HOW TO PROTECT YOUR ONLINE SECURITY IN CYBER CAFES

POSTED BY JIMMY CARR IN STAY SAFE AND ANONYMOUS ONLINE, DESKTOP DIGITAL SECURITY, MOBILE DIGITAL SECURITY

Cyber cafés allow visitors affordable and quick access to the Internet. They can be a fantastic means of communication and research for those who do not own computers or are traveling. There are certain risks, however, in using a public computer or wireless network for personal matters: encrypted connections cannot always be achieved, preset firewalls may be weak, and it is hard to know who is monitoring your activity. The following steps can help keep sensitive data safe, even in the public setting of a cyber café or public Wi-fi hotspot.

Step 1

Be aware of your surroundings. Keep an eye out for anyone who might be observing your computer screen and/or keyboard. If you’ve brought your personallaptop, use a security cable to anchor your laptop to a heavy or immovable object. Never leave your laptop, personal belongings, or any sensitive information unattended for any amount of time. It is inadvisable even to ask a stranger to “keep an eye” on your things for a minute. Cybersecurity is important, but physical security is the first step.

Step 2.

Choose your Internet browser carefully. On a personal computer, take the time to download browsers, patches, and add-ons while at home on a secure, private connection. If you are on a public computer, however, you may have no choice: security settings often prevent installation by guest users. If possible, use Google Chrome in Incognito Mode, as many reports claim it is the least vulnerable to hacking. Firefox with appropriate add-ons such as Stealther and Adbock Plus is also a smart choice. Avoid Internet Explorer; as the most commonly used browser, it is also the most commonly attacked browser.

Tip!

No matter which Internet browser you use, make sure to download the latestpatches as soon as possible. These patches are the developers’ response to the newest viral threats.

Tip!

Before you use any browser, check its privacy settings. For maximum short-term security: block all cookies, disable search saving, disable login information storage, block all pop-ups, and disable location tracking. This will make surfing the web a little slower than it could be, but it will minimize your electronic footprint. If you are a casual user not dealing with sensitive content, these steps may not be necessary.

Step 3.

Choose the most secure Internet connection. In a café or on a public computer, you may be asked to sign in or enter a password. This is for billing purposes and does not mean your connection is secure. If a Wi-fi hotspot pops up, be aware that unless it requires a WPA/WPA2 (not WEP) password, it is not secure; your actions online and the contents of your computer could be vulnerable. If you are using a personal mobile hotspot or laptop stick, protect it with a WPA2 password, as this ismost secure.

Step 4.

Once connected to the Internet, browse consciously and think before you click. If you were unable to connect to a WPA/WPA2, the information you send and receive is not encrypted, so you should try to visit only those sites that use encryption. Encrypted sites’ addresses begin with “https” and will display a clickable padlock symbol in the web address bar or at the top/bottom of the page. You can downloadplugins that will force all sites to use encryption and programs that will anonymizesurfing.

Also, be aware of misleading links and fraudulent sites. If you are ever unsure, hover your mouse over a link before clicking. The real address of where the link will take you will appear. Malware can and will manifest itself as anything: a $10000 prize, an IM from a friend, a message from your bank, a news article. If the real address does not match up or is a strange string of numbers, do not click. Do not open emails from unfamiliar senders, especially if they have URGENT, IMPORTANT, or WINNER in the subject line.

Sites will even fake the https and the lock symbol. If either or those disappear at any time, know that you are no longer encrypted and may be on a fraudulent site.

Tip!

Create a free Google mail account separate from those that you use for business and personal matters. Give it a random name and password. Use it anytime a website requires one, but attach as little person information to it as possible. This will help keep spam—which accounted for 80% of all messages in February 2011—out of your way.

Tip!

Make your passwords random, lengthy, and difficult. Never use your name, your nickname, your mother’s maiden name, your pet’s name, your social security number, or your address. Though it may be hard to remember, a string of random numbers, capitals, lowercase letters, and symbols is safest. Use entirely different passwords for each of your different logins. Only write down a password if you must; never store it with your computer. Change your passwords at least every three months, or at the first sign of hacking.

Step 5.

When you are finished browsing, log out of any sites you logged into. Double-check the browser’s history, cookies, and cache. Delete anything you find there. Close all tabs and windows. Quit the browser. Log out of the computer.

HOW TO's (2): USE COLLAGE TO OUTSMART INTERNET CENSORS

POSTED BY JIMMY CARR IN BUILD AWARENESS , SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL GOOD,COLLABORATE EFFECTIVELY, STAY SAFE AND ANONYMOUS ONLINE

Ten countries censor the Internet heavily enough for Reporters Without Borders to classify them as “Internet Enemies.” Another sixteen—including Australia, Turkey, France—monitor the net enough to be labeled “Under Surveillance.” What began as a means of facilitating rapid communication has become, in some nations, a way to control public’s access to information. Getting around the censors is always difficult; sometimes, it’s dangerous.

Recognizing the need for a new, safer means of communication, students at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a system known as Collage. In the developer’s words, their system, “allows users to exchange messages through hidden channels in sites that host user-generated content.” Basically: a message that would have normally been censored is hidden inside an innocuous Tweet or Flickr upload, which is not censored.

As with many secrecy tools developed for the Internet, there is no way to stop criminals or terrorists from using Collage for nefarious purposes. There is also the possibility, the researchers admit, that “the governments of various countries where the software might be used could discover the hidden messages.” And, as blogger Sami Ben Gharbia adds: “[I]f the social media websites that this tool will be relying on are not blocked yet, somewhere, this will give some “legitimate” excuses for censors to block them.”

This new system comes from the GIT’s GTNoise division. Their site states that their work “ranges from fighting the Internet's cybercriminals (spam, phishing, etc.) to improving Internet availability to making networks easier to diagnose and operate.” Impressively, GTNoise is comprised of only twelve Ph.D. and postdoc students. This month, the students will release Collage, and cyberactivists will be mere steps away from easier, safer communication.

SHARE

Step 1.

Collage is designed to do all of the work for you. Using Collage requires no special skills or technology. Once it is released, merely download Collage from GTNoise’sproject site (a demo is currently available).

Step 2.

If you wish to hide a message in a piece of content, run Collage. Choose a piece of “cover traffic”—a photo, a tweet, ect. Then, enter the text you wish to hide, and Collage will embed it in the chosen cover traffic.

Step 3.

To download a piece of content, you must first digitally “rendezvous” with the person who uploaded it. To rendezvous, as GTNoise’s research paper explains, “senders and receivers perform sequences of tasks, which are time-dependent sequences of actions.” Basically, you must have already arranged with the sender of the information which site will host the cover traffic, and which specific pieces of content on the site will carry the message.

For example: At 10:00PM EST, search Flickr for “black coffee” and download the first fifteen results. If all goes according to plan, the sender will have uploaded at least fifteen photos of black coffee right before 10PM so that his/her encoded messages are the top results. The key to such a rendezvous is nonchalance: sender/receiver action online must look perfectly normal. Who doesn’t search the web for photos of coffee late at night?

Step 4.

Once you’ve rendezvoused and downloaded the content, Collage automatically detects and opens messages hidden in the content. It may take a few minutes to process, but it really is that simple.

Tip!

You can even donate your own Flickr photo album to Collage, giving users in oppressive countries a good, diverse stockpile of safe, free photos in which to hide their messages.

The Middle Ground between Technology and Revolutions

Social media didn't cause the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but it did achieve unique visibility.

Aaron BADY, 26/08/2011

Is there still a debate on whether social media can cause revolutions? If this was ever a serious question, it was mainly an argument between straw men: on the one hand, wild idealists who saw the internet as an all-encompassing force for freedom and on the other, the crusty curmudgeons who fear technology and pooh-pooh the idea that social media is good for anything but posting pictures of cats. NYU professor Jay Rosen characterized the debate as "Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: 'Tunisia's Twitter revolution?') and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims ('It's not that simple!')" and argued that these "only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted."

