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Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

December 20, 2009

Twitter hacked again. Is it really the Iranians?

There have been a series of security compromises on the internet this year, and it has become apparent that no one is safe. Twitter with its <sarcasm>stellar</sarcasm> record of security has been hit again last Friday by what seems like the work of a group calling themselves “The Iranian Cyber Army“.

Twitter has been affected by a DNS redirection attack in which their homepage got defaced. The hackers replaced the homepage with the following image and text:

Twitter Hacked by Iranians

Twitter Hacked by Iranians

The rest of the text:

"Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.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 LIST ;)

Take Care."

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , — M. Bamieh @ 9:30 pm

September 11, 2009

4 App Ideas to Expect When Location-Tweets Hit Mainstream

Trending Places

Trending Places

When people of Iran were enraged earlier this year, post the Iranian elections, people around the world were hooked on Twitter in order to get real-time news updates as it happened. Iranian authorities figured out the threat of Twitter, and sought after local Iranian twitterers based on their profile locations and time zone settings in order to shut them down. People around the world wanted to help those protesters, and started changing their own profiles to make it seem as if they all live in Iran in order to make Iranian authorities mission harder.

That is something from the past, 3 months have passed, today, Twitter is working on adding geo-locations to tweets which will allow us to signal the exact location of where we are tweeting from by allowing apps to attach our latitude and longitude coordinates to tweets we specifically choose to carry such information. That will sure open a whole new dimension to real-time location information.

4 applications you can expect when location-tweets hit mainstream…

What does real-time location tweets mean? and how will it affect our lives? We know that it raises privacy concerns for many legitimate reasons, but we also know that it can be the next big thing which will open the door for many useful applications to take advantage of, and thus we, here at Thoughtpick, decided to voice out what kind of applications we see hitting our doors in the near future:

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Web News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Fadi @ 8:25 pm

July 30, 2009

I Want My Twitter Fix And I Want It Now! Overcome the Censors

Are you a Twitter addict that happens to be stuck in China, the U.A.E., Iran, or even the White House? Then chances are that you won’t be able to get your Twitter fix, but worry not for as long as there is an internet connection then there is way. We will be going through some of the ways to bypass the blockage of Twitter and help you get your fix.

Bypass Twitter's Blocking and Censorship

Bypass Twitter's Blocking and Censorship

1. Use your instant messenger: If you are using Gtalk, Msn or Yahoo add the user “imified@imified.com”. As soon as you start chatting with that user(bot) you will be provided with a menu and it will create an account for you on imified. Select the “My Account” from the main menu by typing 4(default) and you will be redirected to the imified website and there you can add the Twitter widget and add it to your account menu. So when you access it you will be able to get notification and update your status. This will allow you to easily update your Twitter timeline from anywhere you can access your IM, even on a phone. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with imified!

2. Use your email: Browse to twittermail and enter your Twitter credentials and they will supply you with an email address. By using that secret email address you will be able to send and receive tweets using your email account, the message body of the email sent will be the tweet.

[read full article >>]

Filed under: Hacks and Workarounds — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — M. Bamieh @ 2:00 pm

July 6, 2009

Social Media: The New Path to World Peace & An End to Racism?

Will world peace always be a “Utopian” dream? Is open unrestricted communication, amongst different cultures and across unlimited boarders, the way to  achieve world peace? Are social media platforms and services slowly paving the path to a better, more peaceful tomorrow for all?

World peace is a concept which all religions call for and yet seems to be almost unachievable taking into consideration the vast variety of global issues and world wide problems we are facing every single day at an incremental rate!

In theory, world peace is “an ideal of freedom, peace, and happiness among and within all nations and/or peoples. It is the professed ambition of many past and present world leaders.” Leaders aside, there seems to be a great power which accompanies a greater responsibility when it comes to nations and their peoples. Enter the role of social media.

Twitter Visitors Country Rank

Twitter Visitors Country Rank

Through monitoring my followers’ updates, I was quite shocked to find out that probably all of their tweets were utterly unbiased and even more so of an understanding and forgiving nature. Most of my followers actively try, continuously, to spread advice, tips and words of love, peace, awareness, motivation and unity although their ages, ethnicity, race, backgrounds, social status, traditions and country of origin may widely differ.

I was intrigued to find out more, therefore, through Twitter search, I made an effort to look for some of the global controversial topics using keyword search in efforts to see if what my followers are doing applies to every other Twitter user or not.

I searched a few hundred tweets for certain sensitive and racist keywords and our humble results were impressive:

Filed under: Controversial Picks, Deductions and Realizations — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — Beirut @ 2:01 pm

June 22, 2009

Twitter Going Green for Iran – Will social media help shape the future of Iran?

Over 160,000 Twitter users have turned green in a universal movement that is meant to give support and consolidation to people’s demonstrations in Iran. Iranian crisis have proved to everyone that the world is no longer the same, and that social media has empowered people like never before.

Turn Your Twitter Avatar Green to Support Iran

Turn Your Twitter Avatar Green to Support Iran

Twitter didn’t just knock down well established conventional news agencies and reigned itself as the top source of fresh news, but it has also grown up to become a network of human support for people struggling for justice. In today’s world, people can do their daily activities, be productive and at the same time rally for human rights.

While Twitter dominated news coverage of how social media is helping the Iranian protesters, one can’t neglect the power and support other social networks have provided. YouTube and Flicker managed to give us real visuals of what’s going on, blogs served as live testimonials, and social bookmarking websites like Reddit and Digg, with their millions of readers, managed to push stories coming from Iran to the top. On Reddit, for instance, a help message gained popularity for asking Twitterers to change their time zone to 3:30 PM GMT in order to make the job of Iranian security forces of hunting down bloggers much harder.

Today, Mashable compiled a social media time-line for the Iranian Crisis. It is worth checking out how social media is helping up in shaping the state of Iran. Whether governments like it or not, nowadays, people have power – thanks to social media!

Social media gives us hope for a better future of people’s empowerment, it imposes many threats to dictatorships. Some are already working hard to stay in control. Are they fighting a lost battle? I certainly hope so.

Filed under: Controversial Picks, Web News — Tags: , , , , , — Fadi @ 3:48 pm
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