Time | Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.
Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually. What remains is a brittle cyberskeleton: a profile with no data. Users seem to love it. Testimonials range from joyous farewells ("Goodbye, cruel world!") to good-riddance denouements ("Thank you, microblogging. You are, in fact, totally useless"). Suicide Machine is so popular that thousands of people are waiting their turn for their own cyberoffing. "Our server is so busy handling the requests," says Suicide Machine co-creator Walter Langelaar.
But be warned: As in life, resurrection is impossible. Going through the process means that your Web doppelgänger will croak for good. When it does, you'll receive a cybermemorial on the site. RIP, 2.0. We'll miss you.
London Guardian | Some Twitter users are revealing the locations of police drunk-driving checkpoints in Mexico City and the people behind the tweets could be prosecuted, police said Monday.
Mexico City Public Safety Department spokesman Julio Iver said it is illegal for anyone to "divulge privileged information on police agencies," but he did not say what sanctions the Twitter users could face.
Mexico City police change the location of the breath-test checkpoints each day to discourage drunk driving. Police cannot do roving tests from their patrol cars, because the city requires that a doctor be present to administer the exams.
A Twitter account has been tweeting the location of the checkpoints since at least December, apparently allowing motorists to avoid them.
Called "Anti Breath Test," the account now has over 3,400 followers.
The city's criminal code sets out fines of $455 to $2,270, and jail terms of six months to five years, for anyone who "in any way assists a criminal in avoiding investigation by legally constituted authorities or in escaping from them."
As of Monday, the account continued active, with tweets from users with nicknames like "drinkspiration," warning about checkpoints and badmouthing the police threat of prosecution.
Apple Insider | With the help of NORAD, children can once again track Santa's current location via the Maps application on an Apple iPhone or iPod touch all day Thursday for Christmas Eve.
The coverage began at 2 a.m. Thursday and is integrated with Google Maps both on the Web and on mobile devices. iPhone and iPod touch users can launch the Maps application and simply search for "Santa" to see where he's located.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been holding the holiday event for more than 50 years. The tradition began in 1955, when an advertisement for children to call Santa accidentally printed the phone number for the commander in chief of NORAD's predecessor, CONAD.
In response, the director, Col. Harry Shoup, had his staff check the radar for where Santa was located. The children who called were given updates on his location, thus spawning the annual event. Shoup, a retired U.S. Air Force veteran, passed away this year at the age of 91.
Google and NORAD first partnered in 2007, bringing the holiday-themed service to Google Maps and the Google Earth program. Users can download the Google Earth plug-in atnoradsanta.org. Google Earth is available for PC, Mac and Linux. In addition to a desktop application, Google Earth can also be accessed as a Safari plugin and a mobile iPhone application.
Additional tracking can be done through YouTube, where footage from NORAD's "Santa cams" is available, and real-time search on Google, which scans Twitter, Friendfeed, news, blogs and more. Twitter users can also get tweets from @noradsanta.
Wired | America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.
In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.
“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”
Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.
Tighe disputes this — sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”
Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.
Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security clearance.
The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”
But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,” Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.”
Spectator Blog | Update your twitter in class and you might get a glare from your professor. Tweet at a G20 Summit protest and you could get arrested.
That’s exactly what happened to Elliot Madison—a 41-year-old, self-described New York Anarchist—who allegedly used Twitter to advise protesters at the Pittsburgh economic summit where police would be stationed so they could evade the officers.
Madison now faces charges of hindering prosecution, the Huffington Post reported Saturday.
FBI agents obtained a search warrant of Madison’s home Thursday. According to court papers filed by his attorney, the agents confiscated computers and leftist political writings from Madison’s home in Queens, New York.
Financial Times | Forget caller ID. A coming wave of “social” mobile phones is likely to tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the person calling you.
An application called Robo.to, available in the fourth quarter on the iPhone and handsets that run Google’s Android operating system, offers a stream of information about callers, including personal videos, photos and their current location.
It is an example of the “social address book” – the reinvention of a core handset feature that carriers will leverage to earn fresh revenues and win back consumer attention lost to iPhone applications and media companies’ services.
With Robo.to, when the phone rings, a user can see a video recorded by the caller as a “status update” that shows their mood and where they are.
