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Twitter Now Has a Two-Step Solution
So, I use two factor authentication for a variety of services. It’s great for security.
It’s also a royal pain in the ass to be (re)inputting secondary authentication information all the time. That basic ‘pain point’ is sufficient to dissuade most people from setting it up. I support Twitter adopting this, and for some people it’ll be awesome. For most people it’ll just be a pain in the ass.
(Source: cybertheorist)
Big data: the new oil?
Social utopians like Haque, Tapscott and Jarvis are, of course, wrong. The age of networked intelligence isn’t very intelligent. The tragic truth is that getting naked, being yourself in the full public gaze of today’s digital network, doesn’t always result in the breaking down of ancient taboos. There is little evidence that networks like Facebook, Skype and Twitter are making us any more forgiving or tolerant. Indeed, if anything, these viral tools of mass exposure seem to be making society not only more prurient and voyeuristic, but also fuelling a mob culture of intolerance, schadenfreude and revengefulness.
Andrew Keen, #digitalvertigo: how today’s online social revolution is dividing, diminishing, and disorienting us
As an early adopter I know that I’ll stumble into bugs and problems in Apple’s newest OS. The first I’m come across stems from Safari’s integration with Twitter.
Note in that in image on the left there is no ability to cancel a tweet once you click send. I suspect that I’m running into this problem because Twitter is presently (at the time of this screenshot/writing) experiencing downtime. Regardless, the inability to cancel the tweet is particularly inconvenient because the send tweet window hovers over all Safari tabs (as seen in the right-hand image).
This persistent hovering means that if integration with Twitter stalls then Safari ceases to be a useful browser until the send attempt times out. Ideally a future patch will link the ‘send to Twitter’ window with the specific tab the tweet is being sent from, as well as ensure that users can cancel tweets at all times. Hopefully we see a point upgrade soon, to iron out this and other bugs that are being reported across the ‘net.
Former GCHQ Head Calls for Greater Social Media Surveillance
There genuinely are bad people in the world, individuals and agents who largely exist to cause serious harm to citizens around the world in democratic states. These individuals cannot, however, be permitted to destabilize an entire population nor operate as reasons for totalizing mass surveillance. In the UK an incredibly senior and prominent security and intelligence expert, Sir David Omand, has nevertheless called for the following:
In a series of recommendations to the government, Sir David – the Cabinet Office’s former Security and Intelligence co-ordinator – said out-dated legislation needed to be reformed to ensure an ethical and legal framework for such intelligence gathering, which was clear and transparent.
The report recommends that social media should be divided into two categories, the first being open source information which public bodies could monitor to improve services while not identifying individuals without permission.
On the more contentious category of monitoring private social media, Sir David said it needed to be properly authorised - including the need for warrants when it was considered “genuine intrusion” - only used as a last resort when there was substantial cause and with regard to “collateral damage” to any innocent people who might have been in contact with a suspect.
It must repeatedly, and emphatically, be stated that ‘transparency’ in the intelligence world does not mean that citizens will actually know how collected data is used. Neither does codifying surveillance practices in law minimize citizens’ concerns around surveillance. No, it instead operates as a legal shield that protects those engaged in oft-times secretive actions that are inappropriately harmful to innocent citizens. Such changes in law must be incredibly carefully examined by the public and opposed or curtailed whenever there is even the slightest possibility of abuse or infringement of citizens’ reasonable normative expectations of privacy from state intrusion and surveillance.
