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Twitter's celebrity hack: The unanswered question

Thanks to Google, they know where you live. Thanks to Twitter, they know when you floss your teeth.

Now a devious, perhaps ludicrously insane, hacker has taken it further. He (must be a 'he.' Women can spell and are never rude) found his way into the twitterdom of celebrities and tinkered with their tweets.

For example, he attempted to suggest to twitterers of Britney Spears foul words that would surely never have emerged from her imagination. He implied to followers of Rick Sanchez that the CNN anchor partakes of scientifically concocted substances, surely a (free)baseless lie.

Even the President-elect'… Read more

How to downsize your social network portfolio

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more … Read more

Update: Twitter blames celebrity hack on 'individual'

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez wasn't really high on crack this morning, and the reason his Twitter feed said so wasn't the phishing scam that's been going around--it was a lone hacker, the microblogging service said later on Monday.

"The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend," a post on the Twitter blog explained. "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the e-mail address associated with their … Read more

Oops! Twitter hack snares CNN anchor

Clarification: Twitter has clarified that this incident was the work of a hacker and separate from the phishing scheme.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez is one of the most popular users on microblogging service Twitter, with nearly 40,000 followers and a Twitterholic rank in the top 20. Unfortunately for Sanchez, it looks like he fell victim to the phishing scam that has been plaguing the popular service for several days now.

In a "tweet" that has since been deleted, Sanchez's account displayed the message "i am high on crack right now might not be coming into … Read more

Managing my Twitter existence

I've not traditionally been much of a Twitter fan, once deriding it as "Wonder bread."

I've increasingly found, however, that Twitter serves a useful function for me, fitting in between blogs and instant messaging as a "micro-blogging" tool, as Glyn Moody suggests. It's also a way for me to IM multiple people at once, without any near-term expectation of response. I now post to Twitter quite often.

Despite these benefits, the only way I've found to make Twitter work for me is by limiting the number of people I follow. I followRead more

Two tools to add cool people on Twitter

In explaining Twitter to people (something I seem to be a doing a lot lately), one of the questions I get the most is, "So who should I follow?" I've long wished for a tool, myself, that would let me bulk-add cool people to my network. Over the holidays I checked out two new tools designed to do that.

The first is AutoPack, an offshoot of wiki-based Twitter directory called Twitter Pack. AutoPack is a long list of Twitter user accounts broken into categories (such as Quotations, Lawyers, and Green Building). The directory itself is incomplete, but … Read more

Twitter phishing scam may be spreading

There's a scam spreading through Twitter. Direct messages (DMs) are showing up in Twitter accounts with appealing come-ons to visit a site on blogspot.com. The text is, "hey! check out this funny blog about you..." The URL in the message then redirects to a page that looks like the Twitter login page, but is actually not on Twitter--it's a site, twitter.access-logins.com, that masquerades as Twitter to steal your login credentials instead.

If you need to log in to Twitter, do it on Twitter.com itself. And to play it safe, double-check your browser … Read more

Israel brings Gaza airstrikes to the Web

The Israel Defense Forces this week extended its airstrikes on Gaza to the Web, posting video footage of its air assault against Hamas militants on YouTube and using Twitter to spread its message.

According to various news reports, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) created its own YouTube channel carrying videos that include black-and-white aerial footage of attacks on Hamas weapon sites, and clips of Hamas terrorists loading rockets into trucks.

An IDF spokesperson said it is using the platform to "help us bring our message to the world," by offering "exclusive footage showing the IDF's operation … Read more

Six sure things for 2009

Welcome to the Year of Fear. They say 2009 will be difficult, dangerous, maybe even disastrous. But, here at Technically Incorrect, we believe it will be the year that the seemingly impossible will be the most likely to happen.

So here are 6 things that we feel sure will occur in 2009. Notice the vital importance of advertising in each of these surefire occurrences.

1. FACEBOOK WILL BE SOLD TO A NETWORK TV STATION. Oh, guffaw away if you must. But some time this year the folks at Facebook will sit down and realize that they haven't sold much … Read more

The Web's "Message in a Bottle"

Back in 1997 I read Robert Putnam's classic "Bowling Alone" for the first time. In his original thesis, Putnam argues that society has frayed, with people going through the motions of sociability...without actually socializing:

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. [He] draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and … Read more