Tech 2.0 for Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The head man at Twitter is trying to explain what some are taking as censorship. Twitter CEO Dick
Costolo says the company's new country-by-country censorship policy is being misinterpreted. Twitter says it will now remove tweets in countries where the company believes may have violated local laws. Critics say that sounds like censorship to them. But Costolo says by stopping some messages from getting through in some lands, Twitter is making sure tweets are still available to the rest of the world. That isn't sitting well with many, including Twitter users themselves, who feel the company is giving in to attacks on free speech, especially in countries with repressive regimes.
Some of the biggest players in the high-tech world have gone "phishing." To make it clearer, Google, Microsoft and other companies are going after those who are involved in phishing -- the practice of trying to trick people into giving up things like their passwords, financial data and other personal information through bogus emails. The companies have formed an organization to design a system to make sure you know if you get an email from, say, a bank -- that it actually came from the financial institution, not a scammer. The proposed system will go by the name DMARC -- short for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance." It's a system similar to the ones that are used to fight spam.
The love affair with smartphone apps seems to dwindle after the novelty wears off -- according to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life project. Survey data shows that 68 percent of smartphone owners surveyed only open five or fewer apps once a week and 17 percent don't use apps at all. However, once a smartphone owner downloads an app they really like, research shows they will stick with it for a while. An app that's retained by 30 percent of downloaders is considered "sticky".
