Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Exploit Let Two Pranksters Post 30,000-Character Tweet (engadget.com)
sqorbit writes: Two German twitter users were able to post a 30,000-character tweet, blowing way past the 280-character limit it is testing for select users. The accounts were banned for a brief period of time but are now back online after they apologized. The original 30,396-character tweet has been archived and can be viewed here. The two pranksters exploited "a rule Twitter made in 2016 that links would no longer count in the 140-character limit," reports The Daily Dot. "Yes, this is just one big web address with a URL code hidden deep in the large block of text."
I just can't fathom why anyone would use such a pathetically limited platform.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I just can't fathom why anyone would use such a pathetically limited platform.
Hey, 280 characters ought to be enough for anybody.
Unless you tweet the entire contents of "War & Peace". Or maybe the Twitter TOS.
Whatever. As soon as they started allowing anything other than text, they were sort of doing that anyway. You could encode text in an image and use a front-end to get big tweets, or do what a lof of people do and post images of text (yuck), and get huge ugly tweets with the normal front end. It's all a bunch of silliness. If you don't lock it down to text, there's not much of a limit. Even then, you've got the Trumpian... tweets that continue... because I'm too... bigly to adhere to... your limit.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't understand why this is news.
Before the wide use of smart phones (remember Twitter was out before the iPhone), there were limits to the early version of the SMS protocol used. Depending on carrier and network but typically the maximum individual short message size was 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters.
If you're one of those, like me, who still sends Tweets using SMS (rather than MMS which can be a bit finicky on Android devices), you'll still run into these limits.
But the users, audience, and content is pretty well versed in the 140 character limit. And while many people try to make multiple tweets to explain some thought in a rambling way, most of the well-shared re-tweets are concise statements and fit in well with the theory behind sound bites. Also, look at this very post if you want to want an example of a long winded ramble of the kind that really doesn't exist on Twitter but is commonplace on Slashdot.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Have gnu, will travel.
Because if the Donald gets a hold of this exploit... God help us!!!
Because Twitter autoshortens URLs you can post one as big as you want, no "hack" needed. That's sort of the point of URL shortening. You can argue that the design is bad, but I still don't see how this is news.
Compared to churning butter or shoeing a horse, the injection of this 30k tweet may be the most arbitrary and arcane human endeavor to date, stealing the crown from Bitcoin.
In order to fully grasp the "churn & shoe" ratio try to delineate the advances that have led to a point, and identify jump-off points where technology has opened up or closed off human potential.
OPENED UP: From electrons skidding through wires, distance communication, analog voice impulses, time domain digital pulses, store and forward numeric registers, packet communication, buffered reassembly, transparent fragmentation and reassembly, sessions, multiplexing, the OSI model, point to point stream and broadcast through virtual circuits, routing among autonomous systems, mapping names to addresses, from overhead intensive multiple connections to timed keepalive, from bare ASCII to gzip...
We should be living in space by now.
CLOSED OFF:
- SMS developers were concerned that digital text traffic from cell users would disrupt voice communication and imposed a character limit. They needn't have bothered, now you can be watching an HD video with full audio clarity embedded in a busy Facebook page while experiencing a crappy voice call.
- Twitter adopted the character limit for novelty in an attempt to enforce brevity and succinctness. They imagined the imposed limits would broaden human horizons as human intellect funneled into terse communications of awesome power and simplicity. The speed of networks combined with this focus would form global consensus in minutes, solve the world's problems in days, and give us all the 7th day off. They needn't have bothered, because the character limit exposed the human tendency towards short snarky comments, and these have overtaken all other content.
- Now a 30k tweet has been successfully injected but in comparison with every ground breaking moment in technological history preceding it, it is more like an abandoned starving canary locked in a cage that has discovered a new note. The 'injection attack' is a triumph but it is a system-within-a-system-within-a-system, that 30k of content hidden in some 1 megabyte page load of style sheets and HTML fluff, served by half a dozen mysterious IP addresses and keepalive connections that torment in-memory DOM objects with Javascript ooglies.
Meanwhile no butter has been churned, the cows have not even been milked, they are mooing restlessly. And the horses' hooves are wearing thin.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This is why we can't have nice things...
I've not had any problems with the 140 char limit.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire