TxTMOB powered protests at the RNC

Patrick Di Justo writes about TxTMOB in the New York Times (Protests Powered by Cellphone:

As thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan during the Republican National Convention last week, some were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device connected to a distributed information service that provided detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes, street closures and police actions.
The communications device was a common cellphone. The information service, a collection of open-source, Web-based programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone’s closet, is called TXTMob.

In BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin writes that some messages were being blocked as spam during the protests:

In a BoingBoing post last week, one reader wondered if political motivations may have caused T-Mobile’s reported “blocking” of messages from activist messaging service TxTMOB. Not so, replies BoingBoing reader Gabe, who says:

“I’m a network data analyst for T-Mobile. I’ve actually tested the network to see why those messages were blocked, and from the response our email-to-sms gateway is giving, apparently our immensely retarded spam filter thinks that txtmob’s SMTP server is spamming us. Basically, if the network sees more than about a hundred messages coming from the same SMTP server within an hour, it just blacklists it. Stupid but true.”

More from the Times article after the break:

TXTMob allows people to quickly and easily send text messages from one cellphone to a group of other cellphones. This in itself is nothing new: other mobile networking systems like dodgeball.com and bedno.com already exist.

The software was not intended for everyday mobile socializing. It was created as a tool political activists could use to organize their work, from staff meetings to street protests. Most of the people using it are on the left: of the 142 public groups listed on the TXTMob site, the largest are dedicated to protesting the Bush administration, the Republican Party or the state of the world in general.


Posted

in

by

Tags: