Slashdot Mirror
Do Twitter Phishing Scams Herald the End of Microblogs?
An anonymous reader writes "Twitter's been hit by a big phishing scam. Culture Crash blogger Dan Tynan says this is the end of Twitter's innocence. Will tweets become like email, with two out of every three just worthless spam?"
this is the end Twitter's innocence.
Isn't this the internet? What's innocent?
If Twitter is smart, it will end its auth api or modify it so that folks have to go to twitter to authorize an application. This is the way that Facebook, Yahoo, and OpenID do it, as well.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
terms like "twitterverse" and "microblog" are heralding the end of the sane Internet, so lets hope they get consumed by the vermin of the Internet.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Will tweets become like email, with two out of every three just worthless? Amazing how removing one word suddenly makes it already accurate.
Thus far Twitter seems like a totally useless idea to me. No, you are not so important that everyone cares what you are doing when you are going shopping.
Aren't tweets already like email, with two out of every three just worthless?
That seems appropriate.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
I welcome our new TwiPhi overlords!
we can never have nice things!
The exact same crap has been going on with MySpace and other viral sites for years. This ain't news. The funny thing is that the idiots who eat that shit up like to say that their profile was "hacked" when they were really just too lazy to look at the damn address bar.
While in your example that's probably true, I personally like it because it's a quick and brainless way to communicate with friends. It's just fun. Organizations find it's useful as a good way to update people, but past that it's not a serious experience, and shouldn't be treated as one.
Queue up the Don Henley, Twitter's lost his innocence! But it can never lose its reason to exist, because it never had one in the first place!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Thus far Twitter seems like a totally useless idea to me. No, you are not so important that everyone cares what you are doing when you are going shopping.
I suppose if you don't have any friends that like to keep up with what's going on in your life and vice versa.
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
"Do Twitter Phishing Scams Herald the End of Microblogs?"
*Crosses fingers*
A man can dream...
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Agreed. Much like the "blogosphere," twitter is the kind of thing that is OMFG WORLD CHANGING.... but only to its users.
It's great that the service is there and all, but like facebook, myspace, et al, I really wish people would stop blithering about how INSANELY GREAT it is.
A web gui for the equivalent of an IRC or AIM /away message is about as world-changing as a gui for a MUD. Sure, at least one is successful... but I don't do MUDs or MMOs, so how has it changed my life, aside from a few of my friends disappearing for months whenever a new expansion is released?
That said, a pointless-to-me-anyway service that people I otherwise respect can't shut up about is being crapflooded? Awesome!
Most people I know use it like IRC; a really big IRC channel with every twitter user, people are default muted and friends are un-muted (followed). Some forget that their tweets go to the _whole_ "IRC" channel though. I'm ignoring twitter since I've only had two people tell me I _need_ to be using it, and the constant server troubles in the geek-news doesn't impress me either.
2008-1-5 11:53AM - just took a dump.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
twitter is a solution to a problem that never existed... no one wants to know what your doing every five minutes...
Then you haven't used it to track EVENTS (that affect more than one person) of personal importance to you: the first snippets of information to come out of Mumbai were via Twitter. Last night I used it to track snowfall (and traffic conditions) in Vancouver, BC. Coupled with instant upload of phone cam pictures, it was an amazingly realtime view of my personal geographic area.
A: YES.
Did you expect a long diatribe or discussion on this one? Doesn't take a mental giant to ponder this one nor a Nostradamus to look ahead into Twitter's obvious future. This is how the Internet works and they had it coming. Classic Slashdot "Derrrrrrr!" and that's that.
No more "X has lost its innocence". Retire it already. It's sappy and a relic of the previous century.
Innocence? Since when was Twitter innocent. They've been guilty of insidious viral marketing for about a year. They've basically been spamming everything and anything they can to get the Twitter name out there.
So, this is poetic justice. Probably it was some forum user who had simply had enough of their sock puppetry that hacked them. The fact that their infrastucture has never been up to the task they needed it for, probably only made it easier to hack.
It is just another overvalued site that is most likely never to survive the current recession anyway.
This is like saying that spammers spell the death of IRC. Or spammers spell the death of Usenet. In the case of both, moderators were the answer.
In the case of Twitter, trust lists and a trust rating system would solve all the issues within a few weeks.
Also, wouldn't the phish have triggered most new browsers anti-phish code? Twitter could probably expand it's use of SSL, that would take care of several problems as well.
I think we'll see spammers start to attack social networks as vastly improving spam filters make e-mail less and less viable. If a social networking site sends all "messages" on the site as e-mail or texts to the user and the user whitelists *.myspace.com or *.twitter.com (or whatever domain it sends as) all they need is to get an open pipe on that service and they've blasted both their screen, inbox and mobile.
Networks are huge blocks of users often with similar, or easily deturmined interests making the marketing more effective and development to exploit their native openness or a security flaw more profitable than spamming huge blocks of @yahoo.com addresses via e-mail only as many have good spam filters, are spam-only accounts or have gone fallow when XX69sExYbUnNiE69XXHOLLA realizes that might not be the best addy for her college admission papers or her resume.
IANAL but it would be interesting to see if using a social network as a proxy would give one any sheilding from CAN-SPAM or other state statutes since their is no protection on social networking sites, and users did opt-in to reiceve emails from the social network site.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Celebrating the one year anniversary?
This guy's the limit!
No, you are not so important that everyone cares what you are doing when you are going shopping.
If that's all your friend posts, then don't follow that friend. Problem solved.
Oh yeah, that also solves the spam problem too. Or prevents the one that doesn't yet exist. If someone is spamming you, unfollow. It's like email whitelisting.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
If you get 2/3 of spam then you should first learn how to use your email account before you jump to a new technology.
I don't usually see any spam in my account, all spam is automatically placed in a spam folder.
The problem is not the technology, it is people that doesn't know how to use it correctly.
Because only twits use it.
Seriously, go join the Peace Corps and dig wells in Africa you self-indulgent f*cksticks.
And no, we won't read your blog to learn how you heroically overcome your run-in with dysentery.
Let's just say he ate a LOT of bran that day.
I suppose if you don't have any friends that like to keep up with what's going on in your life and vice versa.
That's what conversations are for. You know, real physical human interaction. Remember that?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Must... not... make... joke... about... sockpuppets... oh god please god...
I'm kind of with you on this one. I remember back in the day, if you spent more than an hour on the phone people thought there was something wrong with you. Back then I thought they were right. If some galactic disaster wiped out electronics on Earth, there would be a lot of people who suddenly lose it because they have nobody to blab to. Twitter gives them this outlet even when they are surrounded by people that really don't want to hear their crap. It's really no different than thinking outloud or talking to walls; an umbilical cord to keep them from having to be alone. They talk about how great it is because they are addicted and cannot function without someone listening to them blabber on about nothing all day. As long as they are talking, they feel somehow important. - Yes, I get the irony
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just wtf is the point in Facebook/MyWaste/Bebo/Twatter phishing?
What on Earth does a scammer have to gain from access to a single, random account?
What, you mean Doug doesn't really wanna be my friend?
"it's a...brainless way to communicate.... Organizations find it's useful as a good way to update people" Surprises, surprises.
I use twitter regularly and haven't seen this much.
Regardless, this is similar to stolen accounts being used to spam the message board on Myspace. Slightly annoying yes, but not a big deal because the user generally quickly reclaims their account.
Myspace also took a number of steps to cut down on this and warn users about links to outside domains and significantly reduced the problem.
I don't think this is that big of a deal on Twitter now and if it becomes one I believe it can be effectively combated.
On a side note, it'd be nice that when you notice that you are not logged in to Slashdot after writing a comment and click the 'log in' button on the comment box that it allowed you to log in without losing your comment
and here i thought all twits were spam.
I like Twitter precisely for bloggish status updates like Facebook's "status" option (and have my Facebook status auto-updated from Twitter).
I can easily text message Twitter that I'm heading over to a different town for work and wouldn't mind getting together for coffee with friends and leave it open for people to give me a call.
Its a useful service, but some people have hacked it into a large never-ending chat room which it isn't.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Every method of human communication brings with it the reasons we communicate. Spam, reduced to its essential quality, is broadcasting greed. And that emotion has been around since the dawn of civilization. Every "new" communications medium will have it, and in western civilization with its emphasis on individuality, materialism, and consumerism, it will be all the more prominent. So is it really news that another medium (in this case, twitter) has started to reflect this? Not really.
Concurrently, we've been evolving ways of blocking out this trash -- ad filtering, blocking software, downloading our TV episodes online, etc. There is a real grassroots effort underway to fight back against advertising and an emphasis on "real" communication -- that is, honest opinions by people we trust. In this disconnected world, networks of trust have become more important than ever as a way of not drowning in the sea of greed, self-indulgence, and attention-grabbing behavior. I know people that use gmail for one reason alone: The spam filtering is just that damn good. I have seen people breathe a sigh of relief and leap to hug me after setting up firefox with ad blocking software -- they are geniunely happy.
The real story here isn't twitter turning to a sea of suck, it's that our culture is changing on a fundamental level. And it is doing this without any real organization, without any center. It doesn't seem necessary for a person to be part of a certain subculture or have exposure to a certain trigger to start it; It's a stand alone complex. That is, for those who haven't seen Ghost in the Shell, a phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort.
We're going to see more of this in the years to come.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Well, we have a slightly different protocol, rather than send each other mindless little blips of info, we HANG OUT WITH EACH OTHER.
Then we TALK TO EACH OTHER, sometimes while DRINKING A BEER AND HAVING FUN.
But hey, a few characters on a screen are clearly better...
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
That's what ICQ (or more recently Jabber/XMPP) is for! You can send one-to-many messages there too.
Maybe Twitter is the webmailer of the messenger systems. Just as stupid. Also a step in the wrong direction.
I bet this will all continue, as soon as someone writes an OS in "AJAX / Web 2.0", then a "Browser". Then "web"sites for it.... until someone comes up with an "interactive" way of writing "applications" for those "sites".
It's called "the inner platform anti-pattern". Avoid it! ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It is beginning to approach the levels we see of more conventional email spam and related hacking... and in many cases, they are simply an extension or growth of the original set of problems.
