This is definitely a question reeking of our delightful modernity: if you were an escaped convict, would you regularly update your Facebook status?
This question is significant because Craig "Lazie" Lynch has, according to CBSNews.com, been on the run from a British prison since September. However, his Facebook page, updated with a plethora of bons mots Sunday, has stirred so many who admire freedom and, um, crime.
Lynch's musings are enjoying the attention of more than 3,000, um, friends. They have been regaled with Lynch's dilemmas, thoughts and wishes. This, for example, from Sunday: "Trying to figure out my plans for New Years. I know what I want to do but its not that easy."
Who can but sympathize with his plight? It's tough to get a reservation for dinner at a Gordon Ramsay establishment at such late notice. And if he wanted to take a lover for, say, a night at the Ritz, well, there might be problem with the credit card confirmation.
Lynch was serving a 7-year sentence for aggravated burglary before he slipped out of Hollesey Bay Prison, which is in the rather sleepy and flat part of England to the north-east of London.
An aerial view of the prison and its surroundings. Plenty of fields to hide in, no?
(Credit: CC Babylon Angel/Flickr)The police are, naturally, not well-disposed toward Lynch's updates.
"We have spoken to Facebook and we are trying to trace him from the information we have, but it's one of those things that we're also asking for help from members of the public," police spokesperson Anne-Marie Breach told CNN.
It seems, though, that late Sunday, Lynch began experiencing a little emotional pain. In what must have been an almost teary update, he posted: "right i'm coming off this page as i have better things to do."
Who might have imagined that, in his mysterious hideaway, Lynch had something better to do than continue his run as a Facebook attraction?
Still, he continued: "In fact due to the nature of some of these comments and the racist remarks that keep frequently poppin up have a dig at me by all means but why be abusive to others due to their colour or race it is petty minded fools who have ruined this site."
Petty-minded, indeed. Some of the world's great artists have suffered when their works have been ruined by unscrupulous, jealous critics, so Lynch's pain is entirely understandable.
However, he wants his supporters to know that he is grateful. For he posted: "Thank you to...all of you serious supporters out there and to my admin staff. To all you haters and hitlers out there i hope you slowly choke in your sleep."
By the way, if you ever wondered about the definition of aggravated burglary it is this: at the time of the burglary, the criminal: "has with him a firearm, imitation firearm, weapon of offense, or any explosive."
You might imagine, therefore, that Lynch is someone who might not always turn the other cheek. This might affect the level of sympathy you have for his Facebook critics.
How do you react, for example, to this update from he Saturday evening?: "Its freezing outside. Another lonely night. So far away from my family and friend. Yet I have so many supporters and haters on here. Thx for your support everyone cause this is a FAN PAGE."
One might conceive that, with the help of the large brains at Facebook, Lynch's Facebook fame might shortly come to an abrupt logout.
But here's the thing that seems a little peculiar. Lynch, according the the BBC, was serving time near the end of his sentence and escaped while he was on day release.
For some, the lure of Facebook fame is clearly uncontrollable.
Ever since someone tried to sell me on the curious notion that Houston was the Manhattan of Texas, I have become fascinated with the place.
So I am blissfully excited that PCWorld has caused my blood to turn my arteries into a NASCAR track with the revelation that police in the Houston-area county of Montgomery have decided to shame drunk drivers in a very modern way.
Yes, if you are caught driving while the special eggnog concoctions are making your nerve endings feel like Christmas lights, you will have your name on an especially festive Twitter page.
This seasonal offer only applies to those arrested between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. And the Twitter page in question will not be one newly set up for the occasion, but rather that of Montgomery County District Attorney Brett Ligon.
Naturally, some are wondering whether this little Twittering experiment might be flying the wrong way down a lane currently occupied by the concept of "innocent until proved guilty."
As Houston attorney Paul B. Kennedy says, on his own blog, with a sarcasm that not even a sliver of cabernet sauvignon could dampen: "Of course the police never make wrongful arrests."
