Memes. They’re cute. They’re funny. And they’re infected. That’s what researchers are saying about memes posted on Twitter from a particular account. The memes had commands embedded in their code, so that to look at the meme it looked normal, but when a computer infected with the particular malware encountered the meme, it would read the command and then execute it.
Category: Twitter
Professor Daniel Kammen, up until today the State Department’s ‘Science Envoy’, has served in various Federal agency roles for over 20 years, since 1996. Today the UC Berkeley Professor of Energy, and Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab (RAEL), sent President Trump a letter of resignation in which the first letter of each paragraph spells out “IMPEACH”. Here is the full text of that letter, which Professor Kammen posted on Twitter.
John Rayne Rivello really disagreed with much of what journalist Kurt Eichenwald had to say about Donald Trump; in fact so much so that Rivello, under the assumed name Ari Goldstein and Twitter handle ‘jew_goldstein’, intentionally induced a seizure in Eichenwald, who openly suffers from epilepsy. In what the press is now calling a ‘weaponized Tweet’, Rivello sent Eichenwald a strobing animated GIF, which caused Eichenwald to immediate suffer a seizure upon opening it. The text on the image said “You deserve a seizure for your posts.”
The hashtag #SuziParkerScoops is swirling around Twitter in response to Washington Post columnist Suzi Parker reporting that Sarah Palin will be the new host for the Al Jazeera America channel. To be clear, Sarah Palin is not the new host. It was just last month that a satirical article from the Onion named North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un the Sexiest Man Alive for 2012, causing Asian media to report the story as if it were real.
If your Android is operating on the 4.2 operating system, AKA Jelly Bean, you may notice something in your calendar is missing – the entire month of December. Those running the 4.2 operating system on the Nexus 4 device, Nexus 10 device, Nexus 7 tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphones have reported the issue.
This article is going to be controversial. Whether or not you should follow everyone who follows you on Twitter is a topic which engenders strong emotions and heated debate. In fact, just last week I was accused of “game playing” because I have 1600+ people who follow me on Twitter, while I ‘follow’ fewer than 50.
We’ve been telling readers for years that you need to be very careful about what you say and post on social media, whether Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, or other sites. It can be used against you in divorce proceedings, in lawsuits and criminal trials, and, of course, in the court of popular opinion. Now add another place it can be used against you to the list: during the background check for your Federal security clearance. (Full text of directive below.)
New York teenager James Charles has done something that many people twice his age haven’t been able to achieve: established himself as a moving force to be reckoned with in his professional niche of choice. At just 16 years old, James Charles, who goes by @JCharlesBeauty, has built up an online following of over 200,000. To make it even more impressive, his niche of choice is as a makeup artist (MUA).
In case you haven’t heard, social media prenups are a thing now. (What is a social media prenup? It’s a prenuptial agreement spelling out what you can – and more importantly what you can’t – post about the other person on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc..)
Taking a page from the Facebook playbook, Twitter has just changed your Twitter news feed timeline to show you the “best tweets” first, instead of showing tweets in the chronological order (technically reverse chronological order) that they are posted.
Remember War of the Worlds? Well essentially the exact same thing happened this past week on Twitter, as thousands of people tuned in, horrified, to watch the play-by-play updates of the search for a missing girl, Kamo, which culminated in the discovery of her rape and murder. Only it never happened.
Tamara Fields became a widow when her husband, Lloyd Carl Fields Jr., was killed in a terrorist attack in Jordan. Now Fields is suing Twitter, claiming that Twitter is not doing enough to shut down ISIS Twitter accounts, which they use for recruiting and planning terror attacks. (Full text of Tamara Fields v. Twitter lawsuit is linked below.)
The United Kingdom has passed a law that recognizes ‘domestic violence over social media’, and makes it a punishable offense. According to the new law, threatening or even monitoring someone via social media counts as domestic violence. So how do they distinguish between the average act of ‘following’ someone on Facebook or Twitter, and monitoring? Good question.
This week Twitter removed it’s option to “Favorite” a Tweet with a star symbol, replacing it with a heart symbol to indicate a “Like” (shades of Facebook!), and not everybody hearts it.
Now that they have trained us to fit all of the relevant information into 140 characters, Twitter has announced that they are removing the character limit and lifting the length restrictions on private, direct messages.