Category Archives: resources

Combat censorship with ‘PirateBrowser’

The Pirate Bay recently celebrated their 10th birthday this past Saturday by announcing a new gift for internet users — PirateBrowser:

“a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible.”

browser
screenshot via the PirateBrowser

PirateBrowser is downloadable via bitTorrent and is available to anyone with access to the world wide web. It was created to allow citizens from countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland to browse the internet unopposed. While it was created to “circumvent censorship,” and I can envision the tremendously positive affect it will have on internet freedom, the Debbie Downer in me is thinking about potential implications for terrorists and child pornographers. Not to mention having to worry that I won’t be able to block certain stuff from my daughter if/when she finds out about this. Ack! (P.S. — No, I don’t let my second grader browse the internet unsupervised; and yes, she does have a newer iPad than me. Le Sigh.)

What does it mean?

According to their FAQ, PirateBrowser doesn’t allow users to surf the net anonymously, but it does link to a service that does. Am I taking the whole think globally, act locally blog tagline a bit too far?? What do you think of Pirate Bay’s latest gift to their users?

screenshot of pirate bay

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Social Media App Spotlight: Selective Tweet Status

Hello Commons Community,

With the recent roll out of Google+ this may be a moot point, but I just wanted to share a new (to me) discovery for those who use Twitter and Facebook. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a lot of folks ending their tweets with the hashtag: #fb. I assumed it was some type of reference to Facebook, perhaps notifying their twitter followers that they also had a Facebook account. I admit, I thought it a little strange that there never was a link to the person’s Facebook profile. Anyway, I decided that today was the day that I would find out exactly what the #fb hashtag was all about.

After a little searching around on the interwebs I found out that the hashtag is linked to a Facebook application called Selective Tweet Status that enables you to post a Twitter status update to your Facebook profile by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of your tweet. I thought this was a nice alternative to using a time-saving social media dashboard like Hootsuite or Seesmic or having to log into both Facebook and Twitter in order to post the same thing.

If you’re interested in using this app here’s how you do it:

  1. Log into Facebook.
  2. Enter “Selective Tweets” into the Facebook search bar and select the application.
  3. On the application page, enter your Twitter username and select Save.
  4. Allow the application to access your basic information and post to your wall.
  5. You’re golden!

Now, whenever you want to post to both Twitter and Facebook, all you need to do is include the #fb hashtag at the end of your tweet.

If you have a helpful interweb tool that you want others to know about please feel free to post about it in the comments below or add it to the Kitchen Sink Utilities wiki page.

The post Social Media App Spotlight: Selective Tweet Status appeared first on Commons Connect.

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