I think we can safely put that debate aside. While Malcolm Gladwell made a lot of noise last October by declaring that "the revolution will not be tweeted," reporting like John Pollock's "Streetbook" demolishes the idea that there is some intrinsic and impassable barrier separating "street" activism from the kind of "slacktivist" organizing of which Gladwell is so dismissive. But it's worth noting that even the most visible "cyber-utopians" and "cyber-pessimists" seem to be converging on a point somewhere in the middle. In March, Clay Shirky significantly qualified the kinds of claims he makes for the centrality of social media—arguing that it is access to each other, not access to media, that makes revolutions—while Evgeny Morozov has pointed out that both he and Gladwell have been clear that the internet can be an effective tool for political change, as long as it is "used by grassroots organizations (as opposed to atomized individuals)." If you can see the fundamental divide between these arguments, you see more clearly than I do.

What's different, I suspect, is that we can now ask the question in the past tense, and the answer is that middle ground onto which both sides are converging, a very middling "kind of, but not completely." What happened in Egypt and Tunisia were revolutions, but they were obviously notcaused by Facebook or Twitter: as Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out only 15% of Egyptians have Internet access, and only a small percentage use social media sites. But along with reporting like Pollock's, the work done by people like Zeynep Tufekci, Samir Garbaya, and Ramesh Srinivasanallows us to stop talking, hypothetically, about "technology" and "revolutions" in the abstract, and to start looking at what it was about these revolutions and these regimes that gave these social media tools such potency, visibility, and usefulness. Which is all to the good. Talking about thetechnology risks making Facebook or Twitter the hero of the story, thereby turning our attention away from the courage and commitment of face-to-face organizers and masses in the street.

But while Malcolm Gladwell may still think that "the least interesting thing [about the protests in Egypt] is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media," it still seems undeniable that social media has achieved a unique kind of visibility in the story of the "Arab Spring." You cannot tell the story of Khaled Said, after all, without talking about social media: he was dragged out of a cybercafé and beaten to death for posting a video showing police corruption, whereupon pictures of his battered face became a mobilizing point for the Facebook group "We Are All Khaled Said," moderated by Google executive Wael Ghonim. Ghonim's declaration to Wolf Blitzer on CNN that "This revolution started online...on Facebook" is not really credible, of course; at most, Facebook organizing managed to build on and enhance the Kifaya movement, which started years ago. But if Facebook is not the whole story, it is certainly part of the story. And what are we to make of the story of the Egyptian newborn named "Facebook"? Or of photos like this one?

It seems to me that there are two significantly different perspectives from which to ask the question of what social media technology does. On the one hand, what Pollock documents in the streets of Tunisia is the way social networking can enhance and enable forms of organizing that are utterly precedented: groups organized around Facebook merge seamlessly with groups organized around football. And as I think both Shirky and Morozov would agree, the important thing is the groups themselves, the grass-roots organizing and access-to-each other that could start with something like football, but which could also be maintained and expanded by something like Facebook. In this sense, "social media" is only one medium of revolution among many.

But the medium is also a message. After all, to join a Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" is not the same as joining the group for Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. To "like" Hosni Mubarak would be to endorse a leader—the leader, in fact—but the extremely visibleleaderlessness of "We are all Khalid Said" seems to be exactly the point. In other words, instead of the personality cult by which Presidents-for-life like Ben Ali and Mubarak have ruled for decades, the masses of nameless Cairenes and Tunisians—assembled on Facebook and in the street—represents a kind of anti-personality cult. When everyone is "Khaled Said" (or "Mohamed Bouazizi" in Tunisia), after all, the story being told is not only about that the nation is united, but that it is united by the common experience of having suffered at the hands of the state. In this sense, instead of "leaderless revolutions," perhaps we might think about how Facebook helped facilitate a "revolution of leaderlessness"?