However, in Texas they do seem to be quite keen on humiliation as a palliative. No, I am not referring to the bedroom predilections of Texan lawmakers, but rather to Denton, Texas (near the slightly less Manhattanesque city of Dallas), where every arrest gets Twittered.
It has to be said, though, that the Denton Twitter page was originally conceived by an enthusiastic layperson, rather than a zealous arresting officer.
While the Montgomery County drunk-driving information that is being Twittered is not legally confidential, you might wonder whether Twittering humiliation is a reasonable method of enacting the law.
Montgomery County Vehicular Crimes Prosecutor Warren Diepraam told PCWorld: "I sincerely doubt that the fact that I've put someone's name on a Twitter page is going to affect their right to a fair trial."
And I sincerely doubt that Diepraam believes that social networking is anything other than a vehicle for honest and legal communication. However, could he be the same Warren Diepraam from Houston, Texas who, on his Facebook page, wants people to think he looks like the moon? Surely not.
I recently wrote about interest by News Corp. and its MySpace unit in Flixster, the popular social-networking site for movies.
Titled "MySpace and News Corp. Eye Flixster (But for What?)," I wrote:
Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear. Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase.Sources said any such deal is not imminent, but that News Corp. itself has been conducting extensive due diligence on the San Francisco-based Flixster, part of a plan to combine it with Rotten Tomatoes, another News Corp.-owned site run by its IGN Entertainment division.
Well, BoomTown did more gumshoeing. It is indeed shaping up to be a very complex deal, according to many sources I spoke with, centered on Rotten Tomatoes merging with Flixster, in exchange for a stake in the combined independent company by News Corp.
Flixster has attracted a huge audience--upward of 50 million--who trade all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook. Founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering an angel investment from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
Rotten Tomatoes features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos, and news. It has community feature that is just in beta, so it would be a nice fit with Flixster.
In addition, in a separate but related deal, the resulting company could then have its social, user-generated and premium content threaded throughout MySpace, which is in the midst of transforming itself from a social networking site and into a social media site for music and other kinds of entertainment.
Several sources noted that this deal being contemplated is typical of the overall strategy at News Corp., which has been targeting digital units, which are not an obvious fit inside the company any longer, for sale or other disposition.
In fact, the deal is not unlike one News Corp. did recently, flipping photo-sharing Photobucket into mobile photo service Ontela, with the media giant holding a large equity position in the the new entity.
The possibility of interlinking of MySpace and the combined social movie site is interesting and also yet another signal of one of the new strategies of MySpace, as one source described it, "playing on other platforms."
For example, MySpace recently announced it was adding its data stream into real-time search results on Google.
And, it seems dead obvious that MySpace is likely to adopt Facebook Connect sooner than later, perhaps beginning with a smaller implementation early next year. Focusing less on Facebook, which has long surpassed the once high-flying MySpace as the top-of-mind social network, MySpace is likely to value the massive cross-distribution for its much richer media content.
But that's not all for MySpace, said several sources, all of whom noted it would be rolling out a range of significant design and other feature initiatives over the next 45 to 60 days.
They are all aimed by its news managers at juicing MySpace's prospects, which have declined over the last several years, as have both revenues and engagement with consumers.
"This is not a rocket-ship ride to the moon," said one person with knowledge of the situation. "It's building again step by step."
A Flixster spokesman declined to comment, as did News Corp. I am awaiting a call back from MySpace's spokeswoman, but she is stuck in a security line at the airport.
(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this AllThingsD.)
Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from AllThingsD
How much time do you spend online each week? If you're an average Net user, a new poll shows, it's around 13 hours--excluding e-mail.
The Harris Interactive poll, released Wednesday, found that 80 percent of U.S. adults go online, whether at home, work, or elsewhere. Those who surf the Net spend an average of 13 hours per week online, but that figure varies widely. Twenty percent are online for two hours or less a week, while 14 percent are there for 24 hours or more.
The average number of hours that people spend online each week has grown over the years, hovering at 7 hours from 1999 through 2002, 8 or 9 hours from 2003 through 2006, and 11 hours in 2007. The level hit its peak at 14 hours in October 2008--after the global recession had set in and just before the U.S. presidential election.
