Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Student Responsible For Twitter Exploit
bennyboy64 writes "An Australian teen has caused havoc on Twitter by discovering an exploit that hit thousands of users, including Barack Obama's press secretary, and resulted in the tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Pearce Delphin, who is studying his last year at high school, said that he was surprised that 'so many famous people got infected.'"
The summary kind of makes it sound like he's a kid who was looking for exploits and then used it to make a virus. This doesn't seem to be the case at all. According to the TFA he saw some people using CSS in their twitter posts, and wondered if he could use HTML/JavaScript (as I would be too). He found he could, did some experimenting, and his followers then started doing it too and it went viral (the idea), and then some malicious people found it, and went viral (the code).
I assume no punishment is being leveraged against him, but I'm sure many will misunderstand what happened and call for it anyways. Curiosity should be encouraged.
The article says he is the one that discovered the exploit, but he did not create the script that made 'tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn'. Just to clarify.
Since the fall of Adam.
Well, you did ask.
...Suppose you post a mentally-handicapped guard at your castle gate. When you are gone, your enemy hands him a scroll with instructions and says "These are from your boss. He wants you to do them right away." The instructions tell him to ransack your bed-chamber and run your underwear up the flag-pole. The guard obeys. Who is to blame?
Twitter.
Oh wait, Microsoft.
No... Google.
Ooooh, Terrorists. Almost had me there.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
The 1980s called. They want their curiosity back, you terrorist sympathizer!