I haven’t written much here about my passion for using Twitter with the Track feature, mostly because we talk about it on NewsGang Live all the time.

Track opens the conversation in real time on important topics, from the earthquake in China, to the election, to the recent iPhone release. It permits discovery of new voices with fresh thoughts and releases us from the echo chamber.

For about six weeks, Twitter has disabled their track feature, leaving us to use Summize for tracking important topics. It works reasonably well, but as a standalone site couldn’t be integrated into much other than a cobbled together GTalk application called Twitterspy.

With the acquisition of Summize by Twitter, I hope it can be integrated into the API, and the gateway to IM services opened again with Track enabled. That would be the logical next step — let’s see if they go there. At the very least, they should be able to integrate it into the API so that Twhirl and other standalone applications can access it.

There is an online petition set up for Julie Amero, appealing to the state and local prosecutors to withdraw all charges against her and end the nightmare that has been the last 3 1/2 years of her life. Click here to sign it.

Even though it’s been 13 months since Judge Strackbein set aside the verdict against her, it’s not enough. She should be completely exonerated of the charges, and the only way for that to happen is for the prosecutors to formally drop all charges against her. If they don’t go on record with this, Julie will suffer the way she did earlier this year, when she was fired by her employer after someone left a copy of Rick Green’s New Year’s editorial on her supervisor’s desk, and others pressured her employer to fire the woman who “showed porn to kids”.

This is the stigma she lives with, despite concrete, irrefutable evidence that she was the victim of sloppy network maintenance and multiple malware infestations. Please, sign the petition, and tell these prosecutors the time has come to give Julie Amero the justice she deserves.

It’s been a full year since I’ve written any updates about Julie Amero. Actually, more than a full year. This is because I and many others, including her legal and forensic team, have been waiting to see whether the charges would be dropped after the judge set aside the verdict and ordered a new trial.

Sometimes netroots activism can create a negative environment for the ones with power to do the right thing. Because the goal is for Julie Amero to be free of this millstone around her neck, I’ve fallen silent and waited.

And waited.

I’m still waiting. It has been 13 months since Julie’s verdict was set aside. There is no doubt whatsoever that Julie Amero is as innocent as Michael Fiola was. There is no doubt that the viruses, trojans and malware that were on the computer in the classroom where she was substituting that day were the cause of the popup pornography displayed on that computer.

There is no question that a pregnant substitute teacher who loved kids was absolutely not sitting back in a classroom surfing pornography.

Even the judge agreed that there also was no question that the evidence presented in court was so flawed that Julie Amero received an unfair trial. The judge was so convinced that she set aside a jury verdict, something that rarely occurs in our justice system. Kudos to Judge Strackbein for her wisdom.

Why isn’t Julie free? She isn’t free because prosecutors have not made a decision on whether to retry her or drop all charges. Rick Green of the Hartford Courant tried to get status updates, only to be met with a solid brick wall.

I tried to find out what plans the state has for this poor woman, who was charged, arrested and convicted on false information, shoddy police work and an unwillingness by anyone — from Norwich school officials to state prosecutors — to admit that they had made a mistake.

Michael Regan, state’s attorney for the New London district, reminded me that there is a backlog of serious criminal cases in southeastern Connecticut. The Amero case “is not a high priority for us. We have other cases down here that are much more important.”

Well, maybe it’s not a high priority for Michael Regan, but it sure as hell is for Julie Amero. Since Judge Strackbein’s decision, Julie has lost a job, been hospitalized for stress, and let’s not forget that she lost her baby during the trial, too.

She was arrested 3 1/2 years ago. She was finally tried in January, 2007. That verdict was set aside because of “erroneous testimony” and “false information”.

Yet, her name still appears on the active trial list, so for now, Julie Amero is facing a new trial on charges that should not have been brought in the first place.

I’ll just end with this quote from today’s editorial from the Hartford Courant:

By burying her case in paperwork, delaying decisions and denying her justice, prosecutors are treating Ms. Amero almost as if she were a Guantanamo detainee. It’s past time to end the agony.

Even Guantanamo detainees are finally getting their day in court, or being freed after the court has determined they’ve been unlawfully detained. When will Julie’s prosecutor decide that she, too, deserves liberty and justice? She is an American citizen, an INNOCENT American citizen, who lives her life each day wondering when she is included in the “ALL” that ends our Pledge of Allegiance.

…with liberty, and justice for all.

Warning: It does have language that’s NSFW at the end. Still, it’s 2 minutes well-spent on how to have a productive online discussion:

Unlike Julie Amero, Michael Fiola won’t face criminal charges for possession of child pornography. But that doesn’t make his case any less egregious, or his life any different today. It doesn’t give him his job back, restore his reputation, or the harm that’s been done as a result of yet another ignorant leap to the wrong conclusion.

