Morning Xtra: iPhone 3G S Sells Over a Million, Twitter as a Weapon?
Iranian Cyber Army Powered by Twitter
The New York Times reports that Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters to perpetrate Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on Iranian government and political Web sites. Twitter has been instrumental in Iran's escalating revolt over election results, but this new tactic is decidedly aggressive, enlisting users to participate in a sort of cyber-war against the incumbent government. The idea of a worldwide, civilian cyber-army, controlled only by its level of indignation, is startling and more than a bit scary. [From: NY Times]
iPhone Sales Surprisingly High
Apple sold more than one million units of its new iPhone 3G S over the weekend, according to a company press release. The announcement comes after Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated a much more conservative 750,000 units. This is a new iPhone we're talking about here; we all know the thing's prone to fly off the shelves, no matter what stats and predictions say. [From: TUAW]
FTC Now to Monitor Blog Claims
Bloggers, it's finally time to unite under a common ethical umbrella -- because the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is gonna bust you good if you don't. New guidelines will soon bring federal oversight to the blogosphere, according to the AP. That means those lavish, paid trips and expensive freebies -- all trappings of the blogger lifestyle, apparently -- will now be eyed by the FTC. Finally, some impartiality comes to the Web. Yeah, sure. [From: AP, via Newsvine]
The Best of What's to Come in the New Firefox 3.5
The beta version of Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 has been floating around for a few months, but the newest version of the popular open-source browser will soon be making its full-on public debut. You can keep your nail-biting anticipation of that yet-to-be-announced release day in check by scoping out Lifehacker's handy overview of the new Web browser's top 10 fresh features. [From: Lifehacker]
Conan's Twitter Tracker Returns to Bust Tweets, Split Sides
The best thing on television this summer has to be Conan O'Brien's 'Tonight Show' Twitter Tracker segments. Check out the latest installment, here, wherein many animated birds are blasted into Twitter oblivion. Trust us, it's worth your time. [From: NBC]
Tweets From Iran Continue to Be Reposted
Speaking of Twitter use in Iran, media blogger Simon Owens tracked the lifespan of tweets supposedly coming out of Iran and found that, on average, they were re-tweeted about 58 times. This means that people reading the Iran posts on Twitter re-posted them on their own Twitter accounts. A lot. Check out the data, and how he came to that number, at Owens' site, here. [From: Bloggasm]
Google Cuts Back Chinese Porn Results
Who would've thought China would be as prudish as a nun on a Sunday? The country has voiced a number of complaints over Google's search application enabling easy access to porn, so Google is giving in and taking steps to remove the lascivious content from search results in China. We thought communism was all free-love all the time. Even if not, couldn't pornography act as a kind of population control? [From: BBC]
