Hasta La Gadget!

India’s in the midst of a security crisis and has asked Twitter to curtail “inflammatory messages” or prepare to face legal action, according to the Times of India. The country has shut down numerous websites, while Google and Facebook have already pledged to remove any threatening content. Officials reportedly said that Twitter “failed to cooperate” in efforts to curb messages or help the government find their source, despite an earlier pledge by the social network to censor content when a country demanded it. Indian ISPs have started blocking the service’s accounts, according to TNW, but not Twitter itself, as the site first reported. In any case, the country still has a long way to go to catch the censorship leader.

Filed under: Internet

Twitter warned by Indian government to kibosh inflammatory tweets originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Aug 2012 07:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The app devs over at Sky Sports are having a busy year, and after improving their iPad offering for the F1 season, they’re back with a “second screen” update for football (soccer) fans. Just in time for the start of the UK Premier League season, the new Football Match Centre adds a content bar alongside your chosen stream showing team and player info, in-depth stats of the match in progress and a hand-picked Twitter feed for related musings. You might think the devs deserve a break, but sadly there’s no time — next on the agenda is a similar update for the Champions League tournament, then they’re bringing the second screen to golf fans before the Ryder Cup starts next month.

Continue reading Football fans score additional content in Sky Sports for iPad update

Filed under: Software

Football fans score additional content in Sky Sports for iPad update originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days.

We see a lot of crazy stories here at Engadget, especially when we spend our week poking around in dark and scary corners of the internet specifically in search of them, just so you don’t have to. We consider it a service almost. One that we’re delighted to provide, we must add. When else would we be able to share such delights as an astronaut triathlete, soft, color-changing robots and a recent response to a thirty-year-old alien broadcast? Exactly. This is alt-week.

Continue reading Alt-week 8.18.12: Graphene sponges, zero-g athletics and tweets in space

Filed under: Science

Alt-week 8.18.12: Graphene sponges, zero-g athletics and tweets in space originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Aug 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a classic case of forgetting where you came from, Twitter is suffocating third party Twitter apps until they die so the only Twitter people know is from Twitter, Inc. itself. This sucks for many reasons—mostly because Twitter apps suck compared to third party apps—but also because of this: the Twitter we know today wouldn’t exist without the help of the third party apps Twitter is trying to kill. For example, did you know tweet wasn’t a word created by Twitter but by third parties? More »

Twitter has gone official with changes that will land in version 1.1 of its API. Some of the changes will help twitter to reduce the number of spam accounts and bots that use the service, but the changes will also restrict third-party applications. Specifically, the changes to the new version of the API will place a limit on how often third-party twitter clients and other services are able to access information on twitter.

One key feature of the updated API that will affect third-party applications is the migration of twitter’s former Display Guidelines to Display Requirements. The change will enforce some design requirements on how third party applications present tweets. These changes will make it harder for third-party twitter applications to set themselves apart from each other and from the official twitter service.

That seems like a move by twitter to help push some users back to its official application. If all third-party apps look pretty much the same as the official twitter app, some people may opt to use the official app. One thing that carries over from previous versions of the twitter API is the request twitter places on developers to not mimic or reproduce the twitter consumer client experience. Twitter offered up two examples of applications that mimic its own application to closely including Tweetbot and Echofon.

One of the biggest changes is that twitter now requires all third-party applications that are preinstalled on a device to be certified. It’s unclear exactly what the certification process will entail at this point. All we do know is that any developers who have their app preinstalled on a device without having it certified could have their application keep revoked leaving their application useless. Another major change is that any application or service that accesses twitter data now has to authenticate via OAuth. This particular change will be enforced for all applications starting in March 2013.

[via ArsTechnica]

Twitter API update places limits on third-party applications is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
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