The jump in time spent in cyberspace likely stems from a few factors, according to Harris. More people are comfortable using the Internet. More of them are shopping and watching TV online. In addition, the number of Web sites and online applications has increased. Harris adds that the recession may also play a role since surfing the Net at home is free (after paying monthly access fees), while going out means spending money.
The age group that spent the most time online per week: 30- to 39-year-olds, at 18 hours.
The total number of U.S. adults on the Internet is 184 million, around 80 percent of the total population, according to the poll. That figure is virtually the same as in 2008 but is a big jump from 1999, when it reached at 56 percent, and from 1995, when the figure was a mere 9 percent.
The number of people who surf the Net at home rose to 76 percent this year, compared with 66 percent in 2005, 46 percent in 1999, and 16 percent in 1996. In 1995, that specific question wasn't even asked.
The Harris poll queried 2,029 people in early July and mid-October.
Here are the poll results:
(Credit:
Harris Interactive)
I have often wondered if being a divorce lawyer makes you feel better about humanity or worse. Perhaps it merely keeps you in intimate contact with all the pitfalls of relationships on a daily, even hourly, basis.
Still, whose heart could possibly lose so much as a throb on hearing that almost one in five divorces in the UK are fueled by Facebook?
No, it's not that Facebook's employees are so irresistible that anyone who comes into contact with them, even in the UK, immediately leaves their spouse. Rather, it seems that the constant lack of trust in marriages causes much trawling around spouses' Facebook pages until one party decides the party's over.
It has already been established by one study that Facebook turns lovers a painful shade of green. However, the Telegraph quotes a law firm declaring that almost one in five divorce petitions make Facebook the scene of the crime.
The managing director of Divorce-Online told the Telegraph: "I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was. I was really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook."
Some of the biggest culprits, according to the Telegraph, are flirty e-mails and messages found on Facebook, which are "increasingly being cited as evidence of unreasonable behavior."
And it was only in February that Emma Brady discovered her husband was divorcing her when he updated his Facebook status to: "Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady."
Are people who leave themselves so exposed on Facebook merely careless? Or does the liberating new medium of social networking allow them to deliberately tell their spouses that they have had enough without having the courage to look them in the eyes?
Perhaps, though, Facebook might use this phenomenon to advertise its own power. The site should create a special group: the Facebook Disconnects group. It would bring together all those whose marriages that ended because of wall posts and the like, thereby showing how Facebook relationships are more powerful than any out there in the dumb ole' analog, touchy-feely world.
That way, advertisers might finally realize that it's better to put all of their money into digital relationships on Facebook rather than into those quaintly ancient TV spots.
It's an odd tradition. Well, it is Britain, where they have a talent for clutching traditions like Posh Spice clutches many things with a D&G logo.
The particular tradition that fascinates at this time of year consists of really caring about which song is the best seller at Christmas.
Once upon a time, some of the greatest music ever composed was Britain's Christmas No. 1. Yes, Slade's "Merry Christmas Everybody," Mud's "Lonely This Christmas," and the slightly less melodic "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" by Pink Floyd.
In recent times, Simon Cowell, a man with more tentacles than T-shirts, has timed one of his reality talent shows to coincide with the Christmas period.
No sooner is the winner announced than he or she has a song that is then downloaded beyond distraction straight to the top of something that is still quaintly called the Singles Chart. (Recent examples include the stunning Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke.)
This year, Londoners Jon and Tracy Morter decided that something must be done. So they created a Facebook group, Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No. 1.
Sentiment in the snowy English shires was clearly strong. Because around 1 million people declared their belief in the cause. And Sunday it was announced to huge acclaim that the Facebookers had got their way. The Rage Against the Machine song, so CNN tells us, "Killing in the Name," is the No. 1 Christmas single.
It is not easy to defeat the intentions of Cowell. He is the man who dominates "American Idol" rather beautifully and the man who brought Susan Boyle to the world's attention through yet another pulsating show called "Britain's Got Talent." He is also the man who created "The X-Factor," another talent show designed to create instant fodder for Christmas. (Oh, of course it's coming to the U.S., did you have to ask?)
