Twitter surrenders user data to French government

CEO Dick Costolo's Twitter was forced to turn over data that will allow the French government to ID the service's users. CEO Dick Costolo's Twitter was forced to turn over data that will allow the French government to ID the service's users. Photo: Lionel Cironneau, Associated Press Photo: Lionel Cironneau, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Twitter surrenders user data to French government 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Twitter has turned over data on its users that will help French authorities identify which of the microblogging service's users published anti-Semitic messages, a violation of French law.

The company had been fighting - and losing - in rounds of appeals in French courts in order to protect the users' identities, going so far as to not immediately comply with a French judge's orders, but eventually acquiesced.

This development does damage to one of the company's largest value propositions: that people can speak freely - and anonymously - on the service. In volatile nations like Egypt, Iran and Syria, dissidents have used the services to organize and communicate during uprisings. Many analysts see such tools as integral in marches toward freedom and democracy. In the U.S., much of the Occupy protests were organized on Twitter.

Yet others counter that Internet tools also create an easy way for governments to identify those dissidents, should they get access to the data, and that's what's happened here. What will happen to the racist tweeters remains to be seen.

"This disclosure puts an end to the dispute between the parties, which have agreed to actively continue contributing together to the fight against racism and anti-Semitism, in keeping with their respective domestic laws and regulations," Twitter and the French Union of Jewish Students said in a joint statement.

In October, the hashtags #UnBonJuif (a good Jew) and #UnJuifMort (a dead Jew) appeared in tweets alongside offensive comments. Twitter promptly deleted the tweets.

The Jewish students' union took Twitter to court anyway, demanding the users' personal information. France has laws against publishing racist and bigoted hate speech.

Twitter has claimed it will always try to follow national laws when dealing with legal matters that pertain to a specific country - but in this case, it tried, unsuccessfully, to fall back on the U.S. protections of freedom of speech.

Human copter? Well, humans can fly now.

OK, maybe we won't be flapping through the Grand Canyon any time soon, but researchers have managed to get a human-powered helicopter to stay aloft for about a minute.

In a video that might remind one of the crafts trying to get airborne during the time of the Wright Brothers, a contraption called Atlas remained aloft for 64.11 seconds and reached an altitude of 3.3 meters. In doing so, a collaborative group in Canada called AeroVelo was declared the winner of the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition by the American Helicopter Society. They'll bank $250,000 for the effort.

And effort is certainly the keyword. As you can see in the video - online at http://bit.ly/12wWoDj - human-powered flight has a long way to go. The contraption is completely - hilariously - impractical and the guy powering the bike, which makes the rotors turn, has quads that would make a linebacker jealous.

But the group is optimistic nonetheless.

"We would like the public to understand that with innovative engineering and creative design we can find sustainable and environmentally conscious solutions to many of the technological challenges facing our generation," the group wrote in a blog post.

Human-powered helicopters may be a long way off, and not a solution to world problems. But this one at least captures the imagination - if only for a minute.