Recently, a compromised machine led to the inclusion of my company's mail server in some RBLs. It was annoying, but I do not disapprove of RBLs as a means of ranking trust when processing incoming emails.
I think the same sort of system should be developed for Web server applications and should be built as a security module for Apache and other web servers out there. As hacking and other crap on forum web sites are recorded, there should be some means by which an operator can report incidents to a central authority where it accumulates scores which could then be used to serve as a trust level. So sure, CAPTCHA gets cracked... but by whom or what? Meanwhile other sources may show up as very trusted and clean and may not even require a CAPTCHA at all making the life of some users who keep their machines and networks clean a lot easier.
In the end, if my network were to end up on an RBL again, it just means I am not keeping my network clean and it is my fault. If my users cannot use a web forum here or there, the same should apply -- I am not keeping my machines clean. Now a problem occurs when I am a home user and my neighbor's IP address is ranked badly and I happen to be in that range. I hope those details get worked out, but ultimately, the web world is deserving of similar protective ranking methods that we enjoy with spam protections and it would seem it is all the more critical.
unfortunately
I don't get this scam at all. They use email disguised as a Twitter DM to drive people to a phishing site to steal Twitter logins, so they can do what exactly? The article says they they can then use Twitter to send messages to drive people to websites. Umm, aren't they already doing that with the email?
Twitter is a free service and holds no personal info that doesn't appear on your public profile, other than an email address. People routinely hand over their Twitter logins to third party sites so they can find out their twitter rankings and other such things.
I can understand phishing for bank and paypal logins, but this seems like a lot of effort to achieve very little.
Many people who are replying don't seem to use Twitter or even understand really what is going on with the phishing. Since I use Twitter, I'll explain:
With Twitter, you set up lists of people that you follow. When you follow someone, you can then see their Twitter messages on your main screen (or in your client application if you use one). Everyone else following that person can see the person's messages. People you follow can also send you Direct Messages. These messages aren't seen by anyone but the sender and recipient. In this respect, it is sort of like e-mail only it requires a "trusted relationship" to have been formed first i.e. No spamming from joe_random@somesite.com to everyone_else@somewhere-else.org.
What the Phishers are doing are sending DMs from compromised accounts telling the recipients about some blog post that they should check out. The recipients (assuming they fall for the phish), see a page that looks like the Twitter login page (but is really on access-logins.com). They enter their username and password and now the Phishers have another account to send DMs from. Rinse and repeat. I strongly suspect that there's a Phase Two in there that involves more than just collecting Twitter account information but so far they are just collecting accounts.
Stopping it is easy. If you change your password, they no longer have access. People have been outing people who "sent" them DMs (and thus were compromised). If a person doesn't fix their situation, you could unfollow them. This would mean they could no longer send you Direct Messages. As people stop following compromised people, they will either fix the problem or will dwindle to zero followers. Spam stopped. (If only e-mail spam were so easy to stop.)
And to address the "Twitter is useless" commentary, yes there are a lot of people on Twitter who post inane things. Then again, there are some good posters. (For example, I follow Greg Grunberg from Heroes and love reading his tweets.) I think you'll find that in any online medium. Blogs are like this, web sites are like this, even comments on Slashdot are like this. Choose a random Slashdot article and browse at -1. You're sure to find many worthless comments for every worthwhile comment. As for Twitter, I tend not to follow the inane Twitter posters, so I don't see those posts in my Twitter-feed. Like any online tool, Twitter is only what you make of it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This either means that the username and password information in your settings.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the MySQL database server. This could mean your hosting provider's database server is down.
The MySQL error was: Too many connections.
Currently, the username is cw_blogs and the database server is 10.10.10.93.
For more help, see the Installation and upgrading handbook. If you are unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your hosting provider.
You can no longer innocently follow a link because some quasi-stranger tweeted it to you without being wary
Let me fix that for you:
You can't innocently follow a link because some quasi-stranger tweeted it to you without being wary
Why would you, or anyone, have ever assumed otherwise?
As far as I can tell the ratio of useless to useful "tweets" on twitter has been much higher than two out of every three for a long time already. This is a novelty site with no long term value.
2/3 Tweets aren't spam right now?
What I wouldn't give for one out of three e-mails not being spam. The ratio for me is more 97 out of every 100 e-mails are spam.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
You're supposed to use your phone to tweet that you are "taking a dump". No one cares when you finish.
I quite enjoy using twitter as an easy way to keeping in touch with people and making contacts, but they need to develop a trust and rating system of some kind. Trying to follow a busy "channel" is impossible when it's being bombarded with crap. Because channels are effectively filtered tweets grepped via a search engine, there's no uniform way of rating down a user who insists on trolling or spamming. Have a look at #gaza - i bet about 3 out of 10 tweets are worth reading.
Then yes, it will be spammed to oblivion. Any method of transmitting information is a potential source of spam and becomes an actual one as soon as the potential ROI nears the cost of abusing it.
Can we not now flood the collector site with endless bogus twitter auths? I imagine it's probably already slashdotted anyway...
I've at times had to block entire countries from my SMTP server at the IP level because just handling the first level filtering for spam was costing me as much as $750 a month in traffic surcharges.