The screen can also feature their latest Twitter messages, their name and title from the Linkedin professional network, recent photos posted to the Flickr photo service and a map of their location.
Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, Robo.to’s parent company, says the service should come into its own in 2010 as more phones feature a forward-facing camera for video calls.
Handset makers are also seizing on the popularity of social networks to make their phones more appealing. Motorola’s latest phone, the Cliq, features “Motoblur” software that merges tweets, e-mail and Facebook status messages under the address book listings of contacts. Motorola described the Cliq, or Dext as it will be known in Europe, as “the first phone with social skills” when it unveiled it this month.
However, the Cliq was preceded by another Android phone, the HTC Hero, which has HTC Sense software. This has a similar interface to Motoblur, grouping photos, e-mails and status updates with a contact’s information in its address book.
In July, Nokia bought the German company Cellity, which had developed a “phonebook 2.0” product merging contact information with social networks.
Handset makers are aiming to meet the priorities of carriers with the new capabilities. The merging of information draws users into using more multimedia and data to update their networks, increasing revenues.
“Carriers want to help users socialise their address books. That’s the big 2010 emphasis for them as it unlocks so much power,” says one industry executive.
“The carriers know your current location, who your friends are and what media you are consuming, so this will open up the advertising business for them.”
AP | As the Pentagon warns of the security risks posed by social networking sites, newly released government documents show the military also uses these Internet tools to monitor and react to coverage of high-profile events.
The Air Force tracked the instant messaging service Twitter, video carrier YouTube and various blogs to assess the huge public backlash to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty this spring, according to the documents.
And while the attempts at damage control failed — "No positive spin is possible," one PowerPoint chart reads — the episode opens a window into the tactics for operating in a boundless digital news cycle.
This new terrain has slippery slopes, though, for the military. Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites are very popular among service members, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan who want to keep in touch with friends and family. The sites are also valued by military organizations for recruiting or communicating with other federal agencies.
But posting information on these interactive links makes it vulnerable to being lost or stolen by the enemy, according to Pentagon officials. On Thursday hackers shut down Twitter for several hours, while Facebook had intermittent access problems — an indication of the shortcomings of relying on these services.
The Marine Corps' computer network blocks users from accessing social media sites, which service officials say expose "information to adversaries" and provide "an easy conduit for information leakage."
The Marines recently made its ban official. And that prohibition might extend to other parts of the military pending a top-level review ordered in late July by Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn.
In a widely distributed memo, Lynn said the so-called "Web 2.0" sites are important tools but more study is needed to understand their threats and benefits.
Air Force officials are already aware of the potential benefits.
According to the Air Force One documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida monitored the public fallout from the April 27 flight and offered recommendations for dealing with the fast-breaking story.
Formed two years ago, the cell is made up of as many as nine people who analyze piles of data culled from the Internet and other sources to determine whether the Air Force's message is being heard.
The presidential plane took off for New York from Andrews Air Force in Maryland accompanied by two F-16 jet fighters. The purpose of the flight, which wasn't publicly announced, was to get new photos of the specially modified Boeing 747 with the statue in the background.
The mission quickly became a public relations disaster as panicked New Yorkers, fearing another 9/11-style attack, emptied office buildings. In the aftermath, Louis Caldera, director of the White House military office that authorized the flight, was fired.
The Combat Information Cell's first assessment of the event said "Web site blog comments 'furious' at best." Local reporting of the flyover was "very critical, highlighting scare factor," it added.
A Twitter search revealed a rate of one "tweet" per minute about a pair of F-16s chasing a commercial airliner. A tweet is a text message of up to 140 characters delivered to the author's subscribers, who are known as followers.
Media coverage over the next 24 hours "will focus on local hysteria and lack of public notification," the cell predicted. "Blogs will continue to be overwhelmingly negative."
"Damage control requires timely counter-information," but the opportunity for that had passed, the assessment said. The cell recommended acknowledging the mistake and ensuring it didn't happen again.
Another update on April 28 said the story was still "reverberating, surprisingly resilient." The tweet rate had grown to three per minute and the words "New York" had been pushed into Twitter's high-frequency topic category. Videos of the event posted on YouTube had been viewed more than 260,000 times, it said.
