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Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"pa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1721230/Professor-Gets-4-Years-in-Prison-for-Sharing-Drone-Plans-With-Students?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1721230"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1721230/Professor-Gets-4-Years-in-Prison-for-Sharing-Drone-Plans-With-Students?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YEn4czZdQUHVwmYd0mVfBZ3hB2k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YEn4czZdQUHVwmYd0mVfBZ3hB2k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YEn4czZdQUHVwmYd0mVfBZ3hB2k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/YEn4czZdQUHVwmYd0mVfBZ3hB2k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/_Gtd_CmNDnI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="twittercleanlogo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/twittercleanlogo.jpg" width="156" height="41" If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters./p pTwitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d1.openx.org/ck.php?n=15594amp;cb=15594' target='_blank'img src='http://d1.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=11205amp;cb=15594amp;n=15594' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pIs Twitter in a position to make more acquisitions? We suspect so. It has cash but more importantly it has stock. Think of it this way: Google is afraid of Facebook and Facebook is afraid of Twitter. Would startups bend over backwards to become a part of Twitter? We suspect most would./p pSome of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game./p h2Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already/h2 pimg alt="bitlypic.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/bitlypic.jpg" width="362" height="459" class="mt-image-center" align="right" hspace="5px" vspace="5px"stronga href="http://bit.ly"Bit.ly/a/strong is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_crowns_bitly_as_the_king_of_short_links_he.php"recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice/a, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real time click tracking to semantic analysis for topic keywords from the links that people tweet./p pOne trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/three_reasons_why_twitter_will_not_index_the_links.php"told us/a that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change." [Becoming the default shortener.] Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future./p h2Could Happen.../h2 pstronga href="http://tweetmeme.com"Tweetmeme/a/strong is another fast growing Twitter analytics services that tracks sharing on the service. With a href="http://blog.tweetmeme.com/2009/07/03/more-buttons-more-retweet/"another chunk of new features just added today/a, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could compliment Bit.ly quite well./p pstronga href="http://twitpic.com/"Twitpic/a/strong is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's a href="http://yfrog.com"YFrog/a, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at a href="http://Enjoysthin.gs"Enjoysthin.gs/a, it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.br / centerimg alt="Twitpicpic-1.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/Twitpicpic-1.jpg" width="587" height="527" /center/p pstronga href="http://tweepz.com"Tweepz/a/strong is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out a href="http://www.tweepz.com/search?q=mobile+gameC="this search/a, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also a href="http://twazzup.com"Twazzup/a, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data./p centerimg alt="twazuptennis.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/twazuptennis.jpg" width="610" height="325" /center h2Longer Shots/h2 pstrongAn iPhone app company/strong could be a good buy for Twitter, there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be a href="http://www.atebits.com/"AteBits/a, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though./p pstrongA desktop Twitter app company/strong could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, a href="http://tweetdeck.com"Tweetdeck/a, or it could bring a href="http://seesmic.com"Seesmic/a in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Seesmic is probably getting cheaper by the day (sorry!) and has some really talented people working there. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target./p pstrongGeo-location/strong could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. a href="http://brightkite.com/"Brightkite/a is popular and well developed, a href="http://Shizzow.com"Shizzow/a is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data./p centerimg alt="brightkitejuly09.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/brightkitejuly09.jpg" width="610" height="382" /center pobject align="right" hspace="5px" vspace="5px"script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://static.polldaddy.com/p/1756638.js"/scriptnoscriptbr / a href="http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1756638/"Which of these kinds of companies would you like to see Twitter acquire next?/aspan style="font-size:9px;"(a href="http://www.polldaddy.com"polls/a)/spanbr / /noscript/objectstrongA semantics company/strong could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)/p pstronga href="http://topify.com"Topify/a/strong is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself./p pstronga href="http://friendfeed.com"FriendFeed/a/strong plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment laden and highly ambitious a href="http://oneriot.com"OneRiot/a is a close second.) None the less, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter./p pstrongemUltimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid./em/strong A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_staff_may_not_use_twitter_like_you_do_tha.php"makes relatively simple use of its own service/a, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream./p pMaybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen./p pemYou can find a href="http://twitter.com/rww"ReadWriteWeb/a on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: a href="http://twitter.com/marshallk"Marshall Kirkpatrick/a, a href="http://twitter.com/bernardlunn"Bernard Lunn/a, a href="http://twitter.com/alexiskold"Alex Iskold/a, a href="http://twitter.com/sarahintampa"Sarah Perez/a, a href="http://twitter.com/fredericl"Frederic Lardinois/a, a href="http://twitter.com/jolieodell"Jolie O'Dell/a, a href="http://twitter.com/susyperplexus"Dana Oshiro /a, a href="http://twitter.com/madlid"Lidija Davis/a and a href="http://twitter.com/stevenwalling"Steven Walling/a./em/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ten_companies_twitter_should_consider_acquiring_ne.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GOBc40VVUJKnfT3jMsmnWm7S9KA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GOBc40VVUJKnfT3jMsmnWm7S9KA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GOBc40VVUJKnfT3jMsmnWm7S9KA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/GOBc40VVUJKnfT3jMsmnWm7S9KA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=zxiUVNobdjY:cSuEBL4GZ9g:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/zxiUVNobdjY" height="1" width="1"/

