Twitter Announces Ability To Censor Tweets By Country….. So Much For Free Speech

I guess that Twitter really doesn’t care about free speech, human rights, or anything else that really matters. Because the social networking giant has announced the ability to censor tweets by country:

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.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

Given the fact that the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened without social network services like Twitter, this is not good in my opinion. Imagine the Syrians asking Twitter to censor tweets that they don’t like. Chilling isn’t it?

I really think that there’s more to this than what Twitter is saying. My guess is that they’re trying to curry favor with governments that don’t like Twitter. China is one of those countries as they block access to Twitter currently. If Twitter gave itself the ability to censor tweets, China may stop censoring them and Twitter has a new market to make a buck in.

Any other theories? Leave a note below.

RIM CEO Admits Apple And Google Winning Smartphone War In The US

Perhaps RIM finally has a clue that they’re in trouble? I’m saying that because RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins admitted in a recent interview that they’re losing the smartphone war to Apple and Google in the US marketplace:

“It hurts. It hurts me to see us losing market share in the U.S. There was a paradigm shift, and we did not shift with it…” Heins said. “I know we’ve made mistakes, and I know I’m in for a fight.”

They question is, what is he going to do about it?

“We want to stop the bleeding,” he said. Heins emphasized RIM’s international growth, and noted the company has taken its subscriber base from 50 million to 75 million in a year.

Heins made it clear the company is working to protect its installed customer base and plans a major program to encourage existing Blackberry users to switch to its newest phones, which use its Blackberry 7 operating system.

He would not elaborate on details but said the promotional effort would not be undertaken at a loss to the company, and that carriers are working with it on a program that could include higher end data plans.  

Good luck with that. I still say that RIM is dead. But they are free to prove me wrong (though they won’t).

 

Jon Rubinstein Bails On HP

I can’t say that I’m shocked by this, but the news is out that Jon Rubinstein who oversaw the ill fated switch to WebOS for Palm devices is gone from HP:

Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware.

The question is, where is he going to next? Any guesses?

 

Rogers Cited By CRTC For Net Neutrality Violations

To absolutely nobody’s shock, the CRTC  has decided that Rogers is violating net neutrality rules in Canada. I say that because their traffic management system has been absolutely brutal towards users. Just ask anyone playing World of Warcraft on Rogers. Not to mention that I’ve not only been talking about this topic forever, but I’ve also been calling on Rogers to ditch their crappy traffic management system since it clearly doesn’t work. In any case, the CRTC via a letter has given Rogers until Feb. 3rd to address this….or else. Seeing as the CRTC is pretty much useless (after all, the CRTC threatened Rogers last year), I don’t expect them to really hit Rogers hard… Though they really deserve to be punished for their behavior towards their users.

So will Rogers actually do anything meaningful to fix this? I doubt it. But they could surprise me and actually do something in the interests of their users rather than against them. I suspect that it’s not going to happen, which is too bad.

RIM Tries To Reboot Itself By Naming New CEO

Early this morning, it was announced Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down as the co-CEOs of RIM and were replaced by COO Thorsten Heins. Balsillie and Lazaridis will still be on the board though. A pair of videos from the new CEO then appeared on YouTube. Here they are for your viewing pleasure:

What do I think of this change? There’s really nothing to see here as all RIM has done is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. RIM is still a sinking ship that has no new products based on the new Blackberry OS until the latter half of 2012 and is seeing its market share erode as RIM users migrate to Android and iOS devices. Until they fix those issues, it doesn’t matter who’s at the top of the food chain at RIM.

I will wish Heins good luck though, because he’s really going to need it.

SOPA and Protect IP Halted In Congress… But The Battle Isn’t Over

I guess this week’s blackout on the Internet got the attention of lawmakers in the US. The National Post is reporting that both SOPA and Protect IP have been halted:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said he would postpone a critical vote that had been scheduled for January 24 “in light of recent events.”

Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, followed suit, saying his panel would delay action on similar legislation until there is wider agreement on the issue.

You’ll note that the bills have only delayed and not killed. That means that they could come back in some other form. Those who oppose these bills will have to be vigilant and hold US lawmakers to account.

Megaupload Shutdown…. Anonymous Hits Back

The file sharing site Megaupload was raided by the FBI yesterday and was effectively shut down due to the fact that they facilitated illegal file sharing. Now this angered a lot of Internet users, but the hacker group Anonymous went one step further. They launched an attack on the websites of the Department of Justice, the FBI and Universal Music Group, among others using a distributed denial of service attack.

A video was then posted to YouTube which you can watch below:

You’ll also note that the group mentions SOPA and Protect IP. Clearly they aren’t happy. I’m guessing that we’re going to hear more from them.

 

Review 2011 Ford Focus SEL Sedan

One of the reasons why I haven’t been updating this blog as frequently as I usually do is that I’ve been traveling on business frequently. Often when I travel I have to rent a car. On my most recent trip I lucked out in terms of getting my hands on a Ford Focus SEL sedan. Now the SEL variant is one of Ford’s upper trim levels, so I was kind of surprised that it was sitting at a car rental place in a US airport. But I went with it as it didn’t cost me an arm and leg to rent and it came pretty much with everything I like to have in a car. That includes 6 airbags and stability control. Another thing that I liked is that it had a very European feel to it. It was firm but not punishing. That’s great because previous Focus models have been dumbed down for North Americans. But let me expand on that. It looked like an European car and drove like one. The handling was very impressive. No doubt helped by a feature called torque vectoring which used the brakes to make sure the car stays on the path that you want it to go. It also had a fair amount of get up and go as it had a 160 hp engine. However that get up and go was surely impacted by a rather crappy transmission. Ford decided to use what’s called a dual clutch transmission for the automatic variant. This setup has two clutches. One for the odd gears and one for the even ones. The idea is that this type of transmission can make lightning quick shifts and save gas at the same time. Well, Ford got the fuel economy part down right as I used way less gas than I normally would on a four day trip in the US. However, the transmission shifts were slow. Compared to some VW products that I’ve driven with dual clutch transmissions, that was very disappointing. In fact some Google searches found that I am not alone in feeling this way as Consumer Reports hit them pretty hard over this. The other thing that I found problematic is the MyFord Touch system. It didn’t work for me as well as I expected it to as I had to do too much with my voice to do pretty much anything which in my mind defeats the purpose of having a voice activated system in your car. Maybe if I had a few more days with it, I could become more comfortable with it. I’m not sure, but I do know that I wasn’t impressed with what I used.

So would I buy one? Honestly, I think that I would buy the hatchback variant over the sedan. Also, I’d either take the manual transmission, or wait for Ford to address the issues with their dual clutch transmission. And I wouldn’t get it with MyFord Touch. Which is too bad, because the car handled well and I really liked that.

Sorry Ford. Right now the Focus is a pass for me.

Tech Firms To Protest SOPA Tommorow

I haven’t covered this much on this blog, but SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act and it’s sister the Protect IP Act have drawn the ire of Internet users in the US. The idea behind these bills is to stop piracy on the Internet. But many argue that it will infringe on First Amendment rights, censor and will cripple the Internet. As a result, there’s a lineup of tech companies who are against this and are going to be protesting tomorrow against these bills. Google for one will be doing something on their home page to protest. Wikipedia is going one step further by going dark tomorrow to protest. Word on the street is that Reddit and Boing Boing will take their sites down for 12 hours starting at 8 a.m. as well.

Frankly speaking, these bills need to die. If America really wants to kill one of the few industries that are making money in these tough times, cripple free speech, and be no different that countries that they criticize, then they should go ahead. But if they want to prove that they are the land of the free and the home of the brave, than these bills need to die and die quickly. Americans, tell your friends, tell your family, and most importantly tell your elected officials you feelings on these rather crappy bills before it’s too late.

I’ll be showing my support by not posting tomorrow. It’s the least that I can do.

Hey IT Nerd! How Do I Erase A Hard Drive So That Nobody Can Get The Contents?

In this age of identity theft, this is a concern when you go to sell or donate a computer. The fact is that the only way of ensuring that nothing can be read from a hard drive, you have to physically destroy the drive. Otherwise the best you can do is to use a secure erase utility to reduce the number of people who could get stuff off the hard drive to those with advanced skill and the tech to do it. With that in mind, I recommend a tool called Darik’s Boot And Nuke for the job. Basically you download a CD image that you burn to a CD, and then you use that CD to boot your computer and nuke the contents of the hard drive. What makes it secure is that it gives you the chose of nuking data with pseudorandom numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC. The Gutmann method, Quick Erase, DoD Short, and DOD 5220.22-M. Basically, the same sorts of methods that governments, banks and the truly paranoid use to erase drives. Again, if someone is smart enough and has the tools to recover your data, nothing is going to protect you. But Darik’s Boot And Nuke will make sure that number of people who can are a pretty small number.