Twitter will start to "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country" as part of the company's process of expanding its global business.

In its blog post, Twitter explained that its international growth meant entering countries "that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression", citing France or Germany which ban pro-Nazi content as examples.

According Al Jazeera, censoring is necessary to avoid defying the laws of a nation where its employees reside and therefore avoiding their potential arrest.

However, not everyone is impressed.

Two Canadian high-school students, Asad Muhammad and Matthew Ho, have successfully sent a LEGO man into space. The figurine, attached to a homemade weather balloon and complete with four cameras, reached a height of 24 kilometres above sea level before returning to earth 97 minutes after launch.

From the article in the Toronto Star:

Their jerry-rigged contraption recorded the Lego man's journey from a soccer pitch in Newmarket to the stratosphere -- high enough to see their two-inch astronaut floating above curvature of our planet, clutching a Canadian flag with the blackness of space behind him.

The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn't a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool.

According to Mike Masnick of Tech Dirt, Kader Arif, the person in charge of investigating ACTA for the European Parliament, was so disgusted by it that he quit his role, not before denouncing "the masquerade" behind the legislation.

I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands."

Everyone knows the ACTA agreement is

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This commercial pretty much nails why I carry my trusty Android phone anywhere I go in the world: nothing like having Google Maps at the tip of your fingers, providing you with not just basic navigation, but transit routes, schedules and directions -- very handy, last week while getting around in New York City's baffling subway system or out of an intricate medieval city in Italy in the middle of the night.

Sometimes getting there can be half the fun. Use Google Maps to explore your world and get to your destination on time.

On their Flickr account, NASA uploaded their yearly photograph of planet Earth -- the Blue Marble -- as seen from space, at an astonishing level of resolution. You need to see this, as the scaled-down low-quality image above gives it no justice.

A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

The Sights Map website is an interactive map that allows you to see which areas of the world have had the most photographs taken -- in other words, every place you should avoid if you wish to take a unique photograph. Europe is remarkably popular. North Pole not so much.

The heatmaps are based solely on the number of available Panoramio photos for an area: both the number of photos and the number of authors is taken into account.

The dark and the blue areas have a few photos, the red areas have more and the yellow areas have a large number of photos geotagged.

The selection of FourSquare places for the high-res maps is based on the category and the number of different users ever checked into the place. If you do not see a place that should be there, consider adding it to foursquare and inviting people to check in!

The inspiration for heatmaps came both from the personalized tourism recommender project Sightsplanner and the world touristiness map by Ahti.

In this entry on A Whole Lotta Nothing, MetaFilter creator Matt Haughey explains just on how not to run a Kickstarter project if you want any kind of semblance of success.

This is the story of the worst project I've funded on Kickstarter. I am posting this not to single out the creators behind it, or bad mouth their business, but to go over my disappointment in the hopes that future Kickstarter project creators can learn from it. It's all about communication with your funders, setting up and delivering on expectations for funders, and doing the right thing when things go wrong.

Inspired by the desert drawings still visible today left in the Peruvian desert by the ancient Nazca, the Nazca City project has a robot moving around drawing a city map on the sand.

From the description found on YouTube:

"Nazca City" is a land art project, the drawing of a true scale map of an imaginary city onto the surface of the Peruvian desert. To do this we built a robot which moves autonomously, plowing the ground to uncover its underlying color. Because of its scale, the map can only be appreciated as a whole from certain a height by means of airplains or satellite imaging.

The project is inspired by the gigantic figures drawn onto the desert by the ancient Nazca culture (200 BC - 600 AD), which can still be seen today. It invites to reflect upon the explosive urbanization of the deserts of the Peruvian coast, taking place since the middle of the last century, and its consequences on environmental sustainability and the quality of living.

What's really catchy about this commercial is that there are no cars. Instead, we see people simply floating at high-speed over highways not really paying any attention as to where they're going. Fortunately, airbags appear out of thin-air and we watch the floaters smack their face into it at slow motion while eating a mouthful of glass.

The new "Thanks, Airbag" B-Class spot is a declaration of love to the airbag. For 30 years the airbag has been making driving safer and saving lives. In the future the airbag will have less to do, thanks to the COLLISION PREVENTION ASSIST.

Sigh. I guess it was only a matter of time before Shit Silicon Valley Says came along. It's by Kate Imbach and Tom Conrad.

