VIPs
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Twitter has a secret system for dealing with attacks on high-profile accounts
Twitter has its own method for protecting high profile accounts: Project Guardian.
Oversight Board slams Facebook’s lack of transparency in VIP moderation
Facebook's Oversight Board has issued a strong rebuke to the company in a new report, claiming it was not "fully forthcoming" about its XCheck VIP program.
Wikipedia to store famous voices for posterity, starting with Stephen Fry's
Virtually everyone in the UK (and many an Engadget reader) is familiar with Stephen Fry's iconic voice, but will anyone remember it in, say, 50 years? He certainly hopes so, but just to be sure, Wikipedia has recorded it for posterity and pegged it to his bio page. The plan is to have a large number of well-known types do the same so that readers will know "what (those folks) sound like and how they pronounce their names." Though there are only a handful of contributors so far (including US astronaut Charlie Duke and British peer Baron Knight of Weymouth), the effort will be soon be bulked up by some "500 to 1,000" celebrity clips thanks to the BBC. As tat for its tit, the Beeb hopes to one day use the Wikipedia archive to power a real-time, open-source voice-recognition engine -- and perhaps add some VIP pizzazz to its own collection of voices.
Mountain Lion 101: Mail VIPs
This Mountain Lion 101 feature is a quickie -- Apple's Mail app now has a new feature called VIPs that gives you one-click access to emails from those very important people in your life. Emails from VIPs have a star next to the sender's name, and a mailbox for each VIP is added to the Favorites bar. With a click on the VIPs tag in the toolbar, a popup showing "All VIPs" and the names of individual VIPs is displayed. You can have up to 100 VIPs identified, but in my opinion, if everybody's a VIP, then nobody's a VIP. I'm using the feature to highlight emails from my boss (Mrs. Sande) and my business partner (Erica Sadun). To make that special someone in your life a VIP, you just move your pointer to the left of the sender's name in a message header. A star appears, and clicking the star makes the person a VIP. You can also click the person's name in a message, then select "Add to VIPs" from the pop-up menu that appears (below). If that person becomes persona non grata in your life, removing them from the VIP list is quite simple. Just click the star again, or you can use the "Remove from VIPs" item that will appear in the pop-up menu seen above. For VIPs that have several email addresses in your Contacts list, messages from any of those email addresses appear in their VIP mailbox. If you're using iCloud Contacts, your VIPs appear on any other Mountain Lion-equipped Mac that is signed into the same iCloud account. To get a special notification in Notification Center when email arrives from my VIPs, I set up a rule in Mail Preferences: You could also theoretically add a special sound to the notification with a rule, or kick off an AppleScript to Tweet you. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. As I mentioned, this isn't an earthshaking addition to Mountain Lion, but it is a surprisingly useful feature that can help you pay more attention to email from special people. If it can help me take notice of one more "honey-do" from my wife and keep me out of the doghouse for at least one day, then the Mail VIP feature is worth the $19.99 Mountain Lion upgrade cost.
The Daily Grind: Do you follow industry personalities?
Every field has celebrities of one stripe or another, and MMOs are no different. Some of them start off as programmers, some start as producers, and some start as commentators that later move into an official capacity. Some have a track record of success, some have a big success and a big failure, and some are considered to be solely at fault for anything that goes wrong in a game. But no matter what the background, they're personalities of note, whose words start having an impact on people even when they're not working on a big project. People listen to them, quote them, and take note of their various projects. Especially in light of recent personality-based developments, it's certainly worth asking how much people really follow the paths of programmers outside of playing their games. The MMO industry doesn't follow Richard Garriott like mainstream media follows Brad Pitt, but he still finds ways to be seen even when he's between major projects. Do you follow specific people in the gaming industry, either out of liking what they've done or wanting to avoid what they're working on? Or does the practice annoy you, and all you want to focus on is the actual games they produce?
