Good morning tech

Twitter breaks story on Discovery Channel gunman. “The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first,” The Washington Post reports. “As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter.” http://tiny.cc/v3yt6

India asks RIM, Google, Skype to set up local servers. “India said it will ask Research In Motion, Google, Skype and other service providers to set up servers locally and enable security agencies to monitor mail traffic,” Bloomberg reports. Google and Skype said they had not received any such request yet. http://bit.ly/bbu9vE

China to require cell phone ID. “The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes,” The New York Times reports. Users “will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.” http://tiny.cc/plgdl

RIM faces content battle in Indonesia. “Indonesia’s technology minister has taken his battle against pornography to the maker of BlackBerry smart phones, ordering the Canadian company to block digital content in one of its key Asian markets,” the Financial Times reports. http://bit.ly/bJeNDe

Target to sell Facebook gift cards. Target announced on Tuesday that it will begin selling the items on Sept. 5, making it the first brick-and-mortar retailer to stock them. The gift cards can be redeemed to buy digital goods in online social games, such as Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. They will be available in increments of $15, $25 and $50. http://tiny.cc/od1wh

TWEETED

“I’m going to throw down a challenge: I bet I can get to 600 followers before @aplusk gets 6 million.”

—Media Access Project’s @mattfwood ambitiously pledging to accrue .01 percent of Ashton Kutcher’s followers.

WATERCOOLER

TYING THE KNOT — David Levy, an artificial intelligence researcher in the Netherlands, believes technological advances will pave the way for human to marry robots before the middle of the century, Scientific American reports. http://tiny.cc/0pkv8