If we pull back from the level of the street, in other words, and think about the story being told by people like Wael Ghonim about the revolution, "Facebook" doesn't just represent a medium of street-level organizing. It's also a media messaging strategy, a way of branding and identifying the revolution for the millions who were watching. And it's always worth remembering that these revolutions didn't only succeed in the streets: Mubarak and Ben Ali both lost power when their own militaries (and world opinion) turned decisively against them, siding instead with the nation united in opposition. But how did "the nation" come to seem so completely united? What happened to the ethnic, sectarian, political, and regional divisions that supposedly made it necessary for a strong man dictator like Mubarak to hold the state together? Remember, this has been the argument made for years (and by Mubarak, quite explicitly): Egyptians are so fundamentally divided that without a strong leader, the state would come apart at the seams, would explode into chaos. A Facebook group like "We are all Khaled Said" not only makes exactly the opposite argument—that Egypt is a nation united by its victimhood at the hands of the state— but it demonstrates, quite visibly, that this is the case.

What social media debunkers like Malcolm Gladwell have always argued is that platforms like Facebook are poorly suited for producing strong consensus on a program of action; for Gladwell, the Civil Rights movement was a social movement that could not have been tweeted. And this may be true. But if the movements to oust Mubarak and Ben Ali had been led by a single charismatic leader, or by a party with a clear platform, it would have been much easier for Mubarak or Ben Ali to divide the opposition, to make it seem not like a nation united in opposition to its leadership, but as a particular party or demagogue striving to supplant him. If the Muslim Brotherhood had taken a clear leadership role, after all, Mubarak would have received much more support from those leery of Islamist terrorism. But if the movement had taken on an exclusively secularist character, substantial portions of the population would have been alienated from it. In other words, what Gladwell flags as a weakness of social media—the difficulty of producing strong commitment to a single idea or plan—might actually be what makes it uniquely valuable. By uniting around the crimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak, the much more difficult politicalquestion of what kind of government was to succeed him could be deferred until later.

Aaron Bady is a PhD student in African Studies in University of California Berkeley's Department of English, and the author of the blog zunguzungu.com.

HOW TO's (1): FREE CALLS WITH SKYPE

ENLLAÇ

POSTED BY BRANNON CULLUM IN COLLABORATE EFFECTIVELY, VOICE OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the internet (known as VOIP). Calls to landline or mobile phones can be made for a fee using Skype’s debit-based user accounts system. You can also use Skype to instant message, transfer files, and video conference.

Skype is very popular, especially for people communicating long distance. By the end of 2009, the service had over 520 million registered users. Some countries block VOIP, especially in places where telecommunications services are owned by the government.

Skype is secure and uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to encrypt communicationbetween users.

The newest release of Skype - version 5.0 - is now available for Windows (it’s currently not available for Mac users). New features include an integration with your Facebook news feed, an improved user interface that makes navigating easier, and a new group video calling feature (previously, video calls only worked between two users at a time). Each group member must have Skype 5.0 for this feature to work.

With the new Facebook integration, users can see their Facebook News Feeds in Skype, post status updates that can be synced with your Skype mood message, call and SMS your Facebook friends on their mobile phones and landlines, and make a free Skype-to-Skype call if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact.

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Step 1.

Point your browser to http://www.skype.com/.

Step 2.

Click on the “Get Skype” tab. You will be directed to the download page. Under “On your computer,” click on the green link to download the software application to your computer. You will be directed to another page; click on the “Download now” button. Make sure you download the software for the operating system you use.

Step 3.

The Skype file should automatically begin downloading. Once the file has finished downloading, double-click on the icon. The first time you start Skype, you will be asked to read and accept our End User License Agreement. Click “Accept” only after you have read and understood these terms.

Step 4.

Next, you’ll need to set up your Skype account. Each Skype user has a uniqueSkype Name. Your name must be at least six characters. Add the Skype Name you want and a password. If the Skype Name is already taken by another user, you will be prompted to enter a new Name. You can also provide an email address if you want. This address will be used in case you forget your password. Follow the directions and then Sign In for the first time.

Step 5.

To add contacts: Click on the Directory tab. Then click the link “See friends who are already on Skype.” If your friends are already on Skype, you’ll see them listed and a way to add them to your contacts.

