A software upgrade this week connected the International Space Station to the Web
by Nick Barber
The International Space Station received an upgrade this week that gives astronauts aboard personal access to the Internet.
Shortly after the software update, flight engineer T.J. Creamer sent the first unassisted update to his Twitter account.
"Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s," wrote Creamer.
Typically astronauts would e-mail messages from space to the ground where support personnel would post them to Twitter. Prior to the rollout of personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, astronauts had access to official e-mail, but weren't able to surf the Web, according to NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries. The crew now has access to the Internet via a ground computer when the space station is actively communicating with Earth using high-speed Ku-band communications. Humphries said that he could not discuss the speed of the connection due to security reasons.
Despite some "hiccups" that Humphries could not discuss the astronauts and ground crew had been working for about a month to get the service online. The space station crew is subject to the same computer usage policies as Earth-based employees. These rules prohibit visits to pornography, gambling and other sites. Humphries said that there are content filters on the network level that prohibit access to those and other sites.
At some points the space station can be viewed from Earth by the naked eye. It looks like a bright star moving quickly through the sky and typically can only be seen for a few minutes. NASA provides a Web site to track the station and can tell sky watchers exactly when and where it can be seen. A service on Twitter called Twisst creates custom alerts, based on a user's location, and alerts them when the space station will pass through the sky.
NASA astronauts weren't the only newcomers to Twitter this week. President Barack Obama and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also joined.
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Group behind Twitter hack takes down Baidu.com
Baidu's domain name records appear to have been tampered with, experts say by Robert McMillan
The group that took down Twitter.com last month has apparently claimed another victim: China's largest search engine Baidu.com.
Baidu.com was offline late Monday, but at one point it displayed an image saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites.
With more than half of China's Internet search market, Baidu is by far China's most-used search engine. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.
Not much is known about the Iranian Cyber Army, which first gained notoriety with its December 18 Twitter attack. Hacking groups such as this are constantly defacing Web sites, but it is extremely rare for them to take down a site as widely used as Twitter or Baidu.com.
According to security experts, Baidu's domain name records appear to have been tampered with. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses. "It looks like their domain account credentials may have been snagged," said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with the antivirus vendor Trend Micro.
That's the same technique that was used to hijack Twitter, when Iranian Cyber Army hackers were apparently able to log in to the account used to manage Twitter's DNS records and redirect visitors to another Web server that posted a message similar to the one spotted on Baidu.com. That attack knocked Twitter offline for more than an hour.
Baidu's domain name registrar, Register.com, could not be reached immediately for comment.
Owen Fletcher in Beijing contributed to this story.
The group that took down Twitter.com last month has apparently claimed another victim: China's largest search engine Baidu.com.
Baidu.com was offline late Monday, but at one point it displayed an image saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites.
With more than half of China's Internet search market, Baidu is by far China's most-used search engine. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.
Not much is known about the Iranian Cyber Army, which first gained notoriety with its December 18 Twitter attack. Hacking groups such as this are constantly defacing Web sites, but it is extremely rare for them to take down a site as widely used as Twitter or Baidu.com.
According to security experts, Baidu's domain name records appear to have been tampered with. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses. "It looks like their domain account credentials may have been snagged," said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with the antivirus vendor Trend Micro.
That's the same technique that was used to hijack Twitter, when Iranian Cyber Army hackers were apparently able to log in to the account used to manage Twitter's DNS records and redirect visitors to another Web server that posted a message similar to the one spotted on Baidu.com. That attack knocked Twitter offline for more than an hour.
Baidu's domain name registrar, Register.com, could not be reached immediately for comment.
Owen Fletcher in Beijing contributed to this story.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter
ON June 15, our technicians told me to add a note to our website, writes Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter.
The note warned users of a planned maintenance session that meant our service would be inaccessible while we carried out an overdue system upgrade.
Immediately, we began to see a reaction in the form of tweets. Then came the emails. Then came the phone calls. Even the US State Department contacted us. The message was loud and clear: Twitter cannot rest while there is unrest in Iran.
However, if this maintenance was not done quickly, our operations team feared that the service might go down for days.
With the whole team on edge, my colleague Jessica Verrilli and I called our head of operations to convince him to do what was deemed extremely difficult if not impossible — reschedule the maintenance.
A few more phone calls and we had a consensus to postpone the work despite the risk. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time we had to ask our engineers to perform the impossible. In the space of a year, user accounts had grown by a factor of 10 while our 45-strong team remained crowded into a loft space in San Francisco’s industrial SoMa district.
The work was moved and the maintenance was eventually successful. In the days that followed, our service became inextricably linked to the Iranian election protests in hundreds of media reports on television, online, and in the newspapers.
