Yesterday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that regulates the Internet, released its list of applicants for new .com alternatives. There are obvious ones like .amazon and .hsbc, but less obvious ones like .ninja have also crept in. A few South African companies also got involved.
Greenpeace recently teamed up with activist pranksters, The Yes Men. Their goal? To rip Shell a new one over their planned Arctic oil drilling. Step inside, and watch a great (and hilarious) example of how social media and activism have become inseparable.
Sweden has been handing its Twitter account to a different citizen every week for the past seven months. Which has been great for the most part, with priests and lesbian truck drivers representing the country – except the latest @sweden handler has been catching some flack for trying to figure out “whats the fuzz with jews.”
Sir John Major has been giving testimony at the Leveson inquiry into British press ethics today. Some of his testimony appears to directly conflict that of Murdoch’s, who in April claimed: “I have never asked a prime minister for anything.” Major becomes the first ex-Prime Minister to claim Murdoch tried to get him to change government policy.
Jonathan Shapiro, more commonly known as Zapiro, has been named the 2012 recipient of the International Publishers Association (IPA) award for Freedom to Publish. He’ll receive it for his exemplary courage in upholding the freedom to publish whatever he wants, basically.
British Prime Minister, David Cameron, left his eldest daughter, Nancy, at a pub following a Sunday lunch. It happened after a mix-up with his wife Samantha, Downing Street has admitted. The couple only realised their daughter was missing when they got home.
Yesterday, Nando’s made a decision to hit back at our nation’s broadcasters. They published a summary of their pro-diversity advert in the Sunday papers in response to the SABC, DSTV, M-Net and e.tv banning the advert.
They say: “They’ve made the decision for you. Unlike our broadcasters, we’re giving you the right to choose.”
That’s how we feel too, because nobody should treat you like a child.
Click through to enjoy the ad in all its glory.
A very stimulating new book has just launched: Do Ideas. The book, curated by Don Packett, features contributions from some of South Africa’s brightest minds. They want you to embrace your ideas: “don’t be afraid”, they say. The best bit? It’s free, and online. Go on, you want to have a look.
You might have picked up in the Morning Spice headlines that the Nasdaq stock exchange said it “owe[d] the industry an apology”. It’s gone a little further now, and says it will set aside $40 million to reimburse investors that suffered losses due to technical problems on Facebook’s first day of trading.
LinkedIn has confirmed via its blog that more than 6,5 Million user passwords had been “compromised”. That is a nice way of saying a Russian hacker stole, and then downloaded them. If you have an account with LinkedIn, now would be a great time to change your password.
Right now, you could be using the new Internet, and you probably didn’t know. Essentially, the Internet got too small, and we’d have run out of addresses if they didn’t do something about it. But, we’ll let Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, guide us through the jargon.
More details are emerging about Buffy, apparently the codename for Facebook’s HTC smartphone which may run with Android, all the Facebook trimmings and an Opera browser. Or will it? We try sort the facts from the fiction as excitement mounts over the phone that might topple Apple.
Chinese users of online Twitter-alike Weibo can expect extra restrictions to the service in the wake of complaints from several authorities that users were publishing “false rumours” on the site, namely a “points system” to track and punish offensive posts.
On Saturday, the EU Cookie Directive goes into effect. It’s a European Union law governing the opting in and out of website cookies. The law was ratified in the name of privacy, but, the impact on the digital industry will be immense and, possibly, damaging.
After boasting on Twitter that she got out of a R2 500 fine “for going 140 in a 60 zone” by paying a traffic cop R30, FHM model Sabina Essa received a call from Justice Project SA CEO Howard Dembovsky.
She then confessed to him that she merely sent the tweet for “some attention” from her followers. I honestly don’t know which of the two possible scenarios is worse.
Click ‘continue reading’ for full story..
2oceansViber, Rory Allen, spent four days last week documenting the Eihatsu Maru as it lay stranded on Clifton’s First Beach. He’s put together an amazing time lapse of events as they unfolded.
