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Filed under: Internet Lingo, Social Networking, Technology
We’ve talked about Twitter on this blog and it is mentioned with some regularity in the traditional media. But what IS it?
The answer (in exactly 140 characters) is:
Twitter is a micro-blogging site that is asking you to share what you are doing right now with your friends and the world in 140 characters.
Why? This video from Common Craft answers this question:
Pew Internet did a study showing that teens aren’t using it very much. It is mainly a product used by young adults. This doesn’t mean that some teens don’t use it, or that they won’t use it in the future, but by and large it is not their thing. The research says that teens don’t like the lack of privacy that social networking sites like Facebook have.
Twitter, like all social networking sites, should be used with the same caution as other social networking profiles. Someone may be watching your Tweets that you are not expecting and what you say can still have serious consequences.
Are you a part of a social networking site? If so, which one(s)?
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Tunisia and Bahrain Block Individual Twitter Pages: “
First, governments blocked Blogspot. Then they blocked Facebook, and then Twitter. And just when technophiles all over the globe started groaning, a couple of governments got a bit wiser to social media and, rather than block the entire platform for the transgressions of one user, began blocking individual accounts instead. Notably, this has happened in the past with YouTube where, rather than cut off the video-sharing site for all users, a government will simply block a single video; the latest trend seems to be blocking individual Twitter pages.
Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Years Day.
ifikra and freebahrain ruminate on their Twitter accounts being blocked
Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users pages in mid-2009.
What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability and desire to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this will become a global trend.
“
(Via Global Voices Advocacy.)
'Iranian cyber army' hits Twitter: (BBC)
A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message. Twitter said the attack had been carried out by getting at the servers that tell web browsers where to find particular sites. The site said it would start an investigation into what allowed the ‘unplanned downtime’ to take place. see also Twitter hack by ‘Iranian Cyber Army’ is really just misdirection (Guardian).
(Via QuickLinks Update.)
Iranian hackers ‘hijack’ Twitter:
Popular online messaging service Twitter was left reeling overnight, after Iranian hackers appeared to break into the site and deface it.
The strike left the site completely unavailable for several hours in the early hours of Friday morning, with the site’s estimated 30m users unable to access the service or send messages to each other online.
The incident took place some time around 6am in the UK, when the main Twitter page suddenly seemed to disappear – instead replaced with a stark black and red screen featuring an image of a flag.
The page, which carried a mixture of English and Farsi slogans, appeared to name the group behind the attack and offer a call to arms.
‘This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army,’ said the message.
‘The USA thinks they control and manage internet access, but they don’t. We control and manage the internet with our power, so do not try to the incite Iranian people.’
The site returned to normal functions around two hours later, with staff telling users that it had suffered from ‘unplanned downtime’.
Although early reports suggested the site itself had been breached by attackers, it now seems that the strike was actually a crude form of assault known as a DNS hijack.
The DNS, or Domain Name System, is effectively a telephone directory of the internet – connecting the name of a website, such as twitter.com or guardian.co.uk, to the web servers that hold its contents.
In hijacking cases, computer criminals effectively redirect the traffic intended for a particular website, sending users to a page of their own choice rather than the planned destination.
Around two and half hours after the outage occurred, Twitter staff issued a short statement on the company’s blog confirming the style of the attack it had suffered.
‘Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed,’ said the post. ‘We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.’
It is not the first time that Twitter has found itself subject to attention due to its links with Iranian activists.
During the uprising that followed the elections in June this year, in which incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eventually triumphed, the US state department urged the site to remain online to allow more information about the protests to spread online.
Little is known, however, about the group who appeared to claim responsibility for hacking Twitter. But the nature of the messages they left appears somewhat confusing.
Though the text left by the hackers appeared to be anti-American, they also used the image of a green flag – the colour connected to the election protesters, and to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the main challenger to President Ahmadinejad.
(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)
