NATO and Taliban Engage in Harrowing Twitter Pissing Match [War]

NATO and the Taliban have never really gotten along—a decade of collapsed state power vacuum insurgency warfare will do that. But can't we count on Twitter as a bastion of civility? Apparently not! The battling pair's bickering online.

Like two pissed off teens (fighting for the future of an entire society), the NATO and Taliban official Twitter accounts began sparring yesterday, quarreling over civilian casualties. While I'm impressed by the Taliban rep's use of English idioms, NATO's mastery over the internet slap fight was clear: figures cited, videos pasted—it was a decisive bit of online warfare. Between this and responding to airstrike requests, NATO's social media team has a pretty exciting job!

It may seem superficial, but being able to refute the Taliban's claims in a public forum goes a long way towards weakening their clench on the country. Now if only more than a small fraction of Afghanistan had internet access. [Star and Stripes, Thanks Rosa!]

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iTunes Match Streams and Downloads Your Music [Video]

The developer beta of iTunes Match, Apple's new iCloud-based music sharing service, went live tonight and IGM has confirmed that Match will not only support downloading but stream content directly to your Mac or iOS device as well. Here's how it works.

iTunes Match first scans your library and compiles a list of songs from what it finds—doesn't matter if it's a song you've bought through iTunes, one you've ripped from a CD, torrented, or even made yourself—all of them will be available on the cloud. Songs that iTunes recognizes are streamed from Apple's master recording at 256kbps. Ones that it doesn't recognize are uploaded to the iCloud from your local copy. You'll then be able to access the entire library from any Mac (limit five separate computers) or iOS device with an Internet connection.

The service is expected to launch later this year alongside iOS 5 and reportedly will cost $25/year. [Insanely Great Mac via Mac Rumors]

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