Quotulatiousness

August 1, 2013

“That kind of grassroots power tends to make government officials jittery”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

J.D. Tuccille looks at the rise of Twitter … not so much its rise in users, but the rise in government interest and interference:

Twitter information requests 2012-13You know you’ve arrived as an online media operation when governments take an interest in who is speaking out, and make efforts to muzzle what’s published. That’s definitely the case with Twitter, the microblogging platform that started as an outlet for exhibitionist ADHD sufferers, only to become a powerful medium for sharing news and grassroots organizing. According to the company’s latest transparency report, governments around the world are issuing ever-more demands for information about the service’s users, and stepping up efforts to suppress tweeted content.

From January 1 through June 30 of this year, Twitter received 1,157 government requests for private information about users and accounts, up from 849 during the same period in 2012. Of those, authorities in the United States were responsible for 902 requests. Twitter complied in whole or part with 55 percent of all requests — 67 percent of those originating in the U.S.

Interestingly, roughly 20 percent of information requests issued by American authorities were “under seal,” meaning that Twitter was forbidden to fulfill its usual policy of informing users about requests for their private information.

July 28, 2013

Follow-up to “First world blogging problems” post

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

All good things must come to an end, I guess, so I’ve bid goodbye to the old Tweetdeck, which has been a reliable Twitter client for me for the last several years. When the Twitter corporation took over the original Tweetdeck development, I thought it would be a good thing … until I saw the first release of the “new” Tweetdeck client. It sucked. It was as though the development team’s mission was to find all the good features of the old Tweetdeck and comprehensively ruin them. If that was the case, they succeeded terribly well.

I stuck with the old version of Tweetdeck until it finally stopped working earlier this week. Right now, I’m trying out Janetter, which has been relatively painless to install and configure, and replaces most of the functionality that Tweetdeck used to have. Hopefully, it’ll be around as long as the old Tweetdeck was.

Follow-up to this post from earlier in the week.

July 25, 2013

First world blogging problems

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

I use a few tools to come up with items to post on the blog. The two most useful are Twitter and RSS. I’d been using Google Reader for my RSS needs until it was shut down at the beginning of July, so I switched to The Old Reader and it has been working quite well as a direct Google Reader replacement. Earlier this week, TOR had a server meltdown and multiple failures of drives while attempting to recover. As of this morning, they’re still trying to get back online and (hopefully) recover all the data. Fortunately, I’ve also been testing Newsvibe for RSS, and it’s still working well … but has a different set of feeds than TOR.

My other main tool, Twitter, seems to be having some issues today … or it might just be that my old Twitter client is finally giving up the ghost. I’ve been using the desktop TweetDeck client for years, but I really disliked the “new” version of the tool introduced when TweetDeck was taken over by Twitter itself. Over the last several months, the old client (version 0.38.2) has been slowly losing bits of functionality — for example, sometime in the last week, I lost the ability to send a direct message from Tweetdeck, and earlier this year it became impossible to use the “old” retweet method and more recently to retweet at all.

Today, when I started up the client, it was unable to retrieve any data from earlier this morning. This might be a general issue with the Twitter API or it might be yet another bit of creeping feature-fail. It’s picking up new Twitter posts, but one of the more useful features was that it would also collect tweets from my several lists that had been posted overnight. This morning, only the main feed column in Tweetdeck is being populated, the rest (Mentions, Direct Messages, various list and search columns) are empty.

Old Tweetdeck

I may need to shop around for a new Twitter client. Either way, it puts a crimp in my usual blogging habits.

July 24, 2013

Anti-porn UK MP gets hacked, threatens reporter who publicized the hack

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Apparently British Conservative MP Claire Perry doesn’t know a lot about the way the internet works, despite being described as an “architect” for David Cameron’s proposed porn blocker:

UK MP Claire Perry hacked

Claire Perry is the UK Tory MP who architected David Cameron’s idiotic national porno firewall plan. Her website was hacked and defaced with pornographic gross-out/shock images. When Guido Fawkes, a reporter and blogger, wrote about it on his website, Perry took to Twitter to accuse him of “sponsoring” the hack, and publicly announced that she would be speaking to his editor at the Sun (Fawkes has a column with the tabloid) to punish him for writing about her embarrassment.