Pakistan yesterday temporarily banned Twitter in the region. The move was in response to a competition on Facebook called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, now in its third year. The competition encourages entrants to draw caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and Pakistan authorities actually used censorship to quell the spread of images, unlike South African authorities who dealt with a similar “caricature” incident on Friday.
Facebook is set to float on the stock exchange today and all its early investors must be smiling. One of them, U2’s frontman Bono, has shares worth over $1,5 billion alone. This puts him well above Paul McCartney – currently the world’s richest musician. Who knew devoting your career to charity, world peace, and good causes could be so profitable?
So Google’s trying to change things, again. For those of you who decide that this is the last straw and that you’re going Bing, farewell and good luck finding anything. For those of you wanting to find out what exactly Knowledge Graph is and why it isn’t as terrible as G+, click on through.
Pinterest, the hottest social photo sharing website right now, looks set to receive a nice $50 million injection from Japanese giant, Raukten. Plus another reported $70 million coming in from other international investors! This means that Pinterest’s valuation is now in the range of between $1 billion and $1,5 billion. Impressively, they’ve only been around for two years.
In February this year, Twitter unveiled a service that allows researchers, and anyone who has the money to pay for the service, to unlock the Twitter archives, as it were. They’ve expanded their product range again; and now you can get a weekly email summarising the most relevant tweets and stories distributed by the people on your timeline.
Facebook lately been experimenting with a small group of users by offering them the opportunity to promote their own status messages by paying for them. If the “Highlight” feature is more widely adopted, people will soon be able to pay to make sure their cutesy status updates are at the top of everyone’s news feed.
A short while ago, Jessica Leandra dos Santos and Tshidi Thamana seemed to try to apologise for their recent actions, as well as form some kind of friendship. But Itumeleng Mabeba, a man at the centre of hate speech allegations for sending a very disturbing tweet, has claimed his Twitter account was hacked. His employer is also instituting an internal disciplinary process against him.
In a slightly surprising move, given the extent to which Google and Facebook have been compliant in handing data over to government enquiry, Twitter filed a motion (PDF) yesterday to block a subpoena that would force the company to turn over the data of one of its users, an arrested Occupy Wall Street protestor.
By now, many people within South Africa’s news-following public are familiar with the recent burst of racism that took place on South Africa’s twittersphere involving a model and a “model”. Mistakes were made, but the backlash and long-term effects from a social and mainstream media clamouring may have devastating consequences on the individuals involved. Things begin to go pearshaped when the media is inaccurate with information that disperses frantically when a news story of this nature breaks.
The DA’s National Spokesperson, Mmusi Maimane has penned an open letter, to Jessica Leandra Dos Santos, and Tshidi Tamane, who earned infamy last week by stinking up twitter with their respective outbursts of racist vitriol. Maimane offers to host both of the racist models at his home, for dinner. Read the whole thing, after the […]
Just as Twitter was cooling off from last Friday’s Jessica Leandra furore, another South African model (and also actress, apparently) called Tshidi Thamana (@tshditee) set the infernos of South African outrage blazing once more with a tweet she fired off in response to the Leandra debacle this weekend. But the biggest question on our lips is, who the hell is Tshidi Thamana?
Mark Zuckerberg officially filed its IPO with Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday afternoon, announcing its intention to sell 337 million shares at between $28 and $35 a pop – in the biggest Internet stock offering since Google went public in 2004. They’ll be going roadshow for the next two weeks to let big investors see what they’re buying.
On World Press Freedom Day, the highly acclaimed writer, and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Nadine Gordimer, called for the Protection of Information Bill to be “rejected in its entirety.” She launched the scathing rebuttal in an article entitled, “South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom”, on the New York Review of Books website.
Derided or not, proponents of the KONY2012 campaign have managed to make Kony famous, or at the very least a topic of conversation. And now it would seem authorities are close to capturing him as well. There are three international armies hunting him, and according to Uganda’s army chief Aronda Nyakairima, Joseph Kony is currently operating in volatile border areas between Sudan and South Sudan: