that drew

During an interview with The Telegraph, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates disclosed that he had written a letter to Steve Jobs as he was dying.

Apparently the letter meant quite a bit to Jobs, as he kept it by his bedside in the final days of his life. According to Gates, the letter wasn’t to make peace, as the two had gotten along quite well:

There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.

After Jobs passed away, his wife Laurene called Gates:

She said; ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.

While Gates didn’t share exactly what was in the letter, he did touch on some of the things he wrote to Jobs about:

I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.

Bill Gates has become quite the humantiarian since leaving his post at Microsoft, giving 48% of his net-worth to charity through the Gates Foundation.

It’s sad to think about what type of dent Steve Jobs could have made in the way health is managed in third-world countries after his days at Apple. I’m sure that the accomplishments Bill Gates has made would have fueled him to do the same in his older age.

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it would be censoring tweets moving forward, based on laws where the tweet originated from.

Along with the hashtag streams of #TwitterCensored and #TwitterBlackout, which are comprised of tweets outside of the United States sharing displeasure for the recent announcement from Twitter.

Among those displeased is the non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders, which explains its mission like this:

In the United States, Reporters Without Borders is a 501c3 organization carrying out the mission to protect and defend journalists working both internationally and in the United States. With an office in Washington, DC the US team works with the US media, political leaders, non-government groups and the American public to further press freedom.

The organization has written an open letter to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, asking him to re-consider the move, calling it “too vague”. Here are a few key excerpts from the letter:

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends freedom of information worldwide, would like to share with you its deep concern about yesterday’s announcement on the official Twitter blog of a new policy under which tweets may be censored in some countries, according to each country’s different criteria.

We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board. By finally choosing to align itself with the censors, Twitter is depriving cyberdissidents in repressive countries of a crucial tool for information and organization.

We are very disturbed by this decision, which is nothing other than local level censorship carried out in cooperation with local authorities and in accordance with local legislation, which often violates international free speech standards. Twitter’s position that freedom of expression is interpreted differently from country to country is inacceptable. This fundamental principle is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Questioning how this new approach will be carried out, the organization gives an example that would not be good for Twitter users:

The way this is defined is too vague and leaves the door open to all kinds of abuse. Are you going to act in response to a court decision? Or, as is the case in China, will just a phone call from a government official or a local police station suffice to justify denying access to content? Are you going to limit yourselves to censoring tweets after they have been posted or, if faced with a flood of official requests, will you establish a system of prior censorship based on subjects or keyword defined by censors?

Seeking more clarity on the policy, Reporters Without Borders suggests that the social network, which has been key during international protests, could mute them entirely:

Does your new policy mean that references on Twitter to Arab revolutions and demonstrations in Manama will no longer be accessible in Bahrain? Will Vietnamese using your social network from their country no longer be able to tweet about bauxite mining’s harmful impact on the environment? Are you going to block tweets about the demands of Turkey’s Kurdish minority? Will Russian Internet users see their criticisms of the government censored?

The letter, which you can read in its entirety here, asks many important questions that Twitter should most certainly answer in a future blog post about the matter. We offered suggestions on how to get around these new potential restrictions, but the Reporters Without Borders letter does bring some interesting suggestions on why Twitter decided to move forward with this decision. For example, could Twitter be deciding to participate in forms of censorship just to make its way back to China, where it has been blocked along with Facebook?

Unfortunately, the announcement from Twitter was indeed vague, as Reporters Without Borders points out, so that leads all of us to try and make sense of it on our own. And that’s never a good thing.

Selling things on Craigslist is super simple, and depending on where you live, it’s pretty easy to find a buyer for pretty much anything you want to sell.

Once in a while though, when you list an item on the site you’ll get an email from someone offering to trade you for what you’ve listed. It’s an annoyance, and I’ve seen a lot of people explicitly say “no trades” in their listings. One site called Swap is all about trading, and the site is seeing serious success with the model.

The site is completely free for everyone to use, and it encourages you to share all of things that you don’t want anymore in hopes that someone else will. You know what they say, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. The site sports 1.5 million listings, so if you’re looking for things to trade for, there’s a good chance that you’ll find something that interests you.

The company has launched its iOS app that will make it easier for you to browse for things and add items in your closet you’d like to part with.

Get to swapping

By not being tethered to your computer, the

Swap app makes it easier to rummage through your garage and closets for stuff that you’d like to put on the site for trade. Without worrying about how much to charge for an item, this makes the process way more fun. With its huge marketplace, Swap has users from all over the globe and there are no restraints as to what you can post, be it handmade goods or used video games.

When you download the iOS app, you’ll want to register if you’re not a Swap user already. After that, you can either start browsing for things you’d like to trade for, or add your items one by one.

