WebProNews

Tag: blocking

  • Twitter Makes Odd Privacy Change, Catches Flak, Promptly Backtracks

    In the span of just one day, Twitter made a pretty significant change to a major element of privacy on the site, took a bunch of heat from users, and quickly reverted all changes.

    Early Thursday, Twitter made a tweak to how blocking works on the site. In short, what Twitter did was to make blocking a user work more like muting a user. With the change, blocked users could still follow, retweet, and @mention the users who block them – but the blocker simply wouldn’t see all of this. It was kind of the Twitter equivalent of “you’re dead to me.” But a blocked user could still follow you – and they wouldn’t even be notified if they had been blocked.

    Of course, this is wildly different from Twitter’s normal rules for blocked users which basically disallows them from having any interactions with the blocker.

    Well, there was some backlash – a lot of it. I mean, for example….

    Yeah. So late last night Twitter backtracked:

    “Earlier today, we made a change to the way the ‘block’ function of Twitter works. We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users – we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe. Any blocks you had previously instituted are still in effect,” said Twitter VP of Product Michael Sippey in a blog post.

    “In reverting this change to the block function, users will once again be able to tell that they’ve been blocked. We believe this is not ideal, largely due to the retaliation against blocking users by blocked users (and sometimes their friends) that often occurs. Some users worry just as much about post-blocking retaliation as they do about pre-blocking abuse. Moving forward, we will continue to explore features designed to protect users from abuse and prevent retaliation.”

    In the end, despite the ill-advised push to change a major privacy setting, I guess Twitter can be commended for listening to the angry masses.

  • Facebook Wants More Information On Why You’re Reporting People

    There are nearly a dozen legitimate (and a couple dozen illegitimate) reasons why you would report a certain Facebook user to the FB authority. Whether you’re reporting a fake account, someone who’s posting highly inappropriate content, or some jerk who has been harassing you, Facebook wants to know exactly why you have a problem with said user.

    Facebook has always asked for a little bit of detail when you report an account, but the new menu is a cleaner, more inclusive module for reporting bad Facebook behavior. Before, many of the options were presented in a drop down format. The new menu seen below presents everything at once and also include a couple of new options like “This Timeline doesn’t represent a real person – Business of organization.”

    You are now allowed to select multiple reasons for reporting someone and once you continue on from that prompt, you’ll be asked to fill out additional problems in a text field.

    Everything you see in the “Report Box” is there because it’s a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. On Facebook, as will many social networks, the onus is on the user to make sure that everyone is playing by the rules. Not only does the ability to report/block users help Facebook in running a site that adheres to the rules, but it also gives many users an extra level of security.

    On the topic of reporting stuff, Facebook just announced some improvements to mobile security as well – one of which is the ability to report stories and mark them as spam on your mobile device.

    [Via Inside Facebook]

  • Women Spearhead Facebook Defriending

    Facebook users appear to be beginning to realize that their Facebook friends will never be their actual, in-real-life friends – and women especially have began to trim down their digital buddy lists. According to a Pew study, more users are also untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and cleaning up wall posts. And women and younger users tend to streamline the most – 67% of women with social network profiles have unfriended someone, compared to 58% of men.

    Woman have also been limiting friend access to their accounts more so than men, with roughly the same 9% difference. Though interestingly, only 8% of women claim to regret something they’d posted on Facebook, compared to 15% of men. It has been recently reported that 91% of employers use sites like Facebook to screen potential hires. Perhaps this has something to do with these social media preening trends. Likewise, users are perhaps realizing that their online personas are becoming a more legitimate means of general life-screening, and have become conscious of better discerning the difference between what they would do and say online, and what they would do and say in actual, real life.

    Personally, I know for a FACT that women are defriending people more than the men on Facebook. I also know that not much “about me” on any social networking sites is very “real-life.” Which is likely not good, in hindsight. Alas, I will be doing some internet social snipping after considering these studies. Still, the reports seem to point to the notion that users might be calming down as social media loses it’s general brand-newness. The practice of liking and friending everything in sight has maybe slowed a bit, as the fog clears from the initial visual/motor rapture achieved whilst befriended 73 strangers at once. Oh yeah, and the actual consequences thing also might have something to do with the new trends. Binary friends are really great, but not great enough to possibly get in the way of in-real-life moneymaking activities, like jobs.

  • Iran May Be Blocking Web Sites

    Iran May Be Blocking Web Sites

    We’re one day away from the the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended with the collapse of the royal regime. Iran is reportedly blocking Web sites on the eve of the revolution in an assumed attempt to stifle any potential unrest.

    The Next Web is reporting that Web sites using the “https” protocol are being blocked. Those include banks, Yahoo, Gmail, Google and any other site that relies on Google’s API.

    The reports state that the blocks are widespread and began taking effect earlier this week. They covered the capital, Tehran, as well as Shiraz, Bushehr and Isfahan.

    It’s assumed that the blocks will continue until Esfand – the 12th month of the Iranian calendar that begins at the end of February and ends in March.

    A report on Hacker News seems to confirm the blocks:

    I’m writing this to report the serious troubles we have regarding accessing Internet in Iran at the moment. Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted down the https protocol which has caused almost all google services (gmail, and google.com itself) to become inaccessible. Almost all websites that reply on Google APIs (like wolfram alpha) won’t work.

    Accessing to any website that replies on https (just imaging how many websites use this protocol, from Arch Wiki to bank websites). Also accessing many proxies is also impossible. There are almost no official reports on this and with many websites and my email accounts restricted I can just confirm this based on my own and friends experience.

    It would appear that Anonymous has also confirmed the blocks. They are now in the process of setting up proxies so that Iranian citizens can access the Internet.

    (image)@ioerror
    Jacob Appelbaum    Iran is filtering the internet more intensely as of the last 48 hours. SSL/TLS is censored on many ISPs but not all.(image) 5 hours ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    (image)@YourAnonNews
    Anonymous    ?HELP? Set up Tor + obfsproxy and help users in Iran reach the Internet: https://t.co/ULvqQPHD(image) 1 hour ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    None of this is officially confirmed and tomorrow might be yield interesting results from Iran. We’ll keep you updated if anything goes down.