Twitter is trying to mitigate these problems by only taking down access to content for people coming from IP addresses the country seeking to censor that content. That’s good. For now, the overall effect is less censorship rather than more censorship, since they used to take things down for all users. But people have voiced concerns that “if you build it, they will come,”—if you build a tool for state-by-state censorship, states will start to use it. We should remain vigilant against this outcome.
(…)
So what should Twitter users do? Keep Twitter honest. First, pay attention to the notices that Twitter sends and to the archive being created on Chilling Effects. If Twitter starts honoring court orders from India to take down tweets that are offensive to the Hindu gods, or tweets that criticize the king in Thailand, we want to know immediately. Furthermore, transparency projects such as Chilling Effects allow activists to track censorship all over the world, which is the first step to putting pressure on countries to stand up for freedom of expression and put a stop to government censorship.
Interesting read and advice from the EFF about Twitter’s new method of “hiding tweets” (or, you know, censoring them). Over all it is not as panicked as my first reaction and even acknowledges some positive things in Twitter’s move.
I think what made me so upset the other morning, is the fact that from all the social networks I use, Twitter is the one that holds the most value for me. It’s a great tool and service and I don’t want to see it going the wrong way (and not allowing free speech – even based on a country by country basis – isn’t the right direction).
“No, it’s exactly like Pinterest.”
I came across less - a CSS extension by Alexis Sellier (better known as cloudhead) - quite a few times last year but I’ve refrained from using it, even though I immediately understood it’s great potential. I had that wired thought that I needed to develop my CSS skills at least to a level where I could take advantage of all the fancy stuff one can do with less.
But now that I started looking into it I must says that I’ve been a total fool. I should have started using it way earlier. Being able to insert variables into my CSS is a total time saver! Why remeber and repeat
/* CSS */
color: #dedede;
every time you want to have the color gray to appear somewhere? Or worse: What happens if you want to change that exact color that probably appears quite a few times in your stylesheet?
Defining the color as a variable once and inserting it where needed makes just so much more sense.
// Less
@gray: #deded;
#header {
color: @gray; }
#footer {
color: @gray; }
And it gets even better with Mixins – a way to embed all properties of a given class or id into another.
// Less
.border-radius (@radius) {
border-radius: @radius;
-moz-border-radius: @radius;
-webkit-border-radius: @radius; }
#header {
.border-radius(4px); }
It’s powerful stuff, really. And I haven’t even looked into functions and operations yet… I’m so excited to develop my next project with it.
As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
Really, Twitter? “Different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression”? Call it censorship, because that’s what it is.
I understand that Twitter, being a comercial company, wants to grow and expand its service even in markets where free speech doesn’t exists or is very limited (think China for example) - but it is really sad to see that there is only one year between Twitter’s glowing “Fredom of Expression” blogpost and the one I quoted above.
Quo vadis, Twitter?
I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.
And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
The new Vimeo looks gorgeous!
A 1:1 reproduction of “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” in Mincraft. Filed under: Stuff the internet was made for.
Some impressions from the SenseCamp – a conference about Social Entrepreneurship we co-organized.
It was a blast! A full write up can be found here and on the knowable.org blog soon. In the meantime I encurage you to check out all the #SenseCamp-Tweets.
More recently Nokia has put out some quite noteworthy products. They are few and far between, but things are getting interesting once more. The top end of the Lumia series (particularly the Lumia 900 phone) is a package of both gorgeous hardware and a pretty cool interface. Nokia’s new route planner incorporates public transport data in ways far superior to Google’s attempts so far. The WebGL-based Google Earth-style Nokia Global Maps 3D is – despite limited geographies – fantastic, particularly for something that runs in your browser. (…)
It’s hard to tell if these positive hits recently have been more or less lucky or if they are the first manifestations of a larger change inside the company. And if it is a larger change, is it too little too late? We’ll have to wait and see. I just know that there’s something going on there that brought Nokia back on the radar – in all the good ways.
Oh, how I remember the headline: “Nokia Microsoft is like Yahoo Bing – Nokia’s days as innovator are over”. The day Nokia started using Windows’ Mobile OS as it’s main smartphone OS, everyone agreed that their days as a leading market force were over. They stopped fighting and let Symbian die – and with it all innovation.
Interestingly, as Peter notes, quite the opposite is true. It seems Nokia is re-focusing. And that is a very good thing.
Flickr is promising some significant updates to it’s photosharing site. I’m curious what they have in store – especially since sites like 500px successfully started to compete with Yahoo’s (once) popular service.
