Google vs. Egyptian Censorship
Google promised long ago that it would never "be evil," something that angry progressive bloggers and privacy advocates have frequently challenged. So when Google is distinctly non-evil, perhaps we should give credit where credit is due. From the official Google blog:
Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.
We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
It is unclear how well the technology works (if it's anything like the transcription service from Google Voice, probably not very well), but points for a very clever idea.
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Lifetechnology will find a way -
It found a way for you to post your drivel on the internet, rectal, and for that we all curse it. Well, we would curse it, but since no one goes to your blog, who cares?
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4,879
members of the whore club. Epi why won't you be my whore? -
I'm pretty sure you know the answer to that question. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the answer to that question.
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Wait. Who is stalking who in this relationship?
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You are, anonypussy. You are.
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Why are you stalking Rather? Messy breakup?
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HAHA I see what you did there. You implied that Episiarch used to be in a relationship with Rectal. And then they broke up, hence "Messy breakup." Funny.
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great job wasting this thread and credibility of comments on 'reason.com' whatever the fsk that is
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drink
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Episiarch started it. He's mean. I'm telling Nick.
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Good on Google, at least for trying.
I'm looking forward to the announcement that Amazon is cutting off deliveries and access to the Egyptian people, but will be expediting deliveries of tear gas and flamethrowers to the cops.
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How do you say "I am sofa king we Todd did" in Arabic?
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Mohammed?
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Good for them.
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Page and Brin are fine freedom seeking young classic liberals...
And fuck you again - SoCons!
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Well, there is that whole kissing China's ass business that they did for so long.
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There are two choices for doing business in China (and every other country):
1. Obey local laws.
2. Don't do business in that country.There is no third choice. Egypt internet and mobile phone companies are finding this out right now, for instance.
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You could hire hit men to whack members of the Chinese government.
Google has plenty of dough.
My favorite is when restaurants pull the whole "we hate carding people" bit. Really? What has your establishment done to get those laws off the books?
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So when tweets originating in Egypt go silent tomorrow, we'll know Mubarak's shut down the cell phone services.
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I will have to look into some anti-trust litigation against google, clearly they are cornering the market on this whole voice-to-tweet technology.
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Somebody tweet me outta here!
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Vmail via speak2tweet from Cairo: "Bring it on", "be with us"
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg......xILzlLdz09 -
Who needs mobile phones? Ham radio & APRS FTW.
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I like it, but the bar for "a very clever idea" has really dropped.
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Google promised long ago that it would never "be evil," something that angry progressive bloggers and privacy advocates have frequently challenged.
Angry progressive bloggers, privacy advocates and Drudge. He seems to really dislike Google.
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what are the chances Google is already censoring the converted tweets?...
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They aren't actually attempting to convert the voice messages to text. They are just posting links to the sound clips.
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It is unclear how well the technology works...
If it doesn't point to an admin login page, I'd say it's one step in the right direction.