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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Digital Media Professor Ian Bogost wrote "So Much for the Decentralized Internet: A recent Twitter hack probably didn’t scare you. Here’s why it should" for The Atlantic, July 26, 2020.
Excerpt:
The hack makes Twitter look incompetent, and at a bad time; its advertising revenues are falling, and the company is scrambling to respond. It also underscores the impoverished cybersecurity at tech firms, which provide some employees with nearly limitless control over user accounts and data—as many as 1,000 Twitter employees reportedly had access to the internal tools that were compromised. But the stakes are higher, too. Though much smaller than Facebook in terms of its sheer number of users, Twitter is where real-time information gets published online, especially on news and politics, from a small number of power users. That makes the service’s vulnerability particularly worrisome; it has become an infrastructure for live information.