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Twitter Verification Process Is Taking Shape

Twitter verification process allows celebrities to reveal their identity.

The Twitter verification process is slowly taking shape now as more and more public figures are earning for the blue check next to their name on the social media platform. This will allow them to safely post and avoid any bad publicity that could be generated by a fake account bearing the same name.

In order to go through the Twitter verification process, one must first fill out a form that is available online. The San Francisco company declared that all of the applications are taken into consideration, and all background checks are thorough, so fake accounts will be even harder to create.

However, if you’re not a person of interest from the point of view of the media, you may have to wait a while before your identity is verified. According to a Twitter representative, individuals like actors, musicians, journalists, politicians, and sports figures are a priority when it comes to the new service.

The new Twitter verification process is a key element in establishing the validity of a profile, especially since the platform does not ask for a real name when a person creates an account. Even though most fake accounts are made for fun, others are used to create a negative image of a public person. That is what the social network is trying to avoid.

Another good news for the VIP Twitter users that will go through the Twitter verification process is the fact that the service comes along with additional, more advanced privacy tools and means of filtering out harmful comments or spam. Moreover, users that were verified have the possibility of opting their account out of a group.

The blue verification checkmark that will be featured next to the name of the user will be lost if the individual in question opts for the protected tweets feature or if the original purpose of the account is changed.

Tina Bhatnagar, the vice president of the User Services US branch, declared in a press release that the new Twitter verification process offers users the possibility of connecting with a wider audience and finding relevant accounts to follow.

Some of the users that had the opportunity of testing the new services stated that the feature is extremely useful when it comes to filtering out abusive, offensive, or unverified users.

What is your take on the new Twitter verification process? Do you consider it a helpful thing?

Image source: Pixabay

Twitter GIF File Size Increased To 15MB

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Twitter GIF file size upped to 15MB for desktop users.

The Twitter GIF size increase from 5MB to 15MB will be an exciting transition.

Twitter for Desktop is now supporting GIF files that can go up to 15MB in size. Twitter GIF file size was previously of 5MB.

The mobile Twitter apps did not receive the update as of yet, and it is uncertain if Twitter plans on implementing it anytime soon. The decision for Twitter GIF file size for mobile to remain at 5MB has been made in regards to the size of mobile data plans.

Back to Desktop, the change is being received with much gusto by a significant portion of the hot side of the Twittersphere. Soon after the announcement the micro-blogging platform was flooded with high-definition reaction GIFs and with GIFs as lengthy as music videos.

Complaints soon arose, however, as they often on do the Internet, when many Twitter users were shocked to find out that the file size limits for photos and images were still capped at 5MB.

Twitter GIF posting became the official thing in 2014, after developers of the micro-blogging site noticed increasing amount of complaint in regards to its users having to click the links for the popular reaction gifs instead of viewing them in their Twitter browsers.

GIFs had always been part of Internet culture, but most of their present popularity is owed to one of Twitter’s rival micro-blogging sites, Tumblr.

Other websites such as Reddit and Imgur have brought GIFs to a whole new level, as their user base passionately somehow tapped into the secrets of encoding and created several high quality 60 fps animations.

Twitter GIF, now with 200% more GIF

Back to Twitter, starting February 2016, the company saddled up with Riffsy and Giffy. Facebook Messenger had partnered with Giffy before 2016 and Twitter decided not to live in the GIF dark ages any longer.

The Twitter GIF line of features is currently one of the most performant as animations in tweets are coded to load in the background over Wi-Fi. Searching for GIFs on Twitter is one of the most accessible ways to search for GIFs, as their keyword variation will surprise most.

With some of the user-base clamoring on about larger image files or how unjust it is for mobile users to not be able to upload GIFs larger than 5MB, the desktop community is faced with a far greater dilemma: what will their first 15MB Twitter GIF be?

Image Courtesy of YouTube.

PostGhost Shuts Down Due To Twitters ToS Violation

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PostGhost is shutting down after one e-mail from Twitter

Twitter’s E-Mail to PostGhost talks about violation of the Developer Agreement and Policy.

The website service known as PostGhost is not the most well-known or advertised on the Internet. However, it saw some use and crediting from news outlets and other such media.

What PostGhost does, or rather did, was to keep track of the Twitter accounts of quite a number of well-known public figures. Apart from its owner’s fame, the Twitter account had to be officially verified and it had to have a certain number of followers.

Whenever one of these observed accounts would tweet anything, post a picture, openly reply to somebody, PostGhost would print-screen, copy the data and save it to their own website’s archive which could be publically accessed.

PostGhost did not want popular public figures to ever be able to just deny or take-back having tweeted something.

The End Of PostGhost

According to Twitter, what PostGhost was doing was wrong. Twitter has contacted the site via e-mail and notified them that by having evidence and publicly displaying deleted tweets, they were violating the developer’s agreement and policy.

On Wednesday, July 6th, the website notified its user base that they would be shutting down for good. The entire affair was handled politely and civilized without any manner of drama.

As their goodbye to the world, the staff did state that they will be sorry to go and that when they began the project, they saw the tweets of verified public accounts as quotes spoken publicly. Anyone who would want to keep a record of such quotes would free to do so.

As several cases of what the public labeled as hypocrisy have occurred in the past, PostGhost seemed to have a good idea and the news services who credited it would agree.

However, Twitter is not the real world and it does come with a “Delete Tweet” button. People are allowed to change their minds and to shift their perspectives. Twitter seems to understand and value that.

PostGhost believes that the signal will not be stopped, however. They are certain that other parties or individuals will still keep track of public Twitter accounts. The will take screenshots to use for posterity if the time for social justice ever comes as they did in the past.

The issue with screenshots coming from public sources that have no backing or history or validity is that they can be accused of being fake. In its brief time on the web, PostGhost ensured a solid, unbiased reputation for themselves.

Image Courtesy of The Post Ghost Website.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, Is Twitter’s Hack of the Day

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OurMine Hacker Group Gets To Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

“just setting up my twttr” – Jack Dorsey, March 21st, 2006

The hacker group known as OurMine managed to take a hold of the Twitter account of Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. @Jack was apparently compromised through his Vine account. It is currently believed that the Vine account may have shared an older password with another account.

The password was leaked, without Dorsey’s knowledge, and found on one of many sites openly hosting such databases. The other main theory is that Jack Dorsey had his Vine linked to another social media account and that OurMine hacked that account.

Although no evidence of the hack is to be found not that Jack Dorsey recovered his account, it did happen and some of the Internet was awake to watch it happen.

OurMine let the world know that even for a few minutes, they were able to get to the CEO of Twitter. Everyone else is now left to wonder who is safe from hackers.

The short answer is that the majority of people are safe from hackers. The only reason @Jack was hacked is because he is the CEO of Twitter. And because he had one or two old passwords on websites without two-step authentication.

Jack Dorsey Authored The First Public Tweet

Celebrities, or better said, people with any amount of fame whatsoever, are selected because they are well known. OurMine was in no way coy about they were doing; they treated the hack like an advertising gig.

Whenever a celebrity gets hacked, the Internet catches wind of it and then the hacker openly or covertly gets the recognition and credit they were looking for.

The double-edged of news reporting is that the people need to know that Twitter has flaws in its security. Or when it is not Twitter’s fault, people need to know that they have flaws in their security.

Passwords need to be kept up to date, preferably unique and elaborate. Authenticators or two-factor authentication need to be used whenever available. Additional forms of security for private and personal data needs to be asked for and implemented by the user.

Twitter has been in the news recently concerning, hacks, leaks, and more hacks. It is a very popular platform. The average number of monthly active users in the first quarter of 2016 was over 310 million.

Twitter insists they do not have a security issue and until they change that song, the vulnerability is most likely on the user’s side. People who use the same password for multiple accounts are urged to change it. If hackers can find a loophole for Jack Dorsey, they can most likely find one for each of us if they bothered to look.

Image Courtesy of Twitter.

Twitter Hack of the Day: Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR C.E.O.

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Oculus CEO's Twitter got hacked too easily

The Oculus co-founder found out the hard way that using a 13-year-old password is not smart.

