Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Closes Hole After Attack Hits Up To 500K Users
chicksdaddy writes "Twitter closed an ugly cross site scripting hole in its Web page Tuesday morning, but not until a fast moving attack, including at least two Twitter worms, compromised hundreds of thousands of user accounts. At its height, the attacks were hitting 100 Twitter users each second, putting estimates of the total number of victims at around 500,000 according to researchers at Kaspersky Lab."
How complicated is it to write somewhat secure software that processes 140 character messages?
I treat it more as an RSS feed. A lot of people use it to link to full articles, and as a means of just sharing links to information it's great.
Yet, you read and post Slashdot comments.
It's no fun complaining about something if no one sees or hears you doing it.
I have a theory that this is also why Facebook and Twitter have gained so much popularity. Half the updates I see on either are complaints about work, chores, some person who won't be named but must be publicly called out on some unspecified charge and/or the weather.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
No, I don't use Twitter. Yes, I see the point of using Twitter. No, I don't go around telling people how great life is without Twitter.
I'm sure that there are thousands of fantastic services out there, both on the internet and IRL, for which I have no use, and loads of great services for which I can't even envisage a practical use.
Another thing; your own viewpoints aren't the only ones and likely to be incorrect or incomplete when thoroughly scrutinized. Deal with it.
I had this discussion over some beers with some like-minded friends recently. What we settled on was, "When does it stop?"
BBS, finger, chat, IRC, email, IMs of 90 flavors, pagers, forums, MySpace, texting, LiveJournal, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, etc...
I think the Twitter hate is because you are hanging around the demographic that's largely filled its quota for "new shit that I have to keep track of". Add in our games, RSS feeds, slashdot, comics, etc., and we've filled our time on the internet. We either have to start purging old methods of communication and old pastimes, or we can't start new ones.
Right now, there's a large number of us who have thriving communities in enough places that we're not interested in another. It's not just Twitter - that's just the one that we're being pushed the hardest to adopt. And for a lot of us, Twitter doesn't hold a draw. I'm sure you've found some reasons to adopt it. But I don't have time for it. I'm full up.
Yet here you are, blathering on about how you use Twitter for so many things, how useful it is, blah blah blah.
Does it make any more sense now why the Twitter hate? We don't care already. Shut up about it. Some of us aren't about to give up something else for Twitter, and we'd need to in order to pay attention to it.
Our information bandwidth has been exceeded.
The sooner you and everyone else stops rambling on about The Next Big Thing On The Internet, the sooner we'll stop hating it.
(For the record, I came here to find technical details about the XSS, for although I don't care about Twitter, the details are important in the grand context of the internet. I just figured since you hadn't figured it out yet, I'd stop and point out why a lot of us hate Twitter. And your post which had nothing to do with the details of this attack is a prime example. We get it. You want to make passionate love to Twitter and have its babies. Yet you come to an article about a hack job, and instead of posting anything interesting about the technical aspects, you post a totally unrelated bit of flamebait about "Twitter Hate". That's why we hate Twitter. People doing what you just did. So if it bothers you that we hate your exciting new lover, stop posting shit about your love for Twitter when it's entirely inappropriate.)
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor