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Twitter’s new feature was not requested by their users

johannes — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:00:07 +0000

Twitter’s latest addition to its feature list is its ability to censor tweets that run afoul of a country’s restrictions on speech. Why is this being touted as a feature? To answer this question, one must look at the wider implication this new feature might bring.

This is certainly a great news for so-called “regulators” in countries that are still controlled by military regimes and those who are opposed to free speech. Although Twitter only mentioned countries such as Germany and France, featuring laws prohibiting pro-nazi speech, the feature will be warmly welcomed by many other regimes around the world. While stopping pro-nazi hate speech might be a worthwile feature in the social network, the feature certainly has other uses, just like anti hate speech laws could be used against people advocating social change.

The changes in Twitter is clearly a move to appease speech regulators around the world, which once again poses the question of public needs vs private ownership of networks such as Twitter.

Connecting Android Tablet to the TAFE wireless network

johannes — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:00:59 +0000

Well, I must say that working with an Android tablet poses a lot of challenges. Firstly, to get my tablet to connect to the corporate Wifi network at a TAFE college was a serious challenge for my sanity. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why anyone would want to ship a tablet operating system without any configurable proxy setting. Most tablet users would want to take their tablet to work and connect to a wireless network that uses, guess what, proxies.

Luckily, my sanity was saved by the ability of Mozilla Firefox (for Android) to have a proxy setting (via an Add-on), but the method that I had to use to connect to the wireless network at TAFE is so bizzare, that it defies any logic (this same craziness applies to using my Mac laptop as well). Unless you are using Internet Explorer on Windows, then your milage varies quite a bit.

The procedure on the Android tablet goes like this:

Start Firefox mobile, then turn off proxy settings in the proxy add-on
Type some random URL in the address bar
Authentication page will come up.
Authenticate
Go to Add-on setting and enable proxy.
Close the browser
Open the browser
Authenticate again
Browse the internet
After an hour, repeat all the above steps.

Bizarre or not?

My first online art project searching Flickr using words from Twitter public timeline

johannes — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:43:58 +0000

Lately, my obsession with ActionScript, combined with my activities on Twitter and Flickr made me create an art project. Since it pulls data from both Flickr and Twitter, it is naturally suited to being posted online.

The work basically plays around with the idea of the association that we form between words and images. Putting words next to an image can suddenly shift the meaning of the image, since meaning in an image is quite subjective in a lot of ways. My idea was to create something that is constantly changing according to the data that it can gather. It is by no means some form of AI application. Quite the opposite. The application itself is really quite simple.

Hope you enjoy, here is the link http://www.agit8.org/the_association_of_meaning