Brendan Iribe, the co-founder of the Oculus system and Chief Executive Officer of Oculus VR Inc, is currently a man with a considerably big pull in tech communities. His decisions decide the future of the Oculus and of the virtual reality world.

What kind of man decides the future of the Oculus?

It may come surprising to some to learn that a man in such an influential decision was still using his old MySpace account password for several other current accounts.

It may also come as a surprise to find out that with such a quite old and recycled password, Brendan Iribe had no additional forms of security, such as two-factor authentication. Well, both facts were entirely true, at least in the case of Iribe’s Twitter account.

On the evening of Wednesday, June 29th, Oculus CEO’s 16K Twitter followers witnessed the hacking.

Through the newly obtained account, the hacker openly announced their surprise in regards to Iribe’s low security. They also stated that they simply tried out a password found on a public leaked database.

The password was linked to Iribe’s MySpace account, meaning that the password’s age could vary between 4 and 13 years. Hacked database information is currently available publicly to anyone as long as they know what sites to use or what terms to search in their browser.

Apart from jokingly (hopefully) asking for a free Oculus from the CEO as the ransom for the safe return of his Twitter account, the hacker also tweeted that the same password seemed to work on Iribe’s e-mail account. Two-factor authentication was used with the e-mail’s password, however, and the hacker did not bother in trying to progress further than that.

Password management is realistically one of the biggest issues users are faced with.

For optimal security, users should change their passwords every six months, with some websites suggesting changes as frequent as every three months.

A safe password should also contain at least one uppercase character, one lowercase character, one number, and one special character.

While many sites allow logging in with other services, such as Facebook, Google, or even Twitter, it is more secure to first sign-up with an individual account and then connect them to the other service.

All passwords, passkeys, PINs, and the such should also not be noted down and remembered, implying that they should be logical and easy to remember.

Average comfort, along with the sheer number of accounts users have makes the process of making and updating unique passwords wholly troublesome.

While Twitter helped out the Oculus CEO and restored his account in a matter of hours, the rest of the world does not get to be that lucky. How do you keep your accounts safe? Let us know.

Image Courtesy of Brendan Iribe’s Twitter.

Twitter #Stickers Makes Photo Tagging Fun

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Twitter Will Make Photo Sharing and Connecting Easier with #Stickers.

#Stickers are scheduled to arrive to Twitter for Android and iOS in the following weeks.

On Monday, June 27th, Twitter announced the arrival of #Stickers. The new feature will allow Twitter users to tag their photos and images by choosing and applying one of the hundreds of stickers soon to be available.

The #Sticker feature will allow all such tagged public images and photos to be searchable, in the same way Hashtags are used to search Tweets.

Some could look at Twitter’s visual hashtags and call out the microblogging site on attempting to imitate Instagram. The latter boasted on reaching 500 million active users earlier this month. With Twitter user activity averaging out at close 310 million active users, the service could be seen as trying to catch.

#Stickers is not Instagram though, just as much as Twitter is not Facebook. Although #Stickers could end up serving a similar service of visual entertainment, it only adds to what Twitter already was.

While Instagram has half a billion active users liking, commenting, and sharing content, the actual number of daily posts has been scarce. Twitter, on the other hand, is flooded with millions of photos which tend to be more frequent and spontaneous than Instagram’s.

#Stickers allows users to organize their own photos, to give them a unique twist, and to provide them with the opportunity to be shared in an easier way worldwide.

The feature will be available to Twitter users, through the already integrated image editing option. Stickers will be organized in several categories, and the current library has several hundreds of them. Based on how much popularity the feature will be gaining, more stickers could be coming, similar to Facebook Messenger own sticker system.

#Stickers will also have a Featured category, which will include Live Stickers connected to world news, calendar events. The Stickers were obviously designed to make sharing and connecting easier and fun.

A Sticker can only be used in photos and images. They can be placed anywhere in the picture, with additional options to resize and rotate. Possible options like changing the color or combining stickers could be soon coming if there is enough demand for it.

Tapping on a Sticker already placed in a photo will take the user to a Timeline view of all public Twitter photos with the same sticker.

