Tag: Twitter
A lot more advertising is coming to Instagram, the New York Times reports, undoing the mostly ad-free experience that was one of the main things separating Instagram from the other major social networks. On Tuesday, Instagram announced plans to open its feed to all advertisers, which means you will soon be inundated with all sorts […]
Chelsea Manning, the U.S. army whistleblower serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, has released a handwritten letter to her Twitter account to prove that she is the true identity behind Twitter handle @xychelsea. As part of her sentence, Manning is not allowed to access the internet. However, she has found a […]
Turkey has blocked Twitter and YouTube, along with hundreds of other sites, following a court order. Graffiti is fighting the block by giving instructions on how people can update their DNS to use Google’s DNS at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. The block was ordered because pictures of terrorists and their hostage were being shared on social […]
While the rest of the world marches into the 21st century, the Drug Enforcement Agency — a federal law enforcement bureau that benefits the most from keeping weed illegal — continues its Reefer Madness-style propaganda campaign about weed despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. Several days ago, the buzz-killing malcontents who run the DEA’s […]
Eric Fisher, a man who turns human movement into art through his unique maps, has created an interactive world map that shows how tourists and locals occupy major cities via their tweets. For “Tourists & Locals,” Fisher mapped geo-tagged tweets between September 2011 and May 2013 and ascribed a blue color to locals and the […]
It came as no surprise when straphangers trapped on the 7 train for hours took to Twitter to complain, rant, and even ask for help. But according to a new study from the Journal of American Planning Association, this scene is happening more than you might think. According to the study, the feeds of public […]
The Twitter account of the U.S. Department of Defense’s US CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, have apparently been hacked by a party either working for, or sympathetic with, the Islamic State, a.k.a. ISIS a.k.a. Da’esh. A slew of important looking documents — including scenarios about North […]
More often than not, Twitterbots are useless. They don’t have a lot of practical applications unless you’re interested in spam or looking to spread malware. But sometimes, Twitterbots can be useless in a good way. Oscar Wilde was paying a compliment when he said, “All art is quite useless.” Basically, the inherent use of art must […]
That stream of drunken tweets you and your friends send at night may be good for something aside from eye-rolls and inside jokes. According to siblings Enrique and Vanessa Frías-Martínez, two Spanish computer science researchers, geolocalized tweets could be used to urban planning and land use. In a study published in Engineering Applications of Artificial […]
On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its nearly 600-page summary [PDF] of the staggering, 6,700-page report on the “enhanced interrogations techniques” used by the CIA post-9/11. The report, which studied 6 million internal documents, shows that the agency’s techniques were ineffective in yielding intel, and that the agency repeatedly misled the public, Congress, and […]
