What’s happening now is reminiscent of the state of censorship in France in the decades leading up to the Revolution, the story of which is admirably told in historian Robert Darnton’s “>The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France. In the eighteenth century, publishers required a royal privilege to legally publish books in the kingdom of France. Morally outrageous works and works critical of the government were of course denied these privileges; the publishing sphere’s response was to set up presses beyond the borders of France. The French appetite for the secret, the sexy, and the outlaw was met by pirate publishers operating beyond the reach of Government critiques could never sell as well as naughty books, of course—but in many cases the two were combined, in stories that told salacious tales of the nobility and their ministers which contained coded criticisms of official policies. Bawdy literature served as a form of encryption by which pre-revolutionary authors could ensure their disruptive messages could survive.

Then as now, such works set off an official frenzy of denunciation. The public executioner actually whipped and burned outlaw books in front of the Parlement of France in Paris. Such absurdities were but a prelude to the bloodshed that followed—and when we hear of Sarah Palin calling for extreme measures to be taken against a “treasonous” Assange (who is not an American citizen), we have to wonder where all this will lead.

“Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving.

“We’ve basically gone back to 2003 in terms of the level of standard of living,” he said. The worst has been felt by younger people who borrowed at the height of the bubble and are now having to reduce their debt, he said. “But they’ll come through this,” he added.

Iceland’s experience, he said, offered a lesson for the euro zone as it grappled with its own crisis: “This is the proper process. If you go through a bubble economy and you need to correct it, the answer is not to convert private debt into public debt. Rather it is to restructure the debt to the level of the assets.”

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The three biggest Icelandic banks, which had expanded aggressively during the credit bubble, all failed and were nationalized in October 2008. Cleaning up the mess left by one of those, the Icesave unit of Landsbanki, has soured relations with Britain and the Netherlands and delayed international aid.

Icelanders have resisted international pressure to make them fully reimburse the two governments for $5.4 billion they spent making whole Dutch and British depositors who lost their savings in the financial collapse. A March referendum in the nation of 300,000 people on whether to support repayment was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

The trouble is that Twitter’s authorisation process makes no distinction between small toys like that and big applications like TweetDeck that handle your entire account. Toys only need to read public messages and perhaps tweet once, but usually request, and are being given “read and write” permission, which means they can do every action Twitter can provide an authorised user: the power to change profile pictures, follow and block users, and – crucially – read direct messages. Changing your password doesn’t lock them out either; you need to explicitly revoke their access.