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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.
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?
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. ;-)
They're likely sent in-band because most SMS commands are the same as the web interface. You can follow, direct message, etc. through both SMS or the update interface.
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.
I like that this was marked troll as if the mods were personally offended that someone dare suggest that /. doesn't have 'Super Cow Powers'.