You can add items that you either have or want, and other members of the community can dig through all of your listings to find a potential swap. It’s pretty impressive that a site I’ve never personally used before has such engaged users. Just by clicking around through items and looking at the owner’s profiles, you can see the history of everything they’ve listed, swapped, and still want.

Much like eBay, the swappers get peer reviews so that you know how trustworthy someone is before you message them about a potential swap. The messaging system is lightweight and doesn’t require you to follow the person or become friends. Swap is truly an open marketplace for trading things that people don’t want anymore.

The app also lets you scan barcodes and you’ll be shown how many items match them on the site. So if you’re at the store and see something you want, you can just scan it and it might already be available for trade on Swap.

Rather than go through the headache of putting a price tag on everything you have sitting around, why not throw them up on Swap and see what kind of feedback you get? By listing all of the things that you want, you have a better chance of actually getting them, since the person who visits your profile will have a better idea of what you’re into.

➤ Swap for iOS

Early last month, Twitter revealed its new focus on simplicity and it caught some of Twitter’s hardcore users off guard. The site has become more streamlined to better serve new users who are just learning about the micro-messaging platform, and that’s a good thing.

During its redesign announcement, Twitter introduced us to something new for advertisers called “brand pages“. These pages feature a customizable header and the ability to make on tweet stick to the top of the timeline, as a way to introduce prospective followers to the brand.

At the time, a mix of 21 brands launched their brand pages, but not much was known about why or how they were added to the launch group. According to an AdAge report, we might know now.

According to the report, Twitter has sent emails out to its top advertisers and announced that it will be adding more brand pages starting February 1st. The only ask? That you already have $25k in Twitter’s ad ecosystem, be it for sponsored tweets or trending topics, just to be qualified. Of course Twitter have blessed some charities with brand pages for free, so it doesn’t appear that non-profits will have to buy their way in.

Not much is known about how effective these brand pages are, like the one above from Nike. However, it appears that Twitter is dangling the feature out there as an added incentive to get advertising dollars from new blood. By offering this incentive in the way that it has, Twitter comes off looking pretty desperate to make $25k. On Facebook, companies don’t have to pay any money at all to have a business presence on the platform.

This latest brand page thing sounds to me like the new verified account, as it’s something the company can toggle on and off in hopes of making a company feel special on its platform. In my opinion, it’s going to take a lot more than that.

It’s barely been a day since Twitter made the announcement that, going forward, tweets could be censored based on the local laws that govern a user’s location, and the rumour mill is hard at work trying to figure out the reasons behind the decision.

At the same time, many Twitter users are calling for a Twitter Blackout on January 28, vowing to keep Twitter quiet tomorrow.

While Twitter cited the example of the ban of pro-Nazi content in Germany and France, could there be more to it than meets the eye?

Why is Twitter doing this?

Taking a look at the hashtag, #TwitterCensored, a lot of fingers were very quick to point straight at the recent investment by Saudi Prince, Alwaleed bin Talal, without considering the fact that his stake in the company is a mere 3%. Alex Macgillivray, the general counsel of Twitter, has also confirmed to BoingBoing that the move has nothing to do with any investments that Twitter has received.

While up until now, Twitter is said to have only blocked content that violates copyright laws, the change expands to include tweets that violate the laws of any given country, provided that they are asked to remove the offending tweets.

One possible reason is that Twitter has been consistently targeted by governments for allowing what is considered “illegal” content to be shared via the site. Israeli law firm, Shurat HaDin threatened to sue the microblogging site if it didn’t boot accounts with ties to Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Twitter has also seen increasing pressure from US politicians, with Congressman Lieberman decrying the fact that the Taliban has a very vocal Twitter presence.

Twitter obviously used carefully selected words to convey the changes – at the end of the day blocking tweets can’t be defined in any terms other than censorship. But it is a half-hearted form of censorship that seems to appease the lawmakers but has no real direct effect on the user.

Does this affect activists?

Much has been made of the use of social media in the Middle Eastern uprisings, particularly in Egypt. In 2011, Twitter proved to be one of the essential tools used to broadcast news from Egypt to the world, while a year before that, Cairo-based activists used Twitter to coordinate protests and warn each other of security presence around the city. Twitter provides one of the easiest mobile methods to disseminate information online today.

While it may be understandable to withhold racist, hateful or threatening content, Twitter’s definition is all-encompassing and has the potential to take down perfectly acceptable content.

Following the uprising in Egypt, the government passed a law criminalizing protests. What if a law were passed that criminalizes online criticism of authorities? It’s no stretch of imagination, not when bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned for exercising their freedom of speech. In that case, the government in question could tell Twitter what is considered acceptable content.

So does this mean that Twitter has given governments complete power to control what their citizens see on Twitter?

