“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

> Twitter shut down its communications department and could not be reached for comment

You can append to your existing e-mail address in various ways, and this could be pretty useful for seeing who leaked your e-mail address to spammers. For example, for your bank, give them the address myaddress+banking@gamil.com. Then, if spammers send to that address, you can quickly see where they got the e-mail address from! I've tested it with Proton Mail, and it works in exactly the same way. See https://lifehacker.com/your-gmail-account-has-unlimited-addresses-1849809691 #technology #email #antispam #privacy

Once your archive is on your machine, you will have a browsable HTML archive of your tweets, direct messages, and moments including media like images, videos, and GIFs. This is nice, but it also has a few flaws. For one, you can’t easily copy your Tweets somewhere else, for example, into your website because they are stored in a complex JSON structure. But even more dangerous: your links are all still t.co links. This hides the original URL you shared and redirects all traffic over Twitter’s servers. But this is not only inconvenient, it is also dangerous. Just imagine what happens when t.co ever goes down: all URLs you ever shared are now irretrievable. And then, there are the images: all images in your archive are much smaller than the ones you originally shared, and when you click to expand them, you are taken to the Twitter website once again. So, your Twitter archive is far from being a safe, independent backup in case you want to delete your account or if Twitter ever dies completely. But luckily, there is help in the form of a Python script called Twitter Archive Parser, a project started by Tim Hutton. See https://matthiasott.com/notes/converting-your-twitter-archive-to-markdown #technology #twittermigration #twitterarchive #twitter

> A couple of weeks ago a billionaire, whose skin is apparently as thin as his wallet is thick, took over one of the important public squares on-line. It is a good moment to explore and recognize other dangers, in addition to failure to moderate the public debate, such centralized control creates. Twitter’s tumultuous transition to a privately held company became a lens, focusing — at long last — our collective attention on them. > > These issues are hardly new or unexpected. Activists and experts had been warning about problems related to centralized control of our daily communication tools for years. But by and large, our warnings went unheeded. Today, as we mourn the communities disrupted and connections lost, and grapple with the fallout, we have to recognize this is about more than just Twitter. And use the opportunity to learn not to make the same mistakes again. (...) > We can also build systems that allow people to switch providers without losing contact with their friends and coworkers — e-mail and mobile networks are good, familiar examples of these. The fact that the big social media services, or the huge online productivity providers, do not allow this kind of compatibility is a business decision, rather than a technological necessity. (...) > “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, Winston Churchill once said, and it would serve us well to lean into that wisdom today. A centralized, closed, monopolistic platform’s agony is a good opportunity to reconsider our over-reliance on Big Tech walled gardens in general.

After careful consideration, we will be concentrating Wickr’s focus on securing our business and public sector customers’ data and communications with AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, and have decided to discontinue our consumer product, Wickr Me.

In the late hours of Thursday in San Francisco, a projector was set up at a building opposite Twitter and began putting incendiary messages up against the company’s foyer. The messages ranged from fairly simple such as “Elon Musk, STFU”, to “launching to bankruptcy”, and “Musk’s hellscape”.