The feature will be made available for Android and iOS in the following weeks. #Stickers will be integrated into the Desktop Twitter and official extensions as well.

Image Courtesy of Flickr.

Self Retweeting Enabled As Part Of Twitter’s Timeline Update

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A flock of Twitter-birds, symbolizing a tweet and its numerous retweeting.

Narcissistic users can now like their own tweet, before and after retweeting it.

Self retweeting is now possible on Twitter. Will the world be better, or worse, for it? Will it cause any changes at all?

Twitter is now allowing their users to be able to quote their own previous tweets either partially or entirely. While the community has received this with a wide variety of feelings, the feature was enabled as part of Twitter’s timeline changes.

Many users are simply labeling this as yet another step in the downwards spiral of humanity’s descent into the abyss. Others with a more optimistic view on things, meanwhile, have found some potentially useful uses for the feature.

First of all, self retweeting will allow users to claim authenticity with greater ease. If a user tweets something that just ends up being lost in the Twittersphere, it’s fine.

However, if another user tweets something similar (or the exact tweet, word for word, as it is often the case) much later and is given a lot of attention for it, the former user can now self retweet themselves as the latter’s reply.

Similarly, the self retweet can also be used as a “called it” tool for users who make predictions. Nevertheless, self retweeting is not meant to be a tool that helps users prove they were right or that others are wrong, it is intended to be a tool that streamlines and makes the process easier to view on the timeline.

It is also worth noting that a user can only self retweet a tweet once which means that people who really want to give that joke or jab a second try should really plan it for the best possible time.

And while speaking about planning, self retweeting could also be an effective means to fixing current scheduling issues that can occur, especially between continents due to timezones.

The Internet currently seems to see self retweeting as reminiscent of the selfie and of the massive uproar selfies caused before they started to part of today’s society.

It’s doubtful, however, that self retweeting will have the same effects upon the world as selfies did.

Along with self retweeting, Twitter will also be changing how the “@”, the main way of addressing other users, works within the timeline. Muting, blocking, and reporting users will also be a lot more accessible now, another feature which will streamline the content of Twitter’s timeline viewing.

Image Courtesy of Jisc.

Cyanogen OS 13.1 Brings MOD Ready to OnePlus One Devices

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The majority of MODs are currently Microsoft services and features, but that won’t always be the case.

The Cyanogen OS 13.1 has arrived to the OnePlus One and it is MOD Ready. In only hours after its official arrival, the OS has been given well-earned cheer and positive feedback. Members of the Cyanogen team are probably used to this sort of reception by now, however, as they have been praised for their activities by a much larger community than before ever since the launch of the later versions of OS 11.

So what is MOD Ready?

MOD Ready is the new feature through which manufacturers and developers can reach and add tweaks to components of the Android platform that were initially inaccessible. MODs allow any and all interested and adequately skilled parties to enhance features and services further.

In short, manufacturers may now boldly go within the inner workings of the Android platform farther than ever before.

To demonstrate the applicability of MOD Ready, the Cyanogen OS 13.1 come with several MODs made by the team in February of this year. The mods themselves were prioritized for general utility and usage rate and are various Microsoft features.

For US users, the Cortana MOD may be utilized in several useful ways – hands-free voice activated selfies, and voice activated and delivered reminders and scheduling.

The Skype MOD enables Skype calls via the device’s core Phone app.

The OneNote MOD enables various note options with the device’s core Phone, E-mail, and Quick Settings apps.

The Hyperlapse MOD was also brought to OS 13.1. It makes the recording of stable and streamlined time-lapse video through the device’s core Camera app possible.

The Twitter MOD, the only current MOD that’s not a Microsoft service or feature, will display trending tweets to the device’s core Lock Screen. The Cortana MOD is also available for the core Lock Screen and the Twitter MOD requires the Cortana MOD to be enabled.

With the OS 13.1 now live and available to OnePlus One, the MOD Ready community is sure to see a spike in growth and popularity. The Cyanogen Team has already welcomed the world to the “Post-App Era”.