By April 30, the story had faded, the cell reported. The blogs were still very critical, but it was the White House, not the Air Force, that was taking the heat, the assessment for that day said.
The other dominant news story at the time was public concern over the spread of swine flu. According to the documents, the same Air Force cell suggested there may be an opportunity to turn the tide. "Government involvement in this incident could be used to frame expected handling of H1N1 outbreak," one of the PowerPoint charts reads.
A Utah Air National Guard unit, the 101st Information Warfare Flight in Salt Lake City, was also monitoring the social sites. "To say that this event is being beaten like a dead horse is an understatement," reads an April 28 e-mail from the unit to other Air Force offices. "Has really taken off in Web. 2.0."
Both the 101st and the Combat Information Cell are attached to the 1st Air Force, which is based at Tyndall and is in charge of guarding U.S. airspace.
1st Air Force spokesman Al Eakle explained that the command had no role in planning or coordinating the Air Force One flight. But the units tracked social networks and blog traffic "to obtain what lessons we might learn so as not to repeat them in the future." The assessments were sent to the command's leadership so they'd know how the public was reacting, he added.
John Verdi of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington said gray zones can emerge while monitoring social networking sites because viewing and participating is based on trust.
"Lots of times individuals upload private or sensitive information that they expect to share with their friends or family and not the whole Internet world," Verdi said. "It would certainly be a major problem if the government were accessing that information under false pretenses."
Paul Bove, an Air Force digital media strategist, said service personnel are instructed not to do that. Nor are they to use aliases or represent a position that's beyond the scope of what they do.
"We always tell people, 'Stay in your lane and don't talk about something that you're not qualified to talk about,'" Bove said.
The issue of aliases is at the heart of a complaint stemming for the Army Corps of Engineers' performance in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., asked the Pentagon inspector general to examine allegations that Corps employees posed as ordinary citizens and posted comments on a New Orleans web site defending the organization from criticism following the disaster.
Jon Donley, former editor of NOLA.com, said in a June 9 affidavit that there were as many as 20 registered users who developed a pattern of not only defending the Corps, but at times being "overtly abusive" to any critics. He said he was able to trace their posts to a Corps Internet address.
Ken Holder, a spokesman for Corps' New Orleans District, said it will cooperate with any investigation.
Company gives weapon a personality, accounts on Facebook, Twitter to attract young customers
By Abigail Goldman
Chris Morris
Las Vegas Sun | After a week of endurance tests and press briefings, the Taser X3 decided to spend the Fourth of July in Mexico.
The stun gun announced the decision to friends on Facebook with a blurb and photo: the black Taser X3 trademark superimposed on a beach chair — a logo, lounging.
“I needed some R&R so headed to Cancun,” the accompanying caption read. “Here’s a picture of me relaxing on the beach. Other devices might fail if exposed to the blazing sun & salt water. Not me! My environmentally hardened chassis withstands dust, water, humidity, salt, swine flu & more ...”
The Taser X3 was equally breezy in a Twitter update that day: “I think I’ll celebrate the 4th out at the pool. Take a little dip.”
This Taser is not just another weapon catching up with friends on social networking sites, however. The new X3 model is to be officially unveiled to the world in one week. The chummy electronic control device is a mixed marketing and public relations stunt.
Tweet: “Never thought I’d get so excited about the feel of a safety switch. But wait until you feel it — smooooooth.”
The anthropomorphized Taser hawking itself is obviously an edgy idea. This is a controversial weapon we’re talking about — and now with, as well.
Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle says putting the X3 online, not just as an object but as a kind of chatty male personality, is an attempt to capture young adults in their element and language, which Taser has tried to ape with a wink-wink humor that’s half sales, half satire.
Facebook vacation update: “That song ‘Tequila Sunrise’ comes to mind as I sit on the lanai here in Cancun watching the day break in unbelievably vivid color. It’s almost as stunning (pun intended) as my new color Graphical User Interface ...”
Marketing campaigns on the Internet can explode exponentially. But so can negative press. Dan Zarella, a Boston-based social media consultant, has seen Taser skewered on the Internet, an easy feat when there’s an incendiary article or, say, viral video.
Footage of a University of Florida student being Tasered by campus police has been watched a few million times on YouTube — replayed and recounted so many times that “Don’t Tase me, bro” is an exhausted joke.
