Using Facebook or Twitter ‘Could Raise Your Insurance Premiums’
Richard Evans writes in the Telegraph:
Services such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz can alert criminals when users are not home, according to Confused.com, the price comparison service. Foursquare, for example, shows that people are in a specific spot and, more importantly, that the user is definitely not at home, Confused.com added.It predicted that the new wave in social media could eventually lead to big rises in home insurance premiums.
Darren Black, the head of home insurance at Confused.com, said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if, as social media grow in popularity and more location-based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual’s risk. We could see rises of up to 10pc for people who use these sites.
“Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their information gathering,…
William Shatner in ‘Shit My Dad Says’
William Shatner. Photo by Jerry Avenaim
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Twitter sensation Shit My Dad Says is becoming a TV pilot with William Shatner set to play the larger-than-life dad at the center of it.
The casting of Shatner lifts the contingency on CBS’ multicamera family comedy project based on the Twitter account, which has enlisted more than 1.17 million followers since launching in August and has made its creator, Justin Halpern, an Internet star.
The pilot, executive produced by “Will & Grace” creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, was originally set up at CBS with a script commitment in November. Now, with Shatner on board, it has been greenlighted to pilot.
Halpern co-penned the script with Patrick Schumacker. Halpern and Schumacker co-exec produce the Warner Bros. TV-produced project.
Halpern, 29, had moved back in with his…
PleaseRobMe.com: A Burglar’s Best Friend On The Internet
PleaseRobMe.com uses keyword searches to compile a running real-time thread of tweets in which people advertise that they are out of the house (and what they are doing). Searchable by location, it’s the most valuable tool on the internet for tech-savvy burglars. Or, at the least, an interesting display of people’s eagerness to unthinkingly spout personal information across the internet.
Director Kevin Smith Thrown Off Oakland Flight Over Weight
Reports CBS13:
OAKLAND, Calif. ― A cult-favorite movie director has claimed that he was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight out of Oakland due to a dispute over his weight.
Kevin Smith, the creator of movies like Clerks, Dogma, and the upcoming Cop Out, posted a series of angry, sarcastic messages on his Twitter feed (@ThatKevinSmith) blasting Southwest Airlines for allegedly throwing him off a flight at Oakland International Airport after he had already been seated and buckled in.
According to Smith, a flight attendant told him the flight captain had deemed him a safety risk and requested that he leave the flight.
“I broke no regulation, offered no ’safety risk,’ (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?),” he wrote. “I’m way fat … But I’m not THERE just yet.”
Smith’s followers (numbering more…
God Hates Twitter
Kansas’s Westboro Baptist Church has become famous for holding no-holds-barred protests at funerals and places of worship. But just because you believe that modern America is a hell-bound bastion of sin, doesn’t mean you can’t connect with the youth culture. First there was last month’s Lady Gaga cover; now they’ve begun protesting outside of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco:
“Twitter should be used to tell the punks of doomed America that God hates you!”
The religious group, based in Topeka, Kansas, usually pickets soldiers’ funerals, reasoning that they died defending a gay-loving country. Thursday, they set their sights on a larger target: the headquarters of the social-media giant Twitter.
Everyone played their part as the Westboro Baptist Church immediately antagonized the crowd of several dozen with a rousing chorus of “God Hates America,”…
Astronauts Finally Get Internet Access in Space
From The Miami Herald:
In a high tech first — really, really high — astronauts in space finally have Internet access.Space station resident Timothy (TJ) Creamer had been working with flight controllers to establish Internet access from his orbital post ever since he moved in last month. On Friday, his effort paid off. He posted the first live Twitter post truly from space.
“Hello Twitterverse!” he wrote. “We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station – the 1st live tweet from Space! : ) More soon, send your ?s”
Before, orbiting astronauts had to send such Twitter updates by e-mail to Mission Control in Houston. Then controllers posted the tweets.
The International Space Station crew can now use an on-board laptop to reach a desktop computer at Mission Control, and thereby browse…
Twitter Joke Led to Arrest and Lifetime Airport Ban
Mark Hughes and Jason Walsh write in the Independent:
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport…
The Sisterhood of the Rose Will Save The World
So we are giving away copies of Jim Marrs’ latest book, The Sisterhood of the Rose, (while supplies last!) to folks who tweet the following on Friday, December 18th:
The Sisterhood of the Rose Will Save The World @disinfo #books #FreeFriday #Sisterhood http://bit.ly/70s4p0
And yes, the more you tweet this, the greater your chance is of receiving a free book.
