Twitter has made a disastrous decision about their user interface, and Leigh Honeywell has one of the best posts on what it means, and how to get around it: Changes to Twitter’s Block Behavior - and a Workaround.

Twitter posted an update today to their blocking functionality. In my opinion, it’s a real step backwards for the usability of Twitter for anyone with a large number of followers, or facing any kind of harassment.

It used to be that when you blocked someone, it would force them to “unfollow” you, in addition to hiding them from your mentions. This is no longer the case:

Note: If your account is public, blocking a user does not prevent that user from following you, interacting with your Tweets, or receiving your updates in their timeline. If your Tweets are protected, blocking the user will cause them to unfollow you.

The obvious objection to my objection is “well your stuff is public anyway, they could just make a new account” - the thing is, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of 1) how people use blocking and 2) how harassers operate.

I’m hoping Twitter will rethink this decision. There’s already an outcry (see #RestoreTheBlock), and it’s going to get worse as more people find out that the block feature basically doesn’t work any more.

The old way wasn’t perfect at all, and determined nutjobs could get around it, but this new way equates to just giving up and saying, “Oh well, we don’t want the stalkers mad at us, so you’ll just have to deal with it.”

Twitter spokesperson Jim Prosser says Twitter made the change because it thinks it will cut down on the vitriol, anger, and resentful Jezebel articles that result from knowing you’ve been blocked. “Now when you block a user, they cannot tell that you’ve blocked them,” tweeted Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “It was a longstanding request from users of block.”

“We saw antagonistic behavior where people would see they were blocked and be mad,” says Prosser.

In my NSHO, this is one of the worst decisions by an Internet company in a while. Twitter has a big problem with targeted harassment, and they should be thinking about how to make it more difficult for abusers.

Instead they’ve made it easier for stalkers to do their dirty work, because they don’t want to lose them as customers.

Well, that didn’t take very long! Twitter has now reinstated the block feature.

We're reverting the changes to block functionality. http://t.co/LOvip2QmLX

— Safety (@safety) December 13, 2013

For those of you who’ve never heard of her, Tila Tequila (originally Nguyen) is a “reality show” star who thinks she is a rapper. Originally a nude model, she parlayed her career into being a “professional” celebrity, like a third rate Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton.

Well, in the middle of last year she suffered a brain aneurysm due to a drug over dose and went into rehab to recover. How is that recovery going? Not well, apparently.

Since that time, Ms. Nguyen has decided to abandon her attempt to convert to Judaism and embrace Nazism, and is now on a mission to spread the truth about one of history’s great misunderstood leaders, Adolf Hitler.

Yes, Hitler.

Tablet magazine reported on Monday that Tequila, who came into national prominence through the dating show A Shot At Love in 2007 and 2008, posted a photo illustration of herself on Facebook bearing an armband adorned with a swastika and an SS hat while standing in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz prison camp.

The caption for the picture states, “Tilisis is the GODDESS of LOVE & WAR! [sic] Learn your facts!” In another post Monday evening, Tequila — born Tila Nguyen in Singapore in 1981 — wrote, “I am She, the Queen who hath come to save you from this dark world filled with NWO parasite invaders,” an apparent reference to the “New World Order,” a popular boogeyman figure among conspiracy theorists.

She also responded to criticism of the image by linking to a Dec. 7 blog post in which she defends Hitler, saying his history was rewritten after the defeat of the Axis in World War II.

“I am not going to sit here and say that I hate Jewish people because that is not the case nor is this about Jews,” Tequila wrote. “It is about Hitler and his side of the story that was never told since he was not the victor. However, those of you with a closed mind can think I am being anti-semite all you want because I already told you that I am not, nor will I repeat myself again.”

To show how she’s embraced her new beliefs, she recorded a new song “It’s Going Down!” to explain them, bending all her marginal music talents to come up with the lyrics.

Every time you hear my name it’s going down, goin down X 4
Feeding yo mind with GMOs
while givin yo babies flo flo
not flo rida but flo ride
that shit that burns yo third eye

Jewluminati motherfuckers hate me
Oh no they don’t wanna date me
Nor you nor you nor you too
Worldwide Genocide blame it on the jews

So now they call me a nazi
no bitch I’m just good at yhatzee
Espionage is my middle name HA!
I got you good while rolling through yo hood

Hitler no Hi Tila
Hitler no Hit Tila
Hitler No Hi Tila

Her fellow travelers at Stormfront don’t know what to think:

“It’s insulting to Adolf Hitler to have that promiscuous, degenerate, mongrel defending him. She makes me want to vomit.”