Perry is so technologically illiterate that she can’t tell the difference between writing about someone hacking your website and hacking itself. No wonder she’s credulous enough to believe the magic-beans-peddlers who promise her that they’ll keep porn off the British Internet — a feat that neither the Chinese nor the Iranian governments have managed.

July 15, 2013

Prime Minister live-tweeted his own cabinet shuffle

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

In Canada, we do things a bit differently these days:

And on, naming each new minister or minister with changed portfolio.

July 12, 2013

Satanists and the Texas abortion debate

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Kathy Shaidle finds the Satanists aren’t at all what she expected them to be:

At the height of all the #HailSatan hilarity on the left side of Twitter, a single thunderclap of a Tweet shut down the party pronto:

    Unfortunate to see Satan’s name used in such a diabolical manner. Another example of what ‘Satanism’ doesn’t represent. #HailSatan”—@UKChurchofSatan

It was that utterly breathtaking inclusion of the word “diabolical” that got me thinking like a liberal: that is, that the @UKChurchofSatan Twitter account had to be fake, set up specifically to mock the proceedings, in the tradition of “Clint’s Empty Chair.”

My suspicions were confirmed when I saw that, according to their profile, @UKChurchofSatan was following precisely 666 others on Twitter. Cute.

Their profile didn’t display the address of an official website, either. Not a good sign.

But I kept scrolling down. @UKChurchofSatan had sent out over 150 Tweets — wishing followers happy bank holiday weekends and re-Tweeting Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais — dating back through March.

It was legit.

Unlike messages regularly spewed out by the right and the left, the Church’s Tweets were models of old-fashioned decorum even when they were responding to critics, written in that anachronistic, typing-with-a-quill-pen style typical of earnest, fairly well-read males:

    Why wouldn’t Satanism be pro-life? What else is there? We are all free to make choices. Agreeable or not. Everyone is entitled to choice.

At least in this online iteration, Satanism comes across as a kind of Goth objectivism but manages to express itself without the average Ayn Rand follower’s pompous, unearned sense of superiority.

Thanks to its disapproving July 3 Tweet, which was re-Tweeted over one hundred times and gleefully reported all over the Web and a few newspapers such as the Telegraph, the @UKChurchofSatan is getting lots of positive attention, much of it from a most unlikely source: conservative Christian bloggers in the US, who’ve joked that “Hail Satan!” would make a fine Democratic campaign slogan for the 2014 midterms.

June 30, 2013

Social media marks the end of the red carpet

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Reason, Nick Gillespie gets to the root of Alec Baldwin’s problem with social media:

In an interview with Gothamist, the talented actor and annoying loudmouth inadvertently lays bare the real online dynamic behind his anger with new media — and it has less to do with factually incorrect journalism than you might think.

Baldwin’s real issue with new media — he slags Tumblr, Vine, MySpace, Facebook, and more — is that they level kings and queens and even celebrities into a mosh pit of direct, unmediated exchange that is hard as hell to control. It turns out that there’s really no red carpet or champagne room when it comes to the way that stars (read: world leaders, sitcom heroes, famous authors, former child actors, you name it) are treated.

In the Q&A, Baldwin says,

    Twitter began for me as a way to bypass the mainstream media and talk directly to my audience and say, “hey here’s a show I’m doing, here’s something I’m doing.”… But I realized it’s something I’m not really… it certainly isn’t worth the trouble. Rosie O’Donnell is on my podcast this week, and she said that she’s getting off of Twitter, and I said “God, I was thinking the same thing.” I said “you just end up absorbing so much hatred.” You get these body blows of all this hatred from people who… their profiles are almost identical, like “tea party mom, I love my job, I love my kids, I love my country #millitary #guns” and there’s a screaming eagle in the background of their profile, grasping some arrows and tanks rolling in the background and they all want to tell me how much they can’t stand my politics. And I go, “OK.” What kills me is these are people who want to put me out of business, so to speak, as fast as they possibly can, but they don’t want to put BP out of business, who turned the Gulf of Mexico into a cesspool….