Is it really a big deal?

It’s very easy to criticize Twitter for this move, but the fact remains that in one day, it provided users with the news that content could be censored by location, while also giving them a simple method, one-click away, to make sure that the tweets do flow, regardless of location.

The backlash has been harsh, and Twitter has even been accused of committing social suicide, assuming that an algorithm would be taking care of the extremely sensitive task of censoring content. In it’s announcement however, Twitter points out:

“…if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.”

Twitter is not placing an automated censorship system in place, but rather will only comply with what it sees are valid requests.

Twitter has actually found something of a compromise. With the use of a technicality, Twitter is able to safeguard the company legally, comply with governmental requests, and still make the content available to users with the workaround.

The alternative would be to see Twitter blocked entirely in countries which consider its content to be a violation of their local laws. If the finger should be pointed at anyone, it isn’t Twitter, but rather the lawmakers that make it possible to censor content in the first place.

Twitter is viewing a hyperventilation of sorts, going to the point of calling for a Twitter boycott for one day, but as Jillian York points out, the announcement is not a significant change to Twitter’s existing policies.

The current attack on Twitter is no different from the common, but misguided, accusations that are often heard, that Twitter censors certain hashtags from making it into its Trending Topics, when in fact that is an entirely algorithm-based system, driven mainly by news outlets, and represent “topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis.”

Taking a look at Google’s Transparency Report, which we reviewed here, you’ll find that Google is already exercising similar practices, having withheld content locally in the past in India, while refusing some requests to remove content, in the US for example.

It is not clear whether or not Twitter will do the same, and we could do well to give them the benefit of the doubt, before burning them at the stake.

World leaders are currently congregating in Davos, Switzerland, for the 2012 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, as they try to find ways to kick-start the global economy.

Two studies released at the forum profess to offer a glimmer of hope, and as you might’ve guessed, the Internet is at the heart of it.

The first of the reports, The Boston Consulting group’s (BCG) Digital Manifesto, predicts that the world’s top twenty Internet economies, covering the G-20 countries, will hit $4.2 trillion by 2016, which is around double 2010’s value.

One of the biggest drivers of this growth will be the rise in the number of Web users, with BCG’s report forecasting that three billion people will be tapping in to the World Wide Web by 2016. That’s nearly half (45%) of the world’s population, and double the 2010 figure.

Whilst many of the more developed countries are already seeing Internet-uptake levels beginning to plateau, the rise of emerging markets and the popularity of mobile devices is expected to see the economic impact of the Internet fully realized.

The Digital Manifesto: How Companies and Countries Can Win in the Digital Economy, notes that businesses will be “fundamentally transformed” over the next five years, and urges businesses and countries to take action. Part of this constitutes what it calls a “digital balance sheet”, which – if created – would offer an agenda for chief executives and policymakers to build their “digital advantage”.

“No company or country can afford to ignore this development. Every business needs to go digital,” said David Dean, a co-author of the BCG report, and a senior partner at the company. “The ‘new’ Internet is no longer largely Western, accessed from your PC. It is now global, ubiquitous, and participatory.”

A second report, was released by McKinsey & Co. at the World Economic Forum today, and noted that the Internet is already benefiting a plethora of countries outside the so-called ‘developed world’. It says that the Internet contributes an average of 1.9% of GDP across 30 countries in the developing world and generated almost 2 million jobs alone in six countries: Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan, Turkey, and Vietnam.

Both reports released today are the culmination of more than a year’s work by the two companies, an initiative that was funded by Google, though conducted independently.

“Understanding the economic potential of the Web is crucial, especially given Europe’s current economic challenges.,” said William Echikson, External Relations at Google in Brussels. Meanwhile, check out Google’s video: Single Market Opportunity 2012: Getting Europe’s SMEs Online

An American woman may have just broken the record for the most comments on a Facebook post. While seeing thousands of comments on a public page is certainly nothing new, Cathy Matthews and 107 of her friends set out to eclipse the norm.

Together with a group of her friends, who spend a lot of their time playing Frontierville, a pioneer version of Farmville, Matthews decided to create a post that would earn her some recognition.

Matthew’s claim to fame is getting into the Guinness Book of Records by sitting in front of her Facebook profile and typing the same comment repeatedly on one post. She told Fox40 ”Once you get the rhythm, you can go pretty fast.” While there are some wordy comments on the post, a lot of them consist of just the word ‘go’, among other two-letter words.

The post has reached well over 1 million comments, and with just 107 of her friends participating, that means that on average, each person commented over 9,000 times on the post.

While it’s certainly not the same as an interesting or controversial post getting a million comments because it got people talking, it certainly takes a lot of dedication to get one Facebook post up to 1 million comments, vacuous or not.