The Morters claimed on the Facebook group's page that the campaign was not remotely personal. Some might think this not entirely true, as the Guardian tells us that when they launched the group they said: "Fed up of Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas No. 1? Me too."
Cowell, for his part, told a press conference that the Facebook campaign was "stupid" and "cynical."
You might be wondering why the Morters chose Rage Against the Machine. Well, Jon Morter told NME.com: "It's been taken on by thousands in the group as a defiance to Simon Cowell's 'music machine'. Some certainly do see it as a direct response to him personally."
So one machine has defeated another in the place where they always tell us the Industrial Revolution began. It's a touching Christmas story, isn't it?
(Updated at 1:56 p.m. PST, after I put down my own bottle of Lapin Kulta.)
If you've ever spent a long night drinking with Finns, you may have noted that after the 10th beer, they can become jolly, effusive, and positively inventive. Well, please hark the words of Martti Roth, an alleged employee of Intel Finland, who thought of something rather special while under the influence of alcohol.
I am not libeling him, truly. Because Roth says he really did come up with the notion, while at a bar, that he and his Intel friends should create the world's biggest Intel chime ever by firing themselves out of cannons.
On the special Intel Cannonbells site, Roth declared: "I thought about the biggest, most exciting way we could create those five notes. And the longer I stayed in the bar, the more sense it made."
Roth says he is a field applications engineer. And his family has a history with cannons. No, not in some 19th century war, but, well, it sounds like a tragic story.
"In 1906, my great grandfather tried to fire himself from a cannon over the widest part of the river Vantaa in Helsinki," Roth said on the site.
I cannot imagine why he might have made this interesting choice. In answer to the question "did he make it?" Roth replied: "Some of him did. Funny really, but on the day [of the Intel Cannonbells launch], I really felt as though he was looking down on me and guiding me through the air towards that big, metal pipe. It was very emotional."
I cannot possibly suggest that Roth did this interview when still under the influence of the finest Lapin Kulta (supposedly Finland's finest beer). Or that, as some (including the site's disclaimer writers) might suggest, he is merely an actor.
Oh, all right, here's the full, tucked-away disclaimer: "All copy and videos are part of a marketing campaign for Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. No Intel employees were harmed in the making of this film. All characters featured in the videos were played by actors specially trained in silly costumes and Finnish accents. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to fire anyone out of a cannon."
Still, I trust that the video will inspire you to aim higher in the coming year to create technological feats that will truly make a noise in the commercial world. Even if it might make you mistrust Finns a little in the immediate future.
Sex, porn, and Michael Jackson were among the most popular items kids searched for online in 2009, as tracked by Symantec's OnlineFamily.Norton.
Symantec on Thursday revealed the top 100 favorite search terms among children 18 and under found by its free OnlineFamily.Norton service, which helps parents monitor their kids' online searches. Though innocuous terms like Sesame Street and "New Moon"--a popular movie in the Twilight vampire series--made the cut, sex showed up fourth on the list for boys and fifth for girls, following YouTube, Google, and Facebook as the three top terms.
For boys, the top 25 search terms focused on social-networking sites, shopping sites, and certain adult terms. Girls seemed to favor subjects related to music, TV shows and movies, and celebrities.
Speaking of celebrities, to no one's surprise, the late Michael Jackson was the most searched for celebrity, coming in at number 12, followed by pop singer Taylor Swift at No. 13. Other hot stars that made the list included Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Beyonce, the Black Eyed Peas, the Jonas Brothers, Eminem, Rihanna, and Chris Brown (who was in the news this year after admitting that he assaulted ex-girlfriend Rihanna).
Searching for celebrities online, however, may be hazardous to your PC's health. Symantec has found found that these searches sometimes draw people to dangerous Web sites, which spew out viruses, spam, and other malware.
Kids seven and under searched for items related to video games, while older kids were heavy into music, with 34 percent of teens and 27 percent of tweens searching for music-related topics. The Miley Cyrus song "Party in the USA" was the most-searched for tune among kids, while "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eye Peas took the No. 2 spot.
