Jonathan Zittrain has an interesting rant here about the way that app stores and sandboxing constrain the creativity of application developers. I think where this essay fails is that it does not give proper weight to the security benefits associated with some of the things that it rails against.

Prior smartphone platforms with open application development and distribution models, like SymbianOS, have significant amounts of malware infestation. Thus far, iPhones and Android devices have avoided this plague in spite of much wider distribution. That is a significant victory.

There has been some Android malware this year, but most of it has been distributed in third party app stores and does not affect the vast majority of end users. I think that we'll see more malware for these devices in the future, but thus far the security model has proven to be effective and that is important.

However, the fact that you are controlling applications for security reasons does not mean that you need to control applications for content reasons.

When Exodus International—"[m]obilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality"—released an app that, among other things, inveighed against homosexuality, opponents not only rated it poorly (one-star reviews were running two-to-one against five-star reviews) but also petitioned Apple to remove the app. Apple did.

Apparently Apple has a rule against offending people:

An Apple spokesperson told the Huffington Post that Apple had removed the Exodus International app because it "[violated] our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people."

That is s a pretty hypocritical position for a company that encourages people to "think different." Now, I can see removing this app because telling people that Jesus will cure them from being gay is thought to be harmful and predatory, but thats not the rationale here, and rationales matter. This rationale apparently applies to examples of clearly political speech.

An iPhone application denouncing gay marriage is apparently history after thousands of people signed an online petition urging Apple to remove it from its App Store.

The application, called Manhattan Declaration, was a "call of Christian Conscience" that advocated "the sanctity of life, the dignity of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty," according to its website....

In a statement, Apple said, "We removed the Manhattan Declaration app from the App Store because it violates our developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people."

... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Personal Computer Is Dead - Technology Review

These kinds of stories are really not acceptable:

My twitter account was suspended two months ago. I followed all the steps to have it restored, after about two weeks I received the information you listed from the employees at twitter. They gave me reasons why accounts can be suspended but never advised me of how I broke any of those rules. I asked if they could restore my account but they said that my account was suspended and would not be restored. I had my twitter account for two years and had worked it up to over 6,000 followers and over 15,000 tweets.

Help! My Twitter Account is Suspended!! | Social Media DIY Workshop

My writing:

I’ve been a Twitter user since 2008. My account was suspended a week ago without explanation. There has been no response to my appeals. My first swing through Google looking for information seemed to indicate that it might take a week to hear back from them. This thread is helpful as it seems to indicate that it is now taking as long as a month to resolve these problems.

Twitter is a small company, but there is absolutely no reason why their customer support should be this bad. For example, Heather says that her account was swept up by an anti-spam bot. There is no reason why a spam bot could not have automatically generated an email to her, indicating the reason that her account was suspended. This would not have restored her account any faster, but it would, at least, have given her some useful information about the reason for the problem she was having to deal with. In addition, all of Twitter’s support pages about account suspension indicate that when your account is suspended you should receive an email from them with an explanation. That wasn’t the case for me and apparently it was not the case for Heather.

Furthermore, Twitter has a staff, and they have a support queue. It should be possible for their support queue to automatically determine approximately how long it will take them to respond to an appeal. Googling around, it seems that some appeals get handled in a couple of days, and some take as long as a month. Knowing when I should expect to hear back from them would greatly reduce the frustration associated with this situation. This is basic customer service stuff that anyone with a call center has implemented these days.

Finally, Twitter account suspensions do more then prevent you from posting content or following new people. They also prevent you from reading your feed. There is no good reason for this other than lazy programming. The things in your feed are things that are published by the people you follow. There should be no harm in allowing you to continue to read your feed during the month or more that it will take their support team to get around to handling your case. It should be possible to implement that even if they want to remove your account name from people’s follower lists.

I think that Twitter’s heavy handed approach here is a significant competitive vulnerability that will eventually cost them their place in the social media landscape if they don’t address it.

Help! My Twitter Account is Suspended!! | Social Media DIY Workshop

Previous post here.

