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Sheeeesh! Making Threats on Twitter…Are you Kidding Me??

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:56:35 +0000

FBI Arrests Oklahoma Teabagger For Twitter Threats

Threat_tweats

An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week, in what appears to be first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site.

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents who identified him as the Twitter user CitizenQuasar. In a series of tweets beginning April 11, CitizenQuasar vowed to start a “war” against the government on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol building, the site of that city’s version of the national “Tea Party” protests promoted by the conservative-leaning Fox News.

“START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!,” read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. “After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!,” he added five minutes later. Then: “Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps.”

Hayden’s MySpace page is a breathtaking gallery of right wing memes about the “New World Order,” gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama’s covert use of television hypnosis, among many others.

In addition to the threats, many of Hayden’s tweets fixated on another Oklahoma City man whom he erroneously believed was in charge of the city’s tea party demonstration.

“He seemed to know stuff about me, but I don’t know how or why,” says Earl Shaffer. “He called me a few days before that tea party and let me know somehow he got my name as one of the organizers. I don’t have the energy.”

Shaffer told Hayden that he wasn’t a tea party organizer, but Hayden continued to tweet baffling messages about the 58-year-old retiree, posting his phone number in one.

Hayden’s penultimate tweet at 12:49 AM on April 15 returned to the subject of his martyrdom. “Locked AND loaded for the Oklahoma State Capitol. Let’s see what happens.”

The FBI arrested (.pdf) him at his home later that day, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Oklahoma City, which otherwise declined to comment on the case.

Despite the odd phone call from Hayden, Shaffer planned on joining the tea party himself. He was headed there when he spotted what turned out to be FBI agents watching him from their car around the corner. Like a real Oklahoman, he confronted the feds, who advised him that he could be arrested if he went to the demonstration.

“They asked if I knew [Hayden], and I told them no,” he says. “They asked me questions about how I heard about the tea party, and I told them I heard about it through that talk show host Glenn Beck.”

Hayden was arraigned on the 16th, and ordered released to a halfway house pending trial — a move that suggests the magistrate judge does not consider him a genuine threat. Hayden’s attorney declined to comment. California-based Twitter did not respond to an inquiry by Threat Level.

By Kevin Poulsen

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Twitter Eats World: Global Visitors Shoot Up To 19 Million

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:49:20 +0000

Twitter’s march towards world domination continues apace. This morning comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone.

These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (a large portion of users). But the comScore numbers provide a good proxy for Twitter’s overall growth, which was helped recently by Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million followers, and Oprah’s subsequent adoption of the service.

If Twitter can keep this rate of growth up, it should cross 50 million visitors by summer.

by Erick Schonfeld on April 24, 2009

Geocities Is Shutting Down! Millions of Geeky ’90s Kids Get Nostalgic

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:11:36 +0000

Geocities To Shut Down, Millions of Geeky ’90s Kids Get Nostalgic — And Some St. Louis Sites Are Affected.
My Twitter feed was abuzz this afternoon with geeks mourning the news that Yahoo! is closing GeoCities, the company that revolutionized web-hosting and design in the ’90s. Users created websites in “neighborhoods” tailored to their content — SunsetStrip for music, Athens for artsier things, Silicon Valley for tech stuff, etc. — and encouraged social-networking and information synergy long before Friendster, Napster, MySpace and the like.

The site was never the same after Yahoo! bought it — mainly because a lot of its pages just disappeared, bumming out users who worked hard making geeky fansites — but hordes of computer-geek teens in the ’90s embraced the site’s easy-to-use interface. Hell, I did: Thankfully, my online-diary page is lost to memory and the annals of time (very thankfully), but the homepage of my high school site remains floating in the ether.

One local site still holding strong on Geocities is the American Czech Educational Center, whose events calendar is always booming. The venue holds the occasional punk show and the six-times-a-year kickass record fair — the next one is May 3! (Other holdouts include the ArtLoft Theatre.) I hope the folks who run those sites realize the plug is being pulled.

It’s far too easy to get nostalgic, but GeoCities was a huge part of my life for several years. The music information its users took the care to type out seems bizarrely primitive now — tracklistings and collections of photos, along with the occasionally ambitious news aggregator — but if you didn’t have friends in your area who shared your interests, there weren’t really any other outlets for people to talk about this stuff. (Okay, beyond IRC, ICQ and AOL message boards.) Hell, these sites were the first exposure many people had to others that were just like them.

What did I talk about on my site? Music I dug at the time — especially the Police, Duran Duran, Morrissey and R.E.M., and yes, this was 1996/97 — what actors I found attractive (Eric Stoltz? Can’t resist the gingers…) and other bits of randon minutiae that probably only I cared about. I can’t say I was looking for friends, attention or kindred spirits, but I had fun nerding out and learning HTML at the same time. This was the genius of GeoCities: They were the first company to empower the nascent online generation, to make it easy to create and share content and fandom — but without the pressure and social-networking insanity attached to such sites now. Cheesy, yeah, but it was a more innocent Internet time.

By Annie Zaleski in News