Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands – one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz emailed mashable this morning, writing “[tweet] accept [username]” then the [username] immediately starts following you.”
Initially I noticed that my main Twitter account was following lots of new people that I had not manually followed. That means that if peopel chose to exploit this bug, their tweets could show up in anyone’s timeline — at least until the issue gets resolved. Well it appears the powers to be from twitter have resolved it with a mallet... I now have no followers, no one I am following and my lists have disappeared.
Other reports confirm that this exploit is currently being used by many users. No word yet from Twitter on when this might be fixed and if they’ll be able to do undo the damage, but I’ll update here when I know more.
Twitter is experiencing the same problem OpenID will have, or any "federated" approach where a true factor is not involved in authenticating requests such as this. The balance is, most solutions are too "expensive" (meaning hit to processing, user experience - not just cost) for such lightweight, high-scale things based on the social network site usability or cost model.
Twitter needs to find a strong simple to embed authentication technology that - gives the best of both: strength and validation with SAAS utility ease and integration, cost; but without the thin "browser-only or service-only" rigor that can enable such "over the transom" requests.
Not surprisingly 3 the top 10 trending Twitter topics at the moment have to do with the bug and the zeroing of followers.
Read what the press is saying:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224701415
No comments:
Post a Comment