Damn That Ingrate Sarah Palin For Not Treating The Press With The Courtesy And Thoughtfulness With Which They Have Always Treated Her

Silly. Even Kristen Powers, who is all about Team Hack, can see Palin owes them nothing.

In an additional nugget, Howard Dean says Palin could beat Obama.

This is where we're about to see some serious claim-reversing. Previously, the claim has been, via Limbaugh, "They will tell you who they fear," meaning that when they mock Palin and denigrate her chances, that actually means her chances are quite good, and they're trying to trick us into thinking otherwise.

Well now Dean says Palin can beat Obama. Is he still trying to trick us, or is he now on the level, and how do we tell, using this "they will tell you who they fear" opposite-talk analysis?

I should note this big round-up by Allah, on the nation's economy. One of these I've already linked prominently -- the economic indicators "falling off a cliff" -- and several more I had intended to link, but got lost in WeinerVille. It's a Quotes of the Day all worth reading.

If the economy is perfectly dismal in 2012 -- a scenario which is not yet definite but which is becoming more and more likely -- then I have to confess, yes, as I've said before, in that situation, almost anyone could beat Obama.

But, still, along with Dean, I'd say Palin still isn't my "first choice," as, given current perceptions, she'd be one of the few who would keep it competitive in that scenario, and could possibly lose.

I'm a-gettin' a little Weinered out, and I don't really want to post on it, so I will just secretly snuggle in an update here: The Hack3rz What Hack3d also @Hacked! his 3rd-party Tweetdeck program, just to put the frame on him even harder.

Added: [rdbrewer]

Since Ace is Weinered-out, and since our motto is "All the Weiner That's Fit to Print" . . .

It turns out that all Twitter feeds from members of Congress are recorded in real time by an organization called TweetCongress.org. The Library of Congress does this as well, but it doesn't make the information generally available.

TweetDeck is an application that helps organize and display tweets. Tweetdeck requires a password. When you tweet through TweetDeck and the tweet is recorded by TweetCongress, it puts a TweetDeck stamp on the tweets. This is a problem for Weiner.

Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at security software company SophosLabs, said the TweetDeck stamp “does make it more plausible that it did come from him.”

. . .

“The complexity goes up,” said Chris McCroskey, the Texas software developer who founded TweetCongress.org. The site, which has advocated the increased participation from congressmen on Twitter, aggregates and archives all the feeds of the 112th Congress from Twitter’s application programming interface. It is the only known database to do this other than the Library of Congress, which does not publicly share its data.

Robert Stribley, a senior information architect at Razorfish, a social media strategy agency, reasoned that if Weiner used the TweetDeck app, “it would probably make it less likely his account was hacked.”

So while the TweetDeck stamp doesn't completely resolve the issue, it makes Weiner's story even less plausible. A hacker would have had to know Weiner's Twitter password and his TweetDeck password to set-up a matching TweetDeck account to make it appear the tweets originated from there. Add to that the fact that this couldn't be done while Weiner was online. Add also the fact that the hacker didn't change either password.

But the founder of TweetCongress does reveal a secret method of authenticating the tweet in question, something that would resolve the entire issue completely. The hidden knowledge is that Weiner could call the police.*

“Here’s the thing that solves it all,” said McCroskey, “for him to call for a criminal investigation. All they have to do is look at his TweetDeck and see if it came from there, see what IP address [it had]. The local police department or Capitol Police could probably figure this out in 15 minutes.”

*Actually, Ace may have been hammering this point all along.

posted by Ace at 11:14 AM

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