People don't see the amount of spam out there, but it still has a cost... not only in direct costs (bandwidth, servers, man-hours) but also in things like lost and ignored mail.
I suppose if you don't have any friends that like to keep up with what's going on in your life and vice versa.
That's what conversations are for. You know, real physical human interaction. Remember that?
Just so I have this straight, phone conversations are real physical human interactions? Are text messages? And how is reading another's twitter feed, and responding to, different then a phone conversation? Twitter isn't meant to replace physical meetings or hanging out with friends, it's for seeing what people are up without having to directly interfere with what they're currently doing. At least until we master the whole being everywhere at once thing. Then Twitter will become outdated.
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
Ah, not so!
There are 3 reasons why this is not 'useless'.
1) Entertainment is not useless. That is -all- this was made for. Entertainment.
2) My friend uses this to put up a 'going to X tonight' so that all his friends can tag along like the sheeple they are. (Honestly, he really is the life of any party, so I can't really blame them.)
3) Language learning! It's a great tool to help learn another language. Nowhere else on the internet exists so much mindless chatter as on twitter. You'd think forums had it, but nooooo... Twitter has this area squarely under its thumb.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Address mining using malware (viruses, botnets) has been a regular part of email spam for years. It comes in and out of fashion, but it's been over a decade since it's been possible to treat unsolicited links and attachments even from people you know as "safe".
My XMPP client pushes my status message to a separate program which adds it to my microblog atom feed, and an XSLT turns the last few entries into HTML. My friends can just subscribe to the atom feed. Twitter allows more than this, however, it allows you to 'listen' for specific keywords and get things that random people are saying about a given subject. I've not really seen the point of this, because I don't really care what random people are saying about anything, but apparently a lot of other people do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why worry about those claiming to be an existing well-known social networking site? It's already common practice for these places to, no impostering involved, ask for login details of completely unrelated sites when you sign up. That should _NOT_ be considered in any way okay, even from a site you "trust".
And then there's OpenID or whatever it's called, which basically says "make it not just disturbingly common, but recommended!" wtf?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Cause that is just sad.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Weren't they already?
I personally can call, E-Mail and text any person in my circle of friends that I think needs it. Mostly though people do not need 37 updates on my day.
That kind of thing is not really about what my friends need to know about me but more likely my need to announce my life to everyone I know in order to feel important.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No, I was saying that face to face interaction is the best way to keep up with what's going on in your friends life. It makes great conversation over dinner. What's the point of asking your buddy how the kids are if you receive updates over twitter every time little Tommy burps?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I used twitter to tell my friends I was going to see a movie and asking if any wanted to join.
Now we are 7 people catching dinner, and a movie. That doesn't seem so useless to me.
(And no, I would not call, text or email all my friends for something like that - but those that happened to see the message replied.)
But why anyone would share their grocery-going-abouts with anyone is beyond me...
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Sorry. I just have to go here.
WOW is not a graphical interface for a MUD
A MUD is much more powerful and and much less of a grind fest than any MUD I have ever played.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
This could be a problem...
2008-01-05 13:24 - Getting my bone on ...
2008-01-04 13:25 - Watching Babylon 5
The first and only time I used Twitter was to get updates from my brother in the days (and hours) leading up to the birth of his first child. It was great, since he could just send one message and everyone in our family who wanted to follow it could.
Its actually less than that. Its a solution to a problem they would like to have. Its like offering investment advice to someone making minimum wage (the problem being what to do with excess money). People solve the problem that doesn't exist, hoping to cause the problem it would have fixed.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yeah just like phishing scams heralded an end to email.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Is it possible to have friends that do not need to know everything in my life that will fit in a twit?
Sure it is. It's also possible to have friends who enjoy keeping up with what you're doing, and vice versa, I was in the Navy for 5 years and so I have a few close friends that happened to be scattered around, and not always accessible via phone.
I personally can call, E-Mail and text any person in my circle of friends that I think needs it.
Yes, or you can do ONE status update that all your friends can read and respond to.
Mostly though people do not need 37 updates on my day.
Yes because the only to Twitter is do 37 updates though out the day.
That kind of thing is not really about what my friends need to know about me but more likely my need to announce my life to everyone I know in order to feel important.
Umm... it's most fun read your friends twits rather then you're own, so it's nice to reciprocate.
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
A MUD is much more powerful and and much less of a grind fest than any MUD I have ever played.
I think you mean A MUD is much more powerful and and much less of a grind fest than any MMO I have ever played.
That said, it's a heck of a lot easier to implement a rich hyper-flexible, extensible environment in text than it is with graphics. :)
Why don't we string up the "term life insurance broker in Charlotte, North Carolina" who paid for this crap? Any business that pays spammers to promote their business should face criminal charges and civil damages.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Conversations? Bah, back in my day, we used to grunt and throw rocks at each other to communicate. Then som smart whipper-snapper like you came along with his fancy language, destroying our fine old traditions.
It's that Tim O'Reilly doesn't sleep!
http://twitter.com/timoreilly
And that this "old-timer" is more in touch with technology and society than I will ever be.
You mean they weren't largely a waste of time and bandwidth before?