“The sad part is this no one will listen to her.”

“I congratulate her for finding the truth.”

“Brave woman to throw her career away for truth. Jew Hollywood and media will never hire her again.”

“Very, very strange. Her entry almost seems copied and pasted from this website. I wonder if she wasn’t somehow ‘encouraged’ — either overtly or covertly — to promulgate this information in an attempt to discredit it. I, for one, am quite skeptical.”

“She sounds perfectly lucid to me.”

“She’s not a truther, she’s a plant.”

“We need more people like her spreading this type of message. As long she does not preach racial mixing, has no kids, and eventually commits suicide, it is all good.”

“She’s got 2 million followers. People will listen to her. The Zionist veneer is finally crumbling.”

“I posted a supportive comment on the page. I think we all should to show her that she is not alone in her beliefs.”

And perhaps inevitably…

“Is she of Jewish racial ancestry?”

Unfortunately, I doubt we’ve heard the last of Tila Tequila.

This is an awful story, as Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-Tenn.) former chief of staff (Alexander fired him when the news broke) is caught red-handed with a collection of horrific child porn.

Loskarn possessed a hard drive filled with “hundreds of videos depicting underage boys engaged in sexually explicit conduct,” according to the complaint against him.

He allegedly did not respond when police knocked on his door with a search warrant on Wednesday. When authorities used a ram to force the door open, an investigator saw Loskarn lean out a second-floor window and appear to place something on the roof, according to the complaint. That object was later determined to be a portable hard drive that contained videos of both underage girls and boys being abused, the complaint says.

Also see:
Aide Arrested on Child Porn Charges Was One of ‘GOP’s Top Strategists’

The stupidity here is of monumental proportions.

In a column for Slate earlier this week, Aisha Harris wrote that she had always been confused as a child because the Santa in her home had brown skin like her, but the Santa in malls and on television was always white.

So Harris made the case “that America abandon Santa-as-fat-old-white-man” and adopt a penguin in his place.

“For one thing, making Santa Claus an animal rather than an old white male could spare millions of nonwhite kids the insecurity and shame that I remember from childhood,” she wrote.

But on Wednesday, Kelly decided that Harris had gone “off the rails” with her column.

“For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly said. “But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.”

“Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know?” she added. “I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa — I just want the kids watching to know that.”

Video

More: Fox News Host Megyn Kelly Tells Kids: Jesus and Santa Are Both White Guys

Vimeo

This is the graduation-project made by a group of five students from the 3D design and animation course at Idèfagskolen in Tønsberg Norway. The short film featured here was in production between october 2012 - July 2013. With a few tweaks here and there until the soundscape was in place. The music and sound job was completed in December by a carefully selected third party.

The team behind the production are:
Jonas Martin Larsen
Øyvind Fiksdal
Eilef Sandnæs
Eskild Carlsen
& Yvonne Engbråten

Music Composed by: Joel Forssell
Sound design by: Peder Jørgensen

Image via Shutterstock

As everyone who uses Twitter knows, there’s a limit of 140 characters per tweet. For Twitter API programmers like me, this means your code has to make sure the tweet you’re about to send is not longer than 140 characters, or Twitter will smack you on the knuckles with a ruler and send back the dreaded error message:

Error: 403 - Status is over 140 characters

So what’s the problem, you ask? Just get the length of the tweet you’re proposing to send and make sure it isn’t over 140 characters. Easy, right?

Well, it used to be this easy, but then Twitter started automatically running all links in tweets through their own custom URL shortener (t.co) — even if they’re already shortened with another service.

(Note: when you look at a tweet on Twitter, you won’t necessarily see the “t.co” URL, either; Twitter automatically expands these links when it displays a tweet. But it’s stored internally as a “t.co” URL.)

This change made correctly calculating the length much more complex; now your code has to scan the tweet text to find URLs, and adjust the overall length to account for what happens when Twitter’s URL shortener does its thing.

Continue reading…

Video

If you can’t see the MP4 video, click below:

Comedy Central