Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/ is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. I recently saw someone tweeting the hashtag #ManchesُterDerby Do you see an odd character in the middle? It's an Arabic Damma (U+064F) - a vowel character. Although it comes after the "s" in Manchester, it…
Continue reading →
For the sake of my mental health, I've blocked a few people and organisations on Twitter. They can't see what I do, and I can't see them. I'm sure you've done the same to a celebrity or pundit you just can't stand the sight of. Perhaps you have an abuser you'd rather not have thrust…
Continue reading →
Back in 2014, I set up a rather silly Twitter account - @OxfordSolarLive. The premise was simple. A camera took a photo of the sky above my house. It took a reading from my solar panels to see how much electricity they were generating. It superimposed the reading on the photo. Then posted it on…
Continue reading →
It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but I've seen a recent influx in outright scams. Let me step you through a couple of examples. A typical…
Continue reading →
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 Some of the techniques in this blog post may be out of date.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 →