Just because I personally don't use something like Twitter doesn't mean it has no value. Personally I would hate that level of being pestered but I'm from a generation that is pre-cell phone, etc. Heck, I still only use my cell phone when I want to use it and don't have any of the annoying web services on it.
All this means is that another communication medium is being exploited. Not exactly big news. There's probably stone tablets out there that could be classified as 'phishing' or 'spam' as we use the concepts.
We'll see yet another iteration of pseudo and real security measures and user training and it won't prevent it from happening again and again and again. Nigerian scam, anyone?
Back on topic. I'm not going to slam the service or any of the new terms that have sprung up in a way to sound bite what it does. It's just a wake up call that there is no free lunch, there is no free beer, the cake is a lie, and only you can prevent forest fires.
Because spam has clearly killed the email industry, so it follows that... oh, wait, nevermind.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
but past that it's not a serious experience, and shouldn't be treated as one.
I think you forgot that most people on the Internet (read, people who buzzwords and websites with domains ending with "r" appeal to (also massive idiots)) treat everything on the Internet very seriously. That's why it's filled with drama, and "social networking sites" (a stunning oxymoron, watch The I.T. Crowd for a brilliant parody) are only adding fuel to the fire.
what if proxies were held responsible for the traffic that they send?
Never heard of it. Basically unknown in mainland Europe.
You tracked snowfall in Vancouver, BC???
OMGWTFBBQ!!!one!!eleven!
I totally missed that!
Didn't even know you had a working time machine there. (*)
(*) do I need to explain that is intended as an ironic / sarcastic statement?
"Herald the End of Microblogs"
Let us hope so. Damn mindless hordes and their idiotic effluent.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Twitter does serve a very useful function. As with the structure of haiku, the 140 character limit forces you to express yourself very carefu
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
If I want to know what's going on in someone's life I ask them, if they give me six pages about how they're going to the store, now looking at pants, going to another store, oh shit I forgot to look at something, this guy cut me off, traffic is bad, I'm in a store, I have to work later, getting read for work, working, work sucks... etc etc etc you'd probably punch them in the face.
The problem with twitter, like facebook statuses, and for many people blogs, is that a lot of people are very poor at filtering how many god awfully minute and mundane status updates they give you.
If I want to know what's going on in someone's life I ask them, if they give me six pages about how they're going to the store, now looking at pants, going to another store, oh shit I forgot to look at something, this guy cut me off, traffic is bad, I'm in a store, I have to work later, getting read for work, working, work sucks... etc etc etc you'd probably punch them in the face. The problem with twitter, like facebook statuses, and for many people blogs, is that a lot of people are very poor at filtering how many god awfully minute and mundane status updates they give you.
Get cooler friends, then again threatening to punch people in the face doesn't win over many people does it?
Is this the end of people logging into random web pages that are not the page they asked to visit? Or the end of people using web browsers that will install malware without your authorization just by visiting a web page?
Clicking a link should never be dangerous.
Throw rocks? You and your fancy tools. It's club-wielding whippersnappers like you that chased us away from the watering hole years back.
FTA:
I vote for 'whaling', or possibly 'phailwhaling'.
I can easily text message Twitter that I'm heading over to a different town for work and wouldn't mind getting together for coffee with friends and leave it open for people to give me a call.
Cool, then they can send a text message to twitter that they they like coffee in different towns, and leave it open for people to call them.
Then you can text message twitter just to reinforce just how open to the idea of someone calling you you are.
And they can text message twitter with the same.
And then...
Gee, no wonder it ended up being a never ending chat room.
See... the way I do it is... If I want to have coffee with you, I'll just call or email you. If I don't, then I don't. I don't need to play this ridiculous game of passive aggressive "I want to have coffee with you, but you have to ask me." that you seem to enjoy.
Dang, I actually mis-read the specific statement that your "yes" was referring to. My bad.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Will tweets become like email, with two out of every three just worthless spam?
With systems for auto following everyone you're interested in, long articles on how to simply repost everyone else's tweets in order to draw attention to your narcisistic but utterly unoriginal self, auto notifying, auto responding, auto tweet^H^H^H^H^H drivelling...
How on earth can you say twitter will become worthless spam? Give it credit. It's already worthless spam. Just dressed up in the guise of content that's deperately recycled from everyone else.
Yet another "OMG does X mean the end of Y? We can only hope predict chaos/destruction/carnage/dogs and cats living together/mass schadenfreude! **CLICK ITTT** READ IT RIGHT NOWWWUH !" Twitter being hit by "a big phishing scam," yes it's news, but the headline is more than a little melodramatic, don't you think?
Love, Squeedle
People like this seem to be selectively blind to the usefulness of great ideas and new technology in an attempt to keep a stranglehold on their "back in my day" ways of doing things. With any luck they'll be arrested in some foreign country and have no one to converse with. 'Cept for a large man named Cheryl who loves "physical human interaction".
What would it take for them to return to talking to walls?
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Yes, this is the end. I am sure that very soon, Microblogs will be as dead and obsolete as Email is.
mmmmm the smell of progress
An end to the war on drugs... most likely. If you have any sway with big pharma, perhaps some aspirin-X-treme for headaches and cramps and sports injuries.
Seriously, if we could just get little electric generators in their keyboards while they tweet, perhaps we could help solve the almost was global warming problem? All for the minor cost of having people be quietly annoying on the train ride to work.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Why would phishing attempts on Twitter spell the death of microblogs? I guess because phishing already killed email. Oh wait, it didn't. Maybe it killed eBay then. Hmmm, nope, still going. Ah, but PayPal is surely in troub-- nope, it's ok too. Has phishing actually killed anything at all yet?
Gone are the days of "*ring*ring* Hello? [It's a BOY!!!!!!!!!] Congratulations, dude!".. nowadays you have to subscribe to the twit's twits or be left behind... worse yet, if you did not subscribe, *clearly* you didn't care about his newborn at all so be prepared for a "F U."
MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are all called part of the 'social networking' arena, but I'm starting to side with the psychologists of 5 years ago... these things are just making us -less- social and far more superficial.
I love that the tools exist, I hate what they tend to do to people.
What are you doing?
Er... phishing?
BWHAHAHAHAHHAHA
1:08 EvilGuy1 Smelling coffee.... ...
1:11 EvilGal2 That's hot!
1:13 EvilGuy1 So is my coffee...
1:17 AdamSandler OMG THAT IS SO FUNNY!!!
1:21 (EvilGuy1's Toaster) TOAST IS READY
1:31 EvilGuy1 That's me babe!
1:41 EvilGal2 Wow you are soo deep and insightful.
1:51 EvilGuy1 Word.
2:00 Shakespeare ROLLING OVER kthxbye.
2:08 ThePresident EvilGuy1 only you can save America, please send $50 to this address...
2:10 EvilGuy1 Ok Mr. President. Based on your name you must obviously be the real president.
2:14 EvilGal2 I sent some too Mr. President.
2:22 ThePresident Thanks suckers!
2:36 EvilGuy1 Wha? Did we get punked?
3:37 EvilGal2 I love how you use words so smartly! Whait!
2:42 EvilGal2 Oh no that was my mom's medication money! You not very smarter EvilGuy1!
2:50 EvilGuy1 Shut up stupid head! Wanna make out?
2:52 EvilGal2 Uhh ok!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I have friends and family in far-flung geographic locations. Back when the world was limited to my neighborhood, "real physical human interaction" was a viable option. Now? The world's gotten too big.
Twitter, blogs, email are great ways for me to keep up with those people. Face-to-face interactions aren't an option when I live in Texas and have family in Chile and Switzerland, and phone conversations require a scheduling miracle. (The whole "free" aspect of it is nice, too.)
Criss (CrissWrites on Twitter)
http://crisswrites.blogspot.com
Well I did get that call (and that announcement was not twittered). But I certainly wasn't going to get a call every 30 minutes or an hour saying "still no baby but she's doing fine", which I could follow via twitter.
...of Microblogs? According to CNN, yes. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10131251-36.htmlhttp://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10131251-36.html
I find it fascinating how many people focus on the least-used (or least-interesting) application for twitter.
Among the things I find interesting: feeds from TechCrunch and TechVibes, the Associated Press, and CBC News; local radio personalities, reporters, and newspapers letting me know what's going on in my community; local 'movers and shakers' doing the same; people like Wil Shipley and John Gruber, with insightful, relevant, and often funny commentary; information from friends and associates on what they're doing and where (e.g. the Gastown Snowball Fight).
There's lots of reasons to use Twitter; finding out what kind of salad someone's eating isn't one of them.
They talk about how great it is because they are addicted and cannot function without someone listening to them blabber on about nothing all day. As long as they are talking, they feel somehow important.
This is exactly why I love Twitter so much. Note: I don't actually use Twitter.
But it gives all the Twits a place to Titter to each other, or nobody, and thusly not fill my life with their inane ramble.
Probably the most aptly named service in the history of the internet... Twit + Titter = Twitter. Oh, that's not what it meant? My mistake, I guess I wasn't listening.... :)
People who actually get phished deserve it. Even my (technologically inept) mother knows not to trust links like that. I just un-followed all the idiots from whom I got the phishing link.
If your spam is still at that low of a percentage, be happy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think that's kinda the point. I can post to twitter "My boy turns 2 today" and everyone who's listening can know, without having to explicitly ask me how old my kid is.
This brings up an interesting point (to me anyway). The reason I don't keep a blog is because I feel like my life is not interesting enough. I did keep a blog when I was traveling abroad, though, because I kept seeing an doing interesting things. Even then, though, it was an umbilical cord. I didn't really know at the time if my friends were reading it, but it was always fun to write it.
Recently, I was at a talk that was really boring, and I thought I'd pass the time by writing down my thoughts. As it turns out, that was pretty much just as boring as thinking them. Why would anyone ever want to know every stupid thing I do?
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
Well, in some circumstances people want to know what you think on a given topic. The lecture circuit is full of people that are thought of that way... or think they are. You know, Bill, Woz, Steve, Bruce, ex-presidents, former criminals, and a host of others. At any rate, they get paid well enough to keep telling people about it. Basically a personal presentation of a blog, or is a blog a free but impersonal presentation of a lecture? The responses in blogs are often more entertaining since they have some original material to work with whereas the blogger has to make it all up from scratch. Judging from the Internet, originality has been over-rated for a very long time. With a shout to grammar Nazis of the world, apparently written English has been over-rated for quite some time as well.
