That ID gap is aligned with the 32-bit integer limit, which was manually breached as part of the 1st Tweetpocalypse (http://bit.ly/28MVIF3). It would seem likely to be internally created accounts that re-used that ID space later on.
Full width characters are used to maintain alignment in east Asian languages. A good example is the Chinese encodings, where every character is more or less square. If you put a half-width (e.g. latin) question mark in there is would throw off the natural alignment. A full-width question mark however keeps the alignment by taking up a full square. Might seem like a silly distinction but Chinese typesetting (even web typesetting) expects squares, and so do the viewer's eyes.
Imagine if the University Of YourState had done the aol search log research (http://aolsearchlogs.com/). The reported legitimate user of that data was Phd students in computer science and information retrieval. Making things public is nice, but I would hesitate to take it full speed and make a law requiring it (which with all things slashdot, it's all or nothing). Not because there is no review, but because, like the case of aol, there was review but they were scientists, not security experts and hosed it up.
Slashdot Mirror
That ID gap is aligned with the 32-bit integer limit, which was manually breached as part of the 1st Tweetpocalypse (http://bit.ly/28MVIF3). It would seem likely to be internally created accounts that re-used that ID space later on.
everything old is new again
Full width characters are used to maintain alignment in east Asian languages. A good example is the Chinese encodings, where every character is more or less square. If you put a half-width (e.g. latin) question mark in there is would throw off the natural alignment. A full-width question mark however keeps the alignment by taking up a full square. Might seem like a silly distinction but Chinese typesetting (even web typesetting) expects squares, and so do the viewer's eyes.
Imagine if the University Of YourState had done the aol search log research (http://aolsearchlogs.com/). The reported legitimate user of that data was Phd students in computer science and information retrieval. Making things public is nice, but I would hesitate to take it full speed and make a law requiring it (which with all things slashdot, it's all or nothing). Not because there is no review, but because, like the case of aol, there was review but they were scientists, not security experts and hosed it up.