To add a specific person: Click on the Directory tab, and then go to Find people. Click in the box and type the person’s name, email address, or Skype name, then click Search. Skype will perform a search for that person; if there are search results, you’ll see a list. See if you can find the person you were looking for. If you do, click on the contact name, then click Add contact. This opens a new window that let’s you send a message to that person. Compose a quick message and click OK to send it. If that person accepts your invitation, he or she will show up in your Contacts list.

Tip!

What do the colored icons mean next to a Skype user’s name on your contacts list? Green means the user is online. Yellow means that user is online, but idle. Red means that user is online, but may be busy. Grey means the user is offline.

Step 6.

To make a call: Click on the Contacts button at the top of the Skype application. In your Contacts list, find the person you want to call and and click on their name. In the main window, you will see that person’s details. Click on the green call button to place a call. You should hear ringing.

Tip!

Can’t hear the person on the other end of the call? Click on the Quality icon at the top of the call window.

Step 7.

Want to have video with your call? You must have your webcam plugged in and on. Click on the green video call button to make a video call.

Step 8.

To end your call: Click on the red end call button.

Step 9.

To call someone on a mobile or landline phone, you will have to pay using theSkype Credit debit system. Purchase credit on the site, and then place your calls.

Step 10.

To send an instant message: Go to your Contacts list. Find the person you want to message and click on that user’s name. In the main window, click in the typing box. Type a message and then click the blue send button or press the Return key.

Tip!

Want to chat as a group? To add more users to your chat room, click “+ Add people” to add more people to the conversation.

Were Twitter or BlackBerrys Used to Fan Flames of London's Riots?

By William Lee Adams / London Monday, Aug. 08, 2011

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087337,00.html#ixzz1UTyqAteB

Even after the police arrived, the gasoline bombs kept exploding. On the evening of Aug. 6, two days after Mark Duggan, a black man, had been shot dead by police, his family staged a vigil on the streets of North London's Tottenham neighborhood. Within hours, the peaceful gathering descended into chaos, reportedly after an officer clubbed — or was said to have clubbed — a teenage girl. Mobs of hooded youth threw bicycles at police and slashed the tires of two police cars before setting them on fire. As night fell, a burning double-decker bus lit the way for other hooligans who shattered storefront windows and walked away with stolen cell phones and sneakers.

Before the smell of burning rubber had even dissipated in Tottenham, havoc spread to other parts of the city. The following evening, Sunday, Aug. 7, copycat looters — acting opportunistically rather than out of any desire to avenge Duggan's death — laid siege to the North London boroughs of Enfield, Islington and Waltham Forest. Fifty vandals gathered near Oxford Circus in Central London to damage property. An additional 200 took to the streets of Brixton, in the south of the city, where they raided an electronics store and set a Foot Locker store on fire. By Monday morning, police had arrested more than 160 people and charged 16 with burglary and violent disorder. Three police officers were hospitalized. In the late afternoon, daylight skirmishes erupted in Hackney, East London, reportedly prompted by a police stop-and-search incident earlier in the day.

(See "London Riots: A Blast from the Past or a Glimpse of the Future?")

In an age of social media in which disgruntled youth are frequently more skilled with smart phones than are the adults who police them, London authorities believe handheld technologies may have helped those trying to instigate violence to spread their message. Rather than shouting through a megaphone — as in the infamous 1985 riots on the Broadwater Estate in Tottenham — today's rabble rousers are more likely to organize online and with the aid of their iPhones and BlackBerrys. As the riots unfolded, some used Twitter to encourage violence. "Everyone up and roll to Tottenham f*** the 50 [police]. I hope 1 dead tonight," one man tweeted. Jody McIntyre, who was forcibly removed from his wheelchair by police during London demonstrations last year, asked his 9,000 Twitter followers to spread unrest across the city. "Be inspired by the scenes in #tottenham, and rise up in your neighbourhood. 100 people in every area = the way we can beat the feds."

