Finally. Twitter has stepped up and dealt with one of the more serious problems that has dogged it for years. Unfortunately, it's not the widespread abuse and harassment of women on the platform. No, they're dealing with the terrible menace of unfunny people passing off usually unfunny jokes as their own.

• It seems you can't copyright a tweet anyway, at least not in the US.

People like the authenticity of citizen journalism / eyewitness reporting and are willing to overlook the poor quality of much of it, according to the BBC. Fortunately for less scrupulous media outlets, they don't really care whether it's properly attributed or not.

From the department of This Shouldn't Come As A Surprise To Anyone, slamming an interstitial in front of visitors to your mobile site demanding they install your app leads to most of them going away and not bothering to come back.

Your Android phone can be hacked by delivery of a simple text message, and the fractured nature of Android distribution means that this exploit may well not be fixed any time soon.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

A Lunar Landscape At Night

Totally Confused

Thirteen months in the Googleplex, Blueshirts covered up, DIY Whoppers, Google divorces Google+ and how to tell if you are in an Old English poem.

Finally, have you heard the one about the new airport in Berlin? The amount of ineptitude would bring a tear to the eye of the most hard-hearted PIIG.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below. 

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

This is all wrong. Green is the best flavour. Or perhaps some of the purples. If you’re Twitter though, white is now the only available flavour for everybody using the Web interface. Lots of outrage about this on Twitter, naturally. So long as they leave Tweetdeck alone it doesn’t bother me too much, but I fear it’s only a matter of time before they get around to breaking that somehow.

Television has been relegated to second screen status by kids, or more accurately punishment screen status.

Mobile devices are so popular with kids that nearly half of the 800 parents quizzed by Miner & Co. reported that they confiscate their kids’ tablets when they act up and make them watch TV instead, thereby fostering a sort of Pavlovian response that equates TV with punishment.

Where the audience goes, the advertisers naturally follow. Since they and the publishers have managed to make reading articles online a wretched experience, the likelihood is that the same will happen to online video. Increased irritation ahead.

Ironically, newspaper publishers are stepping back from their recent eager forays into online broadcasting.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Viewing The Earth From Above

Totally Confused

Robots buying drugs, banning hashtags, killing a Jeep, Silicon Valley mystics and AI versus racists.

Finally, a positive story about good people on Reddit.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

 

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below.

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.

Ron Swanson, not in Glenties

We’re back, because there’s just too much excitement. Everything has been hacked! Gawker is tearing it self apart from within! The MacGill Summer School is in full swing! (Wait, that last one isn’t remotely exciting, or important, or even funny.)

First up, hackers got hold of lots and lots of user data from Ashley Madison, the Internet’s number one destination for people who want to have extramarital affairs. The site boasted how secure it was last year, and if that isn’t a red rag to a bull then I don’t know what is. Puerile giggling aside, this has the potential to cause real damage to users of the site who may have naively believed Ashley Madison’s claim that it could fully scrub all their details. For a fee, of course. Privacy is privacy, no matter what, and protesting Ashley Madison’s poor handling of it’s privacy promises by breaching user’s privacy isn’t a justification.

Yet another example of how, for most firms, security is expensive and at best an afterthought. Here’s a depressing 1999 hot take on it from the then CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy: “You have zero privacy anyway”.

Onwards to the good ship Gawker. It’s the old, old story here – put a sleazy post up, take the post down, lose your managing editor and editor-in-chief amidst a lot of handwaving about Chinese walls and publishing of the Gawker brand book. But does anybody outside US online media really care?

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Bee-utiful bees

Totally Confused

Peak juice, against subwoofers, flying for free, harassers are literally losers and Richard meets J.

Finally, this mildly dystopian vision of the future of office software is well worth a read. Includes a cameo from Jack Lemmon as a spreadsheet cell.

Yours etc., @loughlin

---

 

Think you know someone who might like to receive more emails like this? Then forward this one on to them so they can read the words below.

Hey! Want to be part of something hip and retro like a mailing list? Of course you do? Then head on over here to subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address to Facebook. Or Google. Or Twitter. Or anyone else at all.

Follow @WantYouToKnowHQ on Twitter for more bits and bobs.