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Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

sucky.ninja

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Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#81

Post by munk-a »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #43

The article states and asks: > I had a new IP > I had a newly installed operating system and browser. > What exactly about my behavior is unusual? It's not that this behavior is unusual (though, it is), it's that this behavior looks exactly like a bot. It's sad, but this is the state of the world now. If you're a big actor like Twitter, you end up blocking anything that looks like a bot, with an escape hatch a user c…

Right now that may be the case but, I'm curious if this might cause some small nation with an international code to succumb to the massive amounts of money spammers will start offering for large banks of phone numbers... Looking at you British India Ocean Territories...

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#82

Post by est31 »

deogeo wrote: post #53
jrockway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is understandable why they'd lie. If the error message was something like, "your request was blocked because you've included HTTP headers in the order [x-foo, x-bar], which is the header ordering in 99.9% of spam tweets", they would just change their agent's header order instead of no longer spending spam. I am not sure people realize what a high percentage of users of "free" services are spam bots of some sort. S…

You misunderstand - not divulging what triggered the suspicion isn't lying. Claiming a phone number is required due to suspicious activity, when in fact it is required of almost all new accounts, is .

Another covert spam fighting way is when one of the platforms require you to set up a phone number "for two factor authentication", basically not letting you to use their service unless you actually provide the number. There are multiple platforms framing the issue in this way.

Facebook once required that you set up 2 factor authentication and they promised that the phone number won't be used for anything else. Few years later, they started spamming users at those phone numbers with notifications about what their friends did. And since this year, those numbers can be used to search for users on the platform.

The big issue with giving those platforms your data is that you hand over control. Even if they promise you something.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#83

Post by Nextgrid »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #63
Nextgrid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone numbers are extremely easy to obtain. This won't achieve anything in the long run.

Can I have 100 phone numbers for free? I don't believe it is so easy.

The same way we have the robocall situation (thanks to shady telcos that turn a blind eye), the same way this system will be bypassed with similar telcos offering massive blocks of numbers at very cheap prices per unit (Twilio numbers seem expensive at small scale, but I guarantee you will get those prices down if you commit to getting like a thousand of those or so at once).

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#84

Post by tyingq »

ebg13 wrote: post #68
tyingq wrote: post #59

I don't use Twitter much, but every time I click on a Twitter link from my Android phone...it pops an error page. The page says either something about an error, or that I'm rate limited. A page refresh usually then works fine and displays the page. Is this related to similar attempts to block bots/spammers? Or maybe just something wrong on my end?

It happens to me too, only when linked from HN.

Ahh, so rate limit by referer? That's weird. I wonder why. Almost guarantees viral events make Twitter look broken.

I mostly only navigate to Twitter from here, so I didn't make that connection.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#85

Post by munk-a »

inopinatus wrote: post #80

We're going this way as well (requiring & verifying phone numbers, not locking accounts). We don't have a problem with bots, but users in the "not so tech savvy" segment tend to switch/discard/forget their email address. Rather than try to recover their account with us, this group will subsequently just create a new one, and then wonder & complain that their profiles/settings/content/histories aren't carried over. We…

We're in a similar sort of space with regards to shifting emails and a lack of easy account recovery. I have educated my family on password managers and I really would appreciate (it's beyond my means) someone putting some serious effort into getting a larger proportion of the population onto using password management software - along with a nice free cloud based option. There is so little data involved in these sorts of things that it's got to be pretty much incidental to offer free storage in a safe encrypted manner.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#86

Post by apo »

Linking pseudonyms from two different networks (in this case, Twitter and the phone system) together is a classic and serious privacy leak.

It's far from clear exactly what information Twitter, in its longtime effort to combat spam, has already collected on its users. Throwing a phone number into the mix expands to range of activities that can be unambiguously tied to the same individual. Given that Twitter certainly knows IP addresses of its users, it's trivial to do things like link site visits directly to an individual answering the phone number.

Unfortunately, most people simply don't understand the implications of any of this. They don't understand what an entity, "authorized" or not can do with this kind of data. They are far too trusting of governments and other powerful entities to do the right thing. They have not been paying attention to the steady erosion of civil liberties around the world and can't conceive of, for example, ever ending up in prison for some lame post they made 10 years ago.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#87

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

tyingq wrote: post #66
ridgewell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to do so from Firefox / a reddit app? This is fairly normal and the general conspiracy theory is that it's an erroneous error to get you to download the Twitter app once and for all.

Stock chrome on an Android phone. Most often from a Twitter link on HN. I'd say I get an error 90+% on the first try, and the refresh usually works the first time... occasionally, I need to do two. Bone stock phone, nothing notable about it or the browser. Doesn't happen on my Windows or Linux desktops.

Open the links in desktop mode and see if the errors go away.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#88

Post by [deleted] »

tyingq wrote: post #66
ridgewell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to do so from Firefox / a reddit app? This is fairly normal and the general conspiracy theory is that it's an erroneous error to get you to download the Twitter app once and for all.

Stock chrome on an Android phone. Most often from a Twitter link on HN. I'd say I get an error 90+% on the first try, and the refresh usually works the first time... occasionally, I need to do two. Bone stock phone, nothing notable about it or the browser. Doesn't happen on my Windows or Linux desktops.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#89

Post by jaifraic »

tyingq wrote: post #66
ridgewell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to do so from Firefox / a reddit app? This is fairly normal and the general conspiracy theory is that it's an erroneous error to get you to download the Twitter app once and for all.

Stock chrome on an Android phone. Most often from a Twitter link on HN. I'd say I get an error 90+% on the first try, and the refresh usually works the first time... occasionally, I need to do two. Bone stock phone, nothing notable about it or the browser. Doesn't happen on my Windows or Linux desktops.

I have the same problem. I don't really use twitter, but sometimes I get a link to there from Reddit or HN. Twitter never works on the first try with Firefox or Chrome on Android. Often a refresh helps, but sometimes it does not work at all.

I too think it is done intentionally to get users to install the app. I can't think of a reason this is a simple bug. But the again... Hanlon's razor.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#90

Post by deogeo »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #70
jrockway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is understandable why they'd lie. If the error message was something like, "your request was blocked because you've included HTTP headers in the order [x-foo, x-bar], which is the header ordering in 99.9% of spam tweets", they would just change their agent's header order instead of no longer spending spam. I am not sure people realize what a high percentage of users of "free" services are spam bots of some sort. S…

I've wanted this as a service forever. Does anyone do it?

I believe Google's captcha does. With the unfortunate side-effect of Google de-anonymizing everyone they let through - as you'll know if you try to access something behind captcha through Tor, and get stuck in an infinite loop helping Google train their artificial vision.

They claim it's against bots, but no matter how well you identify traffic lights and fire hydrants, it won't let you through.

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