If you said "whattergate??" then click here.
The blog-o-twit-o-sphere is coming down pretty hard on TechCrunch for this and unfortunately generating enough noise to drown out the few people who have stopped twooting for a moment and thought about what is actually happening here.
Some unknown person went through a lot of trouble to steal damn near every internal document at Twitter. Then, they handed those documents over to the biggest tech news site on the four internets. One can only assume that they very much wanted TechCrunch to publish those documents. Had TC declined to do so, this person would have simply moved on to Drudge, Slashdot, Cake Wrecks, etc. until the thief found someone willing to publish the documents and give him the satisfaction of screwing Twitter.
Knowing this, Twitter was no doubt relieved to hear that their good buddies at TC had acquired the documents before anyone else. TC could craft the release so as to minimize damage to Twitter, while still satisfying the thief enough to avoid or delay further leaks. If there are more leaks, the incredibly popular TC story provides a distraction.
Of course, in the interests of professionalism, and to further sate the malevolent thief, Twitter must publicly express their outrage towards TC. They can't admit that they authorized the public release of confidential documents.
As to the question of how exactly the publication of the documents was "crafted", there is no particular reason to think that they omitted anything besides personal information that was not newsworthy. Indeed, Arrington says as much in this article. Trying to hide anything "juicy" would just leave it up for grabs by a less cooperative news outlet.
Maybe my tinfoil hat is too tight, but this all seems fairly straightforward to me. I'm not all that interested in this topic, I'm just annoyed by all the noise from the "ethics" debate when there is no ethical issue at all.
The blog-o-twit-o-sphere is coming down pretty hard on TechCrunch for this and unfortunately generating enough noise to drown out the few people who have stopped twooting for a moment and thought about what is actually happening here.
Some unknown person went through a lot of trouble to steal damn near every internal document at Twitter. Then, they handed those documents over to the biggest tech news site on the four internets. One can only assume that they very much wanted TechCrunch to publish those documents. Had TC declined to do so, this person would have simply moved on to Drudge, Slashdot, Cake Wrecks, etc. until the thief found someone willing to publish the documents and give him the satisfaction of screwing Twitter.
Knowing this, Twitter was no doubt relieved to hear that their good buddies at TC had acquired the documents before anyone else. TC could craft the release so as to minimize damage to Twitter, while still satisfying the thief enough to avoid or delay further leaks. If there are more leaks, the incredibly popular TC story provides a distraction.
Of course, in the interests of professionalism, and to further sate the malevolent thief, Twitter must publicly express their outrage towards TC. They can't admit that they authorized the public release of confidential documents.
As to the question of how exactly the publication of the documents was "crafted", there is no particular reason to think that they omitted anything besides personal information that was not newsworthy. Indeed, Arrington says as much in this article. Trying to hide anything "juicy" would just leave it up for grabs by a less cooperative news outlet.
Maybe my tinfoil hat is too tight, but this all seems fairly straightforward to me. I'm not all that interested in this topic, I'm just annoyed by all the noise from the "ethics" debate when there is no ethical issue at all.
This brilliant bit of marketing appears to be doing quite well in the twit-o-sphere. The cause is getting Microsoft to support "standards" by using the IE8 engine to render HTML email in Outlook, instead of the Word engine, which has been in there since 2007. Behind this movement is the "grassroots" Email Standards Project, which is apparently composed of one email marketing firm and two freelance designers. Judging by this deluge of copypasta, the sheeple are overwhelmingly supportive.
Read more...
If you have a Telus mobility account and you're having trouble logging in to their new "improved" web site, and your username is longer than 15 characters, try just the first 15 characters.
Also, if you use http://guru.com and your username is longer than 12 characters, ditto.
And lastly, if you are a web developer building an account system, or overhauling an old one, and for some reason you feel compelled to impose a length limit on usernames or passwords, please give your users at least a subtle hint that you are doing so, rather than silently mangling their credentials.
Also, if you use http://guru.com and your username is longer than 12 characters, ditto.
And lastly, if you are a web developer building an account system, or overhauling an old one, and for some reason you feel compelled to impose a length limit on usernames or passwords, please give your users at least a subtle hint that you are doing so, rather than silently mangling their credentials.
Here's some lovely art:
That's nice! But so crude. Let's just fix that up a little:
Much better. Oh, you don't agree?
Here's something else amazing:
Yeah, just that thing.
You see, in this new age of casual written communication, people were having trouble expressing emotional context, so they invented new punctuation marks from existing characters. They even managed to make the punctuation marks resemble the physical manifestations of emotions so that their meanings would be implicitly obvious. There are many others.
I find that amazing. If any postmodern artist from the past saw that, they would fucking freak. Humans are awesome <3 <3 <3
However, when my email program finds one of these things, it shows this instead:
My email program does this because it is tasteless and simple minded. I really am embarassed to be seen with it.
If you make an email program, or any of the other things that normally do this, don't do this. You don't replace the word "be" with a picture of a bee. You don't make the word "jump" actually jump around the screen. So don't do this either. Don't fuck with language.
That's nice! But so crude. Let's just fix that up a little:
Much better. Oh, you don't agree?
Here's something else amazing:
Yeah, just that thing.
You see, in this new age of casual written communication, people were having trouble expressing emotional context, so they invented new punctuation marks from existing characters. They even managed to make the punctuation marks resemble the physical manifestations of emotions so that their meanings would be implicitly obvious. There are many others.
I find that amazing. If any postmodern artist from the past saw that, they would fucking freak. Humans are awesome <3 <3 <3
However, when my email program finds one of these things, it shows this instead:
My email program does this because it is tasteless and simple minded. I really am embarassed to be seen with it.
If you make an email program, or any of the other things that normally do this, don't do this. You don't replace the word "be" with a picture of a bee. You don't make the word "jump" actually jump around the screen. So don't do this either. Don't fuck with language.