Tag: twitter

Twitter shuts down accounts monitoring politicians’ deleted tweets

After suspending API access to the Open State Foundation’s (OSF) primary American account in May, Twitter went ahead and nixed the foundation’s 30 remaining satellite accounts over the weekend. OSF employed these accounts to monitor and publicize the deleted tweets of elected officials in countries worldwide. Twitter also shut down the group’s Diplotwoops account, which served the same purpose but for diplomats. Notice:Twitter have killed part of @politwoops that powers this account. No new posts for now but tweets available at http://t.co/w6y19ppzRZ — Tweets MPs Delete (@deletedbyMPs) August 22, 2015 Twitter reportedly decided to shut out the OSF after “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors.” The foundation cited a note from Twitter regarding its decision, stating “Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable? No one user is more deserving of that ability than another.” The OSF has since released a statement on the matter: What elected politicians publicly say is a matter of public record. Even when tweets are deleted, it’s part of parliamentary history. These tweets were once posted and later deleted. What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice. It should be noted however that Twitter is not a government entity and, even here in the US, has precisely zero responsibility to allow accounts that it feels violate its TOS. In light of the shutdown, the foundation states that it will continue working ensure messages sent by elected politicians remain visible. Just not on Twitter. Filed under: Internet Comments Via: The Next Web Source: Open State Foundation Tags: openstatefoundation, OSF, politics, twitter

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Twitter shuts down accounts monitoring politicians’ deleted tweets

Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory

minstrelmike writes: Over the weekend, hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled in the Washington, D.C. area after air traffic systems malfunctioned. Now, the FAA says the problem was related to a recent software upgrade at a local radar facility. The software had been upgraded to display customized windows of reference data that were supposed to disappear once deleted. Unfortunately, the systems ended up running out of memory. The FAA’s report is vague about whether it was operator error or software error: “… as controllers adjusted their unique settings, those changes remained in memory until the storage limit was filled.” Wonder what programming language they used? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Air Traffic Snafu: FAA System Runs Out of Memory

Android M’s official name is… Marshmallow [Update: Version 6.0]

https://twitter.com/davey_burke/status/633324719266115584 With every major Android launch comes a new codename, and for each new codename, Google adds a statue to the lawn in its Mountain View headquarters. The latest Android version has only been known by its codename—Android M—but today Google unveiled the official name: Marshmallow. Dave Burke, Android’s VP of engineering, unveiled the statue on Twitter just a few minutes ago. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android M’s official name is… Marshmallow [Update: Version 6.0]

CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

vivaoporto sends word that in a rare case of an individual taking on large corporations for copyright infrigement, a New York man has sued news networks CNN and CBC after they took a video of his from YouTube and broadcast it on the air without licensing it. His video shows a winter storm in Buffalo generating huge amounts of lake effect snow. The man, Alfonzo Cutaia, decided to enable monetization on his video, selecting the “Standard YouTube License, ” “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of [the video]. All other rights are reserved to the copyright owner and standard copyright laws and exceptions apply.” Cutaia says the CBC used his video with their logo on it. The CBC confirmed this, and said they received a 10-day license from CNN, who had no legal right to do so. His lawsuit now accuses them both of “intentional and willful” copyright infringement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don’t last long before needing recharging. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

Coder wins a thousand Twitter contests using a bot

You’ve probably seen “retweet to win” contests on Twitter, and maybe even won a t-shirt, concert tickets or marshmallows . But computer engineer Hunter Scott completely automated the idea and created a bot that entered every Twitter contest it could find — 165, 000 in total. As a result, he claims to have won four contests a day for nine months, for a total haul of over a thousand prizes . A lot of that swag was terrible, and a lot of it he couldn’t accept. But the interesting part was how he allegedly managed to beat Twitter’s system. The most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter. Scott said that “the most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter.” The social network has limits in place to stop such activities: unless you have a high follower count, you can only follow up to 2, 000 people yourself, for instance. At the same time, you can’t follow and unfollow users too rapidly or retweet too often. Luckily, Scott’s Python script was able to balance all that and follow every single contest it found. He said his win rate was “pretty miserable” considering the low quality of the prizes. He couldn’t claim the best one, a $4, 000 trip to New York’s fashion week because of taxes and fact that he didn’t live near New York. Nevertheless, he was fond of a few them, especially a cowboy hat autographed by actors in a Mexican soap opera. “It really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests, ” he said. Scott never revealed the name of his Twitter bot, so we’ve reached out to verify his claims — but the prizes appear to check out. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Hunter Scott Tags: contests, HunterScott, Python, retweet, Twitter, Twitter bot

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Coder wins a thousand Twitter contests using a bot

North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone

jones_supa writes: North Korea has announced that it is winding its clocks back by half a hour to create a new “Pyongyang Time” — breaking from a time standard imposed by what it called “wicked Japanese imperialists” more than a century ago. The change will put the standard time in North Korea at UTC +8:30. North Korea said that the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and officially announced on Friday, would come into effect from August 15, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone

Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release

judgecorp writes: The Mobyl Data Center, designed for the US Department of Defense, puts a data center in a rugged suitcase-sized box, and it will shortly be available commercially. The box includes up to 88 Xeon cores a maximum of 176 GB of RAM, and 2.8 TB of SSD storage with 12TB of hard disk as an option. The system uses credit-card sized MobylPC server units, sealed in epoxy, and rated to survive 300g of shock, but apparently proprietary to the vendor, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release

LibreOffice 5.0 Released

New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.0 Released

Soylent 2.0 Comes Bottled and Ready To Drink

An anonymous reader writes: Soylent has announced today their latest product, Soylent 2.0. It comes premixed and ready to drink in recyclable bottles. Each bottle is one fifth of a scientifically balanced daily meal plan, will last up to a year unrefrigerated, and will cost you $2.42. A Soylent blog post reads in part: “Not only are its ingredients vegan, Soylent 2.0 reaches an unprecedented level of environmental sustainability with half of its fat energy coming from farm-free, algae sources. This next generation agricultural technology has the potential to reduce the ecological impact of food production by orders of magnitude, signifying a major step towards a future of abundance, a world where optimal nutrition is the new normal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Soylent 2.0 Comes Bottled and Ready To Drink