Twitter – Who Wanna Follow?
I’m on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alantanblog
U Follow I Follow Back 🙂
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets.
Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).
Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them.
Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.
The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
Hi, remember me, we met at starbucks last saturday 🙂
followed you on twitter.
Twitter outage leaves millions stranded
By KELLY GOH
PETALING JAYA: Popular micro-blogging service Twitter experienced one of its more serious outages in recent months, leaving millions of its users worldwide stranded.
The service’s notorious “fail whale” error message, which appears on the site whenever there is a service disruption, surfaced at about 10.30am yesterday.
A statement posted on Twitter’s service site acknowledged the problem and said the disruption was the result of “failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caÂching.”
The statement added that the company’s infrastructure and operations engineers were working to resolve the problem and that a status update would be posted soon.
Problems with the service started on Saturday, and users reported several incidences of poor site performance and a high number of errors.
A post on the Twitter engineering site attributed those errors to one of its internal sub-networks being overwhelmed in terms of capacity.
According to statistics from web performance monitoring company Pingdom, June is shaping up to be the worst month in terms of outages for Twitter since October last year.
At press time, Twitter has been down for four hours and 56 minutes so far this month, compared with five hours and sixteen minutes last October (you can view the Twitter uptime chart here: bit.ly/11gXN).
Twitter said users may temporarily experience missing tweets from their timelines but these would be restored as soon as possible.
No estimated time was given to fix the problem.
Although Twitter does not release figures on the number of users it has in Malaysia, it runs into the hundreds of thousands and includes personalities such as Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak.
fr:thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/6/16/nation/6480482&sec=nation
Twitter settles over data security lapses
WASHINGTON: Twitter has agreed to settle charges by federal regulators that it put the privacy of its users at risk by failing to protect them from data security lapses last year that let hackers access their accounts.
The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday the settlement bars Twitter from misleading consumers about its security and privacy practices and requires the start-up to establish a comprehensive information security program.
No monetary damages were assessed. The FTC complaint said the breaches allowed hackers to gain administrative control over the online service, which lets users send brief messages called tweets to each other.
According to the FTC, hackers were able to view email addresses and other private user information, gain access to user messages, reset user passwords and send phony tweets from user accounts.
At least one phony tweet was sent from the account of Fox News and another phony tweet was sent from the account of then-President-elect Barack Obama offering more than 150,000 followers a chance to win $500 in free gasoline, the FTC said.
The agency charges the incidents deceived users because Twitter’s privacy policy pledged to “employ administrative, physical, and electronic measures designed to protect your information from unauthorized access.”
“When a company promises consumers that their personal information is secure, it must live up to that promise,” David Vladeck, head of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.
One breach occurred in January 2009 after a hacker used an automated password-guessing tool to gain control of Twitter.
The second breach occurred in April 2009 after a hacker broke into a Twitter employee’s personal email account, which stored two passwords that were very similar to the employee’s administrative password for Twitter.
The FTC said Twitter was vulnerable to these attacks because it used weak, lower case common dictionary words as administrative passwords and failed to take reasonable steps to prevent unauthorized access to its system.
Such steps include prohibiting employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text in their email accounts, periodically changing administrative passwords and restricting access to administrative controls.
In a blog post, Twitter General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray said that even before the company reached the agreement with the FTC, it had already implemented many of the security practices highlighted by the agency.
He added that the company quickly closed the security holes, notified affected users and disclosed what had happened in blog posts following both incidents.
Macgillivray also noted that Twitter employed fewer than 50 people when the breaches occurred.
“At the time of the incidents, we were … in the midst of perhaps unprecedented user growth for an Internet company; and, didn’t employ the security methods that we use today,” the company said on Thursday.
Twitter said 45 accounts were accessed in the first incident and 10 accounts in the second incident.
fr:biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/6/25/business/20100625142859&sec=business
Twitter hack opens popups, causes havoc
NEW YORK: A new way to cause mischief quickly spread through short-messaging service Twitter on Tuesday morning before the site could fix the problem, as mysterious “tweets” of blocked-out text propagated themselves and caused popup windows to open.
Shortly before 10 a.m. Eastern time, (1400 GMT), Twitter said on its “safety” feed on the site that the attack had been shut down. It also said it does not believe that any user information was compromised, rather, the “vast majority” of the breaches were pranks or promotions.
The hack had been extra nefarious because the tweets activated without being clicked on — it was enough for Web surfers to move their mouse cursors over them. But it only affected visitors to Twitter.com. Various third-party programs used to send and read tweets, such as Tweetdeck, were unaffected.
The popups could, though didn’t necessarily, contain malicious code that could take over poorly protected computers. The White House’s official Twitter feed — followed by 1.8 million users — was among those affected, though the offending message was quickly taken down.
Fittingly for Twitter, which limits messages to just 140 characters, the virus may have been among the shortest on record. According to security software maker F-Secure Corp., the shortest virus so far was just 22 characters long.
Twitter said in a blog post it was notified of the security breach at 5:54 a.m. Eastern time. The problem was caused by something called “cross-site scripting.” This allowed users to run JavaScript programs on others’ computers, turning tweets different colors or causing the pop-up boxes to appear. Some users, Twitter added, took things a step further and included code that got people’s accounts to re-tweet the messages without their knowledge.
“It was like a massive snowball fight that got out of control,” said Ray Dickenson, chief technology officer at computer security firm SafeCentral.
But while the effects of Tuesday’s mischief were very visible — such as the pop-ups — and playful, Dickenson said that he was worried because JavaScript can quietly do more malicious things, like sending people to sites that can infect computers.
Security breaches had been common in Twitter’s early days, but the company has since worked to beef up its vigilance and the problems have become less common. Tuesday’s hack coincided with Twitter’s ongoing rollout of a redesign of its website, which tries to streamline users’ Twitter feeds and make it easier to see photos and videos directly on the site, without having to click on a link to YouTube or Flickr.
Twitter said it discovered and fixed this problem last month, and that a recent site update unrelated to the redesign was responsible for its return
fr:biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/9/22/business/20100922083529&sec=business