Although Twitter provides an interesting vantage point from which to watch the riots, it may be premature to suggest, as some British tabloids have, that the service somehow fueled the chaos. Sure, users retweeted an image of a burning police car 100 times during the riot, but it hardly follows automatically that this image inspired anyone to grab a crowbar and start smashing the windows of electronics stores.

Jonathan Akwue, author of the blog Urban Mashup, has suggested that BlackBerry Messenger — the smart phone's instant-messaging service — may have played a more significant role in the mayhem. "People were referring to BBM as a network where they were telling people where they were going," he tells TIME, noting that references to the Tottenham riots on BBM began cropping up two days before violence broke out. "In advance of what took place Saturday, information was shared across the network."

A quick search of "BBM" in Twitter suggests Akwue may be on to something. "There's a recruitment broadcast going around on bbm to gather hoodrats to start a riot," one user tweeted. "Just received 3 BBM Messages detailing a new organised 'Riot' plan complete with 'Loot Rules'. This is the start of something new. #Anarchy" wrote another. Given that BlackBerry messages are sent across private networks, it's difficult to assess the full extent and content of the messages. BlackBerry U.K. put out a statement on Twitter on Aug. 8 at 3:07 p.m.: "We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can."
(See photos of the London riots.)

BlackBerry has targeted Britain's urban youth for years through its long-standing partnership with rapper Jay-Z and through promotional events like a BlackBerry-sponsored hip-hop concert in London on July 22. Akwue says its popularity also stems from the fact that its data packages are "all you can eat," which might explain why 37% of British teens now have a BlackBerry handset. For potential rioters, there's an added perk: the origins of messages on the BlackBerry Messenger network may be more difficult than those on Twitter for authorities to trace.

As the police probe the ways in which technology may have helped spread mayhem around the city, the people of Tottenham and other affected areas are focused on recovery. The morning after the attacks in Walthamstow, local Member of Parliament Stella Creasy surveyed the damage to her community. One local supermarket lost about $100,000 after looters emptied its cash registers, while scores of smaller stores had their windows smashed and their stocks raided. Aware of the conversations taking place on Twitter, Creasy has been reaching out to her constituents through the site and has set up meetings with concerned citizens to dispel various myths. "Pure and simple, people were coming here to steal stuff they could sell," she says. "It's looting. It's not rioting." Creasy knows that messages sent via BlackBerry and Twitter may have played a part. But she doesn't want the hype surrounding social media to overshadow what matters most. "Do I think that social media is responsible? No. That's bonkers," she says. "It's ultimately the people who were doing it that are responsible. That's what we need to get to grips with."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087337,00.html#ixzz1UTxiRKmS

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Life in the vanguard of the new Twitter proletariat.

BY BLAKE HOUNSHELL

JULY/AUGUST 2011

It was late at night on Tahrir Square. Egypt's embattled leader, Hosni Mubarak, had just given his bizarre speech vowing not to step down, and I followed an enraged crowd of several hundred protesters over to the state television building along the Nile, where they were gathering to denounce the official media for defaming the revolution. Up front, near the entrance, a fired-up speaker called out from a bullhorn: "Down with Anas al-Fiqi, the lying minister of information! Down with the corrupt regime!" To one side stood a different category of rebel entirely: scruffy guys and gals staring down at their cell phones. They were tweeting.

For days, overzealous headline writers and breathless TV anchors had been gushing about the "Twitter revolution" sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. The Daily Show mocked the hype, trotting out Samantha Bee as its "senior tweet analyst." I also thought it was ridiculous, or at least wildly overblown; anyone who'd seen numbers on Egypt's Internet and smartphone penetration rates could tell you that much. ("The online activist community is tiny," one protest leader reminded me.)

But it was there, in front of the TV building, that it hit me all over again: These weren't revolutionaries so much as they were reporters, translating their struggle for the rest of us.

Since January, I've also been tweeting about the Arab revolutions, pretty much day and night. Does that make me a revolutionary? Not at all. Despite all the sweeping talk about it, Twitter isn't the maker of political revolutions, but the vanguard of a media one. In just a short time, it has become a real-time information stream for international-news junkies. So forget all the extravagant other claims for it. Isn't that one revolutionary enough?

