If this had happened 5 years ago, who knows what would have happened. Fouad Mourtada, a young Moroccan posts a joke profile of the King's brother, Moulay Rachid, on Facebook and a few days later the profile is removed from the site. Then, two weeks later, two officials show up at his home, blinfold him, and take him to a secret location where he is interrogated, beaten, and spat upon.
Two weeks after his arrest, on February 22, Fouad was sentenced to 3 years in prison and a fine of over $1000 for "identity fraud of an electronic document."
On February 5, computer engineer Fouad Mourtada was blindfolded and taken from his house in Casablanca, Morocco. He was taken to a police station where he was harassed and spat on by local police. Two weeks later, on February 22, he was sentence to three years in prison and a $1350 fine. His crime was creating a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rachid, the King's brother on Facebook.
As Laila Lalami comments on The Nation's web site, "there are fake profiles on Facebook for everyone from Brad Pitt to Mother Teresa, from King Abdullah to Osama bin Laden.
We were just recently alerted here at Mashable that January 30th, just a few scant days away, is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Cory Geller sent us to a blog post by Simon Owens describing his growing disgust with the constant friend requests from the fembots and the the anonymous birthday announcements, not to mention spam wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in banner ads.
He decided to catalog the many ways in which MySpace had failed him:
"Oh, my darling, I'm so glad that you're finally here."
Well, my new power cord arrived on Wednesday evening and.... it worked! So, here I am, plugged in, battery happily charging, tapping on my laptop, enjoying my laplife. As promised, I did use my week without a laptop to reflect on the role of laptop in my life. Here is what I can up with. Does your laptop mean the same things to you?
1. A laptop is just an entry point to the almighty network
Ever since we started going online en masse in the late 90's, computers have
My friend Angelo Embuldeniya just told me that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident, is on Facebook. Is it possibly a fraud? Sure. (I friended her anyway.) I guess my question is, assuming this is legitimate, how will she use Facebook? To protect herself by raising awareness of her situation? To share information about her cause? To organize actions? To recruit members to an organization? These are all uses of Facebook. Will she take advantage of them?
Columnist Thomas Friedman is worried about the politics of the Internet generation. He wrote the following in the New York Times on Wednesday in an editorial entitled "Generation Q."
I just spent the past week visiting several colleges...and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed....
I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad....
But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good,
I just found this great post by Berkman Center fellow Gene Koo. He's talking about how Facebook has not yet become a site for meaningful grassroots citizen engagement. One of his insights is that current Facebook groups (like I Went To Private School...Now Pump My Gas!) are more like status-proclaiming tatoos than civic organizations. There's a lot of other good stuff in the post too. Here 'tis:
Networking is the lifeblood of all politics. So why are the Obama and other political applications for Facebook so terribly disappointing? At best, they function like bumper stickers for profile pages,
It's not even 2008 yet and already I'm disillusioned with every presidential candidate. But, thanks to Facebook, I've found a new candidate I can get behind: Nobody.
According to the Nobody for President group page on Facebook, Nobody will end the war in Iraq, Nobody will clean up George Bush's mess, Nobody will fix the education system, Nobody will make us energy independent, Nobody will protect us against terrorist threats, and Nobody will restore ethical behavior to the White House. Sounds like a great candidate. I'm in.
I wasn't always this cynical. In 1999 and 2000 I actually spent several
I just found this great post by 