Twitter Bug Lets Users Force Others To Follow Them 143
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.
That sounds more like a (Score:3, Insightful)
test command embedded into the code that allows "dummy" testing within the development environment. Either way - oops.
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
and i thought people just hated me (Score:2, Insightful)
looked up my twitter and i have 0 followers now
In-Band Signalling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In-Band Signalling (Score:3, Insightful)
not exactly.. their failure was not implementing some type of request/accept queue system.. and if they did they bypassed it and gave the accept message the ability to add people even if they where not in the queue, which is just stupid.
while i agree that In-Band Signaling is not easy to do right, and that they do have a limited communication channel.. they do not have a limited processing or back-end infrastructure..
there is no excuse for this type of screwup..
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Conan saw it coming (Score:1, Insightful)
http://twitter.com/ConanOBrien/status/13631062967
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blue Box (Score:3, Insightful)
The main difference being that back in the blue boxing days, security was an afterthought and now it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry... that gets called in after-the-fact once a tool gets really popular.
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not this would be useful for spam, it would be more profitable for Twitter to be able to control it, rather than letting individuals force other people to follow them. This is clearly a bug - there's no financial benefit to Twitter with this and if it went on for too long they'd lose users (which is probably why they shut off the follower mechanism as soon as the bug was publicized).
Not to say Twitter couldn't introduce their own advertising scheme. Just that if they did they'd want it to be one they controlled - and took payments for - not one that random spammers could exploit for free.
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Probably not a bug (Score:1, Insightful)
yes