For more information about The Sisterhood, please check out the companion website, www.SisterhoodoftheRose.org, and read this special message from the author.
Here’s a trailer we made the book:
Twitter Hacked By the “Iranian Cyber Army”
Michael Arrington writes on TechCrunch:
We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site is currently offline. We’re looking into this and waiting on a response from Twitter.
The message reads:
Iranian Cyber Army
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COMU.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LISTTake Care.
Read More on TechCrunch
Gangs In New York Talk Twitter: Use Tweets To Trash-Talk Rivals, Plan Fights
Is there no stopping the spread of Twitter? Now it’s a tool for gang warfare, at least accoring to tabloid newspaper the New York Daily News:
The city’s street gangs are becoming tweet gangs.
Manhattan’s young thugs have turned to Twitter, and the cops who track them are fast behind, the Daily News has learned.
It’s old-school crime meets new technology: attacks being plotted – and thwarted – 140 characters at a time.
One investigator recently warned parents and teens that the bastion of OMG and LOL has been infiltrated by violent crews waging turf wars.
A boy shot in the leg weeks earlier on Lenox Ave. may have been targeted because of a battle the Original Young Gangsters crew started on Twitter.
“It’s horrible,” NYPD Lt. Kevin O’Connor of Manhattan North’s gang intelligence unit told…
Sometimes Twittering Sh*t Your Dad Says Gets You A TV Deal
MG Siegler writes on TechCrunch:
Back in August, we wrote about Shit My Dad Says, the Twitter account of a 28-year-old guy named Justin who literally just tweeted out things his dad said. At the time, he already had over 100,000 followers on Twitter, now he has over 700,000. And now he just landed a TV deal.
Yes, you read that right. A 20-something just landed a TV deal thanks to his Twitter account. Again, not a website, not a book (though there is a book in the works too), just a Twitter account.
The TV industry blog The Live Feed reports that CBS is working with Justin (whose last name is Halpern) to create the show along with Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. Halpern will write it along with…
Feds’ Search of Twittering Anarchist Upheld
Ryan Singel writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
Federal authorities can resume combing through the notebooks, memory cards and computers of a twittering anarchist being investigated for violating an anti-rioting law, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday.
U.S. district court judge Dora L. Irizzary found no reason to throw out the government’s search of the home of a 41-year old social worker who used the micro-publishing service Twitter to help anti-globalization protestors at the recent G-20 convention, clearing the way for the feds to look through the evidence they collected. Madison and his attorney sought to have his possessions returned unexamined, on the grounds the search violated his constitutional rights to free speech.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Elliott Madison’s house in a dawn raid on October 1, seizing myriad computers, unpublished…
A Tweet Unleashes Vitriol on a User in Britain
Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times about @brumplum, the Twitter user that has made Twitter (even more of) a household name in Britain:
LONDON — In the realm of Twitter insults, it was at the far end of mild. “Much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit … boring,” a Twitter user called brumplum wrote Saturday, speaking of the tweets of Stephen Fry, the British writer, actor and television personality.
But that little tweet set off a frenzy of vitriolic attacks and counterattacks on Twitter, drawing an untold number of people into an increasingly charged debate and thrusting brumplum — in reality a man from Birmingham, England, named Richard — unhappily into the public’s angry glare. It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter…
Twitter and a Newspaper Untie a Gag Order
Noam Cohen reports for the New York Times:
Twitter has been credited with helping to organize political protests and shine a light on abuses around the world. At the same time, the ubiquitous service has been criticized for disrespecting the sanctity of once-private halls of deliberation — whether a criminal jury’s chambers or an N.B.A. locker room.
In the rarest of cases, apparently, Twitter can do both. That is the view of the editor of The Guardian in London, Alan Rusbridger, who, after prevailing in a legal fight over the publication of secret documents, wrote that “the Twittersphere blew away conventional efforts to buy silence,” as a headline on his column put it.
Last month, a British judge ruled that material obtained by Guardian journalists about a multinational corporation had to be kept…
Tweet Your Way To An FBI Raid
Once again, the government is finding a way to use Twitter and other social networking platforms as tools to curtail civil liberties. Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger of Queens, New York were arrested on charges of hindering apprehension, criminal use of communication facility and possessing instruments of crime. The charges stem from Madison and Wallschlaeger setting up shop in a hotel room with some police scanners and sending texts and tweets to demonstrators about police movements during the G20 demonstrations in Pittsburgh.
The FBI raided the home of Madison, spending 16 hours snatching everything from computers and cell phones to gas masks, books and apparently a picture of Lenin.
