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"@" on Twitter

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Re: "@" on Twitter

#51

Post by computerfriend »

Gigablah wrote: post #44
CommieBobDole wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, when Google Plus was new and people were excited about it, a whole bunch of companies flocked to the site to set up accounts for their businesses. But Google hadn't launched the "business account" functionality yet, so they banned them all. I guess Google Plus and Friendster are good examples of how that mindset works out.

Because nobody could conceivably impersonate a business and cause all sorts of legal and PR issues.

Just like nobody could impersonate a person?

Re: "@" on Twitter

#52

Post by kemitche »

weberc2 wrote: post #48
CGamesPlay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug. Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

Both array indices and user IDs are numbers.

And it's certainly possible in Python to accidentally use a map as a list or vice versa, if the map has integer keys.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#53

Post by chrfrasco »

weberc2 wrote: post #48
CGamesPlay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug. Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

Python doesn’t do any implicit coercion (apart from ints and floats etc), right?

Re: "@" on Twitter

#54

Post by ipsum2 »

weberc2 wrote: post #48
CGamesPlay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug. Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

I've been bitten by this bug before, PHP's associative arrays are pretty strange compared to other languages.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#55

Post by agency »

weberc2 wrote: post #48
CGamesPlay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug. Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

JavaScript does.

  var arr = ["one", "two", "three"];
  arr["2"] === "three"; // true

Re: "@" on Twitter

#56

Post by [deleted] »

warent wrote: post #29

Is product quality degrading on the internet over time? It used to be that once a week or longer I would find some amusing bug. But now it's not uncommon for that I encounter dozens of bugs daily on various popular services that are worth $millions or $billions, which is just obnoxious. Not only that, but usually the services have no way of filing a bug report or getting in touch with support. It seems like internet…

[deleted]

Re: "@" on Twitter

#58

Post by CivilEngineer »

weberc2 wrote: post #48
CGamesPlay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug. Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

Don't make the PHP zealots angry!

Re: "@" on Twitter

#59

Post by cyberferret »

enthdegree wrote: post #4
isp wrote: post #2

At least two usernameless Twitter profiles exist: https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=34313404 https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=71996998 (credit: https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/989868697660477440 ) It is possible to retweet-with-quote the tweets, but not to retweet directly or (as far as I can tell) to link to individual tweets directly. EDIT: It is possible to link to individual tweets. Added link…

How could such an account have been created?

MVP mania perhaps? You know, the old chestnut about "You have to get the shoddiest, most ethereal, stuck together with sticky tape and chewing gum version of your app out there to get market validation before you do some serious development work on it" ideology that is always being touted in the startup world... It tends to lead to this sort of technical debt.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#60

Post by reaperducer »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #43
wpietri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked somebody who used to work there, and the answer I got was that there are a bunch of accounts from back before validation was as tight as it is now. Which seems reasonable to me. At-replies were not something that Twitter started with, but instead were community-driven with software support added later: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2008/how-replies-w... It's a good reminder that it's always easier…

If I recall correctly, when Google Plus was new and people were excited about it, a whole bunch of companies flocked to the site to set up accounts for their businesses. But Google hadn't launched the "business account" functionality yet, so they banned them all. I guess Google Plus and Friendster are good examples of how that mindset works out.

Facebook did the same thing.

I remember having to merge multiple "person" Facebook accounts into a single "business" Facebook account for a client once business accounts became available.

It was extra hard not only because FB made the process cumbersome, but because everyone in the company seemed to have taken it upon themselves at some time in the past to create a person account for the business. Sales people, the owner, various marketing people no longer with the company, etc...

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