Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Bug Lets Users Force Others To Follow Them
Several readers have sent word of a Twitter bug which has been allowing users to make any other user follow them by simply tweeting "accept [username]." People have been abusing it to make the accounts of various celebrities and publications follow them. Twitter acknowledged the bug and disabled the follow/unfollow system until they can get it fixed.
Twitter says they have resolved this bug. http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Looks like it's being fixed...
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8671581.stm
Slashdot has comments, friend/foe, and journal (blog) space. What's to prevent you from getting fired for using Slashdot?
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Consider that selling a list of users and their preferred content information to advertisers could result in a huge profit for Twitter. Then imagine a captive audience forced to receive what is essentially spam tweets.
This is definitely a feature, not a bug. And this disabling of the feature for the time being is a temporary measure to let the furor blow over before reactivating it later.
Twitter isn't a public utility. It's a business just like Google and Microsoft. They will find a way to monetize your behaviors.
So what should you do? Stop using Twitter?
test command embedded into the code that allows "dummy" testing within the development environment. Either way - oops.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Justin Bieber is actually a secret computer hacker, breaking simple algorithms like this is cake for him.
In fact, all of his music is about IRC.
All your tweets are belong to us?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What if I try to tweet system("rm -rf /") ?
accept +1 Funny
looked up my twitter and i have 0 followers now
This is one of the difficulties of In-Band Signaling. Their communication channel is so limited that handling secure signaling is difficult.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
TWITTER BEFORE ZOD!
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Heh, it's tempting to view this as an accidental homage to the blue box.:
An early phreaking tool, the blue box is an electronic device that simulates a telephone operator's dialing console. It functions by replicating the tones used to switch long-distance calls and using them to route the user's own call, bypassing the normal switching mechanism. The most typical use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls - inversely, the Black Box enabled one to receive calls which were free to the caller.
For those new to the party, on early telephony networks the telco's control signals were sent on the same channel as the content (voice) signals. Some bright folks figured out how to exploit this weakness. Oops. ;-)
I thought the Woot blog response to the matter was more interesting. I haven't been corrupted by Twitter yet, so it's all just amusing to me anyway.
fixed!
You are kidding, right?
http://status.twitter.com/post/587210796/follow-bug-discovered-remedied
1) Do not hire anybody using social networking sites.
2) Make joining social networking sites a cause of immediate termination of employment.
Are you kidding me? How on earth do you expect employers to spy on their employees without the employees handing out their personal lives on a sliver platter? Sure, everyone wants the "best and the brightest" employees ... but do you really need a Rhodes scholar to do your accounts payable paperwork? Or handle your returns department? Of course not. Employers use these sites to "safely" monitor their herd of employees without "going to far".
> Slashdot has comments, friend/foe, and journal (blog) space.
> What's to prevent you from getting fired for using Slashdot?
much less obvious when comes the time to link it to my identity. Not that it is impossible although ;-)
I never told my Slashdot ID to anybody I know, I don't friend/foe anybody and I have no journal. Additionally, I try to be careful about what I post.
When can I pass the interview ? ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
..not on third-party apps?
Twitter, meet WWW::Mechanize.
WWW::Mechanize, meet a twat.
> Slashdot has comments, friend/foe, and journal (blog) space. > What's to prevent you from getting fired for using Slashdot?
much less obvious when comes the time to link it to my identity. Not that it is impossible although ;-)
I never told my Slashdot ID to anybody I know, I don't friend/foe anybody and I have no journal. Additionally, I try to be careful about what I post.
When can I pass the interview ? ;-)
When you work for a company I'm pretty sure they know your identity. I think it's also safe to assume they don't care what your /. ID is, just that you're wasting company time.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
until you realize that as twitter creeps further into english language use, the following conversation following english language convention is only a few months away:
"i was going to twitter that until i got the tweet you twatted yesterday and i realized its no fun twuttering anymore, you twat"
"don't call me a twat you twit"
(shudder)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
modfunny 318230
Better known as 318230.
Sorry I posted on the wrong topic, I had a FA linking to a topic about social networking sites and jobs in "sensible activity fields" on my /. front page and it doesn't seem to be there anymore ;-))
It might be a /. bug, I can`t explain it ;-(
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967
Sorry I posted on the wrong topic, I had a FA linking to a topic about social networking sites and jobs in "sensible activity fields" on my /. front page and it doesn't seem to be there anymore ;-))
Here is the link I posted to, it apparently has been rescheduled from 1:27 PM to 3:09 PM eastern time. So it seems like a /. problem.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/10/1652245/Businesses-Struggle-To-Control-Social-Networking?art_pos=1
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
> just that you're wasting company time.
Some people are paid by their company to read /.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
What is it with the so-called Web 2.0 sites that makes them so much more prone to cock-ups like this?
If they aren't suffering from a security flaw like this one, they're suffering from horrible performance problems.
Take Reddit, for instance. They put it in read-only mode for many hours last week after users had their posting histories go missing and other problems arose.
It's not like these sites are getting that much traffic. Digg and Reddit aren't even in Alexa's Top 100 sites. There are many other sites out there that get just as much, if not more, traffic, yet their performance is just fine.
Maybe it has something to do with these sites using NoSQL? They've flat out rejected 40 years of accumulated database knowledge and experience in favor of messing around with network-aware hash tables. Maybe it's no surprise that they have so many problems, when they intentionally avoid best practices.
... but most of all, samy is my hero.
It's twitter. Did you really think it takes that great of an actual programmer to write that site? I mean they did decide to make a massive site using Ruby on Rails and then write their own message queue in Ruby, ignoring the 100000 existing queues that were better in Ruby and other languages. Is anyone shocked that they can't implement basic logic and security properly?
And yet some of us have been using slashdot for as long as we've been on the web (roughly so ~ more or less) as younger folks know it today.
I've been using this nick since 95 ish and haven't hidden that fact as far as I can remember. It was only lately that I even got an email addy that matched my real name (and that only for job hunt purposes). So I guess the fact that you don't share your username outside /. is related to the fact that you only got on the internets a couple years ago?
Also, who the f*ck cares? It's /.. We're supposed to be crackpots. Why be careful about what you post?
2^3 * 31 * 647
Has anyone abused this to follow themselves? That has much more fun potential than pretending random strangers care about your tweets.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
friend VGPowerlord
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Too bad there is no -1 Making me envious moderation.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I never thought I would see one of these soviet russia things where it was actually accurate and relevant.
"So what should you do? Stop using Twitter?"
Exactly. They'd loose 90% of their users like that if it they started doing that.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That reminds me of a Breakfast Club quote: "Demented and sad... but social."
One tweet to rule them all... One tweet to find them... One tweet follow them all... and in the darkness... pitch them your script for your Lord of the rings spin-offs.
Better watch out for the Twitterbug... ;)
"Twitter bug and ensuing 0 followers/0 following fiasco was inadvertently started by a Turkish fan of heavy metal band Accept. When this young man tweeted "Accept pwnz," he found that the user @pwnz was suddenly following him."
Follow Me Bitch!
but how did you acquire your ticket? cash?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Too bad there is no -1 Making me envious moderation.
Its not a good thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
chmod +5 ---funny 'Dan East':318230
As a programmer, I found the story of how the 'bug' was discovered quite amusing.
"The bug was inadvertently exposed by a Turkish fan of the German heavy metal band ACCEPT. When this young man tweeted "Accept pwnz," he found that the user @pwnz was suddenly following him." (Details (in Turkish) at http://inci.sozlukspot.com/e/4266098/)
This should forever be used as an example of why security through obscurity is no security at all.