The web’s response to the passing of music legend Michael Jackson has been staggering. Social media was pounded with tributes last Thursday after the news broke, but next Tuesday could be a huge test for the entire infrastructure of the web, when the memorial for Michael Jackson will take place.

The tribute and remembrance of the late King of Pop occurs next Tuesday (July 7th) at 10:00 AM PT at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Beyond the 17,500 tickets that will be given away to fans and the millions more that will converge on downtown L.A., the memorial will be live streamed free via the web and media outlets across the world.

This event will almost certainly shatter records for the biggest single live stream ever, and could be one of the biggest worldwide media events in history. Will the web be able to handle it?

The details

The splash page of the Staples Center

Although details are sparse, CBS News does a good job of breaking down the information currently available. Here are the key points:

- The memorial will occur at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. 17,500 tickets will be randomly drawn in an online lottery available until 6 PM PT July 4th. Only U.S. residents qualify
- 8750 names will be selected Sunday, each of which will receive 2 tickets to the memorial
- There will be a simulcast in the Nokia Theater
- There will be a free live stream on the Internet available to all. Details on how the stream will be distributed are currently unavailable
- However, we suspect that thousands of stream will be available from media companies and live stream services around the world

The demand was so high for these tickets that the Staples Center website has had trouble staying up, and in fact took down almost every non-essential image and menu to keep the website up. This could be a prelude to the worldwide response we’ll see next Tuesday.

What will Jackson’s memorial mean for the web?

If you remember back in January, there was another historic event that blew us away: the Obama inauguration. Here are some of the staggering numbers from CNN and Facebook.

- 200,000+ status updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
- 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
- CNN served 13.9 million live video streams globally in about 6 hours
- Don’t forget about the millions of other live streams and TV viewers that watched worldwide.

Now, throw all those numbers out the window, because Michael Jackson’s memorial is almost certain to utterly overshadow Obama. Not even Obama consumed 30% of Twitter and set traffic records at Yahoo.

With the world mourning and a specific time and place set for the memorial, we may very well see the entire web converge on this one event. There will likely be thousands of streams worldwide via platforms such as Justin.tv and Ustream (the latter of which has a deal with CBS to stream events like this one). It’s also certain that Twitter, Facebook, and the social web will be booming with commentary on the event.

How many people will watch Jackson’s memorial? Can the web’s biggest players handle the massive traffic that will ensue? Will there be enough bandwidth? Could this event be the single media event in history? The answers to these questions will not only be a testament to Jackson’s impact on the world, but may very well set records that will last in history.

Perhaps most of all, the web will allow people to come together to celebrate Jackson’s life, no matter who they are or where they live.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, ustream

Tags: jackson memorial, justin.tv, michael jackson, ustream

Fancy tie-tying, Wi-Fi password cracking, Google Voice, and Firefox 3.5 round out this week's most popular posts. Dress Up Your Ties with the "Merovingian Knot" The realm of dress tie knots is...

Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music mdash; which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."pa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1528259/Copyright-Should-Encourage-Derivative-Works?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1528259"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1528259/Copyright-Should-Encourage-Derivative-Works?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tbzQ3x4_N8qTxqHjOcfDsudPyJE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tbzQ3x4_N8qTxqHjOcfDsudPyJE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tbzQ3x4_N8qTxqHjOcfDsudPyJE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tbzQ3x4_N8qTxqHjOcfDsudPyJE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/MAQ_gltPfEg" height="1" width="1"/

Today a fire hit a major datacenter in Seattle, taking money processor Authorize.Net down. This has caused many web-based financial transactions to grind to a halt, but Authorize.Net isn’t the only website that’s gone offline today.

Another popular website has fallen, Geocaching.com, a worldwide GPS-based treasure hunting game, leaving thousands of people trying to figure out just what’s going on and why it went down. Wikipedia explains the game’s worldwide reach:

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook and “treasure,” usually toys or trinkets of little value.

Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. There are over 820,000 active geocaches in the world right now.

While the fire may or may not be responsible for this specific outage (we cannot confirm), it’s clearly had an effect on the entire web. Even Microsoft’s search engine Bing was affected, specifically Bing Travel.

We will provide updates on Geocaching and Authorize.Net as we receive the information.

Reviews: Wikipedia, bing

Tags: geocaching

If ever there were a holiday that yields colorful and flashy desktop wallpaper, it's definitely the Fourth of July. Celebrate the Fourth on your desktop with these swanky fireworks wallpapers. If...

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."pa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1539249/Open-Source-Facing-a-Difficult-Battle-for-Cloud-Relevance?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1539249"/a/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1539249/Open-Source-Facing-a-Difficult-Battle-for-Cloud-Relevance?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FRkioeXNoHYk8aUqMVBngVN9V8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FRkioeXNoHYk8aUqMVBngVN9V8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FRkioeXNoHYk8aUqMVBngVN9V8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3FRkioeXNoHYk8aUqMVBngVN9V8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/kGhbRr9fUSs" height="1" width="1"/

A somewhat distressing tech story today: a female employee at the Arlington Apple Store was shot in the shoulder this morning by a man who rang the doorbell at the back of the store. Fortunately the employee is said to be recovering in hospital. It’s thought the motive was attempted robbery.

According to ABC7 news, the shooting happened shortly after 10 a.m. at the Apple Store located at 2700 Clarendon Blvd. A search for the suspect is underway.

The Washington Post adds that the suspect is “a black male, between the ages of 35 and 45, with a medium build and facial hair. He was last seen fleeing the area on foot, wearing a light-colored, short sleeve shirt, light-colored long pants and a dark baseball cap. He was carrying a handgun.”

Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of a hypothesized active water cycle based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."pa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1529234/Phoenix-Lander-Discovers-Nighttime-Snowfall-on-Mars?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1529234"/a/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1529234/Phoenix-Lander-Discovers-Nighttime-Snowfall-on-Mars?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a0AXuN9LKtQolKGmtwMqtMFdTGM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a0AXuN9LKtQolKGmtwMqtMFdTGM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a0AXuN9LKtQolKGmtwMqtMFdTGM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/a0AXuN9LKtQolKGmtwMqtMFdTGM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/9b-NkF5aw98" height="1" width="1"/

Choosing the right sunblock is important, but let's say you're more of a DIY type, or maybe your skin is sensitive to many of the common ingredients. The solution is simple: make your own sunblock....

For marketers, Twitter has been a dream come true. It’s an open platform growing at a phenomenal rate. This combination can allow a single tweet to be seen by thousands of potential customers. But as Twitter continues its mainstream ascent, it has been targeted by spammers and scammers, something that doesn’t help legitimate marketers or users at all.

Yet despite its spam woes, Twitter has somehow avoided an overflow of content from one of the Internet’s biggest industries: porn. Well, until recently that is. An interesting article in MediaPost describes both marketers and Twitter users noticing an increase in pr0n-related spam, and they are not liking it. The issue makes us wonder: should Twitter stamp out pornography; and how should they go about it?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

The MediaPost piece essentially quotes some of Twitter’s active marketers on the issue of Twitter and porn. What they have to say, though, is not pretty at all. While you can guess how users react in the piece, Ben Smith of MerchantCircle sums up the problem best:

MerchantCircle has begun to offer a portfolio of local city-specific coupons via Twitter feeds. “As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” says Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

Has pornography taken over Twitter? No, not by a longshot. Is it a growing problem? Absolutely. Things like Twitter porn trojans make it clear that Twitter is not impervious to porn-related spam and malware.

