[ExI] question for twitter hipsters

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed Jun 1 15:30:33 UTC 2011


 

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mr Jones
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2011 6:52 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] question for twitter hipsters

 

2011/5/31 spike <spike66 at att.net>

>>So now here is my  question for hipsters: assuming someone guessed this
guy's twitter password, does twitter have some means of tracing the actual
phone number from which the tweet was tweeted?

 

>I'm not sure if Twitter keeps track of IP's used to send a particular
'tweet' or not.  Most likely they do. .

So in the end...COULD someone go through all this to burn this guy.  Yes.
Did they?  No idea.  Would it be very costly/difficult?  Not really.  My
intuition is the guy got busted with his pants down ;)  and now he's trying
to cover his tracks.

 

 

 

Thanks again Jones, this has all been most educational.  Here's where I was
going with all this.  There was a book by Gleick called Faster, which was
about how everything is accelerating in the way society does everything,
information handling being a prime example.  I am a fan of his, but I
consider this his weakest book.  He missed so many important things, and one
of them is found in how quickly information soaks into public awareness.

 

For those of us who are old enough to remember Richard Nixon, there was the
Watergate break-in, the bad guys were caught on 17 June 1972, but it took
over two years for the press to tease out all the pertinent facts, publish
them on dead trees, resulting in Nixon's resignation in August 1974, and
even then, most of the public was mostly unaware until the summer of 74.
Contrast to 3 decades later, fall of 2004 when Dan Rather ran a 60 Minutes
spot on George Bush's service records with counterfeit documents.  (The
story was true, but the actual evidence was counterfeit, ahem.)  It took a
couple weeks for CBS to recant and Dan Rather to resign.  Now this latest,
the photo of a man's bulging package was sent Friday, the buzz went around
the internet over the holiday weekend, and when the regular news staff
returned from the holiday, CNN grilled the congressman on Tuesday.  The
betting is running high if he will resign before the end of the week.  So in
our lifetimes, we see a process that took over two years, to one that took a
couple weeks, to one that may be complete in days.

 

Along with all this are other interesting questions of extrapolating these
trends.  Consider the magnitude of the crime:  Watergate break-in: enormous.
Reporting fake documents: big.  Politician posting a photo of his penis:
tiny.  (Ahem, pardon, but the jokes just write themselves in this case.)
Trend: smaller infractions by politicians and public figures cause more stir
faster.

 

Another interesting note: since we now have quick references to everything a
politician said, I noted that nowhere did the politician actually explicitly
claim the photo was not his junk.  He implied it clearly, but if you look at
what he specifically said, it was "FB hacked" which is Facebook.  When I
read that, I thought he meant his twitter, which made me immediately ask:
couldn't they trace that somehow and figure out the real killers?  But he
never did explicitly say his twitters were hacked, only FB.  So yesterday he
had a catastrophic interview with CNN in which he very skillfully and
lawyerly made no false statements, but didn't actually deny anything.  He
repeatedly referred to his previous statements, which also don't
specifically deny that it is in fact his penis.

 

Stay tuned, this will be a short one.  A short *time* I mean, to resolution.

 

spike

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