Requests to discuss the tumult flooded in from everywhere but we did not engage. We chose instead to issue a simple statement on Twitter’s blog.
While it is our job to keep the service running, it was not the appropriate time or circumstance to put ourselves into the same conversation with people who were risking their lives on the streets of Tehran. The experience remains a humbling one that would define the year for Twitter and also underscore the motivation behind a decade of effort leading up to this point.
My co-founder Evan Williams and I have spent the past 10 years developing large systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate openly. We are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways.
Although we are already a few years into our latest collaboration, this has been the year the world took note of a simple service that has profound promise. For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity.
Many people have assumed that Twitter is just another social network, some kind of micro-blogging service, or both. It can be these things but primarily Twitter serves as a real-time information network powered by people around the world discovering what’s happening and sharing the news. The Iranian election was the most discussed issue on Twitter in the final year of a decade defined by advancements in information access.
In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world. These are figures we did not anticipate when we founded the company in 2007.
Looking back, the year is a blur, but that one summer morning remains fixed in my memory because it is a powerful reminder of why we find it meaningful to develop technology.
The note warned users of a planned maintenance session that meant our service would be inaccessible while we carried out an overdue system upgrade.
Immediately, we began to see a reaction in the form of tweets. Then came the emails. Then came the phone calls. Even the US State Department contacted us. The message was loud and clear: Twitter cannot rest while there is unrest in Iran.
However, if this maintenance was not done quickly, our operations team feared that the service might go down for days.
With the whole team on edge, my colleague Jessica Verrilli and I called our head of operations to convince him to do what was deemed extremely difficult if not impossible — reschedule the maintenance.
A few more phone calls and we had a consensus to postpone the work despite the risk. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time we had to ask our engineers to perform the impossible. In the space of a year, user accounts had grown by a factor of 10 while our 45-strong team remained crowded into a loft space in San Francisco’s industrial SoMa district.
The work was moved and the maintenance was eventually successful. In the days that followed, our service became inextricably linked to the Iranian election protests in hundreds of media reports on television, online, and in the newspapers.
Requests to discuss the tumult flooded in from everywhere but we did not engage. We chose instead to issue a simple statement on Twitter’s blog.
While it is our job to keep the service running, it was not the appropriate time or circumstance to put ourselves into the same conversation with people who were risking their lives on the streets of Tehran. The experience remains a humbling one that would define the year for Twitter and also underscore the motivation behind a decade of effort leading up to this point.
My co-founder Evan Williams and I have spent the past 10 years developing large systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate openly. We are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways.
Although we are already a few years into our latest collaboration, this has been the year the world took note of a simple service that has profound promise. For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity.
Many people have assumed that Twitter is just another social network, some kind of micro-blogging service, or both. It can be these things but primarily Twitter serves as a real-time information network powered by people around the world discovering what’s happening and sharing the news. The Iranian election was the most discussed issue on Twitter in the final year of a decade defined by advancements in information access.
In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world. These are figures we did not anticipate when we founded the company in 2007.
Looking back, the year is a blur, but that one summer morning remains fixed in my memory because it is a powerful reminder of why we find it meaningful to develop technology.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Twitter deal will add location services to Tweets
Purchase of Mixer Labs will show Twitter users' location as they share what they are seeing or experiencing
Twitter is buying a startup called Mixer Labs in an effort to pinpoint the locations of people posting short messages on its service.
Financial terms of the deal announced late last night have not been disclosed.
Mixer Labs, founded by former Google employees, developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI.
Evan Williams, Twitter chief executive, said that GeoAPI could prove helpful by showing where people are as they share what they are seeing or experiencing.
He wrote on Twitter's blog: "We want to know What's happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering 'Earthquake!' alone is not as informative as 'Earthquake!' coupled with your current location."
"We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla,Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities. We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are," Mr Williams added.
About 58 million people around the world use Twitter, which accommodates messages of up to 140 characters.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, has raised about $155 million from investors since its 2006 inception.
Twitter is buying a startup called Mixer Labs in an effort to pinpoint the locations of people posting short messages on its service.
Financial terms of the deal announced late last night have not been disclosed.
Mixer Labs, founded by former Google employees, developed a location-tracking tool called GeoAPI.
Evan Williams, Twitter chief executive, said that GeoAPI could prove helpful by showing where people are as they share what they are seeing or experiencing.
He wrote on Twitter's blog: "We want to know What's happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering 'Earthquake!' alone is not as informative as 'Earthquake!' coupled with your current location."
"We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla,Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities. We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are," Mr Williams added.
About 58 million people around the world use Twitter, which accommodates messages of up to 140 characters.