Michael Fiola worked for the Department of Industrial Accidents in Massachusetts. On November 20, 2006, Fiola was issued a laptop for use in connection with his field work as an accident investigator. In March, 2007 the laptop was seized and Fiola was subsequently fired from his job for possession of child pornography. The case was also referred to the DA for prosecution.

This time, however, the laptop was examined by a qualified forensic examiner, Tami Loehrs. Her examination and analysis of the laptop concluded the following:

1. The laptop was infected with at least 5 serious viruses and Trojans that caused the computer to be compromised for at least 4 1/2 months — longer than Fiola had possession of the laptop.
2. The Symantec antivirus software installed was outdated and not functioning properly from day one.
3. The Systems management software wasn’t installed properly, so no network monitoring or updates were being pushed to the laptop.
4. Mr. Fiola not only wasn’t responsible for the pornography, he probably didn’t even know about it.

Of course, the DIA didn’t take kindly to the allegation that this was all their fault, and in a fashion similar to Julie Amero’s prosecution, said that with their 3-hour examination of the hard drive and the assumption that one has to DO something in order to initiate such activity it was clearly Fiola’s fault and so he should be fired, he should not get his job back, and he should suffer the stigma of being a kiddie porn downloader for the rest of his life.

This is outrageous. Beyond outrageous. You can read Loehrs’ report yourself. The investigator for the DIA climbs up on his high horse and makes the usual specious statements about how “the network is monitored carefully” and that “the user has to do something to have pornography downloaded, it just doesn’t download itself”, indicating that he has absolutely zero knowledge of how Trojans and viruses work. In fact, one of the times the laptop had activity was a time where Fiola was out for the evening without the laptop. Loehrs hammers home the responsibility of the network administrator here:

It is their opinion that Michael Fiola must be responsible for the activity because it was only happening when he possessed the Laptop out in the field. How else could viruses, Trojans and hackers attack a Laptop? The Laptop must be turned on for the viruses and Trojans to execute or for a hacker to gain access to it. Therefore, the Laptop could only be compromised when Michael Fiola had the Laptop turned on and he typically had the Laptop turned on when he was in the field. He did not need the Laptop at the office because he had a desktop computer at the office, therefore the Laptop was not compromised during those times. In addition, viruses and Trojans typically need some event to occur in order to trigger their execution. For example, when the Internet browser is opened, it may trigger the downloader to download a back door which in turn allows the hacker to gain access. Therefore, when Michael Fiola opens his Internet browser to access a work-related website, checks his email or logs into the DIA mainframe, the trigger is pulled, the virus or Trojan begins its attack and the activity subsequently appears to be caused by Michael Fiola.

Her indictment of their disingenuity is no less scathing:

If the DIA had reviewed the Symanec logs, they would have discovered the numerous viruses and Trojans attacking the Laptop for four and a half months without resolution; that log files were missing or incomplete; that virus definition downloads were failing; that virus scans were only taking 30 seconds to complete. If the DIA had reviewed the SMS logs they would have discovered the numerous errors that began the moment Michael Fiola received the Laptop thereby leaving the Laptop unmonitored and unmaintained for four and a half months. If the DIA had reviewed the temporary Internet files they would have discovered suspicious activity occurring day after day including the appearance of pornography with no preceding event; websites being cached to the hard drive at the rate of 20 to 40 per minute; JavaScript files with malicious code. What should have been a “red flag” to Mr. Glennon and the IT department when they found the Verizon wireless data usage to be four and a half times that of any other user is that the Laptop may have been compromised by a virus, Trojan or hacker.

According to the Boston Herald article, the Fiolas intend to sue the DIA for the destruction of his reputation, career and life. His attorney has a good grasp of the big picture:

“Imagine this scenario: Your employer gives you a ticking time bomb full of child porn, and then you get fired, and then you get prosecuted as some kind of freak,” he railed.

This is happening to many, many people. The combined arrogance of in-house IT folks who don’t want to admit they screwed up someone’s computer and someone’s life and the ignorance of many who investigate on the employers’ behalf leaves real people behind, bankrupt and ostracized.

I hope Mr. Fiola succeeds in his efforts to hold the TRUE culprits available. And I hope Julie Amero is given a new trial, or better yet, has the charges dropped against her. Both are victims of something they could not control, and both found themselves at the mercy of IT administrators’ arrogance (or ignorance), and hot zeal to hand out punishment for it, whether or not the responsible party was punished.

If you know of anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation and are in need of assistance, send them to The Julie Group blog for assistance.

h/t Alex Eckelberry - Sunbelt Blog

For a Monday, it wasn’t so bad. One of my coworkers is on vacation so I was in full-tilt boogie covering for her, had twitter open and had loaded up Leo LaPorte’s live stream of Steve Jobs’ keynote about the new iPhone.

