Twitter has a problem with scam advertising. Rather than having humans manually check adverts for acceptability and authenticity, they let almost anyone promote anything. Whatever meagre protections they build in are rapidly evaded by the scammers. Let's take a look at an example of a promoted crypto-scam about Singapore. I'd say it was obviously a… Continue reading →
Imagine the scenario. You're trying out some cool new Twitter app. It asks you to sign in via OAuth as per usual. You look through the permissions - phew - it doesn't want to access your Direct Messages. You authorise it - whereupon it promptly leaks to the world all your sexts, inappropriate jokes, and… Continue reading →
Twitter has an undocumented feature which lets you follow accounts without being logged in. Here's how I found it, and how you can use it. My crappy old TV has a crappy old web browser on it. One boring Sunday, I decided to see which websites worked and which didn't on a 6 year old… Continue reading →
Update for 2019! Twitter have changed how they compress images. Some of the techniques in this blog post may be out of date. Let's talk image compression! Services like Twitter will often apply aggressive levels of compression in order to reduce their storage space and decrease download times. This can have negative consequences for usability… Continue reading →
(This isn't really a security issue, although I've disclosed it to the Twitter team.) "Fuzzing" is a computer science term which means "sending weird data into a program and seeing what happens." It's a useful way to see how your code can break in new and unexpected ways. It's particularly good at showing what a… Continue reading →
The Video EVERY EMOJI! pic.twitter.com/2fCUqwu67c — Terence Eden (@edent) October 24, 2017 Download the WEBM version (19MB). The Process Mostly notes to myself, but I thought you lot might be interested 🙂 Get Every Emoji from Twemoji Twitter maintain the Twemoji Project - it contains high quality SVGs of every emoji. They generously make them… Continue reading →
Here's a very simple introduction to getting started with Tweepy - a Python program which lets you access Twitter. This will work on small computers like the Raspberry Pi. Everything here takes place in the Terminal on the Command Line. This should work on Windows and Mac - but I'm using Linux. Get Python Open… Continue reading →
Five years ago, Twitter updated its logo and demonstrated that it could be made entirely of circles. Interestingly, the official Twitter logo doesn't use circles directly. So, here is an SVG I've made which is only circles: Or, without the edges, and no transparency: And the raw code: <svg height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100" width="100"… Continue reading →
Ever had a moan at your bank on Twitter? You're not alone - it's one of the most popular ways to interact with large companies. But how can you be sure that you're actually talking to the real customer services team? There's been a worrying rise in the number of fake accounts which attempt to… Continue reading →
Companies face a complicated choice. Make things easy for the customers, or make things secure for them. Convenience seems to take priority most of the time. This forces companies to get their customers to risk their own security. In this example, we see Verizon Wireless asking their customers to type their passwords into Twitter for… Continue reading →