Group items tagged

Should be obvious, but now it is publicly obvious.

By uploading images of this week's violence in Manama, the capital, to Web sites like YouTube and yFrog, and then sharing them on Facebook and Twitter, the protesters upstaged government accounts and drew worldwide attention to their demands. A novelty less than a decade ago, the cellphone camera has become a vital tool to document the government response to the unrest that has spread through the Middle East and North Africa.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

This article describes how history is being made as millions of twitter users broadcast their comments

"Dr Val Curtis, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, shows the BBC around her "smart house". She shows how the toilet, sink, soap and toothpaste in her bathroom are wired up to a central computer so that she can monitor her family's hygiene habits. The system is part of a research project to track our daily behaviour."

Short clip but shows some sensors and may provoke a discussion on privacy for family members & also data collection for research.

Users of the Amazon-owned video game streaming service Twitch have been instructed to change their passwords amid fears the site has been hacked. Twitch told users that their names and phone numbers were among the details feared to have been leaked. It said it had deleted passwords, which were encrypted, and disconnected users' accounts from Twitter and YouTube.