NEW FEATURE: Meet Jeff Tweeney
Hey folks, Jeff Deeney here to let you know how this new Twitter project we’re rolling out will work. From now until Philadelphia no longer needs me for cannon fodder in the trenches of the War On Poverty, I will be posting the little overheard snippets of unintentional brilliance and frequently unhinged insanity that comprise the background noise of my work day. Think of it as Today I Saw for the ADD set; I will bring you the streets in 160 characters or less. All dialogue 100% overheard. You’re already a couple days behind, so start following the Phawker Twitter stream and you can play along at home. And yes, it WILL be on the test.
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THAT’S COMCASTIC: 8,000 Customer Passwords Leaked
NEW YORK TIMES: A list of more than 8,000 user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months. Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site.
Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl. The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.
Mr. Andreyo informed Comcast, the F.B.I. and several technology journalists about the breach on Monday morning, but the document disappeared only at 1:45 p.m. when I contacted Scribd about it. “That isn’t just my password for Comcast, it’s my password for everything that is not tied to my credit card,” Mr. Andreyo said in an interview. “It’s one thing to publish a credit card number, but to hand over user IDs and passwords for accounts is another. Someone could just go in and pull up all your archived messages, and then they have everything about you.” MORE
[H/T to DANTZERDAZE]
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Phawker.com's
March 16th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
This is downright shameful. Poor black people say the darndest things, right? Ya, well so do self-inflated white dudes.
Your snippets of conversation provide no context and smack of the same poverty porn you’ve been peddling on this site for a while now, Deeney.
It is so disheartening to see how you’re capitalizing on your access just to trivialize these impoverished communities. I’m sure if they followed your twitter they would feel clowned. It especially stings that you’re getting these quotes while on the “job”, which I would assume is some sort of community services job. You’re there to help. So start.
March 17th, 2009 at 6:12 am
That’s unfortunate you feel that way, as I think most people who have been following what I do here understand that I have given 8 hours or more of my life to these communities at least five days a week for many years. I have helped the poor communities of this city more than you or anyone else reading this have a hundred times over and could produce a list of families and individuals who would attest to that fact that is longer than the line you’re going to be standing in at Starbucks this morning.
Poverty porn is exactly NOT what I do, and I question your reading comprehension level if that’s what you came away with. I take my work and my writing very seriously and have literally risked my life in order to bring a picture of this city that most people would rather not look at, to dipshits like you who would be too terrified to ever go look at it themselves.
March 17th, 2009 at 6:25 am
Oh, I would also like to point out that quite a few of the Tweets already up including:
Deeney: “His drug money started three legit businesses. He don’t need to keep hustling, but he does. He likes that lifestyle too much.”
Deeney: “You heard what the Pastor said? He say he rather have hard times with the Lord than good times with anyone else.”
Deeney: “This boy on the elevator smell like weed so bad I asked him, ‘Did you even put it out or did you just put it in your pocket?’.”
Are all BLACK SOCIAL WORKERS talking amongst themselves. You think the only black people I interact with as a social worker in Philly are my clients? What kind of fucking bullshit is that? Have you ever been in a social service office in this city? Newsflash: black men and women in this city also have jobs, and many of them bust their asses working to help the communities they came up in. But, hey, you were just trying to be a good liberal, trying to defend those poor, defenseless black folks.
March 17th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Again, SHAMEFUL.
You assume so much and are so wrong. I do a lot for my community and actually am working hard to come up with more ways to make an impact. And I don’t go to Starbucks…in my neck of the woods, there isn’t one for at least 2 miles (and that is light years in Starbucks metric). I am more familiar with the communities you “help” than you imagined.
My challenge stands: If you’re proud of your Twitter then at least tell your coworkers, the ones you’re quoting, about it.
And the question remains: If your heart is for this city and its communities, who is edified by your tweets?
March 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Shameful: What’s so shameful about giving the outside world a window into the world many have never seen and away from which most of those who have seen it have run? Most of this isn’t humorous at all, unless you’ve been there and seen enough of it for yourself that you just have to laugh, like I have. When I left a place where I was reminded of this every day, Deeney kept his nose in it, and has been relaying messages from deep space ever since, seemingly just to keep us all honest. It makes me ill on a regular basis to work and mingle with people who are so wrapped up in the secure, upper/middle class existence they’ve been sheltered under since birth that they would read Deeney’s tweets and insist they’re fiction. To me, they’re bite-sized reminders of what the world is for a lot of folks; reminders that there’s a lot of good that needs to be done and a lot of uncomfortable and horrifying reality out there; reminders that there are a lot of real humans doing what they can every day to deal with it. They are perspective, and they direct some extra attention where not enough is paid. Isn’t that a good thing? Without readable reports from the front, there would just be so much more anonymous, silent suffering going on. Is that what you’d prefer? For people NOT to see this? For people to continue to forget about the problems of the inner city and the people trying to do something about them?
Something is better than nothing, and even the folks who are interested, like me, need to get their information in tolerable doses. I’m not going to wallow in it all day every day; I can’t. I just need a reminder every once in a while of how good I have it, and not to forget about the shit going on every day out there in the real world–shit that might as well be happening in China, for all anyone in my Ivy League neighborhood cares. I need something to keep the reality top-of-mind. Jeff’s articles and now his tweets do this for me and many readers. If he gets some attention for it, good for him. You may think of it as poverty porn. I think of it as a window into a part of the world that we all need to be paying more attention to–a window that you can actually tolerate looking through occasionally. It’s not porn, it’s reality. Context or not, it’s better than silence. It edifies ME. Maybe you should start writing about the things you see, too. Who knows, people might pay more attention to it. It might even help.
March 17th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Let’s take a look at today’s posts and see who got “clowned.”
Deeney: “We’re worldy brothers. Our minds is vast. We know alotta shit about alotta shit.” — N. Broad, Muslims speaking on glorifying God.
Here we have two black Muslims standing on a street corner in North Philly, having a serious conversation about their spiritual convictions and their identities as they perceive themselves. I’m presenting it as I heard it because I think this kind of candid, honest moment between two members of a socially isolated community that is often misrepresented — as recently as last month in Philly Magazine — as dangerous and virulently radical isn’t something you, my reader, probably often hear.
Next,
Deeney: “I got your number, I’mma hit you. Stay safe out here, son, things is gettin’ crazy right around now.”
Here we have a conversation between two defendants waiting in line at the courthouse. This little snippet is valuable because, as you may not know, last weekend in Philadelphia was ridiculously violent, with shootings and stabbings popping off left and right. Big surprise, right, because the weather’s warming up and that’s when violence spikes. I’m sure you knew that.
That news to you, that violence just went through the roof for the first time this year, is like, “sheesh, another crazy weekend in the city, when will the madness stop?” And you turn the page or change the channel. However, to these two guys, this news brings a state of elevated alert. It’s that time of year again, watch your back, it’s getting crazy out there in our community. It’s interesting how the value of the information changes depending on its consumer. Right? I thought it was, that’s why I presented it.
But you know what? Most of my readers don’t need this kind of hand holding. They don’t need for me to explain to them in this absurd amount of detail why it’s okay for them to read those few short sentences, or why I found them significant enough to want to present them. They get it. You don’t. So the unfortunate fact is that I cannot edify you, because I quite honestly don’t have the time to explain why and how I am trying to edify you two or more times a day while I simulatenously have a heavy caseload of high need clients to tend to.
I’m sorry, Shameful, but you’ll just have to remain dense.