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"@" on Twitter

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Re: "@" on Twitter

#61

Post by singlow »

rco8786 wrote: post #31
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…

You encounter dozens of bugs daily? That doesn’t really pass the smell test.

There are several services I use daily which have bugs I encounter regularly, and have for years - just have to know the workaround. I built some of them :)

Re: "@" on Twitter

#62

Post by sizzle »

rasz wrote: post #37
cromwellian wrote: post #16

Reminds me on the old Commodore 64 Quantum-Link service (former version of AOL), there was a hack called 'Q-Armor' where you could get a username of all spaces, and no sysops or any chat room managers could kick you, or do anything to your account.

people griefing in online games (hacks/aimbots) often run with nicks like ||||||||||II||I|||||||||||||II1111|||||||IIIIIIIIII||||||||||||

I used to use aim chat booters by a blog named 'esoteric code' program was called subterfuge. Familiar with it by any chance? I thought it was brilliant.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#63

Post by V-eHGsd_ »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #38
ClassyJacket wrote: post #20

Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. My understanding is that for the sake of simpler interfaces such as SMS, which they let hold the whole service back for a long long time, they had a "follow [username]" feature - and if the person had to approve follow requests, it would send one to them. To accept the re…

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.

another facebook doozy was their "view my profile as " feature. Apparently for some time after that it was released, when you used it view your profile, you could interact with facebook as ; including chatting as them, reading their messages, etc.

but then, I've had my share of turrible bugs too, so i'm not here to poke fun.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#66

Post by sulam »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

That must be Bobby Droptables twitter account :-)

Classic! We named our guild in EQ "NULL", as a joke. People would comment that we had a problem when they saw us running around with "" running over our head. It bit us on the ass when someone went to Sony's EQ con one year, and they literally couldn't print out their badge because "your guild name is NULL? Really?"

Re: "@" on Twitter

#67

Post by osrec »

ipsum2 wrote: post #54
weberc2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it easier to think of them as an "ordered" hash map rather than an array...

Re: "@" on Twitter

#68

Post by imsofuture »

cromwellian wrote: post #16

Reminds me on the old Commodore 64 Quantum-Link service (former version of AOL), there was a hack called 'Q-Armor' where you could get a username of all spaces, and no sysops or any chat room managers could kick you, or do anything to your account.

For some time you could steal AOL usernames by registering i.e. 'obar' or 'oobar', and using client side hacks could switch the registration to the already registered username 'foobar' which would then belong to you.

This only worked if 'obar' or 'oobar' was unregistered, but it was a pretty nifty way to steal single word usernames, and speaks to some strange validation/truncation somewhere in the code.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#70

Post by icebraining »

chrfrasco wrote: post #53
weberc2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, booleans are integers, so you can do:

    >>> True + 1
    2
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