Woman Tweets Her Abortion

'Appeasement' measure dumps 5-year shut-down

(NEWSER) - Syrian authorities are lifting a 5-year-old ban on Facebook, YouTube and other Internet sites in a move seen as an attempt to appease the public and stave off the kind unrest rocking Egypt. The country's state-owned ISP is in the process of unblocking sites including Twitter and Blogspot, although Wikipedia is still blocked, the Next Web reports. More»

(NEWSER) - Italy has legalized the abortion drug RU-486, drawing the ire of the Vatican, which threatened to excommunicate doctors who prescribe the medication and women who take it. A church official said using the pill is "a sin in a moral and juridical sense," but a politician who is also a gynecologist hailed yesterday's decision, telling ANSA, "It's above all a victory for Italian women, who from today have more choice." More»

Olympics protected by stringent branding laws

(NEWSER) - The Olympics are headed to London this summer, but visitors and athletes alike better beware of what they post online, reports Mashable . London has passed legislation ahead of the games to penalize people who violate the games' official branding. Legally speaking, this would include:

• Athletes posting media of themselves with products that are not Olympics sponsors
• Fans uploading their own photos or video of the games
• Businesses attracting customers with official Olympics nomenclature, like "2012 Games"

We only actually like 36% of what shows up in our stream: study

(NEWSER) - A new study in the Harvard Business Review confirms what you probably already know if you've spent any time on Twitter: Just 36% of tweets are actually worth reading. Another 39% are "just OK," and a full quarter aren't worth your time. That's according to 1,443 users, who evaluated 43,738 tweets. The tweets that scored the best were funny or exciting thoughts, tweets that shared information or asked questions, and even self-promoting tweets—particularly those that included links. More»

Maryland may ban practice

(NEWSER) - Some employers and colleges have found an ingenious way around Facebook's pesky privacy settings: Simply demand that applicants or students friend you, give you a tour of their account, or even divulge their usernames and passwords. MSNBC reports on a number of places instituting the troubling practices:

• At Maryland's Department of Corrections, job applicants are asked to log in to their account and allow an interviewer to watch as they click through their photos and posts. The Department of Corrections used to ask for username and password outright, but stopped after an ACLU complaint last year.
• Colleges are requiring student athletes to "friend" a coach or school official so that their Facebook posts can be monitored. If they refuse, they don't play. "Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings," reads the University of North Carolina handbook.
• Though social media monitoring seems to take place mostly with student athletes, non-athlete college applicants have reported to one lawyer that they were asked for their login information during interviews.