Baldwin sputters that the very tools he can use to bypass “the mainstream media and talk directly” to his audience also empowers all those dim people out there in the dark. What’s more, his followers have minds of their own. They may enjoy his turns in Glenngarry Glenn Ross and 30 Rock and guest-hosting on Turner Classic Movies but not really find his views on fracking to be worth a damn. It’s a real kick in the pants for a celebrity to be reduced to asking, “Do you think I’m really changing anybody’s mind?”

[. . .]

Reading Baldwin’s comments, I’m struck by how his comments strongly vindicate what we’ve been stressing at Reason since the dawn of the Internet Age: That the audience has a mind of its own that it’s always been dying to express. What’s different now is that we can. Baldwin’s complaint that “there’s no journalism anymore” (except for the people he likes) and his attack on “tea party moms” who thrill to see the Gulf of Mexico foam with oil are best understood as howls of rage from the ancien regime as new-media sans-culottes storm the gates of privilege and power. Being in charge — of government, of media, of art, of business, of religion — just ain’t what it used to be.

Given his temperament and the massive amount of abuse he seems to have taken, Baldwin’s probably right to vacate Twitter and other forums that allow direct, unmediated access to him. That’s his right to exercise. But among the costs he and other powerful people — pols, pashas, pundits, etc. — will bear is lack of engagement with exactly where the world is literally and figuratively trending.

June 26, 2013

Buh-bye, DOMA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

I was away from my computer for about an hour this morning and when I came back online, my Twitter feed had exploded with news and opinion links about the US Supreme Court striking down the Defence of Marriage Act. While I’m delighted with the result (check my posts tagged Same Sex Marriage if you’re curious), it’s interesting to watch the reactions on all sides of the issue.

June 13, 2013

Twitter and #EthicalCleansing

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

In sp!ked, Mick Hume talks about the dangers to free speech on Twitter:

The latest bizarre episode in this campaign of ‘ethical cleansing’ on the web occurred at the end of last week, when a 21-year-old London student was sentenced to 250 hours of community service as punishment for a 16-word tweet, having been found guilty of sending a malicious electronic message at an earlier hearing.

Like several other recent Twitter incidents, the case began after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22 May. As a natural home of rumour, gossip and ill-informed opinion, Twitter was soon ablaze with comments about the killing, including rumours that Drummer Rigby had been decapitated in the street. Deyka Ayan Hassan, a 21-year old English and politics undergraduate from north London, quickly joined in the Twitter-fest with what she intended to be a fashion joke about Lee Rigby’s outfit: ‘To be honest, if you wear a Help for Heroes t-shirt you deserve to be beheaded.’ Hassan’s lawyer told the court that this was the sort of remark she would typically make ‘about clothes and shoes she didn’t like’ (which sounds believable enough to anybody familiar with the level of online ‘banter’). Hassan also insists that at the time of tweeting, she did not know that the dead man was a soldier or that Islamic extremists were accused of his murder.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hassan’s joke about the t-shirt did not meet with universal approval online. She was soon inundated with hundreds of hate tweets, threatening her with everything from rape to being burned alive in her home. The naive and shocked student then went to a local police station to report these threats and insults. Rather than listen to her complaints, the police arrested Hassan for sending the original tweet. She was then fast-tracked into court, as if this was an urgent case, and pleaded guilty.

Bad taste in humour and a bad sense of timing should not be criminal offences, and the authorities talk about this as though incidents like this don’t actually happen:

Cases such as this demonstrate how the creeping culture of You Can’t Say That is now spreading across the supposedly free fringes of the internet. As other incidents listed below show, it can now be deemed a crime to post accusations, insults or just ‘naughty’ words that tweeters, the police and the courts consider ‘inappropriate’, ‘offensive’ or ‘insensitive’. And we thought that Thought Crime belonged in the realm of fiction.

