taking carefully screened questions, and answering them with ten minutes of blather apiece.

Anyway: while Pawlenty’s stated reason is, well, reasonable enough – everybody knows that the President’s not going to get a question harsher than ‘Has the intoxicating scent of unicorn flatulence ever affected your job performance?’ – the actual goal here is to get the contact information of all those people who are: paying attention; exasperated with the President already; and energized enough to want to raise a bit of a ruckus.  Now, admittedly I may be prejudiced by having Tim Pawlenty be currently at the top of my list – but that hardly sounds like a bad thing.  And I suggest that the rest of the GOP field may want to step up their own efforts to get in regular contact with the folks that already give a tinker’s dam about what’s going on.

Because that’s your cadre, right there.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I respect your collective intelligence, even if it’s an open question whether the current President does.

Palin boosts Boehner’s health care address.

Via her Facebook account, of course:

Mark my words – tomorrow is the game changer! Tune in to hear common sense solutions that bury the false accusations that conscientious members of Congress have no solutions to meet America’s health care challenges.

If you’re like me, shaking your head wondering why all the miscommunication between Washington and the American people who have been saying, “Please hear what we’re saying about our desire for health care reform,” then tomorrow will be a refreshing time of clarity for all.

As she notes, preview here. This will be interesting to see for two reasons; first off, as Dan Riehl notes this should provide Rep. Boehner’s address with a bit more traffic than these things usually get.  I’ll be interested to see whether or not it’ll be a significant spike, but it should be something.  Second: if you were holding out hope that former Governor Palin was going to play third-party advocate… you might as well stop.  This is her way of saying that NY-23 is a special case, not a general one; and that she’s still in, and in with, the GOP.

[Insert tired, yet labored Halloween cliche here.]

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Civilization coming to Facebook. Yes, that’s why the vulture’s on your chair.

Well, it’s not like we needed a functioning society, anyway.  And the irony that it’ll fall because we’ll all be playing Civilization is not lost to me:

Civilization creator Sid Meier has confirmed that an online version of the popular strategy title is coming to Facebook.

Civilization Network will arrive on the social networking website next year. The game will emphasise cooperative play, allowing friends to share technology and form military alliances with one another.

“The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment – you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it’ll be free to play,” Meier wrote on its Facebook fan page.

Via the Backwards Compatible webcomic, which has already made… plans.

Fugitive caught via Facebook updates.

Ironically – or at least funnily – I came across this article while looking for fresh content:

A man on the run, wanted for fraud by US authorities, inadvertently revealed where he was hiding through a series of extravagant Facebook updates.

Maxi Sopo’s updates advertised the fact that he was living the high life in the Mexican resort of Cancun.

So I was ever-so-slightly, barely-triggering-the-needle, blink-and-you’d-miss-it sympathetic towards the guy’s obvious need to keep producing…

He also adding a former US justice department official to his friend list who ended up helping to track him down.

…and then I got better. Because that’s just a doofus move.

Moe Lane