That doesn't even begin to cover logging onto SecondLife and attending a lecture by someone at Cisco. I have no clue if that is a lecture or a blog reading? Animated blog? Cartoon lecture? My head is aspolodin!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
First off, your post made no sense.
Secondly, your post shows an immense lack of comprehension of what I said.
I text a message status to Twitter " ... is going to be in Toledo this weekend, anyone free?" instead of calling EVERYONE I might know in Toledo and then saying "well hold on, I haven't called Y or Z yet."
X, Y and Z can then either privately message me back or give me a call directly that they're free and want to do something.
Funny, sounds much more efficient than leaving voice mail messages everywhere, or texting everyone I know in sequence. Also consider that many other people I know are also very mobile and might be in Toledo when I am without me knowing it.
Of course, you sound pretty selectively social by comparison with your "I'll call you" attitude. No need to tell your friends they'd be free to call you instead huh?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
It might be the 'best' way, but it's not always an option. Particularly with friends who live nowhere near you and who you will not have a daily or even monthly chance to interact with face to face.
http://transformativeworks.org/
It lets you do fun stuff like this: atstream.henk.ca.
Not really useful though. =)
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
I text a message status to Twitter " ... is going to be in Toledo this weekend, anyone free?" instead of calling EVERYONE I might know in Toledo and then saying "well hold on, I haven't called Y or Z yet."
1) Does everyone you know that's not in Toledo not vastly outnumber the number of people in Toledo?
2) My email has this feature where I can cc or even bcc messages to as many people as I want, it also supports setting up groups of recipients for groups I might want to send messages to often. Doesn't yours? I don't object to your using twitter, but replicating features of 20 year old email is hardly something to be excited about.
No need to tell your friends they'd be free to call you instead huh?
Correct, there is no need. My friends don't need me to tell them they can call me. They just call me.
"We're in the death throws of the internet-of-the-corporate-hack."
Are death throws something like Hail Mary passes?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
it's a quick and brainless way to communicate with friends
I was going to argue that this was Facebook's territory, but then I realised that Facebook is a quick way to communicate with brainless friends.
Coupled with instant upload of phone cam pictures, it was an amazingly realtime view of my personal geographic area.
In the US we have a device we call a "window" that we use for the same purpose.
The problem with spam on Twitter is that Twitter is subscription-based, not broadcast-based. If someone is spamming you, unfollow them. If you don't want them to see you either, block them. Problem solved.
This problem is only a problem because stupid people are careless with their passwords. Once that problem is solved (hah!) we're back to normal again.
I agree strongly with this opinion. If you want to chat with your friends, they are much more fully featured ways of doing it via other social networks. Most of these have mobile application for them too. For example Facebook, which is (or was) based around a shared photo album, as well as your twitter like statuses, and walls for public messaging.
Twitter also doesn't work well for notifications, as you only have 160 characters, and it's pretty hard to get a full title + URL in there, let alone a summary. RSS, Atom do this much better, offering no limits on the article size. As well as this feeds are much better integrated with your browser, phone, as almost everything has a feed reader now.
I'm sorry but whats the big deal, phishing has been going on for years, users being too trusting to verify that sites aren't the site they think they are at is nothing new
Don't tell them that!!!!
Twitter was designed to keep all the attention seekers and idiots occupied. It is imperative that they remain within their illusion.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
It is like regular blogging. Most blogs have frivolous posts in them as well. But get that rare someone who is clever or has actual important things to say, Twitter then becomes quite entertaining. Please don't place all Twitter users in the same bucket.
Journal
Wow, it looks like you just don't get the point, or you're just trying to be "edgy" by straw-manning a popular service. Why do you and the other posters in this thread get so angry over something that other people genuinely use but you don't find useful?
And no, I am not so important that everyone is interested in what I am doing, but the twenty-five or so people who follow me on Twitter do. If not, they wouldn't be following me. And I actually am interested in what all the people I am following are doing. If not, I wouldn't be following them - and I have dropped people who I don't care about or those update every thirty minutes. Twitter lets me stay connected to my friends without all the bloat of something like Facebook. If you don't want to know when I'm going shopping, then don't follow me on Twitter and shut up.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/04/23/le-twittre/
And the Fax Machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached!
Twitter is IM without the targetting. I need a browser filter to strip out anything twitter from pages I visit :(
Wow, way to post a reply and not contribute a single bit to the discussion by completely ignoring the actual topic.
http://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Gone phishing.
It makes great conversation over dinner. What's the point of asking your buddy how the kids are if you receive updates over twitter every time little Tommy burps?
Because then over dinner you can ask how *loud* he burped. And what, if anything, came up.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
However, in this case, even if they don't get it, it's worth exposing Lovecraft's... well, craft. Only one out of a hundred people will become further enlightened by it, but that's pretty valuable.
[Ego]out
I feel that's about as apt.
Problem is one of using the right tool for a job - a blog (or twitter) is not a substitute for real time, acknowledged communication, any more than it's a good idea to email me to let me know my mail server is down.
