1. Log into your Twitter account.
2. Go to http://api.twitter.com/apps..
3. Register a new application
4. When you’re done registering, go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps and click on the application name.
5. Copy and save your consumer key and consumer secret.
6. Click “My access token” at right.
7. Copy and save your access token and your access token secret.
8. Download Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth package from github. (If you have any trouble later, download and use the 0.2.0-beta3 branch instead of the latest.)
9. Unpack the archive and transfer the directory it contains to your web server’s public_html or whatever directory is set up as your document root.
10. IMPORTANT: Change the name of the directory to something secret. Make up a string of random letters and numbers. We’ll call this string SECRETDIR.
11. Go into SECRETDIR, edit config.php and insert the consumer key, consumer secret, access token and access secret.
12. Go into SECRETDIR and create a “tweet.php” file, like this:

    <?php

require_once('config.php');
require_once('twitteroauth/twitteroauth.php');
$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, ACCESS_TOKEN, ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET);
$today = idate('z', time());
$enddate = idate('z', strtotime('31 December 2010'));
$daysleft = $enddate - $today;

$tweetstr = 'Only ' . $daysleft . ' day';
if ($daysleft > 1) $tweetstr .= 's';
$tweetstr .= " left to send out a holiday card for Bradley Manning's freedom! http://bit.ly/dW5w5e #freebrad";

$connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => $tweetstr));

?>

13. Now create a cron job on your server. I’m tweeting once daily at 9:00am in my webhost’s time zone, so I used:
    00 9 * * * wget http://www.bradleymanning.org/SECRETDIR/tweet.php
14. Enjoy your auto-tweeting goodness!

Yes, using a SECRETDIR as a security (by obscurity) measure is not the best idea, but it does allow for a quick and dirty solution. Other solutions are possible, but this will get you started.

Quite the contrast.

Criminalization of Social Networking Technology – Twitter, G20 Pittsburgh, & Iran

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here, I’ll let y’all have a crack at ‘em:

Queens ‘Tin Can’ Anarchist Held One Pound of Liquid Mercury

Since mercury is liquid at room temperature, freezes around -40 °C and boils above 350 °C, one wonders what the point of stressing “liquid” here is… unless it was a rather unseasonable day in Queens.

And then:

Donald Douglas: All Dumb is Liberal

I could swear I’m being called dumb there. Unclear. I feel dumb for not updating my “about” page lately, but whatever.

Go get ‘em, tigers.

Tweet, tweet! I'm a dangerous anarchist bird!

I’ll probably be producing a couple of these per week, with Brad Spangler backing me up both as writer and as alternate reader.

It’s a bit creepy voicing this, given the arrests of Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, and the raid on Madison’s home, since I was doing much the same thing for a couple of evenings: listening to Pittsburgh-area police scanner traffic over the internet, and repeating interesting information to several relevant hashtags on Twitter.

Can the military coexist with social networking sites?

Gosh, I sure hope not.

The idea that Twitter, MySpace and Facebook could simply crash the modern cyber-state’s ability to wage war — which is to oppress, occupy, conscript, tax, torture, rape, murder, rob, poison, dispossess, expel, infect, regulate, control, police, imprison, degrade, dehumanize and destroy human beings — simply tickles me.

And it just may be possible.

At different times and in different combinations, military service personnel communication with the outside world is and has always been banned, blocked, censored, controlled, forced, edited in transit, misdirected, intercepted, co-opted, manipulated and so on.

The technology to do that has typically relied on the application of policy and physical means to the hired thugs themselves and their communications channels. In the dead age of empires, that mostly meant controlling the mails, access to military sites, physical documents and the like.

The modern mercenary for Leviathan has all manner of fresh, cool, exciting, low-power and long-reach wireless communications tools available which can beam messages, documents, position information, local data feeds and so forth around the globe to millions — on or off the secret military networks — in seconds. Those tools, in combination with the existing social networking services, might well make it impossible for wealthier nations to maintain typical military discipline and operational security.

This is not to mention that the tools are sometimes used by accident, and that just like the number of intentional uses, the number of accidental uses in increasing in tandem with the tools’ growing reach, range, speed, popularity, ease of use, market penetration, protocol and network compatibility, interchangeability, user loyalty and the like, plus their shrinking costs, sizes, power profiles, new-user learning curves, and detectability by Powers That Be and Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Let’s hope that’s enough to make the modern makers of mass misery not just obsolete, but impossible.

But if it’s not enough, what’s coming is distributed, peer-to-peer, organic, cypherpunk- and crypto-anarchist-created Facebook- and Twitter-like social networking and communication services that support unbreakable hard encryption, market-produced unfalsifiable digital identity management, mathematically guaranteed transactional and locational anonymity by default or at will, untraceable anonymous digital bearer certificate trading networks and, of course, assassination markets.

And when those things launch, they’re going to launch on all channels. Linux clients? You betcha! MAC OS X? Yes we can! Windows Vista? ¡Viva Bill Gates! Official Apple iStore version for iPhone? Gosh yes! But it doesn’t stop there, of course — there will be interfaces and gateways springing up on everything from your old-school two-way pager to instant messaging services like ICQ, AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Skype, Gadu-gadu and all the rest. Plugins and widgets and gizmos and HUDs for Counterstrike and World of Warcraft and Second Life and Runescape. Classified ads in the local advertising circular. Newsletters and forms by post. Scratch-off cards in cereal boxes. And nice men and women at church or in cafes who field requests and handle messages into and out of the darknet for the benefit of those who can’t manage the tech themselves.

To troops everywhere: think about getting into a new line of work.

I’m unlikely to be able to follow this closely, so follow Jason on Twitter (@JDTalley) and Pete (@peteeyre) if you haven’t already. Also, tracking the #MHD tag on Twitter is a way to get the news, especially if the boys go silent.

From Jason’s tweets, reverse-chronological:

1. We will now be escorted into a new holding area. This time it’s the U.S. government. 16 minutes ago
2. Reinforcements have been called. Homeland Security vehicle is now blocking MARV. 19 minutes ago
3. U.S. Border Guard told @peteeyre to stop recording or his camera would be confiscated. 21 minutes ago
4. Now we are getting hassled by U.S. Border Guards in Detroit. #MHD 23 minutes ago
5. Canadian border guards are tossing our motorhome again. I just cleaned it. about 2 hours ago
6. We’re in the no man’s land between Detroit and Windsor, Canada… on accident. Wrong turns suck. about 2 hours ago

Gak.

Also thank Governor Gregoire and legislators for adopting the “Fair Play in Community Sports” bill. http://bit.ly/DGPvc

Seriously this is weird, from my rarefied perspective.

So, there’s this guy who comes around and rapes me twice a week for the past year…

And one day I notice he hasn’t been around for a few months.

What do I do now? Send him a fucking fruit basket?

Unable to find the version by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (1990?), which was my first exposure to this wonderful work, I present a fine mashup of the original track by Gil Scott-Heron (1970) together with “California über Alles” (1979) by the Dead Kennedys, previously featured at this very blog in its later “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” remake verson.

Scott-Heron’s original lyrics, from his site:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.