Twitter, based in San Francisco, has raised about $155 million from investors since its 2006 inception.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Twitter finally in the money with Google link
Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, was in the audience at the launch this week of Google’s new weapon in the search engine wars.
He was looking remarkably cheerful, as well he might. The announcement of a stream of millions of Twitter updates in Google’s results pages marked the moment when the faddish micro-blogging site truly entered the mainstream and started to make real money.
Now Google’s millions of users can see a scroll of updates, many from Twitter, in their results pages when they do a search for a vast number of popular queries.
A search for “Tiger Woods” produces a page with a new “Latest Updates” box. In it there is a constantly refreshing and scrolling list of tweets, blog posts and news stories, all flowing on to the page in real-time within seconds of their publication to the web. Designarchives tweets: “Holiday shopping is officially in full swing, kinda like Tiger Woods was.”
While not everyone will want up-to-the-second delivery from the globe’s virtual water-cooler, Twitter’s partnership with Google, and a similar deal struck with Microsoft and its Bing search engine, give the three-year-old company a solid revenue stream.
The deals are each worth several million dollars a month to Twitter, industry insiders said. The cash marks the first tangible evidence that the service can make money after months of monetisation promises from Twitter executives.
Twitter has seen explosive growth in the past two years to more than 50 million users, driven in part by celebrity endorsements but also by the service’s ability to deliver breaking news, sometimes ahead of traditional media, such as the plane crash on the Hudson river in New York. The Treasury used the service this week to deliver summaries of the Pre-Budget Report as Alistair Darling was addressing the Commons.
But while Twitter has become established as a cultural phenomenon, critics have pointed to the lack of a business model and questioned its longevity. Analysts said that Google’s exposure of tweets to a wider audience — the search engine processes billions of search queries a day — will help the company to cement its position as a window into the world’s conversations.
Greg Sterling, analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said: “The value is the institutionalisation of Twitter that comes from the deal with Google. The inclusion in the search results will make it more visible.”
He said that Twitter was difficult for many people to get started on. “Twitter can seem ridiculous to those who are not using it to get commercial offers or information from sources that they value. There will be some education for parts of the market from this,” he added.
Twitter’s real-time insight into what people are discussing has huge value to marketeers and companies that want to reach consumers and understand how their brands are perceived, according to experts.
That potential has seen venture capitalists pile into the company. Twitter has gathered $100 million in funding to finance its operations, valuing the company at $1 billion.
The latest stakes were sold in October to three of Twitter’s existing investors — Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Spark Capital — and two new shareholders, Insight Venture Partners and T Rowe Price.
The cash has given Twitter breathing space. Executives have said they are in no hurry to introduce advertising to the site, which may put off users. They have also said they will remain independent despite rumours of overtures from Google and Microsoft. Last year they turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook.
Mr Stone said last month that 2010 would be Twitter’s “revenue year”. The company will capitalise on corporate use of the service by introducing fees on accounts primarily used for commercial purposes. A report from NeXt Up Research forecast that Twitter would have about $140 million in revenue a year by 2014. A new poll of 1,200 UK businesses using Twitter found that 22 per cent would be prepared to pay for additional services. Nearly half the companies surveyed by Accredited Supplier said Twitter would be the world’s largest social media property by 2020.
Computer maker Dell said it had pulled in more than $6.5 million from its (free) Twitter accounts.
Tweets will push up profits: Analysis by Murad Ahmed
Google’s desire to obtain real-time information — such as the deluge of messages that come out of services such as Twitter every second — is in keeping with its mission: “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
These tweets are a cash cow waiting to be milked. Google executives have never been shy in explaining why they want more and more information to be searchable. The better and more relevant data that they can offer its users, the more advertising they can sell next to these search results.
This billion-dollar revenue stream is the driving force behind almost everything Google does. Whether that is Street View, which gives people a pedestrian-eye view of roads around the country, or Google Books, an attempt to scan and digitise millions of texts — the aim is simple: make Google the indispensable holder of the world’s information.
Realising this, Microsoft, with its Bing search engine, and this week, Yahoo, have also announced similar deals to contain real-time search information within search results.
But why is real-time search valuable? Because it is instant. Whereas news articles take hours and days to prepare, and blog posts take minutes, tweets and micro-blogs can be tapped out and published in seconds.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, once explained that he first saw the power of the service when the first he heard about an earthquake a few miles away was through people tweeting about it. He felt the tremors a few minutes later.
Some worry that people will tweet less, or more privately, now that these messages are just a Google search away from being discovered.