The Hassan case should also be a warning to those many users of social-media sites who now see it as their role to police what others say online – and to inform the real police about tweets and posts they find offensive. The police are happy to act on such information, since they far prefer pursuing thought criminals across their tweets to chasing real ones on the streets. But as Deyka Ayan Hassan’s experience shows, the law is no respecter of anybody’s freedom of expression. She thought she was reporting a crime, and ended up with a criminal record. Those who try to live by the ‘hate speech’ laws can perish by them, too.

[. . .]

The culture of You Can’t Say That is making seemingly unstoppable progress across society, even while apparently oblivious civil libertarians rage against the spectre of state surveillance. Last September, no less a figure than the UK Director of Public Prosecutions himself announced that ‘offensive comments made on Twitter are unlikely to lead to criminal charges unless they include threats or turn into campaigns of harassment’. In what was billed as ‘an important statement about the boundaries of free speech’, Keir Starmer reportedly ‘suggested that prosecutions would not be brought over one-off jokes made online, even if in they were in poor taste’. Tell that to such examplars of one-off poor taste jokes as Deyka Ayan Hassan and some of the other characters listed below.

May 25, 2013

James Delingpole, that intellectual lightweight

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

Here he is again, banging on about his failings, particularly over the Woolwich murder:

On occasions like this I really do feel a bit of an intellectual lightweight, I must say. There am I, stuck in the fuddy-duddy mindset where you see a 25-year old father of a one year old boy being hacked to death with meat cleavers on a busy London street and all you can do is respond with the gut feeling that “This is wrong. This is totally wrong!”

Whereas if I were a bit younger, less reactionary and I’d had a proper educational grounding somewhere serious like the LSE, what I would have realised is that you just can’t judge things like this at face value. Sure, there’s a temptation to dwell on what a terrible way to go it must have been for that poor young man; to think about what his family must be going through — his wife and mother especially, who will surely be re-living his imagined death every day from now on till they die; to get quite angry, even, about the perverted political values and warped mindset that led to this barbaric act — and also about the cultural relativism that helped make it possible. But succumbing to this temptation would, of course, be a serious mistake.

No, if you’re a truly enlightened citizen of the modern world, the correct way to respond is the way all those sophisticated intellectual types on Twitter did. You recognise straightaway that the horror of the murder is just a distraction from the real issue. The real issue being, of course, that this regrettable event was the sadly inevitable consequence of Britain’s racism, intolerance and Islamophobia — as demonstrated by Nick Robinson’s bigoted, ignorant and inflammatory use of that reprehensible “of Muslim appearance” comment on BBC news for which he has since, quite correctly, apologised.

Until, as a society, we learn to face up to our collective responsibility for Drummer Lee Rigby’s death, young men like Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale ought to have every right to go on drawing attention to this rampant injustice in whatever way they deem fit. It is frankly outrageous that in order to make their point they had to resort to the blunt instrument of execution by motor vehicle and butcher’s knife. A truly considerate society would have made public funds available for them to afford some properly functioning automatic weaponry. That way these gallant, oppressed freedom fighters could have made their vibrant and refreshingly direct contribution to our national debate with a lot less fuss and a lot less mess — perhaps preventing the disgraceful public overreaction we have witnessed over the last couple of days, everywhere from the hateful, violent racist English Defence League to the hardcore, fascist right-wing BBC.

May 7, 2013

Chris Kluwe sees @OnionSports satire, responds appropriately

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:37

The Onion posted a short “editorial” “by” “Chris Kluwe”. The former Vikings punter responded that he’s quite capable of writing his own biting satire with extremely generous sprinklings of naughty words:

(more…)

April 30, 2013

Another incident of hypersentimentality

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the latest opportunity for people to ostentatiously display their sentimentality:

I wish Scottish author Iain Banks had kept his cancer to himself. For in making it public, through a statement about being ‘Very Poorly’, he has unwittingly mobilised one of the ugliest mobs of modern times: the death-watchers, the ostentatious grievers, those who like nothing more than to read about another’s physical demise and advertise how moved they are by it.

