Turkey's Twitter 'Takedown' & 4 More Stories You Need to Know Today

NO TWEETS FOR YOU! — Turkey has banned Twitter, and Twitter — as it always does — is getting the last laugh. #TwitterisblockedinTurkey went viral after Turkey tried to deny its citizens their basic, human right to Tweet. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it with style: “Twitter, mwitter!” he cried, reports the Washington Post, helpfully offering the rough translation of "Twitter, Smitter!

“We now have a court order,” declared Erdogan, who’s ensnared in a scandal inflamed by social media over recordings that purportedly reveal corruption in his administration. “We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.”

How's that going for you, Mr. Prime Minister? Not well? … The Guardian reports that the ban didn't cause a blackout so much as a tsunami of Tweets — actually setting a new record in Turkey as citizens find simple workarounds like texting and spoofing their computer's location. Turks are even using Twitter to share tips on how to bypass the Turkish Twitter ban. Heck, even the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, openly criticized the governmental action – from his Twitter account. Well played, Mr. Erdogan. Well played.

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THE EYES HAVE IT — Maybe we should all just get used to the idea that nothing we do on the Internet is private. NSA spying, Google looking for signals for relevant advertisements, Facebook. Now, a Microsoft investigation into the leak of a trade secret has surfaced a portion of Hotmail's terms of service that, to put it mildly, was not widely known: To identify an employee who had allegedly shared proprietary Microsoft code with a blogger, the company peered into that blogger's hotmail account. Federal prosecutors have charged the employee, Alex Kibkalo, with the theft of trade secrets. The blogger remains unnamed. Microsoft conducted only an internal legal review before unilaterally peeking into the account, relying on its documented privacy policies, which say in part: "We may access information about you, including the content of your communications...to protect the rights or property of Microsoft." But, as the Financial Times reports, the backlash has prompted Microsoft to say it will refer "all cases like this" to a former federal judge who would be expected to apply the same standards as the request for a court order.

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NETFLIX NEUTRALITY — Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is making a strong appeal for net neutrality. In a post on his company's blog, Hastings is connecting the dots many did for themselves a month ago when Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for a direct connection into its network, to ensure high-quality video streams into homes of the cable company's 22 million customers. At the time, Hastings said one had nothing to do with the other, and the complicated architecture of the internet made it difficult to state definitively that Netflix paying Comcast directly — instead of paying an intermediary for similar reasons, as it had been — raised net neutrality concerns. But Hastings is now calling a spade a spade: By dealing directly with Comcast, Netflix is paying a gatekeeper to reach their common customers — and that is precisely the arrangement net neutrality advocates says sets a very bad template. And, now, so does Hastings:

Without strong net neutrality, big ISPs can demand potentially escalating fees for the interconnection required to deliver high quality service. The big ISPs can make these demands – driving up costs and prices for everyone else – because of their market position. For any given U.S. household, there is often only one or two choices for getting high-speed Internet* access and that’s unlikely to change. Furthermore, Internet access is often bundled with other services making it challenging to switch ISPs. It is this lack of consumer choice that leads to the need for strong net neutrality.

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FIRST ROUND'S ON ME — Starbucks is already the remote "office" for untold legions of workers who sip coffee and gulp WiFi all day long. Soon, Starbucks will also be the perfect venue to entertain clients after work, when libations a little harder are in order. A pilot program to serve beer and wine began in 2010 at one location in the company's home city of Seattle. It expanded to 26 locations, and now Starbucks plans to expand to "thousands of select stores" over the next few years (it has 11,000 locations in the US.) The idea, of course, is to continue to make it impossible to find a seat even after the evening commuter rush.

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THE NOSE KNOWS — In business, you often have to go with your gut. Does that idea pass the smell test? Quantifiers scoff. But there is new evidence that our olfactory sense is far more sophisticated than previously thought. The study, in the journal Science, has discovered that we can detect at least one trillion distinct odors — and the authors believe that might be an underestimate. They also postulated that smell has been degraded over the eons as vision and hearing became more relevant to process our surroundings. But smell is still essential in the workplace: none of your other senses will warn you to avoid the breakroom because some idiot used the microwave to re-heat his tuna casserole.

Top Photo: Jiri Flogel / shutterstock Remix: LinkedIn Pulse

Lower Image: Cem Ozkaynak?@cemm

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Are you tweeting from Turkey? Got a hotmail account? A love-hate relationship with Starbucks? Co-workers with lousy breakroom etiquette? Have a take on another hot topic of the day?

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