Already, Twitter has become an essential -- no, the essential -- tool for following and understanding the momentous changes sweeping the Arab region. It's surprisingly smart and fast -- if sometimes a little too quick on the draw -- and human where other sources feel impersonal. "I think of it as a giant speech bubble for what's happening in the world," says Riyaad Minty, head of social media at Al Jazeera.

If there is indeed such a thing as a Twitter revolution in the Middle East, it's the way the tool is transforming how the outside world looks at the region. Deen Freelon, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, assembled a massive database of nearly 6 million tweets on the protests in seven Arab countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. What he found when he filtered the data by location was that Twitter was overwhelmingly a platform for outsiders to discuss big breaking news, be it Mubarak's resignation, one of Muammar al-Qaddafi's insane rants, or the start of a major protest. "It is only when outside attention dies down that local and regional voices even begin to achieve parity with their international peers," he wrote. In other words, Twitter rides the same news wave as everything else, only more intimately.

I must admit to being an initial skeptic of Twitter -- it seemed to be one of those faddish tools like Foursquare or Flattr, just another of those other ubiquitous social media sites that all seem to end in "r." Its advocates tended to be the sort of people who mostly went around the world live-tweeting from conferences about the virtues of Twitter. In the first year or so after I joined, I used it very little.

But five years since its founding, Twitter has hit a critical mass of activists and casual observers on the ground, journalists in the office and in the field, and analysts behind their desks. Twitter today is always buzzing with news, ideas, rumors, speculation, and juicy gossip. (It was Twitter itself that understood this shift from vanity tool to news platform earlier than anyone else, when in November 2009 it changed its prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" One of the fastest ways to tell whether someone's not worth following is if they're still answering that first question.)

Facebook and YouTube are obviously essential parts of this new news ecosystem, but mainly as platforms for primary sources from "citizen journalists" -- a fancy name for people with cell-phone cameras. Unsurprisingly, the videos and firsthand accounts they upload are often hard for outsiders to navigate and verify. Twitter is where the good stuff bubbles to the surface. "You can't really hunt through Facebook pages to always know what's going on," says Zeynep Tufekci, who studies social media at the University of Maryland. Much of the online organizing and mobilization that went into the Arab revolutions happened on Facebook, usually in Arabic, she notes, but Twitter is where activists went to get their message out to the world, more often in English. "I see Twitter as a broadcast platform," adds Minty, "as you would a satellite provider or cable provider."

But it also has the power to tap into a collective consciousness, as when Manal al-Sherif, a 32-year-old single mother, was arrested for defying the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia. News of her arrest broke first on Twitter, and Arabs from all over the world chimed in. Ironically, that's when following a hashtag -- Twitter-speak for a community-driven topic tag like #FreeManal or #jan25 -- becomes least useful: the more users flood a given story, the more bad information, or repetitive tweets by less sophisticated users, can drown out the good. Fake pictures of a dead Osama bin Laden, for instance, circulated for days after they had already been debunked.

I'm often asked: Is Twitter, or social media in general, a reliable source of information on these revolutions? That's a lot like asking: Is television trustworthy? Are newspapers any good? It's just a tool -- it depends on how you use it. Networks like Al Jazeera and the BBC have developed rigorous checklists for vetting information they get from online sources, from contacting eyewitnesses over Skype to authenticating regional dialects and checking new images and videos against verified geocoded ones. But in the end, like traditional news outlets, social networks rely on trust -- we're more likely to believe information we get from someone whose information has been solid in the past. In any case, most of us don't want to spend our time hunting through Facebook pages, assessing the veracity of videos of people getting slaughtered or beaten by the police or pro-regime thugs. That's what "old media" is for -- now more than ever.

Blake Hounshell is managing editor of Foreign Policy. Time magazine selected his feed, @blakehounshell, as one of its top 140 best of Twitter.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/20/the_revolution_will_be_tweeted?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full