Almost as soon as Banks announced earlier this month, through the publisher of his entertaining novels, that he was suffering from terminal gall bladder cancer, these professional proxy weepers were doing their thing. Premature mourning was rife. Twitter became a vast virtual pre-death condolences book, as everyone stopped what they were doing for 45 seconds to tweet about how torn apart they were by the news of Banks’ sickness. People seemed keen to out-lament each other. One said Banks’ cancer revelation hit her like ‘a chill blast of sorrow and grief’, which makes you wonder how she’ll cope when he dies.

Friends and fans of Banks set up a website where lovers of his novels can get updates on his condition and sign a ‘guest book’ that is really just another offensively early condolences book. Thousands of messages have been posted. It’s remarkable how many of the message writers admit they ‘don’t know what to say’ yet proceed to say it anyway, at length, clearly feeling weirdly compelled to sign up to the speedily constructed community of online mourners.

We’ve also had pre-death obituaries, articles assessing Banks’ life and work before either has come to an end: his next novel, The Quarry, will be published shortly. Even those who know nothing about Banks felt an urge to write about him, or rather about how they personally felt upon hearing he was sick. Simon Kelner at the Independent admitted ‘I haven’t read any of his books’, before producing a whole column on Banks’ cancer news. The macabre sense of anticipatory mourning is summed up in the way Banks’ wife is referred to on the tribute website: as his ‘chief widow-in-waiting’.

April 16, 2013

QotD: Media “experts” immediately after a tragedy

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

Right now, I could write segments on the idiot comments made by the usual suspects … but do you really need another piece of evidence to support the argument that, say, Cynthia McKinney is a lunatic? […] I can’t get all that revved up about it. She is what she is. If you really put much stock in her judgment of what’s “the real story” behind a horrific news event, theories that hear this awful news and immediately jump to elaborate theories of “false flag” operations and the notion that our local and federal law-enforcement ranks are full of men and women willing to set bombs and blow up children in order to score some sort of propaganda victory … well, then I doubt there’s anything anyone can say to dissuade you of that vast worldview you’ve constructed within your mind.

The conspiracy theorist is only a couple of steps away from the person who — often on Twitter — begins discussing who was behind it with way too much certainty. As I said on Twitter yesterday, I suspect that speculation, unhelpful as it is, is a coping mechanism: People attempt to make a sudden unexpected horror fit into pattern of known facts. If we can figure out who did it, we can find someone to feel anger and rage towards and, for some people, that’s a much easier emotion to deal with than shock, horror, fear, and sorrow.

The all-too-confident speculator is only a few steps away from the ordinarily knowledgeable terrorism expert or pundit yanked into a television studio at a moment’s notice and asked to speak, extemporaneously, about what could be behind these awful events based on nothing more than initial reports and the most horrific of images playing on a monitor just beyond the camera.

Jim Geraghty, “The Morning Jolt”, 2013-04-16

February 16, 2013

“The mainstream news has become the Boy who Cried Internet”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:29

In Maclean’s, Jesse Brown explains why the mainstream media still doesn’t seem to “get” the internet or social media channels like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook:

While I was delivering some talking-head sound-bites on this item for a certain newscast, the reporter asked me why the Twitter hack was such a huge deal. I was stumped – it wasn’t. So she asked me why it was getting so much attention. I knew the answer, but held my tongue.

Here’s what I was thinking: it gets so much attention because print and TV news love to bash technology, especially social media, and can’t resist a scary story about how the people who use it should be very, very afraid. The truth is, despite years of fear-mongering stories about Facebook identity theft, Gmail phishing attacks and massive Twitter hacks, public interest and concern about these things remains very low. That’s because these things haven’t happened to the vast majority of us, or to anyone we know. For the small number of people this has happened to, the impact is typically minimal. The mainstream news has become the Boy who Cried Internet.

This is not to say privacy isn’t a valid concern when it comes to free Internet services. There’s much to worry about, but little of it has to do with Russian digital mobsters, Chinese military hackers or spammy Nigerian princes. The real data privacy danger – with social media, and beyond – comes from government.

January 18, 2013

When sarcasm goes right over their heads…

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Andrew Coyne parodied Toronto attitudes to winter in a Twitter update earlier this morning:

As often happens, the sarcasm went right past some folks:

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