Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#41

Post by HowardRoark » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:56 PM UTC

galactus wrote: post #28

amazing. They found out, it seems: right now everyone seems to have 0 following and 0 followers.

Thank god. Its everyone.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#42

Post by barnaby » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:57 PM UTC

dmn001 wrote: post #17

nutmeg wrote: post #13

There could be notoriety for anyone who does this to Conan O'brien. He only follows one person AFAIK. Edit: Looks like this probably already happened.

ConanOBrien was following 190 a few seconds ago, now there are 266 and its rising.

Now he's at 0 along with everyone else

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#43

Post by remi » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:57 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #7

Yes, this does work. Now what's the opposite verb to make someone unfollow me?

"block" :P

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#44

Post by lukeqsee » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:57 PM UTC

Everyone shows 0 followers, but your stream still shows those you follow. Interesting.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#45

Post by acangiano » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:58 PM UTC

EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#46

Post by rmorrison » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:59 PM UTC

I can't believe they didn't create an OOB mechanism for accept/deny requests, especially since they send so much meta data w/ each tweet anyway.

This seems like an extremely basic design flaw.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#47

Post by barnaby » Mon, May 10, 2010, 4:59 PM UTC

HowardRoark wrote: post #41

galactus wrote: post #28

amazing. They found out, it seems: right now everyone seems to have 0 following and 0 followers.

Thank god. Its everyone.

I had the exact same feeling of panic, then relief to find out I'm not alone.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#48

Post by travisp » Mon, May 10, 2010, 5:00 PM UTC

acangiano wrote: post #45

EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.

even if you don't try it, you'll lose all of your followers

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#49

Post by savrajsingh » Mon, May 10, 2010, 5:01 PM UTC

I would guess this exploit has always been possible until today? What's interesting is that someone has probably been wielding this secret power well before it got outed here on hacker news.

Re: Twitter bug: Make anyone follow you on Twitter

#50

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 10, 2010, 5:03 PM UTC

travisp wrote: post #48

acangiano wrote: post #45

EDIT: My original message invited people not to try this. It turns out that everyone's counter is showing zero followers, regardless of whether you tried the hack or not. Thanks Travis for pointing this out. I was misled by my desktop client which cached my follower number.

even if you don't try it, you'll lose all of your followers

[deleted]