Facebook has finally admitted that it has been watching the web pages its 750 million members visit. The huge privacy breach was simply a mistake, it says. Software that automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook “inadvertently” sent information to the company, whether you were logged in or not.
Wonderful. Leisha Hailey, former The L-Word castmember, was thrown off of a Southwest Airlines flight yesterday for kissing her girlfriend – the flight attendant citing the apparent fact that Southwest is a “family airline.” This is the same airline that booted Kevin Smith for being fat, and Green Day’s Billy Joel Armstrong for wearing baggy pants.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that an Australian technologist, Nik Cubrilovic, has discovered that Facebook is tracking the websites its users visit even when they have logged out of the social networking site. Reactions have been mixed, but is this something we should be that surprised about?
Look, it’s nice to know Apple isn’t the only company that knows how to create buzz by accidentally leaking information. Ji Lee, Facebook’s creative director, tweeted about Facebook Music, which is set to launch tomorrow. The post was quickly deleted, but not before the Internet had time to get all excited about it.
The University of Washington has finally found a way to make us of the mental energy expended by online gamers – recruiting them to decipher the structure of monomeric enzymes, found in retroviruses like HIV, by playing an online game called Foldit. Researchers had been working on it for the past decade; the collective gamers did it in three weeks.
I’m not clear on why we would still need travel agents or anything, but if we do, Google Flights, launching today, is up to the task. Initially only available in a couple of US cities, Google Flights is the first result we’ve seen of Google’s acquisition of travel software company ITA back in April.
Time to ditch the Farmville, folks! Mini have just released a Facebook game powered by the mighty forces of Flash and Google Maps that allows you to motor a mini.. er Mini across the global destination of your choice.
The dispute between Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg has still not been put out to pasture. The disgruntled Winklefaces are currently starring in a terribly clever TV ad during which they take a dig at Zuckerburg for stealing their social network idea. In other news, the ad is for pistachio nuts.
Really not exaggerating in that headline. Two days ago, blogger Shoshana Hebshi, a self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife,” found herself cuffed and thrown off a Frontier Airlines flight and strip-searched – because she was seated next to two Indian guys she didn’t know, and another passenger had found that suspicious.
If people keep telling you that drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism, then you either need to drink less, or find a way to make sure that there are people to drink with all the time. The geniuses behind the social network app ‘Let’s Drink Tonight’ figured the latter choice made more sense too.
We already have the Regulation of Interception of Communication Act (Rica), and as the ad hoc committee from Parliament yesterday adopted the controversial Protection of Information Bill after nearly a year of deliberations, we might now also see the decryption of BlackBerry messages become a reality.
You’re not all on Twitter. I get that; I know people who don’t drink alcohol, either, and I don’t judge them for that. To all you cool social media cats, though, this is troubling: Twitter is readying a new ad product that will serve up ads to users from company accounts they don’t already follow.
Despite topping the user charts with over 750 million users, social networking monolith, Facebook, is rolling out a range of new services to keep its users happily posting, perving and otherwise wasting valuable hours of productivity.
Wikileaks is parceling out another bunch of diplomatic cables today, in case we’d forgotten about Julian Assange amidst all the other hubbub. Expect people to largely ignore the allegations of internal corruption and the details of John McCain’s conversations with that Gadaffi chap, and focus on the whole rape trial thing.
Around 2 000 people participated in the Cape Town leg of the international anti-rape SlutWalk campaign on Saturday. Unfortunately, Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba speculated on Twitter whether he “might get lucky” at the march, in which many women wore deliberately revealing clothing to make their point. Way to go, Malusi.
And today was going so well. The mankini, popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat. Because that’s what we want 2011 to be known for; the year that we introduced torso-spanning banana hammocks into our day-to-day vocabulary. Other words that are now acceptable to use include ‘sexting,’ ‘retweet,’ and ‘cyberbullying.’ See also, ‘apocalypse.’
And suddenly the real use of online flash-mobs becomes clear: stealing junk from convenience stores. Yesterday, a group of about 28 ‘young people,’ believed to have coordinated online, cleaned out a Maryland convenience store in under a a minute.The police have attempted online identification, but no arrests have been made.
Don’t worry, the artificial libertarian islands will have better names than that. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, has given $1.25 million to an initiative to build libertarian island states in international waters. Because that’s what you do when you’rea 43-year-old gay libertarian with money to kill, I guess.
A 20-year-old man in Essex has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” because he used Blackberry Messenger to invite people to a public water fight. Whether this means British cops can now wiretap the Blackberry messaging network is unclear, but either way: great job, democracy.
There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.
Where are you going to be at 18h00 this evening? I know what I’m going to be doing – and let’s be honest about this – you know what you should be doing too, right? Something awesome might happen. The Old Spice Guy has accepted Fabio’s challenge and they will have some sort of bathroom face-off, live, on YouTube.
Chinese officials have ordered two of the five fake stores already located in the south-western city of Kunming to suspend business while they’re investigated, a local government website said on Monday. But, it’s since emerged that similar fakes exist in countries from Croatia to Venezuela.
The pressure finally got to the fiery red-headed Rebekah Brooks. In the last few minutes news agency Reuters has officially announced that News International CEO Rebekah Brooks has resigned and will be replaced by Tom Mockridge. This comes after a scathing attack in an apparent four-page letter from Elisabeth, and the second biggest NI shareholder declaring “she has to go.”
When he’s not letting us know that he’ll be on holiday, President Jacob Zuma harnesses the power of the presidential twitter feed to promote the dramatic accomplishments of his progeny. Sweet, man. Check out the tweet after the jump.
Moments after John Smit announced he would be leaving the Sharks and joining English club side Saracens for two seasons after the 2011 World Cup, well-known author and rugby pundit, Dan Retief weighed in with his opinion on Twitter. Smit replied, with a perfectly weighted volley of wit. Check out the tweets after the jump.
This morning Kylie Minogue got down with the Soweto gospel choir, who welcomed her on her arrival in Johannesburg a few hours ago. She tweeted this rather festive picture of herself dancing with the singers, obviously having a great time. Wonder who’ll greet her at CT International next week. The possibilities are endless.
Come on, you all know what we’re referring to in that headline. It’s just a little bribe and you’re done. In there. RICA sorted. It’s actually hardly surprising, but it deflates the high we all experienced with the relatively hassle-free event that was reported in a lot of the mainstream media.
The Chinese often find ingenious ways of rectifying problems, but they’ve gone too far this time. A badly doctored image of government officials inspecting a new road in Huili, a modest county in a rural corner of south-west China, has produced some exquisite viral images indicating the public’s displeasure with being lied to.
“Taliban: ‘On each floor of the hotel, our fighters have broken down the door to each room, taking out guests and killing them.'” This was one of the traumatic tweets circulating on Twitter last night, as Taliban militants stormed the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, killing 21 people.
Pope Benedict XVI took to Twitter yesterday and composed a tweet on an iPad before sending it out into cyberspace. Granted, it did take about six other similarly aged cardinals and other officials to help him out, but it is the thought that counts, right? See a video of him tweeting, as well as his full Twitter message, inside.