And suddenly the real use of online flash-mobs becomes clear: stealing junk from convenience stores. Yesterday, a group of about 28 ‘young people,’ believed to have coordinated online, cleaned out a Maryland convenience store in under a a minute.The police have attempted online identification, but no arrests have been made.
Don’t worry, the artificial libertarian islands will have better names than that. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, has given $1.25 million to an initiative to build libertarian island states in international waters. Because that’s what you do when you’rea 43-year-old gay libertarian with money to kill, I guess.
A 20-year-old man in Essex has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” because he used Blackberry Messenger to invite people to a public water fight. Whether this means British cops can now wiretap the Blackberry messaging network is unclear, but either way: great job, democracy.
There is something encouraging coming out of the past three days of rioting and looting, even if it is a remote silver lining: the online mobilization of volunteer clean-up operations, mostly organized via Twitter and Facebook. By this time yesterday, #riotcleanup, was the second-highest trending topic worldwide.
Where are you going to be at 18h00 this evening? I know what I’m going to be doing – and let’s be honest about this – you know what you should be doing too, right? Something awesome might happen. The Old Spice Guy has accepted Fabio’s challenge and they will have some sort of bathroom face-off, live, on YouTube.
Chinese officials have ordered two of the five fake stores already located in the south-western city of Kunming to suspend business while they’re investigated, a local government website said on Monday. But, it’s since emerged that similar fakes exist in countries from Croatia to Venezuela.
The pressure finally got to the fiery red-headed Rebekah Brooks. In the last few minutes news agency Reuters has officially announced that News International CEO Rebekah Brooks has resigned and will be replaced by Tom Mockridge. This comes after a scathing attack in an apparent four-page letter from Elisabeth, and the second biggest NI shareholder declaring “she has to go.”
When he’s not letting us know that he’ll be on holiday, President Jacob Zuma harnesses the power of the presidential twitter feed to promote the dramatic accomplishments of his progeny. Sweet, man. Check out the tweet after the jump.
Moments after John Smit announced he would be leaving the Sharks and joining English club side Saracens for two seasons after the 2011 World Cup, well-known author and rugby pundit, Dan Retief weighed in with his opinion on Twitter. Smit replied, with a perfectly weighted volley of wit. Check out the tweets after the jump.
This morning Kylie Minogue got down with the Soweto gospel choir, who welcomed her on her arrival in Johannesburg a few hours ago. She tweeted this rather festive picture of herself dancing with the singers, obviously having a great time. Wonder who’ll greet her at CT International next week. The possibilities are endless.
Come on, you all know what we’re referring to in that headline. It’s just a little bribe and you’re done. In there. RICA sorted. It’s actually hardly surprising, but it deflates the high we all experienced with the relatively hassle-free event that was reported in a lot of the mainstream media.
The Chinese often find ingenious ways of rectifying problems, but they’ve gone too far this time. A badly doctored image of government officials inspecting a new road in Huili, a modest county in a rural corner of south-west China, has produced some exquisite viral images indicating the public’s displeasure with being lied to.
“Taliban: ‘On each floor of the hotel, our fighters have broken down the door to each room, taking out guests and killing them.'” This was one of the traumatic tweets circulating on Twitter last night, as Taliban militants stormed the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, killing 21 people.
Pope Benedict XVI took to Twitter yesterday and composed a tweet on an iPad before sending it out into cyberspace. Granted, it did take about six other similarly aged cardinals and other officials to help him out, but it is the thought that counts, right? See a video of him tweeting, as well as his full Twitter message, inside.
Social Intelligence, a company approved a week ago by the Federal Trade Commission, is one that uses deep-search tools to do background checks on other companies’ potential employees. These guys could find your MySpace account, they’re that thorough. And if your deep-search profile doesn’t look good, you don’t get hired.
Public holiday weeks, like last week, are problematic. It’s a commonly accepted truth that human beings experience a normal five day working week (or four-and-a-half-day working week, if you’re sensible) to be far more excruciating after a week which incorporates a public holiday. And Jacob Zuma is no exception. He needs a break, and he needs it now.
So Nonhle Thema – from Vuzu reality show Nonhle Goes to Hollywood, and the former face of the Dark and Lovely brand – seems to be having a bit of a freak-out on Twitter. She’s eager to tell everybody that she is “young and RICH……….LOL…..DEAL WITH IT PLEASE…” Over and over again.
Here’s a quick Facebook 101 tutorial. It’s not smart to include hate speech in your conversation with other FB users. Especially if you are, say, a budding journalist. Mail & Guardian intern Ngoako Matsha, who apparently has some pretty strong anti-Semitic views, learned that the hard way this week.
Hot damn but I love the future. Iceland is drawing up a new constitution, in the wake of the country’s commercial banks collapsing. Which is news, but not news-news; the interesting part is how the former vikings are going about the process – they’re crowdsourcing the draft online, with links to Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts.
There was a fair amount of coverage about the apparent arrest of “Amina Arraf”, the pseudonym of openly gay Syrian blogger behind ‘Gay Girl In Damascus,’ which did a lot for getting word out about human rights issues in Syria. Except it turns out that Amina was invented by 40-year-old Tom McMaster, from Georgia.
Reject tag. That’s the best solution to most Facebook picture problems involving you looking dodgy, drunk or disorderly in someone else’s weekend photo album, right? Not anymore. In more FB news today, the social network has decided it’s rad and totally okay to have face-recognition software automatically detect users in images, even career-damaging ones.
For once, news that seems to be too good to be true, actually is true. The ANC has done a little back-peddle today and called for an extension to the June 24 deadline to complete the drafting of the Protection of Information Bill. Jimmy Manyi must be beside himself at the moment.
The concept for a Marlboro cigarrette-swapping smartphone app has been making the rounds – the idea being that social smokers would be able to trade digital cigarettes for real ones using bump technology, and ‘hardcore smokers’ would be able to redeem the digital smokes for real ones once they’d accumulated enough.
Facebook is highly addictive and a much better way to spend your time than say, actually living your life. So what would happen if your access was snatched away from you in an instant? Well one pervert had this happen to him, so he decided to act, by wandering into an Apple Store to check his account.
Twitter has been ordered to hand over confidential details of five British users in what may become a landmark case for the social networking website. It is believed to be the first time the social networking site has been forced to provide details about users in the UK.
Google Wallet and Google Offers launched yesterday, both of which sound supremely cool – PayPal’s grumblings (and lawsuits) about commercial espionage notwithstanding. Google Wallet lets users swipe their phones in lieu of credit cards, even allowing subscription to a new prepaid Google debit card; Google Offers looks to work like a virtual loyalty card.
Zimbabwe’s privately owned NewsDay newspaper has said that a magistrate in Bulawayo has set a trial date for Vikas Mavhudzi, who faces a charge of posting offensive messages on Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Facebook wall, for June 10. Mavhudzi became the first person to be arrested in Zimbabwe for a Facebook post. Screenshot after the jump.
Follow Will Ferrell on Twitter @willferrell
Google has been hit with a string of security flaws lately and the internet giant has now been exposed yet again with a “significant security hole” being found in its smartphone operating system, Google Android. As usual with these things, it can allow attackers to gain access to users’ personal information without their permission.
Wow. Alright. Apple gave the the green light to a mobile app that promises to connect rich old dudes with young women. Sugar daddies with gold diggers. Seriously. They call themselves SugarSugar, “the world’s most effective and discreet place for finding Sugar Daddy and Sugar Baby relationships.”