For Taser to put its controversial product on Facebook and humanize it, Zarella says, is an apt counter-strike, one that’s “a little like breaking the fourth wall and winking at everybody.”
“There’s some risk involved,” he says, “that somebody is going to take them to task for making light of such a serious thing, but no good social media is without risk.”
Of course, Taser’s first goal is to sell a new product, one that’s available only to law enforcement. The problem is that the first police officials to buy Taser products in the mid-’90s, when they first became available, are increasingly outnumbered by younger recruits. Newspaper articles, even direct e-mail and sleek company Web sites, are not going to intrigue officers fresh out of high school or their friends, Tuttle says.
“We want to get that generation. This keeps Taser from being a dinosaur.”
Since the Taser X3 started Twittering on July 30, it has gained just shy of 150 followers — not a great success. Since the stun gun’s Facebook page was launched, only one day earlier, it has gained more than 1,000 fans — people reading online updates designed to secretly inform.
When the X3 says it’s going for a swim, Tuttle says, it’s really to emphasize the device is safe near water.
When the Taser X3 says “I’m petitioning for Mensa membership — I only transfer enough energy needed to disable the suspect. Smart indeed,” it’s an attempt to convey the device’s advanced technology, the specific details of which are being largely withheld before the official launch.
“This gives (the X3) a personality. Gives it some pizazz and puts some edge on it,” Tuttle says. “And here’s the nice thing — it harms nobody.”
The chatty gun is harmless online, though people will inevitably question the safety of the X3 as they have other Taser models, which, put simply, use an electric current to inhibit muscle control.
The company has been sued numerous times by the families of people who died after being Tasered, which has provoked an ongoing debate over the device’s danger. Taser says its technology isn’t lethal, while groups like Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union insist it can be. This is a complicated issue, one that can’t easily be summed up on Twitter or Facebook, where, even if critics had spoken out against the device, the X3 has been too busy marketing itself to defend itself.
After posting a Facebook blurb on its own flashlight system, which automatically adjusts depending on the outside conditions, the X3 wrote, “That, my friends, is what we call mood lighting ...”
The X3’s friends quickly wrote back, including one fan who simply posted “SWEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!”
Global Research | The passionate support for Israel expressed on talkback sections of websites, internet chat forums, blogs, Twitters and Facebook may not be all that it seems.
Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel.
Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict.
“To all intents and purposes the internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” said Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for the project.
The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year.
The team will fall under the authority of a large department already dealing with what Israelis term “hasbara”, officially translated as “public explanation” but more usually meaning propaganda. That includes not only government public relations work but more secretive dealings the ministry has with a battery of private organisations and initiatives that promote Israel’s image in print, on TV and online.
In an interview this month with the Calcalist, an Israeli business newspaper, Mr Shturman, the deputy director of the ministry’s hasbara department, admitted his team would be working undercover.
“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli foreign ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis,” he said. “They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”
Rona Kuperboim, a columnist for Ynet, Israel’s most popular news website, denounced the initiative, saying it indicated that Israel had become a “thought-police state”.
She added that “good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved.”
Her column was greeted by several talkbackers asking how they could apply for a job with the foreign ministry’s team.
The project is a formalisation of public relations practices the ministry developed specifically for Israel’s assault on Gaza in December and January.
“During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers,” Mr Shturman said.
“We gave them background material and hasbara material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the internet.”
The Israeli army also had one of the most popular sites on the video-sharing site YouTube and regularly uploaded clips, although it was criticised by human rights groups for misleading viewers about what was shown in its footage.
Mr Shturman said that during the war the ministry had concentrated its activities on European websites where audiences were more hostile to Israeli policy. High on its list of target sites for the new project would be BBC Online and Arabic websites, he added.
Elon Gilad, who heads the internet team, told Calcalist that many people had contacted the ministry offering their services during the Gaza attack. “People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the internet.”
He suggested that there had been widespread government cooperation, with the ministry of absorption handing over contact details for hundreds of recent immigrants to Israel, who wrote pro-Israel material for websites in their native languages.
The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.
Nasser Rego of Ilam, a group based in Nazareth that monitors the Israeli media, said Arab organisations in Israel were among those regularly targeted by hasbara groups for “character assassination”. He was concerned the new team would try to make such work appear more professional and convincing.
“If these people are misrepresenting who they are, we can guess they won’t worry too much about misrepresenting the groups and individuals they write about. Their aim, it’s clear, will be to discredit those who stand for human rights and justice for the Palestinians.”
When The National called the foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, a spokesman, denied the existence of the internet team, though he admitted officials were stepping up exploitation of new media.
He declined to say which comments by Mr Shturman or Mr Gilad had been misrepresented by the Hebrew-language media, and said the ministry would not be taking any action over the reports.
Israel has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to new media since it launched a “Brand Israel” campaign in 2005.
Market research persuaded officials that Israel should play up good news about business success, and scientific and medical breakthroughs involving Israelis.
Mr Shturman said his staff would seek to use websites to improve “Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity”.
David Saranga, head of public relations at Israel’s consulate-general in New York, which has been leading the push for more upbeat messages about Israel, argued last week that Israel was at a disadvantage against pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“Unlike the Muslim world, which has hundreds of millions of supporters who have adopted the Palestinian narrative in order to slam Israel, the Jewish world numbers only 13 million,” he wrote in Ynet.
Israel has become particularly concerned that support is ebbing among the younger generations in Europe and the United States.
In 2007 it emerged that the foreign ministry was behind a photo-shoot published in Maxim, a popular US men’s magazine, in which female Israeli soldiers posed in swimsuits.
Les Visible | When I want an idea of what is happening in the world, I always look at the underbrush. It’s natural to look at political and economic trends. The state of religion also gives a good indication of where any culture may be headed. When the political leaders are nothing more than soulless whores, rubberstamping corporate policies and when the economy reflects the wholesale theft of the people’s industry by a handful of international thieves, you can bet there’s trouble on the way. When religion becomes a travesty upon the teachings of the founders in tandem with the aforementioned, you’re looking at a dangerous highway into darkness but… when the culture has turned into gum from a hot sidewalk on the bottom of your shoes, then there is no telling just how bad it might want to get. It’s not accidental. The key to understanding what is happening is to recognize that it is not accidental.
Enter Twitter. It’s hard to read about anything these days without some mention that some Twit has had something to say about it on Twitter. This is one more example of the general public looking at something but not into it. What does this site do? It gives you something like 144 characters to make a comment. Can’t you do this already anywhere you want to say something? Does this Twitter provide any other service or any service whatsoever that would make it useful or necessary in relation to anything that is already out there? No. All of a sudden though… right out of the blue… there is this interface for disposable and witless banality that is now lit up like Broadway on a Saturday night.
I went there exactly one time to see the interface. What it is is internet text messaging. It’s a virtual cell-phone. What’s more interesting is what people are saying about it (see the following comments). When you’ve got something that’s composed of high fructose, spun through forced hot air turbines into wall board insulation, you’ve got Twitter. I’ve seen one functioning value which Twitter provides. Twitter allows you to determine the useful value of any person in your life simply by discovering whether they use it or not.
The hype is mind boggling. However, if you look at the undergrowth of real human opinion you find something very different from the left-handed skyhooks and ubiquitous hoopla… something very different indeed. Type in ‘Twitter is’ in Google and look at the drop down menu. People are not as stupid as we are led to believe. Our being led to believe that people are increasingly more stupid than we ever imagined is a calculated presentation that can only have something truly dark and dangerous in mind. It’s an automatic jump from Twitter to Twits.
I have never seen anything like the Twitter epidemic. Look at how many times it now appears in any article in the MSM. It generates no real income yet it is benefiting from free publicity like no other item of the type has ever received before. There’s more to what’s going on here than what meets the eye. Given that there is nothing going on with Twitter at all makes it very, very strange.
These days, when I drive through towns it is impossible not to note a particular phenomenon. At any hour of the day, on any street where I may be driving, every pre-teen and teenage girl is tapping away on a cellphone; teenage boys as well but less often. The amount of people at all ages who are using cellphones at any time… in their cars, on the street, no doubt on the toilet as well is pandemic. And what were they doing before they were doing this? I especially like it when they are vigorously bouncing their crossed leg over the one below while so engaged.
It’s all in the underbrush. You can see the industrial green shoots of coming permutations pushing up through the cultural Kudzu. You have only to look but people do not look. The important thing is not what people are doing but what they are not doing. With each year the degree of superficial interest in transitory, pop trivia increases. Everything is five miles wide and one inch deep. What is the point?
The point is the direction in which life is being herded. Everything is instant and artificial. It’s processed foods, soda pop and designer coffee. It’s the highly destructive ingredients that go into them. It’s the people who laugh at you when you mention it. It’s the political trends where you don’t have to do anything; all you have to do is say something. Saying is the new doing. Foreign aid and rebuilding of nations destroyed under false pretenses has nothing to do with aid or rebuilding. The money is given for the purpose of being paid out to corporations to the tune of 86% of the outlay. The products and services given are then inflated in costs to several times of any actual cost.
We have come to the point where lies are the substance of life. We have come to the point where the lives of others are nothing more than casualties in a video game. We have come to the point where there is no point and Twitter is going to let you know just how true that it. We’ve come to the point where people believe life on Earth began 6000 years ago and they are doing museum tours to imprint this ugly fantasy into the minds of their children.
Think about this… look what has happened to every element of the culture in the last few decades and imagine… imagine where it’s headed. Keep in mind what occurred around Katrina. Keep in mind the now irrefutable truth about the recent wars, strong-armed through Congress by Zionist catamites. Keep in mind the recent scandals in the United Kingdom concerning their Parliamentarians and the theft of public funds. Keep in mind the new expansions of conflicts by a president elected to end them. Keep in mind the destruction of the educational system and the plague of political correctness running through every level of it. Then there’s Twitter. It’s everywhere. It’s got an unbelievable engine of ‘in your face’ name recognition embedded in nearly everything you read in the main stream.
I’m not going to delve too deeply into what I’m trying to get the reader to recognize because I believe the reader knows what I’m talking about. The most curious thing is that many, many people recognize what I myself can see. The CNN poll of a few years ago showed that over 80% of the American people believed there was something wrong with the official version of 9/11. Observe the behavior of Zio-Joe Biden when confronted about it a couple of days ago. Look at the looting of the American public for the benefit of the very people who caused the financial crisis.
We know one thing and the press tells us another. We want one thing and the politicians give us another. We want health and well being and the corporations give us deadly products to ruin our health for the prosperity of the AMA-Pharmaceutical combine. I found out the other day that major health insurers have billions invested in the tobacco industry.
Forget the religious angle concerning the implications of the present state of existence. The meaning of these things can be intuited though objective reasoning. You can take hard math and calculate where this is going to end up.
What was once important is no longer important. What is completely unimportant is now critically important. Twitter isn’t an accidental name. Consider the meaning of ‘twittering away” in its various possibilities of meaning.
I haven’t said what I wanted to say because, after all, we’re talking about Twitter. Life is now a soundbyte. The good news, I guess, is that when life as we knows it, encounters its certain destruction… it won’t mean anything. A giant pig is going to appear in the sky, silhouetted in a Warner Brothers logo and the last thing you’re going to hear is “Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all folks!” That last sentence is just about exactly at the limit of a Twitter entry. Big God and Mr. Fate
USA Today | The official White House Blog calls it "WhiteHouse 2.0." The administration is unveiling its membership in a trio of the social-networking leaders today: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. How do the accounts look shortly after launch?
The Facebook page already has more than 38,000 fans, and the number appears to jump another thousand every few minutes at this hour. The MySpace page is a highly stylized version of designs typically seen on the service, with 5,300 friends and counting. "A quick glance at the profiles shows that they mostly just link to or copy entries on the existing WhiteHouse.gov blog, but they welcome comments and are quickly gathering thousands of fans," PaidContent.org says.
TechCrunch offers initial analysis of the MySpace page: "There are no ads on the page, but if you click through to photos page, then you do get some ads. The add beside this photo of the president running down a hallway with his daughter's puppy has an ad that says, 'Pimp My Profile.' Not very Presidential. On Facebook, there is an ad slot on the actual page, but I only saw a house ad for Facebook's gift shop with a penguin. ... The Facebook page basically has the same information, but presented as a stream. Which one do you like better?"
