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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.
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.
Here is the solution I propose for them in order to strike a balance:
1) Do not hire anybody using social networking sites.
2) Make joining social networking sites a cause of immediate termination of employment.
Side effect in my case: 3) profit from the new job openings available ;-)
Seriously, I hear that this has even become an issue for military staff located overseas where tactical information might be leaked when sampling feedback from a sufficient number of individuals.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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
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 /") ?
(7000+1440+700)*4 was what got me Halt. Even Emacs
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
..not on third-party apps?
Twitter, meet WWW::Mechanize.
WWW::Mechanize, meet a twat.
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.
http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967
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?
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
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
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
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.