“Hell is other people” says Sartre. If that is so, then Facebook is a glimpse into hell. I’ve had a rocky relationship with FB (“it’s complicated”); after leaving Facebook for almost two years and then coming back, I have been very self-conscious about my use of the social network, and Read more…
So, the Gay Girl in Damascus ended up being Tom MacMaster, a 40 year-old American student at the University of Edinburgh. It is needless to rehash what has been said, I highly recommend Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent article on the subject. There is however one aspect of the affair that has Read more…
Twitter has been in the news quite a lot recently: Anthony Weiner’s inappropriate tweet to one of his followers; Wayne Rooney posts a picture of his hair-transplant; the whole Ryan Giggs keruffle trying to stop information about an alleged affair from leaking (I feel all journalistic by using the word Read more…
(via Andrea Glorioso) I received an interesting Facebook invitation, and it answered an important question that I have had about my FB timeline. I reproduce the message here: “Have you noticed that you are only seeing updates in your newsfeed from t…he same people lately? Have you also noticed that Read more…
Twitter has been in the news quite a lot this last week here in the UK. First, we were presented with the Twitter Joke trial, where accountant Paul Chambers lost an appeal and was fined £2,000 GBP for posting a threatening message on Twitter, or more accurately, he posted a Read more…
Yesterday we got a very interesting lesson about law enforcement online. Imagine that you discover your rights are being violated in some way, and you are almost certain that you are on the right. Traditionally you had three options: do nothing, contact the offender to negotiate, or file a lawsuit. Read more…
SocialMediaLand has been flooded in the last couple of days with stories about Firesheep. In case you have not heard about it, Firesheep is a Firefox add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people’s social network accounts in open wifi zones. The way the application works is staggeringly simple. If Read more…
For years, xkcd’s map of the online communities has been my favourite graphical representations of the Internet, and it has been immortalised as the cover of Edwards and Waelde’s Law and the Internet. Now there is an update, and what a beautiful update it is: Desert of Food Updates. River Read more…
Interesting start of the afternoon. Twitter has been hit by an XSS exploit which makes use of Javascript mouseover function in a browser, so that every time people browsed over a tweet, it opened a screen, sent an RT which propagated the vulnerability. The purpose was spam, the browser would Read more…
Should we be worried about social media? While this is sort of an exaggeration, the speed of information it describes is real. A girl in London rick-rolls a Japanese guy using Chatroulette, and as revenge he uploads her video on YouTube. What happens next? Mob (a near-future science fiction story) Read more…