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Filed under: Search, Microblogging

Twitter takes deleted tweets out of search results

Even before Twitter purchased Summize and turned it into Twitter Search, users started to realize that a deleted tweet was never truly deleted. If you knew what it said, you could easily find it by searching for some of the words, and even if you didn't, you could see someone's deleted tweets in the results for "from:username." M.G. Siegler over at TechCrunch noticed that after Twitter made high-profile search deals with Google and Microsoft, they also decided to clean up the problem and stop indexing deleted tweets.

This is a big win for personal privacy, because although Twitter Search is relatively low-volume and you'd have to know where to look to find a deleted tweet, the sheer number of Google searches that happen every day would inevitably result in people seeing tweets they weren't meant to. I think it's great that Twitter has closed this privacy loophole, but it's also important to think before you post anything, because with retweets, third-party aggregators and the like, your tweets aren't always going to be isolated to your Twitter page. Treating them as public, Google-indexable info is probably the best policy.

Filed under: Internet, E-mail

Oops, sorry - 14,000 e-mail accounts get deleted

OopsLooks like Charter, a national cable and high-speed internet provider, decided to include more than just inactive accounts in its routine email account deletion. Although arguably not as bad as over-billing your customers a year in advance to the tune of $7.5 million, 14,000 users that had e-mail accounts with Charter found them to be completely emptied, including all the cute photos of the grandchildren and other attachments.

Worse yet, it's gone for good. According to the AP, Charter says that none of it can be restored. To make amends, the company credited the bill of each user who's account was deleted with $50. Better than nothing, but still - the only excuse Charter could come up with for this error was that something like this had never happened before.

All told, the mistake cost them $700,000 - and a few customers, perhaps. It seems that irresponsible handling of customer data has virtually no repercussions beyond self-inflicted ones. Airlines lose luggage on occasion, but not a whole day's flights worth of luggage. But who's to blame? The users who failed to protect their own data or the company that failed to protect the user's data?

Filed under: Security, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft

"Previous Version" file system support coming to Vista

Ars Technica is reporting that versioning support will be implemented in Vista at the file system level, allowing users who have System Protection (enabled by default) running to simply right-click a file to access a "Previous Versions" menu (now I know why Vista's hard drive requirements are so steep). Previous Versions will also monitor backups made of files with Vista-aware backup applications, so it will only show versions of the file made after the last backup.

As usual, there could easily be privacy and security concerns among the corporate IT crowd, as Previous Versions can make copies and track versions of files on network drives as well. As icing on the cake, the term 'deleted file' might also become a thing of the past, as Previous Versions can restore files even after being removed from the recycle bin.

Check out Ars Technica's full writeup of everything Previous Versions will have to offer.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

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