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 trick people into handing over their banking details. Let's take a look at one of them. Here we see what looks like a genuine account from one of the UK's biggest banks - NatWest. This account belongs …
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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 everyone to see! This is dangerous. It is likely that many of their customers recycle their passwords. Does the average customer know that their "billing"…
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Update! The source-code for this app can be found at https://github.com/edent/TweeView Many years ago, I created a threaded conversation viewer for fledgling social network App.net. It was a unique way to flow through a conversation without having to be constrained by the linear vertical scroll of the typical web browser. App.net died - and I never found a reasonable way to recreate it for Twitter. Until today. Paul Butler has created "Treeverse" a Chrome Extension which lets you…
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Twitter has recently improved the accessibility of its site. When uploading an image, a user can add alt text - a short description of the image for people with visual impairments. Here's an example: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentThis is a test to see if alt-text in images is searchable on Twitter.alpaca omnithorp pic.x.com/jhgcsaxpkd❤️ 1💬 0🔁 010:37 - Sun 19 February 2017 If you take a look at the HTML source, you can see that I've added a unique string as the alt text. That should make …
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This is a lazy way of making a collage of Tweets. I was originally going to use this method: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @6byNine@6byNine it is all I've got so far!❤️ 1💬 0🔁 019:11 - Sat 29 October 2016Mike@6byNineReplying to @edent@edent No idea about getting urls, but this may or may not be useful (cmd is also in image alt-text) pic.x.com/jh3yh4yki0❤️ 4💬 2🔁 020:01 - Sat 29 October 2016 but, sadly, gnome-web-photo crashed repeatedly when I tried to use it. It is a typically u…
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Here's a simple step that Twitter App Developers can do to reduce the amount of abuse which is generated on the platform. A few friends of mine regularly receive harassment on Twitter. Typically, there are two ways to deal with it: Mute the offending user. This means their tweets to you never show up in your replies. Block the offending user. The same as muting, except the offender is also prevented from seeing your Tweets while they're logged in. There's a flaw with both of…
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When is a string not a string? When it's a series of control characters! Not a particularly funny riddle, but one I've been wrestling with recently. Imagine we want to write a program which displays a Twitter user's name. Not their @ handle, but their "real" name. For example, instead of @POTUS, display "President Obama". Easy, right? Not quite. What happens when a user is named "️"? Normally, we'd just say if (null == $name) { ...Do Stuff... } Ah! But that's not an empty string, i…
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Regular readers will know that I take a keen interest in Twitter spam. It seems the more popular a network gets, the greater the propensity for spam. A shame, but it seems to be the way of the world. Recently, one of my Tweets which mentioned SoundCloud was retweeted in rapid succession by a variety of accounts. Take a look at the mugshots below and see if you can spot a pattern. Ok, let's ignore the obvious - spammers apparently think that blonde women attract more attention. A quick…
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Go take a look at this tweet https://twitter.com/edent/status/650948940431511552. You can't - I deleted it! I've been looking at how to track politician's deleting tweets, when it occurred to me - is there any way to prove that a Tweet ever existed? It's possible to automatically take a screenshot of a page, but screenshots can easily be manipulated. So, can we preserve deleted tweets with reasonable proof that the Tweet existed? I think the answer is yes - although it's cumbersome,…
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A little curio for you all. A StackOverflow user has pointed out that certain Twitter profiles contain very odd Unicode characters. What on Earth is going on? Let's take a look at Bill Clinton's profile on Twitter. Ok, that looks pretty normal. But let's take a look at the HTML source. Huh... What are those funny characters? Unicode Character U+0003 is "End of Text" - it's one of the original ASCII Control Characters used to inform a computer to stop processing the received data. In…
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This is a quick tutorial on how to encrypt your Twitter messages using PGP with the help of Keybase.io. I read an article yesterday which seemed to imply that Twitter was mangling PGP encrypted messages (albeit unintentionally). There is a minor bug in Twitter's web interface - but PGP seems to work perfectly in apps. So, I want to demonstrate how it can be done successfully. I've written this article with a non-technical audience in mind - feel free to point out any areas where I can make…
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Twitter, as part of its never-ending quest to alienate users and appease the rich and powerful, have shut down Politwoops accounts. Politwoops monitored politicians' Twitter accounts and noted when they deleted a tweet. Most of the time deletions were done for the same reason we all deleted content - mispellings, broken links, etc - but occaisionally they caught politicians attempting to flush history down the memory hole. If you're a dab hand with Python, and have a server upon which to run …
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