I posted a post on the political blog and went back to work, listening to the iPhone presentation in the background, when all of a sudden some Twitter friends sent me a note at the same time telling me they were getting an error message saying that the site they were accessing was on a server that was to be deleted.

WTF? And sure enough, there it was.

I have several sites on Startlogic and all but this one have been migrated to their new server and admin platform. This is the oldest of them all, so I figured it would be one of the last.

Evidently not. It seems that something didn’t port well, and despite the rather snotty insistences that they had been sending me emails for months letting me know this was going to happen (they didn’t, but more in a minute on that), it was still sitting in limbo and due to be deleted forever on June 30th.

So instead of telling me they were going to redirect to a splash page, they said nothing. I went through all of my email and found the note saying it was scheduled for migration but no notice that there had been a problem. No notice saying “drop dead or fix it by June 10th or ELSE.”

Just a forced redirect to a splash page telling every visitor and everyone who linked to me here and on the political blog that…nothing was here.

After spending an hour holding for their tech support, I decided it just wasn’t worth the aggravation. I backed up the blogs, the databases, and all the multimedia and moved everything over to Bluehost before Steve Jobs could say “Congratulations, it’s iPhone 2.0!”

Now it’s nearly 11:00. It took over 12 hours for the DNS to update to the new server. I still can’t see the blog from my own computer here, but twitter friends assure me it’s really, really there. Of course, the database broke during the import and I ended up being locked out of my own blog, but that was a small thing, easily fixed. More or less, anyway.

Just a little notice, Startlogic. That’s all it would have taken. You could have sent me a “FIX THIS OR ELSE” letter. You could have called. Even robocalled and left a message. You could have twittered me, even.

But when you suck up someone’s entire site into a black hole and leave a splash page behind, we’re done. After three years, that’s exactly what we are. Buh-bye. You too, can suckit.

Lori Drew has been indicted on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers for her role in Megan Meier’s suicide.

Wow, after spending most of my adult life criticizing the Los Angeles District Attorney, I am now applauding with hands, feet, voice and everything else that makes noise. While these charges are peripheral to the outcome of her actions, they still send a clear message to anyone who would brutalize another, especially a CHILD, online.

Kudos, and I’ll be watching for the trial.

Technorati Tags: Lori Drew, MySpace, suicide, Megan Meier

This is in response to a commenter on Steve Gillmor’s Techcrunch post, who essentially thinks any time and bandwidth wasted on a discussion of Twitter is nonsense.

For me, the value of Twitter rests entirely in instant communication, accessible anywhere, one to many, many to one. I can get onto Twitter and not follow one single person if I want. All I have to do is fire up GTalk, ask Twitter to track some keywords, and I’m plugged into a real-time news feed.

This is a capture from my real-time Twitter stream this morning. Note particularly the last entry from corvida (one of the newest Read/Write Web contributors), whose family’s home was damaged by tornadoes ripping across the Southeast since yesterday. Corvida tells the whole story here.

This is what my GTalk window has looked like for the last 12 hours. Quiet, followed by bursts of reports of tornado outbreaks, high winds, destruction, people shouting out for help, to locate others, to find a safe place, to share their worries with other people out on the stream.

Unless you have lived through a natural disaster of the type that devastates towns and cities capriciously, you cannot understand the value of being plugged in this way. But Corvida did, and she reached out. Be sure you read her whole story. Twitter reached out in a real way and helped her family, as well as four other families who were in need of food tonight.

This can’t happen in decentralized parallel universes. Or to put it today’s political terms, we cannot have red states and blue states, and still be the United States. In Twitter, of course, there are no states; just places where people are.

The value of Twitter is its universality, which is why it cannot be decentralized; at least, not in ways similar to FriendFeed, which I like well enough as an aggregator but do not consider a place to center discussion. For me, Friendfeed is the storage device; Twitter is the capture device. It scans; Friendfeed holds.

Cliff Gerrish has a great explanation for why Twitter cannot be decentralized:

It’s tracking that makes a decentralized Twitter nearly impossible. Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe. In this model, you’re following everyone, or at least everyone who uses that particular tag. This feature radically changes the shape of the social graph underlying the information stream. Since you don’t know who might use a tag you’re tracking, the regular RSS style contract around publication and subscription doesn’t work. Track is not commonly used today, but it’s one of the more interesting features of the service.

While there’s a ton of irony in the content of the Techcrunch comments on Steve’s post, particularly with regard to the number of characters he used to convey his thoughts, I’d suggest that they should go back and re-read what Steve wrote, because he’s right.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tornadoes, techcrunch, steve gillmor, track, corvida