Tracy Hodgson, one of Matthews’ friends has registered and submitted their achievement to the Guinness Book of Records and they are now waiting to hear if typing the word ‘go’ over and over again on Facebook for hours on end actually paid off.

Imagine what you would do if you opened a package containing what you thought would be a book on terrorism, only to find that it came with a free gift — a bag of cocaine.

That’s what happened to Sophia Stockton, a student at MidAmerica Nazarene University, who regularly orders textbooks from Amazon, but found herself heading to the police station to identify the suspicious package she received in the mail.

Stockton ordered a used copy ‘Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues’ from Amazon.com, which was delivered directly and entirely packaged from the online retail giant.

KWCH 12 Eyewitness News reports:

Stockton says she was flipping through the pages when a clear plastic bag fell out. The junior took the book and bag to the Gardner police station after class on Monday and was surprised at what authorities found.

“He put some gloves on and put it in a plastic bag, he took it back to test it and like 10 minutes later he came back and said, ‘Did you happen to order some cocaine with your textbook?’”

Gardner police destroyed the cocaine and Amazon has not issued a comment on the incident.

We have to admit that as soon as we read that the title was a used book, we assumed that it had been sold and sent by an Amazon Marketplace reseller. However, the young woman involved said the package was sent directly from the retailer and was sealed within its packaging when it was delivered.

Curious.

Amazon looks to have an employee giving out free, but illegal, gifts with certain purchases.

There are a few apps on my iPhone that are there just to show other people how cool the iPhone is. They aren’t useful really, except that when people want to see the iPhone they make for a great demo. Examples for me are Weather HD, CardFlick, Compass, Heart Rate and a few games that have great graphics but which I never actually play.

It seems to me that Siri is slowly entering this area of ‘nice to show but not actually useful’. I know a quite few people with an iPhone 4s and I asked around a bit and they all almost regretfully acknowledge that they, in fact, don’t really use it anymore, once you get beyond the newness of it all.

The commercials look great and in the beginning you can still find the patience to play and experiment with it. But then reality kicks in and you find out that Siri is just too slow and although it’s probably the best voice recognition on any mobile platform, it still isn’t good enough to always understand what you mean.

It reminds me of Apple’s earlier attempt at voice recognition, called PlainTalk. It came pre-installed with with System 7 on Apple’s Quadra line of computers and it looked awesome:

I remember being excited about the technology at the time and trying it out for the first time. It worked, sorta. You had to speak LOUD and CLEAR and there was a few second delay before the computer seemed to react. 8 out of 10 times the command wasn’t recognized and I would have to repeat the sentence. Within minutes it became very clear that just typing the command or clicking the mouse was more efficient and a lot faster.

After that the only times I used PlainTalk was when I wanted to show off the capabilities of my computer. Which brings me back to the iPhone, and Siri. I know that Siri is light years ahead of PlainTalk. It is just so much more than just speech recognition. But ‘m still wondering how useful it is once you get beyond the thrill of seeing it work.

Lets find out how Siri is doing, if it is really being used, or whether it is time to say goodbye:

The Indian Army is reported to be introducing a total ban on social networking amongst its servicemen and women as it is fears that sites like Facebook could lead to crucial information leaking into the wrong hands.

The ban, which was reported by Ad Age and is yet to be confirmed by authorities, is said to require the force’s 36,000 officers and 1.3 million other personnel to immediately cease using and delete their social networks profiles. New recruits will be informed that they are not permitted to even join, let alone use, social networks at any point while they service in the army.

The increase in photos of officers in uniform, with weapons or amongst their units posted to the Web has led to concerns that important information may be at risk through sites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and others.

While authorities aren’t fearful of officers revealing data themselves, they are concerned that those who are clearly identified as army personnel could be targeted by stings or honey-traps. Such tactics are commonly used in the business world, where fake accounts are set up with the intention of friending insiders to gain their trust and extract crucial information through conversations on social networks.

A source revealed that “if any officer or soldier is found violating [the order], strict action will be taken”, although no specific details of punishments was given.

The increase in modern communication is posing new and difficult demands for armed forces and other organisations that deal with confidential information. In Singapore, for example, Apple has begun selling its iPhone devices without a camera as authorities look to mitigate the data risk associated with modern smartphones.

The move hasn’t come out of the blue and, as Pluggdin explains, four naval officers were investigated this week after leaving confidential information through social networks, while a similar incident took place in 2009.

The alternative to an all-out ban, which is not likely to be well received by army personnel, would be a scheme to educate servicemen and women of the dangers of online communication and the Internet. However, the risk of officers being trapped appears to be sufficient enough for the army to take no risks and roll out a blanket ban.

Image credit: Flickr user soldiersmediacentre