Tech terms that popped up on the list included MySpace at No. 8, MSN at No. 33, the iPod Touch at No. 98, and Bing last at No. 100.
To compile its top 100 list, Symantec tracked 14.6 million searches run by users of its OnlineFamily.Norton service and ranked the terms according to ones submitted most frequently to those submitted the least. The terms were collected anonymously, so none could be associated with any specific children or families.
Updated at 11:15 p.m. PST to include comment from witness and reflect Twitter.com accessible again.
Updated at 11:50 p.m. PST with status update from Twitter.
Twitter.com was down Thursday evening, and it appears that the microblogging site may have been hacked or the victim of a DNS hijacking.
The site, which was inaccessible for about an hour starting around 10 p.m. PST, was defaced with the following image before it was taken offline:
The message at the bottom of the image appears to be written in Perso-Arabic script and when translated to English it read:
Twitter's status blog was also inaccessible. CNET has inquiries out to Twitter and we will let you know more when we hear back.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.
Chris Hoare, a Flickr user in Leicester, England, captured the screenshot above and said his attempt to connect to Twitter bounced through a second Web-hosting server before the image was displayed but that he couldn't catch the address.
"The HTML was pretty basic, and everything that it showed was local on the server it was being sent from," Hoare told CNET News.
A Twitter update message posted at 11:28 p.m. said the site was "working to recovery from an unplanned downtime" and indicated that the incident was indeed a hijacking of Twitter's DNS records:
Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.
Security has been a thorny issue for Twitter in the past. In January, a hacker hijacked CNN anchor Rick Sanchez's feed and proclaimed the journalist was "high on crack." Twitter users have also been the target of a password-stealing phishing scam. Disguising itself as a private message that led to a fake Twitter log-in screen, the scam was widespread enough for Twitter to put a warning message on all members' home pages alerting them of the issue.
Certainly, there is a contentious history between Twitter and Iran. In the wake of supposed results of that nation's presidential election in June, protesters in Iran used Twitter to skirt government filters to report events, express outrage, and get people out to opposition rallies. Twitter even rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval at the request of the U.S. Department of State.
Here is what has been reported.
According to Florida Today, a woman tweeted at 5:22 p.m. Monday about the fog over Brevard County in Florida. Some time between 5:22 p.m. and 5:38 p.m., her 2-year-old son fell into a swimming pool and was found floating in it.
911 records reportedly show that his mother called the paramedics at 5:38 p.m. Monday. At 6:12 p.m., she reportedly sent an update to her Twitter page, Military_Mom. It read: "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool." (The tweet has since been removed.)
Her name is Shellie Ross. She is a regular tweeter and has a blog called Blog4Mom. Not long after she tweeted for her 5,300 followers' prayers, her 2-year-old son, Bryson, was pronounced dead.
At 11:08 p.m. Monday, she reportedly tweeted: "Remember my million dollar baby," along with a picture of her dead son.
(Credit:
CC Appfrica/Flickr)
The Huffington Post reported that her tweets caused some people to offer little sympathy.
@jalynsandoval (whose Twitter page has since been removed) reportedly tweeted: "military_mom 's fault for not keeping an eye on her son while he was next to the pool. she was to (sic) busy with twitter i guess. RIP kid."
Shellie Ross, military_mom, reportedly replied to this tweet: "@jalynsandoval you are an ass, I was outside w/him and it took 2 sec for him to slip away, I hope U never feel this pain u ass."
Florida Today reported that Ross' friends describe her as "a fantastic mother who is devoted to her children." Moreover, Brevard County authorities reportedly describe it as an accidental drowning.
A child is dead. A mother sent Twitter updates. And some who don't know her criticized her actions.
This is what has been reported. Can anyone make sense of it? Should anyone make sense of it? Or does the very use of Twitter, given its public nature, make everyone fair game for even passing critics?
The minute you tweet, you sacrifice your privacy for the sake of some greater sense of connection, some greater sense of urgency. A tweet is a report, one that will subsequently be re-reported and re-interpreted.
They may call it social media. But the society it brings together isn't always one of your choosing.
