Terence Eden’s Blog

That's not my name! Practical problems in real name policies.

@edentabuse security · 10 comments · 700 words · read ~1,522 times.

A human holds up some paper with a mysterious script printed on it.

Once in a while, big companies suggest that the answer to abuse is to ban anonymity and institute a Real Names policy. This time, it is Google's turn. They think that critical software should only be authored by people with "real names". I don't want to go into whether this is a good idea or not. Nor philosophical discussions of what a "real name" is. I want to discuss how this would work practically. Let's assume that a central website - like GitHub - decided to gather real names for…

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How To Add Twitter's "Report Abuse" Button To Your App

@edentabuse api blocking twitter · 350 words

You can't. I mean, not officially. There's nothing in the API documentation, and all my attempts to contact Twitter on this matter have been ignored. If you're getting abuse on Twitter you have to use the official Twitter clients to report people. No matter that 3rd party clients may be better at protecting your privacy, offering you a sanitised view of the people tweeting you, or enable you to block offensive words or phrases. In Twitter's increasing war on the developers who helped build …

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