Subject: RE: ##### Twitter Support: update on "Hi - you suspended my account?"
From: tom@memestreams.net
Date: Wed, Nov 30, 2011 3:58 pm
To: "Twitter Support"

Twitter,

One week ago, on November 23rd, my Twitter account was suspended. I did not receive an email explaining the reason for my suspension. I filed an appeal and no one has responded. I have been using Twitter since November of 2008. At the time of my suspension I had over 400 followers and nearly 600 posts. I am a legitimate user. I have not violated any of your policies.
Please respond to this email and explain why my account has been suspended.

Thank You,
Tom Cross

According to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the bill will "basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield" and that someone suspected of ties to Al Qaeda can be locked up without trial whether he is an "American citizen or not."

Its odd that Congress would choose this moment to formally extend the "battlefield" to the domestic United States, allowing for military detention of US Citizens on US Soil. The legality of Jose Padilla's military detention was never fully adjudicated, and herein Congress would bless it. This is really the end of the road for habeas rights in the US. Obama is fortunately threatening to veto this - it may be the moment when he finally differentiates himself from the Bush administration on civil liberties.

My question is why right now? Why didn't they do this years ago if they wanted to?

I suspect this might be political cover for something else in this bill - one way to kill a bill you oppose is to vote against it - but if you can't, you can make it so radical that the other side won't support it any more.

Is the President's Indefinite Detention Power Limited to Foreigners? - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

In research that has important findings for banks, businesses and security buffs everywhere, scientists have found that computer files stored on solid state drives are sometimes impossible to delete using traditional disk-erasure techniques.

Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data • The Register

Oh fuck.

The break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible...

Britain is now planning on the basis that a euro collapse is now just a matter of time.

“It’s in our interests that they keep playing for time because that gives us more time to prepare,” the minister told the Daily Telegraph...

Some analysts say the shock waves of such an event would risk the collapse of the entire financial system, leaving banks unable to return money to retail depositors and destroying companies dependent on bank credit...

Some economists believe that at worst, the outright collapse of the euro could reduce GDP in its member-states by up to half and trigger mass unemployment.

Analysts at UBS, an investment bank earlier this year warned that the most extreme consequences of a break-up include risks to basic property rights and the threat of civil disorder.

Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns - Telegraph

I continue to find it hilarious that Tea Party supporters take the position that protest is okay only as long as it stays orderly and doesn’t violate any laws.

Zing!

Quote of the day

In recent weeks, one source of live news coverage for the Occupy Wall Street movement stood out above all others. Not a cable news network, not a newspaper, but a 25-year-old guy named Tim Pool. He packs a smartphone with unlimited data, a copy of Ustream's mobile video streaming app, and a battery pack to keep it all going — which he has for 21 hours straight, on big news days. Soon, Tim and team plan to have have their own hacker-made flying camera-drones, to provide aerial footage TV news chopppers can't. The guerrilla web stream "The Other 99" has reached more than 2 million unique viewers over the last two months, and become a source of eyes on the ground unmatched by big media. The project runs solely on donations.

The dronecam revolution will be webcast: Interview with Tim Pool of "The Other 99" - Boing Boing

My account on Twitter has been suspended. I logged in and was informed of this by a banner across the top of the site. I have no idea why. I'm obviously not a malicious user.

Twitter's documentation claims that if you've been suspended you'll have received an email explaining why. I have received no such email. I appealed, and the appeal produced a rather paternalist automated response:

If you didn't receive an email indicating why your account was suspended, please take a minute to review the Twitter Rules. If you suspect you've been suspended for another reason, please reply to this email with a short explanation.

What?

Some Google searches pull up lots of people in the same circumstances - their accounts have been suspended and they have no idea why, they have received no email explanation and their appeals are never responded to either.

So I have no idea if I'll ever hear from Twitter again. One person who did hear back, heard back about a week later. Is that really the best they can do?

I've been using Twitter since 2008. I have over 400 followers and nearly 600 posts. I rely on Twitter as a way to communicate with other people. Obviously, that was a mistake.

What I've learned from this experience is that Twitter accounts can be suspended at any time, without explanation, and without a reliable appeal process.

In other words - relying on Twitter to communicate with people is probably not a good idea.