Yet analysts said there is little evidence of that happening. Twitter has thrived because of its openness, just like other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. People seem happy to trade in privacy to be part of these communities. Tweets will continue to grow. Google, Microsoft and others believe that their profits can follow suit. Twitter finally in the money with Google link
He was looking remarkably cheerful, as well he might. The announcement of a stream of millions of Twitter updates in Google’s results pages marked the moment when the faddish micro-blogging site truly entered the mainstream and started to make real money.
Now Google’s millions of users can see a scroll of updates, many from Twitter, in their results pages when they do a search for a vast number of popular queries.
A search for “Tiger Woods” produces a page with a new “Latest Updates” box. In it there is a constantly refreshing and scrolling list of tweets, blog posts and news stories, all flowing on to the page in real-time within seconds of their publication to the web. Designarchives tweets: “Holiday shopping is officially in full swing, kinda like Tiger Woods was.”
While not everyone will want up-to-the-second delivery from the globe’s virtual water-cooler, Twitter’s partnership with Google, and a similar deal struck with Microsoft and its Bing search engine, give the three-year-old company a solid revenue stream.
The deals are each worth several million dollars a month to Twitter, industry insiders said. The cash marks the first tangible evidence that the service can make money after months of monetisation promises from Twitter executives.
Twitter has seen explosive growth in the past two years to more than 50 million users, driven in part by celebrity endorsements but also by the service’s ability to deliver breaking news, sometimes ahead of traditional media, such as the plane crash on the Hudson river in New York. The Treasury used the service this week to deliver summaries of the Pre-Budget Report as Alistair Darling was addressing the Commons.
But while Twitter has become established as a cultural phenomenon, critics have pointed to the lack of a business model and questioned its longevity. Analysts said that Google’s exposure of tweets to a wider audience — the search engine processes billions of search queries a day — will help the company to cement its position as a window into the world’s conversations.
Greg Sterling, analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said: “The value is the institutionalisation of Twitter that comes from the deal with Google. The inclusion in the search results will make it more visible.”
He said that Twitter was difficult for many people to get started on. “Twitter can seem ridiculous to those who are not using it to get commercial offers or information from sources that they value. There will be some education for parts of the market from this,” he added.
Twitter’s real-time insight into what people are discussing has huge value to marketeers and companies that want to reach consumers and understand how their brands are perceived, according to experts.
That potential has seen venture capitalists pile into the company. Twitter has gathered $100 million in funding to finance its operations, valuing the company at $1 billion.
The latest stakes were sold in October to three of Twitter’s existing investors — Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Spark Capital — and two new shareholders, Insight Venture Partners and T Rowe Price.
The cash has given Twitter breathing space. Executives have said they are in no hurry to introduce advertising to the site, which may put off users. They have also said they will remain independent despite rumours of overtures from Google and Microsoft. Last year they turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook.
Mr Stone said last month that 2010 would be Twitter’s “revenue year”. The company will capitalise on corporate use of the service by introducing fees on accounts primarily used for commercial purposes. A report from NeXt Up Research forecast that Twitter would have about $140 million in revenue a year by 2014. A new poll of 1,200 UK businesses using Twitter found that 22 per cent would be prepared to pay for additional services. Nearly half the companies surveyed by Accredited Supplier said Twitter would be the world’s largest social media property by 2020.
Computer maker Dell said it had pulled in more than $6.5 million from its (free) Twitter accounts.
Tweets will push up profits: Analysis by Murad Ahmed
Google’s desire to obtain real-time information — such as the deluge of messages that come out of services such as Twitter every second — is in keeping with its mission: “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
These tweets are a cash cow waiting to be milked. Google executives have never been shy in explaining why they want more and more information to be searchable. The better and more relevant data that they can offer its users, the more advertising they can sell next to these search results.
This billion-dollar revenue stream is the driving force behind almost everything Google does. Whether that is Street View, which gives people a pedestrian-eye view of roads around the country, or Google Books, an attempt to scan and digitise millions of texts — the aim is simple: make Google the indispensable holder of the world’s information.
Realising this, Microsoft, with its Bing search engine, and this week, Yahoo, have also announced similar deals to contain real-time search information within search results.
But why is real-time search valuable? Because it is instant. Whereas news articles take hours and days to prepare, and blog posts take minutes, tweets and micro-blogs can be tapped out and published in seconds.
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, once explained that he first saw the power of the service when the first he heard about an earthquake a few miles away was through people tweeting about it. He felt the tremors a few minutes later.
Some worry that people will tweet less, or more privately, now that these messages are just a Google search away from being discovered.
Yet analysts said there is little evidence of that happening. Twitter has thrived because of its openness, just like other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. People seem happy to trade in privacy to be part of these communities. Tweets will continue to grow. Google, Microsoft and others believe that their profits can follow suit. Twitter finally in the money with Google link
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