The @whitehouse Twitter feed so far has more than 10,000 followers and retweeted a swine-flu alert from the CDC. Information about the H1N1 virus is the most common theme across the White House's uses of the services today.
"Hopefully, these pages will follow the same pattern as the administration's other web efforts -- they start out underwhelming, but improve eventually," Venture Beat writes. The blog's underwhelmed headline is "Meet White House 2.0, same as White House 1.0 (but on Twitter!)"
How the Internet is Being Used to Control Your Mind
By Chris
Information Liberation | I was watching "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" earlier and I saw the creators of "Digg.com" on the show. What struck me was that these people did not seem at all like programmers, but instead like actors.
If one studies the history of sites like Facebook, or DailyKos, they are riddled with CIA connections.
As I watched these characters on TV I couldn't help but think perhaps the CIA ties which bind Facebook and DailyKos go much, much, deeper. You have to wonder, with a site like Digg, it used to be totally dominated by truthers, yet with their new secret admins now the site is one story about Obama and then another about some tape from Al-Queda and so on. The site is just as phony as the rest of the mass media.
Promotion is an extremely difficult thing to do, people pass things around but it has a limit, even the most viral of stories or videos eventually dies off. With massive financing it is a different story though, especially if you have TV media behind you. For example take Twitter, within the last few weeks it is all the sudden being talked about on every major news channel there is. A while ago when Myspace was bought by Rupert Murdoch the same occurred, it was practically the only thing which the news talked about, they would constantly prose about "is it scandalous" or "too sexual" etc. just to get the masses all talking about it and using it. When Myspace started to die out Facebook came to replace it with an even wider "more sophisticated" appeal. If you are aware of how heavily controlled something like the TV news is, it is foolish to assume there is not also extremely heavy control over many of the biggest sites on the internet.
The big danger becomes that unlike the television, these sites have the ability to watch YOU. Think of everything you enter into Google and Yahoo, they admittedly store that info for years, but then combine that with an even more invasive technology like Facebook or Myspace, where staff, or computers, can analyze everything you personally write about in private messages to your friends.
They do not need to actually read what you are writing word for word to understand you, all they need to do is scan your writings for key words, for example if you are all the sudden messaging people about "Twitter" they could pin you as highly suggestible. Same goes for any stories about celebrities in the news, if you are writing to your girlfriends about Jennifer Aniston or whoever it reveals how you think, combine that now with a database of over a million products, things like pharmaceuticals, electronics, illicit drugs, foods, websites or even something like using an obscure vernacular, all these things can reveal A LOT about you. We are talking about 1984 times a thousand.
When you think of this you realize so much of this power comes from the idea the Internet is private, certainly some sites are but with ISPs actively being involved with the spying any semblance of privacy is going completely out the window. The danger in this is that this information can be used to control you COMPLETELY. If you know someones deepest darkest secrets you have a lot of power over someone.
Certainly this is the perception they want people to have, they want them to be afraid and live in fear, just the other day someone "demanded" I remove their comment (which was calling for nothing more than Blair and gang to be put in jail) because "the first few digits of his IP were showing" and "that could be used to track him down."
The man wanted freedom and justice but the mere possibility that he could be tracked down for expressing that feeling was too much to bear. If that is not complete and total mind control I do not know what is. We are talking about total mind control without even the use of high technologies like the sound of silence. The prospects are terrifying.
People must not let themselves be controlled by this perception. The reality is if you feel a certain way, chances are someone else does too, maybe even everybody else, it is just everyone is too afraid to express it. This is the political correctness which dominated life under the Soviet Union and in places like North Korea today, and it is done through the suppression of individuality and most of all self-honesty.
There is lots of talk of "taking back control" of the government, the federal reserve, etc. All these goals are perfectly fine and should be worked towards, but how much talk is there of taking back control of yourself, taking back control of your own mind which is being stolen from you in the most sophisticated and subtle of ways. To even communicate these days is difficult if everything you say is not politically correct, to express a feeling about some topic dealing with sexuality for example leads to endless misinterpreting and the creation of scandal from people who do not want to understand. The easiest way to deny a truth these days is to complicate it.
The most important thing that people need to understand is how they control themselves, external situations are not the root cause, it is the people themselves dodging responsibility which is at the core of the situation we are in today.