The Board of Awesomeness is a Microsoft Kinect SDK controlled longboard powered by an single-wheel drive and powered by an 800 watt motor and 36 volt battery, which give the board a top speed of 32 MPH. You can accelerate and decelerate by using your hands.

From the article on The Verge:

The tablet on the base of the board shows a live feed of what the Kinect sees, and also displays the "hitbox," which is similar to the strikezone in baseball. When the Kinect detects your hand inside the hitbox, the board begins to accelerate. Simply move your hand toward the Kinect to accelerate and pull it away to decelerate. For safety, there's a small metal kill-switch that sits on the top of the board. Like a dead man's switch, if you don't maintain constant pressure on it, the power will be disabled and the board will stop. Oh and by the way, there's no brakes. Surprisingly, no Kinect software hacks are used in this setup, though admittedly, the Kinect's power cord was

According to Matthew Panzarino, News and Apple Editor of The Next Web, Apple's release of its quarterly earnings revealed that the Cupertino company sells more iPhones per day than people are born, daily, everywhere in the world.

If those numbers are correct, and we believe that they are, Apple is now making iPhones at a rate that exceeds the amount of babies that humans produce on earth every day. This number is likely to be transient as the birth rate isn't static and Apple's first quarter normally gets a bump in sales from the Christmas shopping season which subsides in the second.

From Season 1-20 of The Simpsons, the D'ohs that Homer Simpson says. There are a few missing but not that many.

The http://nooooooooooooooo.com/ website is to be used only during dire situations.

Super Mario Question Mark Block Lamp

If you want to give your home an instant touch of geek heritage, Nintendo-master Bryan Duxbury has come up with the perfect item: the Super Mario Question Mark Block Lamp. The bottom of the lamp is actually capacitive-touch sensitive, so when you punch it Super Mario Bros style, the lamp toggles its light and plays the classic coin sound. While no coins come out of this one, anyone coming over your house will know immediately how to turn it on.

As Bryan explains:

The outside is made of laser-cut plexiglass, while the guts are a custom-milled PCB full of LEDs and an ATTiny microcontroller. It was really fun and rewarding to figure out how to use an ATTiny in place of a full-blown Arduino -- I definitely recommend people consider using those controllers for their permanent projects.

If you want it -- because you know you do -- completed lamps and self-assembled kits can be found on Bryan's Etsy store.

MPAA Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren't Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought

According to Mike Masnick of TechDirt, Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, publicly threatened politicians on Fox News who accepted Hollywood's donations but who are now, due to public outcry, no longer supporting SOPA and PIPA.

"Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,"

This certainly follows what many people assumed was happening, and fits with the anonymous comments from studio execs that they will stop contributing to Obama, but to be so blatant about this kind of corruption and money-for-laws politics in the face of an extremely angry public is a really, really, really tone deaf response from Dodd.

Meanwhile, a petition asking the White House to investigate comments

#ACTA Makes #SOPA Look Like Child's Play

Just when you thought that SOPA was dead and gone, E.D. Kain of Forbes brings to attention ACTA -- the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- a piece of legislation with provisions as deleterious as anything we saw in SOPA. And get this: the legislation has already been signed and just needs Senate's ratification.

Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.

Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning. The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes, with unelected bureaucrats working closely with entertainment industry lobbyists to craft the provisions in the treaty. The Bush administration started the process, but the Obama administration has aggressively pursued it.

Shit Nobody Says

I guess that after Shit Girls Say and Shit Nerds Say, it was only a matter of time for Shit Nobody Says made an appearance.

Overheard on the Goldman Sachs Elevator (@GSElevator)

Blackball Bill of the Total Frat Move site has been following the @GSElevator account, reportedly opened by an anonymous career banker inside Goldman Sachs who shares some of the "hilarious banter that takes place in the privacy of the GS elevators".

Since then, the account has evolved to include things overheard on trading floors, bullpens, lobbies and bars. Some of the conversations involve more than one person, and the participants are distinguishable by their number (#1, #2, #3).

Blackball Bill has put together a list of his favourite tweets from the account. Here is some of mine:

#1: She's only about 3 weeks of anorexia away from looking hot.
#2: Maybe 4.

#1: Can we please stop calling them 'hipsters' and go back to calling them 'pussies?'

#1: My garbage disposal eats better than 98% of the world.

A New Game for Dinner: Don't Be A Dick During Meals With Friends

From the BLK.GRL.BLOGGING Tumblr blog comes this new dinner game called Don't Be A Di*k During Meals With Friend. The main premise of the game is simple:

The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.

