Tag: CONTROVERSY

Users of popular Twitter clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd found that they couldn't log into Twitter today, and a post in the Twitter help center explains why: UberTwitter and Twidroyd have been suspended for violating Twitter's policies. TechCrunch followed up with Twitter on the suspensions and discovered that the suspended apps were violating Twitter's privacy, trademark and monetization rules. ...

There's a minor blogstorm brewing around the relationship between Internet calling powerhouse Skype and mobile chat service Fring. The two companies have been attacking each other on their blogs today over missing Skype functionality in Fring. They both agree that Fring's iPhone 4 two-way video calling feature, which used Skype, no longer works. Here's where it gets messy, though. Fring says ...

Digg users recently noticed some interesting new behavior related to Digg's shortURL service, the Diggbar: instead of shortlinks going directly to their destinations, logged-out users who click them will now land on the corresponding Digg.com page. Sure, that's a lot of new traffic for Digg, but it's problematic because the change was never announced, and users who generate Digg links might not ...

Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published ...

The last time we talked about the uproar over Bing's live video previews including some explicit material, Lee was reporting that Microsoft had changed the default safesearch features to block porn. A week later, they've taken one further step to reassure concerned customers that they're not going to accidentally see XXX videos. Potentially explicit videos and images are now served from their ...

After about a day with "#fixreplies" as a trending topic, Twitter has responded to the very vocal crowd of users who disliked their new @reply settings. Things aren't exactly getting changed back, but there will be a temporary fix, and then an improved version of the old @reply options on the way. Here's what Twitter had to say about it: First, we're making a change such that any updates ...

When the Twitter team was first figuring out how people liked to use the site's public reply feature, it introduced a set of three options for seeing @replies: you could either see replies to and from people you follow, from people you follow to anyone else (regardless of following), or no @replies at all. It was a decent system, and it gave people a choice about how much noise they wanted ...

After I posted about the Baby Shaker iPhone app controversy, we got an email from the developers of a fart-soundboard app called Crudebox, telling their story of rejection from the App Store. Fart apps were the early targets of public outcry when Apple first started vetting software for its app store. They're obscene! Why do some get in, while others are rejected? When Apple rejected Crudebox ...

Apple's policy of approving every iPhone app that goes into its store has led to delays for developers and plenty of controversy whenever a questionable app makes it through the process. The latest stir was over a "baby-shaker" app that was available in the store from Monday to Wednesday of this week before Apple pulled it, according to The Examiner. Apparently, the object of the game was to see ...