Twitter made some waves this week when it announced a new feature — granular country-by-country censorship of Tweets. It was probably a tactical misstep to make this announcement in the wake of the anti-SOPA blackout protests, and initial reactions ran accordingly hot, but cooler heads have since, for the most part, prevailed. The reality is that Twitter has “boots on the ground” in a number of countries that have different speech laws than we do, and as long as it must comply with those laws to avoid endangering its employees, the best course is to make that compliance as transparent and non-disruptive as possible. Local blocks are better for the greater Twitter ecosystem, and direct attention to the bad laws that deserve the blame.
There is so much aggressively wrong with Paul Carr’s recent “Angry Nerds” piece that it is hard to know where to begin. To summarize: Carr is shocked to see that the very same tech community who rallied against SOPA and PIPA is now rallying behind 37 Signals in a case involving blatant design plagiarism — down to hotlinked images — by another start-up named Curebit.
This online blackouts last week were not only the largest in recent history, but in a narrow sense, they might be the most effective ever. Imagine: online protests and the resulting media coverage and legislator calls led to the shelving of two “sure thing” bills over the course of two days.
This week I purchased a new cell phone. I’ve been using my current phone, an HTC Desire Z (dubbed the G2 by T-Mobile in the US), for a little over a year and it’s time for an upgrade.
Over on his blog, John Lilly provides the best sort of analysis of the SOPA conversation — reasonable and measured. The problem with the “dialogue” so far, he says, is that (1) it has basically consisted of each side calling the other names, (2) which isn’t going to help now, and (3) will set a bad precedent for making new tech policy.
The first week of the new year: time to make resolutions about the sort of person you want to be, and the sorts of behaviors you want to have. Go to the gym, blog more, that sort of thing.
In the spirit of BoingBoing’s annual charitable giving guide, here’s a list of organizations that I’ve given to this year. As far as I can tell, these groups are each doing great work, and deserve every penny they can get.
I’ve been impressed with the quality of language used to describe the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill is a disaster for the internet, and its opponents are devising some pretty creative ways of expressing that. Two of my favorites:
Over on his personal blog, my buddy Peter Bihr has come to the defense of that most reviled breed of start-up — the German copycat. And while the whole thing’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, he’s actually right about some of the benefits that so-called “copycats” offer; they are in a position to make marginal changes and improvements that “original” start-ups might be hesitant about, from small feature improvements to big things like internationalization.