So many people are searching for freedom but they are looking in the wrong places, it is like trying to find your glasses when they are on your head. Freedom is the wellspring of life, when you promote life and help others to live you become free, when you denigrate life and promote degeneracy we all become slaves. - IL
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.' - Aldous Huxley
PC World | The backlash against Facebook's updated privacy policies is about to expand. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is preparing to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the social network's updated licenses, PC World has learned.
"We think that Facebook should go back to its original terms of service," says EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg.
EPIC expects to have its complaint submitted to the FTC by the end of Tuesday.
Wide-Reaching Reaction
The wave of reaction, of course, is hardly limited to official organizations. More than 38,000 Facebook users have joined a user group protesting the change, and countless blogs and news sites have written extensively about their concerns. The issue comes down to a couple of alterations within the company's terms of use that, it would seem, give Facebook eternal ownership of your personal content--even if you decide to delete your account.
The changes were actually made in early February but not widely noticed until Sunday, when The Consumerist's Chris Walters stumbled upon the subtly shifted language. The section in question explains how Facebook has an "irrevocable, perpetual" license to use your "name, likeness, and image" in essentially any way, including within promotions or external advertising.
That clause, Walters noted, wasn't new. What had changed was that a sentence at the end of the paragraph was now mysteriously missing. The deleted line stated that the license would "automatically expire" if you removed your content. With that line omitted, Facebook's license to use your content is simply "perpetual" and "irrevocable," even decades after you delete your stuff.
Damage Control Doubt
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has attempted to calm the concerns, posting a blog entry stating that "people own their information" and that Facebook "wouldn't share [it] in a way you wouldn't want." As an example of why the controversial clause is needed in its updated form, Zuckerberg explains that even if you were to delete your account, any messages you had sent to a friend would still remain in his inbox--so Facebook requires the expanded rights to make sure that could happen.
Isn't that a far cry, though, from anything that'd warrant retaining a "perpetual" license to "use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, [and] adapt" any content you've ever uploaded, including the option to "use your name, likeness and image for any purpose"?
Something doesn't quite add up.
Social Network Comparisons
Hey, maybe I'm misreading this. Could Facebook just be catching up with social network standards? Could everyone be overreacting?
Turns out, no. MySpace's terms of use agreement grants the company the license to use your non-private content only within MySpace-related services. Moreover--and perhaps more important--MySpace notes that once you delete something from its site, it "will cease distribution as soon as practicable, and at such time when distribution ceases, the license will terminate."
With Twitter, the company's terms of service state it "claim[s] no intellectual property rights over the material you provide" and that "you can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account."
Even YouTube, owned by privacy advocate punching bag Google, limits its license to use your content at will. The license will "terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your user videos," the service's terms of service say.
Facebook's neverending lease on your online life, then, isn't exactly the norm. Perhaps you can take comfort in the fact, though, that Facebook could change its policies again without ever telling you. "We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these terms at any time without further notice," Facebook's agreement says. "Your continued use of the Facebook service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new terms."
Well, that's at least reassuring. Anyone else having Beacon flashbacks right now?
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Time | Need to disappear from Facebook or Twitter? Now you can scrub yourself from the Internet with Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a nifty service that purges your online presence from these all-consuming social networks. Since its Dec. 19 launch, Suicide Machine has assisted more than 1,000 virtual deaths, severing more than 80,500 friendships on Facebook and removing some 276,000 tweets from Twitter.
Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm 
Spectator Blog | Update your twitter in class and you might get a glare from your professor. Tweet at a 
Les Visible | When I want an idea of what is happening in the world, I always look at the underbrush. It’s natural to look at political and economic trends. The state of religion also gives a good indication of where any culture may be headed. When the political leaders are nothing more than soulless whores, rubberstamping corporate policies and when the economy reflects the wholesale theft of the people’s industry by a handful of international thieves, you can bet there’s trouble on the way. When religion becomes a travesty upon the teachings of the founders in tandem with the aforementioned, you’re looking at a dangerous highway into darkness but… when the culture has turned into gum from a hot sidewalk on the bottom of your shoes, then there is no telling just how bad it might want to get. It’s not accidental. The key to understanding what is happening is to recognize that it is not accidental.
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