And the reason, even better:

Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.

Goodbye, Kodak, and Thanks for All the Film

In what Bloomberg called "inevitable," the Eastman Kodak Co. -- the company that brought affordable photography to the masses -- has declared bankruptcy. Kodak, says Bloomberg, failed to commercialise on the digital camera -- a device they actually invented. I bet they're feeling really stupid right now.

"Everyone in the 20th century has been familiar with the Kodak name and its products," said Burley of Ryerson's School of Image Arts. "We've not only used them to memorialize our families and their histories, but also for diagnostics in hospitals, producing books and newspapers and police investigative work. And then the whole world of Hollywood is based around Kodak products."

The company also invented the first digital camera in 1975, which it shelved because it would threaten its lucrative film business, Perez said in an interview in March.

The Guardian has put together this gallery of images on Kodak's history.

The above image is from the Wikipedia entry on

Where the Wild Things Are (as read by Christopher Walken)

It's quite amusing to hear Christopher Walken talk in general, never mind when he's reading a kid's book. Good way to traumatise my little ones after I tuck them to bed.

Christopher Walken reads beloved Children's book Where the Wild Things Are but has to improvise as it is mostly pictures.

Iconic Logos Redrawn Using Comic Sans

French design studio Cephalization has recast the logos of McDonald's, Google, NASA, Durex, and many other famous brands in Comic Sans. As FastCoDesign's senior editor Suzanne LaBarre puts it: "the typographic apocalypse is upon us."

Why? Why, why, why? Amoneau admits that Comic Sans is crap. "It's childish, dumb, and wrongly drawn," he tells Co.Design. "But we wanted to show that when a font is well-used, it could be pretty too. Even if it's with Comic Sans."

Cuppow: the Travel Mug for Hipsters

Be the envy of your hipster posse by carrying the ultimate retro travel mug: the cuppow, a BPA free and 100% recyclable sipping top that turns any canning jar into a travel mug.

This is CUPPOW - our solution for easier drinking from a canning jar. The canning jar already makes an awesome platform for a travel mug: it's easy to clean, made of heat-resistant glass, cheap, durable, and when sealed it doesn't leak. The only problem is that with their large openings, canning jars are not great for spill-free sipping while on the move. So we adapted it - made a new lid that lets us drink like a boss from virtually any wide-mouth canning jar. It's a simple eco-friendly alternative to poor-performing and messy disposable hot cups, and over-built and expensive travel mugs.

Wedding Proposal in LEGO Stop Motion

The short story of Nealey and Walter... and how their engagement came to pass, all done in LEGO stop motion.

Human Captcha Solvers Earn, on Average, $2.98 a Day

According to this article on Krebs on Security by Brian Krebs, there is a rise of low-skilled technical-jobs that allow individuals to work from home. The catch is that most, if not all, of these jobs are serving cyber-criminals and pay, on average, less than 3 bucks a day.

The abundance of these low-skilled, low-paying jobs is coming from firms that specialize in the shadowy market of mass-solving CAPTCHAs, those blurry and squiggly words that some websites force you to retype. One big player in this industry is KolotiBablo.com, a service that appeals to spammers and exploits low cost labor in China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

KolotiBablo, which means "earn money" in transliterated Russian, helps clients automate the solving of puzzles designed to prevent automated activity by bots, such as leaving spammy comments or mass-registering accounts at Webmail providers and social networking sites. The service offers an application programming interface (API) that allows

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So, What Are You Supposed To Do When Someone's Masturbating at Barnes & Nobles?

"Tell me if you need me to move," I said to a guy as he wandered past. He was in his late 40s, early 50s, mustache, baggy sweater with a leather jacket.

"No no you're OK," he said, not looking at me when he said it. I was at this part where Gloria Steinem is telling us about the Bunny Bible -- the rules and regulations that any Playboy bunny must follow, including the proper maintenance of the tail -- when I noticed the guy had been crouching next to me for a while. I could see something moving in my peripheral vision. I turned toward him and holy crap: He was masturbating.

One of the perks of working in a coffee shop is that often you get to work with really beautiful women and develop friendships without the innate suspicion that all you are trying to do is fuck them. It's a good thing, that. I never really go on the make (tangentially: whenever I do something really horrendous happens), so its really annoying to me when a woman blows me off simply because she is used to guys having ulterior motives at all times, and assume that I am the same.