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

We took a look at the Twitter Terms of Service, which governs user interactions with the Twitter platform. While it mentions that they can “remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine … are obscene or otherwise objectionable,” it makes no specific reference to pornography.

Compare this to the terms of service of other social media companies, such as the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which specifically states the following:

6. You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Does this mean that Twitter doesn’t care about porn? Absolutely not – Twitter has addressed pornography spam in the past and we doubt that it would let the Internet’s underground industry tarnish its strong reputation.

And yet Twitter needs to monitor the situation. Porn should not be acceptable on Twitter, especially an open platform that millions of companies and users use for business and marketing every single day. It may be a relatively small issue now, but it will grow more prevalent unless they put a stop to the problem early. It’s easy to forget just how much of the Internet is entirely porn.

First though, Twitter needs to build a search spam solution ASAP. It’s all part of the same core problem that Twitter will need to address.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: porn, pornography, twitter

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1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."pa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1637228/Seattle-Data-Center-Outage-Disrupts-E-Commerce?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1637228"/a/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1637228/Seattle-Data-Center-Outage-Disrupts-E-Commerce?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qvo1QNiqRbU60CE6uLC_mlBXXLc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qvo1QNiqRbU60CE6uLC_mlBXXLc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qvo1QNiqRbU60CE6uLC_mlBXXLc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qvo1QNiqRbU60CE6uLC_mlBXXLc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/0rigp6NJ3Ks" height="1" width="1"/

For a complete collection of Twitter resources, check out The Twitter Guide Book, Mashable’s hub for all things Twitter.

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Most Twitter users probably follow under a thousand other people, but that’s enough to make it hard to keep track of the real-time stream. I actually started having trouble keeping up when I hit about 50 follows — and depending on how prolific the people you’re following are, you could be dealing with a hard-to-parse Twitter stream even following just a handful of people. But while people like social media fanatic Robert Scoble, who follows over 100,000 people, appear to have the superhuman ability to stay on top of things, the rest of us need help filtering the Twitter stream.

Fortunately, there are a good number of methods and applications we can put to work to filter tweets from the people we’re following. Which work best for you? Let us know in the comments.

(Please note that a few of the apps in this post actually do multiple types of filtering, and so could have theoretically been added to more than one category.)

By Keyword

One way to filter Twitter is by keyword. Filttr is a full-featured, web-based Twitter app that includes keyword-based filtering. You can both blacklist and whitelist key phrases and Filtter will block or allow those tweets. Flittr, though, has a pretty steep learning curve, and before I even added any keywords it started filtering tweets — and took a particular dislike to a few of my Twitter friends. I’m not sure what criteria it was using for those initial filters.

Another full web-based client that includes keyword filtering is Mixero, which is in private beta.

Philtro, which is also in private beta, learns what types of tweets you like based on your ratings. Give thumbs up and thumbs down ratings to tweets, and Philtro slowly figures out what you like and attempts only to bother you with tweets you’d be likely to want to read.

By Links

About 19% of all tweets contain links, but if your Twitter stream moves quickly, you may miss many of the best unless you use a filter. MicroPlaza organizes the links tweeted by out by your followers by recency or popularity. MicroPlaza personalizes the concept employed sites like Tweetmeme, Twitt(url)y, and dailyRT, which assume that the more a link is tweeted, the more worthwhile it is of your attention.

MicroPlaza not only looks at which links are being tweeted and retweeted the most, but also which are being tweeted specifically by the people you’re following. The idea is that you’re most interested in things your followers are saying (otherwise, you wouldn’t be following them), so if they tweet about popular links, they’re more likely to be of interest to you.

One of the coolest features of MicroPlaza, though, is that you can assume the identity of any other Twitter user — so if you follow someone very connected to a specific industry, you can see the links that their friends are sharing.

By Grouping

Another way to filter Twitter, is by organizing your friends into groups. By putting the people you’re following into groups, you can break up and effectively slow down your Twitter stream, making it easier to follow tweets from your friends, colleagues, and family members.