Friends I like chatting to. I have several acquaintances though, that I don't enjoy chatting to. Therefore getting a summary of their life in a readable text format quite neatly allows you to be a real git and abort their attempts to talk to you face to face.
No, I don't remember that, because Twitter has totally replaced all other forms of communication!
Seriously, don't be daft.
Why do my friends need to know what's going on with my life?
The sane way to communicate this is by point to point communication with each one of my friends, allows to interchange the information that is relevant to each one of us about each other.
The informational diarrhoea that is is Twitter is a fad which hopefully will die an unhypped death soon.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Honestly, which need is there to either know all what is going on with somebody else or to let everybody else know what I am doing?
Why either of these is necessary?
Just because the government is trying to spy on us 24x7 means that we should give up privacy for no particular reason.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I question how genuine a friendship is if neither part can be bothered to write an email, letter or can't be bothered to phone.
Twitter seems like an excuse for the lazy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
10? 20? 100?
Those are not friends, there are acquaintances at best.
Real friends can be counted with the fingers of a hand, and they are so important to me I will ring each one of them if I am on their respective towns.
Anything else is a cop out and frankly the world does not work like that, few people have so many friends that it becomes justifiable to make more efficient the communication process....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's what conversations are for. You know, real physical human interaction. Remember that?
The nice thing about twitter is that when you talk to people you actually get to have real conversations. The social utility of twitter is that it allows people to skip the small talk when they see each other. They already know about the chit-chat stuff because they've been following each other with twitter. So, conversation time can be devoted to substantive discussion.
Sure, most of the tweeters don't really have much to say to begin with, but for those that actually do, it helps to eliminate a lot of idle chit-chat.
It's great that the service is there and all, but like facebook, myspace, et al, I really wish people would stop blithering about how INSANELY GREAT it is.
When my nephew and niece come over they whine about who gets to use the computer so they can go to their myspace accounts. I didn't mind, whatever. I didn't mind until my nephew (about 12 or 13) started asking me "Why don't you get a myspace page?" He started saying "Dood you gotta get a myspace page."
I snapped. I said "Myspace pages are for fucking idiots that are even lower than slashdot posting MUD players."
He didn't know what I was talking about but I think he got the gist of it. He never hassled me to make a myspace page again.
P.S. My niece even tried to reboot the computer after she tried to install some shit from myspace but she didn't know I changed the default account to limited and put a password on the admin account. Heh. I should've done that a long time ago with kids using the computer. (Even the adults I know.)
Your first point is moot; the number of friends in locations other than where I'm going is not relevant to the debate.
Your second point makes no sense since what you're saying is I should use a feature that does not exist on my phone (E-mail via text message) and that requires more effort (looking up each name, adding them to the CC list) and that doesn't have the effect of notifying people that I wouldn't know are also in Toledo at the time.
Thirdly, your friends wouldn't know you were going to Toledo. Do your out of town friends frequently ask you to do lunch when they don't know you'll be in town?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Your reply reflects a specific personality type and your assumption does not hold true for all people and how they handle friendships.
Feel free to study some work on personalities like Myers-Briggs sometime.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Your first point is moot; the number of friends in locations other than where I'm going is not relevant to the debate.
Bullshit.
Your second point makes no sense since what you're saying is I should use a feature that does not exist on my phone (E-mail via text message)
So send it from your laptop a couple hours later. This is hardly a message that can't wait to be sent out.
and that requires more effort (looking up each name, adding them to the CC list) and that doesn't have the effect of notifying people that I wouldn't know are also in Toledo at the time.
Boo fucking hoo. Take the time to contact the people who will be where you are going, and don't bother the vast majority who won't be. What? Are you so imporant and your time so valuable that you'd rather spam everyone you know than take the minimal amount of time to create an address group or lookup a few names?
And as for the people you wouldn't know are in Toledo at the same time... geez. You want to spam everyone you know on the off chance one or two people might be in the area? Hell, if you have friends that travel that much that its actually likely they'll happen to be in Toledo at the time, I guess send them a message too... but of my list of friends and acquaintences, I highly doubt any of them will be in Toledo.
In any case, turning it around, I have a cluster of friends in Calgary. They probably get together every few days, I'm in Calgary every couple years... do I (and everyone else they know who isn't in Calgary) want to be fucking notified everytime they want to see who's going to be at some local club for a few beers just in case one of us in Calgary that night. No fucking way do I need that constant stream of spam. If I'm going to Calgary I'll tell them.
Thirdly, your friends wouldn't know you were going to Toledo. Do your out of town friends frequently ask you to do lunch when they don't know you'll be in town?
If I was going to their town, I would send a message to the people in that town to invite them. See how that works.
Better still if someone else I knew was also going to be in town, yeah, I'd miss inviting him. But the friends in town that I did send it to would say, "hey, guess what, so-and-so from somewhere also called us to say he will be in town that weekend; we should all try to get together..."
Obviously I'm not going to change your mind, so I'll drop it, but your argument is so ridiculously self centered its pathetic.
Yaknow, I had that thought while I was typing that comment...
Uh, hardly. The less brainpower it takes to operate ANYTHING, the better. :-P