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Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

dansdeals.com

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Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#131

Post by Lendal »

seancoleman wrote: post #5

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…

I originally created a Twitter account back in 2007 for this same reason. To this day it's still my only account. Having great insight and vision, I could foresee no usefulness or future for "social media", except as a way to send free SMS messages, and only Twitter had that.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#132

Post by harikb »

seancoleman wrote: post #5

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…

Was this your own personal setup or part of some product? Because you would have had problem if end user really had a real Twitter account with the same number. right?

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#133

Post by tallgiraffe »

Wow, it’s been more than 10 years since twitter was born. Can’t believe they’ve been running txt based version for this long. Does it mean the mobile web has finally penetrated enough countries where browsing is as cheap and accessible as text?

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#134

Post by alpb »

aaronlifshin wrote: post #12

He writes: "Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either." But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

Not if you live in a surveillance state such as many middle-east countries.

Many Telegram accounts were compromised in Iran a while ago because of this. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/hack-brief-hackers-breach-ultr... Similarly I know for a fact that in many countries your GSM provider stores your texts so you can view/reply them from their web portal. (As you can imagine despite an attacker might not have your SIM card, they might find your user/pass to log in your GSM provider's portal.)

Also state-sponsored actors do tap into GSM operators since SMS is not end-to-end encrypted. Add this to the previous attack vector and you'll see that wiretapping inbound SMS is surprisingly not that hard.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#135

Post by azernik »

alpb wrote: post #134
aaronlifshin wrote: post #12

He writes: "Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either." But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

Not if you live in a surveillance state such as many middle-east countries. Many Telegram accounts were compromised in Iran a while ago because of this. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/hack-brief-hackers-breach-ultr... Similarly I know for a fact that in many countries your GSM provider stores your texts so you can view/reply them from their web portal. (As you can imagine despite an attacker might not have your SIM ca…

Resistance to state actors is a pretty high bar.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#136

Post by Semaphor »

amatecha wrote: post #83
thirtyseven wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are dynamic DNS services no longer a thing?

Yep, free dynamic DNS still exists, for example NoIP https://www.noip.com/ However, you have to refresh it each month by filling out a "I'm still using it" web form they email you. So, you can't just set it & forget it.

https://freedns.afraid.org/

Works in the free tier as set and forget. As long as you keep updating it (with whatever API), it works. Filling out a form manually makes NoIP sound like a horrible service.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#137

Post by HenryBemis »

Wait!!!!!

So Dan was a freeloader, instead of HIM paying the cost to notify HIS subscribers (aka TWITTER followers), he externalised/rolled off the cost to Twitter. Now that Twitter wants to do some cost-cutting and Dan has to pay HIS own "phone bill" for HIS customers, Dan is calling out on Twitter? Suck it up bro.

When I hear people complaining that "in our office they changed the coffee to a shittier one", I know what this is a prelude for avalanche of cost cutting measures. SMS in Twitter are being switched off? Blame the folks that created their business on someone else's £€¥$ and the Twitter shareholders came calling for more profit.

I wonder what are the savings that Twitter is making by flipping that switch off...

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#138

Post by clarry »

pests wrote: post #35
Dunedan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, an occasional reader without a Twitter account, the experience became much worse in the past decade. That's because Twitter switched of RSS feeds and when opening links to individual tweets nowadays there is this ubiquitous "Something Went Wrong, Try Again" on first page load.

If I'm not mistaken that "Something Went Wrong" is their web API keys being throttled...

I get that every single time unless I'm in private browsing mode. Clearing cookies and local storage makes no difference..

sigh

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#139

Post by franga2000 »

kragen wrote: post #115
amatecha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, free dynamic DNS still exists, for example NoIP https://www.noip.com/ However, you have to refresh it each month by filling out a "I'm still using it" web form they email you. So, you can't just set it & forget it.

it really isn't that hard to set up dynamic dns yourself. like maybe a day of work. just don't forget to upgrade your dns server software when exploits are discovered

Running your own DNS server (if that's what you're suggesting) just for dynamic DNS is extremely unnecessary. Not to mention the case of someone who doesn't have another server with a static IP to host the DNS on.

All but the worst of the worst providers have an API of some sort and if you're savvy enough to set up BIND, you can handle writing a curl command to post your IP to the API and sticking it into cron.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#140

Post by [deleted] »

mschuster91 wrote: post #63
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political content... that sounds amazing! I’d be there in a heartbeat.

The thing is, everything is political. Take LGBT people, especially trans people. Their entire right to existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions. Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even such utterly mundane things as lipstick. Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.

[deleted]
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