There are a ton of different ways to organize you friends into groups, but one of the easiest is to use a Twitter client that supports grouping, such as desktop heavyweights Seesmic Desktop, Destroy Twitter, and TweetDeck (which has a complimentary iPhone app that also supports groups), or a web-based app like PeopleBrowsr.

Another option is to use a service that helps you create channels or groups of Twitter users and monitor their tweets. Floxee is one of the most full-featured such sites. It not only lets users monitor the tweetstream of a predefined group, but also displays stats about the activity of that group (or “flock”). Other sites you could use include TwitHive, Tweetizen, Twhanel, Crowdstatus, TwittGroups.com, and TweetChannel.

Disclosure: TweetDeck partnered with Mashable to create MashDeck, a branded version of the software.

By Favorites

Favorites aren’t the best way to filter tweets, because the reasons you favorite tweets might not be the same as other people. However, by the same token, tweets that have been favorited by multiple users are generally worth reading for some reason: they’re interesting, funny, clever, extraordinary, etc.

Favrd keeps track of the most favorited tweets, but is limited to those users who have signed up with the service to have their favorites watched. (Careful: Favrd is often NSFW.) Favotter is another favorite tracking site, but again, watches a limited number of users (due to API limitations, according to the site’s about page).

BONUS: TwitterForBusyPeople doesn’t really filter Twitter, but it does organize your recently active follows in a way that you can get an “at a glance” view of the activity of people you’re following. Once you get used to it, it is potentially a good way to make your Twitter stream more manageable.

BONUS 2: Twalala does keyword filtering, but where it really shines is the ability to mute certain users to remove their tweets from your twitter stream temporarily.

Bird illustration via Flickr user matthamm.

Reviews: Flickr, Mashable, Mixero, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Tweetizen, Twitter

Tags: filter, twitter

Fireworks displays across the U.S. are set to go off all weekend in celebration of the Fourth of July. Take better photos of both the fireworks and the friends and family you've gathered with. Photo...

As a lot of e-commerce businesses and Twitter users are noticing, the entire Authorize.Net infrastructure crashed a few hours ago. For anyone who makes a purchase online, this is huge; Authorize.Net is the largest service for accepting credit cards and e-checks through the web. This means that millions of web-based transactions and purchases have come to a halt.

Luckily, Authorize.Net understands the usefulness of social media in situations like these. They set up a new Twitter account, @AuthorizeNet, earlier today to keep users informed about the recovery of one of the web’s most important payment systems. So what took Authorize.Net down anyway? And when will it be 100% back?

Twitter and the status of Authorize.Net

According to AuthorizeNet, the cause of the outage was a fire at their datacenter in Seattle. This impacted not only their website and transaction platforms, but even their backup center. Couple this with the fact that today starts the 4th of July holiday weekend, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Luckily, it seems that transaction processing has returned, although global processing is still down:

This is the most important aspect of the outage – without the payment system, merchants couldn’t accept credit card payments, which could result in millions of dollars lost among all of its vendors. The website is still down, meaning that accounts can’t be accessed. Luckily, the company had the foresight to use Twitter to keep merchants and users informed. We will update this post with any new developments on the situation.

Update: From the Authorize.Net Twitter account:

#authorizenet Full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.

The website seems to be loading now too, albeit very slowly.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: authorize.net, payment

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An anonymous reader writes "Now that some little time has passed, and the hype has died down a bit, I'm wondering if anyone has taken the $500 plunge and gotten a Kindle DX. From the academic-paper-reading-geek perspective, is it worth the money? How well does it work with PDFs, and is it easy to get them on and off? I haven't been able to find any good reviews on the interweb that address its usability as I would like to use it."pa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1548247/Is-the-Kindle-DX-Worth-the-Money?from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/07/03/1548247"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/07/03/1548247/Is-the-Kindle-DX-Worth-the-Money?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bboKOMF8eEaLmJRLF7D2emHslWE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bboKOMF8eEaLmJRLF7D2emHslWE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bboKOMF8eEaLmJRLF7D2emHslWE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bboKOMF8eEaLmJRLF7D2emHslWE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/U6hKl5ePpFU" height="1" width="1"/