With a lot more MODs soon to be shared by 3rd party users, MOD Ready has the potential to be the new trending topic for years to come. Is there a phone or feature you’d like to see brought as a MOD? Is there anything you believe could stop the MOD Ready features from picking up speed? Let us know.

Image Courtesy of Cyanogen’s YouTube Channel.

Hate Speech Regulations Adopted by Major Social Media Platforms

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Free speech is not synonymous with the right to promote hate speech.

Social media platforms have become a place in which people vent their frustrations. Unfortunately, not all of them are upset by a late delivery, or a favorite team losing a match. Some users use social media outlets for racist propaganda or the promotions of terrorism. This is where the new hate speech regulations come in.

As of today, Goggle, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have agreed to the new European Union hate speech regulations. According to them, every time the platforms receive a notification regarding hateful content they must check it in a maximum of 24 hours.

These new regulations are meant to minimize the impact of racist, homophobic, and terrorist propaganda that has been spreading on on-line social outlets.

Furthermore, the new guidelines are promoting the use of “independent counter-narratives” as a means of fighting on-line hate speech.

The European Union has become increasingly concerned with hate speech after the recent Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks. Also, Europe is currently undergoing an unprecedented refugee crisis that sparked the racial tensions in many of its countries.

Facebook has been collaborating with German official government representatives in an attempt to combat in a proactive manner any xenophobic or on-line racist behavior. Google and Twitter have joined the effort and are now respecting the new European Union hate speech regulations when managing the German platforms.

“The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech. Social media is, unfortunately, one of the tools that terrorist groups use to radicalize young people and spread violence and hatred,” the European Union commissioner for justice, Vĕra Jourová, declared.

The new hate speech regulations are putting the social media giants on the spot. By promising to abide by the new regulations, they are also promising to limit the free speech of some people. While it is okay to speak your mind, these tensions will create a new paranoid wave of population that will report any statement that they don’t agree with, leading to a new set of problems.

On the other hand, seeing as the political stability in the EU is rather fragile after all of the terrorist attempts and the refugee crisis, the support of the social media platforms is a welcomed aid in the fight against hate and the violence it generates.

Image source: Wikipedia

Twitter Knows When You’ve Had One Too Many

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While it’s not Twitter as an entity that can tell and instead it’s an algorithm that Twitter owns which knows when you drink, the point is – it can guess how drunk you are and where you have been drinking. Typing is hard, especially when you’ve had a few (too many), and this is just one of the several variables that the algorithm in question uses to tell if you have been drinking.

The algorithm in question has been developed by researchers from the University of Rochester and showcased the way it can recognize tweets that are related to alcohol, sent by inebriated individuals as well as those who are drinking while tweeting. Thanks to the ability of the machine to tell where the person who tweets lives “with great accuracy”, according to MIT Technology Review reports, it will also be able to tell whether this person is drinking at home or not.

The machine-learning algorithm did not achieve its capabilities so easily. Researchers from University of Rochester led by study author Nabil Hossain have spent nearly 7 months collecting reference data, between January and July 2014, from the area of New York City and Monroe County. A total of 11,000 geolocated Tweets were fed to the machine-learning algorithm, allowing it to learn how to find tweets that suggest the writer behind them has been drinking.

The second part of the algorithm – and more specifically, the one that can tell whether you’re drinking from home or somewhere else – does not imply any kind of GPS tracking or other invasive manner of detecting your location. Instead, it uses keywords that could relate to one’s home such as ‘sofa’ and ‘bath’ that can lead it to the conclusion that you are or are not tweeting from home. By taking said tweets through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service, they were able to analyze the tweets in more detail.

In addition, the algorithm that is in charge of detecting where you live use various methods of pinpointing where you live. By taking into account things such as where you send the last tweet of the day from, where you send most tweets from or where you tweet from between certain periods of time (when it is considered you are most likely to be at home) are all factors that account towards figuring out where you live.

But why do these scientists want to know when you’re drunk? Well, for first, a small scale experiment with the algorithm detected that high-activity cities host a higher rate of drinking. Secondly, it could help perform multiple social studies, as well as statistic information regarding drinking habits in various locations on the globe.

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