Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

Oh believe me, I am under no illusion about that fact. My point is that the average user is completely unaware of it and Twitter, like most other companies, has gone to great lengths to obscure this material fact from their users and stockholders. If they told their users and stockholders, in no uncertain terms, the level of security they actually provide, which is massively different than what the users and stockholders believe, then I would not fault them for upholding their promises even if they are lackluster.

The problem is that they have not revealed the massive discrepancy between the common expectation and the truth which I, and I suspect most people, would consider to be fraud. Some might argue that they did not guarantee the common expectation and therefore it is the consumers problem for engaging in wishful thinking, but that is frankly a ridiculous argument. We generally expect, and the law codifies, certain requirements on the consumer-business relationship which effectively amount to: "Consumers have certain reasonable expectations based on common sense, you can't just willy-nilly toss those in a contract and blame the consumer for not reading a 100 page contract where you get to sacrifice their first born in fine-print every time they buy bananas." I do not believe the law exactly codifies this form of fraud, but I think most would agree that a massive discrepancy between consumer expectation and the truth should be clearly communicated (the larger the discrepancy the more clearly/loudly) and acting otherwise should be at the least in the general vicinity of fraud.

In my opinion, the discrepancy is sufficiently large that it should constitute either criminal fraud or gross negligence depending on how aware Twitter was as to their own internal security. If they were aware, they engaged in fraud given they made no effort to properly inform anyone of their security. If they were not aware, they are grossly negligent in that they could not observe such a massive discrepancy between their beliefs and the truth. To anybody who reads this and says that this is a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation, I say that this is a result of the ridiculous discrepancy. If it were less ridiculous, like say a small group of organized hackers or a top-flight hacker, it would probably not qualify as gross negligence in Twitter's case if they were unaware, though it might still be fraud depending on the expectations laid out.

Incidentally, this reasoning scales to other cases people have mentioned like nuclear power plants or banks where people have certain expectations on their security which are likely different and more stringent than Twitter. The important thing is not that they all have the same high level of security, it is that the expectation matches reality and the reality is properly communicated.

And enriching the private prisons owners, who then lobby both parties for harsher sentences and this is why the US, a free democracy, has the highest incarceration rate in the World.

The only reason he got caught was because he used his access to attempt a BTC scam.

The likelihood that more sophisticated individuals and organizations have access to Twitter (and probably various other tech companies), and understand the importance of not letting your access be discovered, is probably far far higher than we realize.

Should we just assume all data held by Twitter and various other tech companies is compromised (by multiple different actors)?

Twitter seems to be wording things to make the attack seem out-of-this-world sophisticated, but I just have serious doubts about that.

To repeat myself, the opposition to victim blaming is about "not blaming victims for things that are out of their control or that any other reasonable person would do." I acknowledged that a standard lock is generally not going to stop many determined criminals, but it is an acceptable baseline that all reasonable people can be expected to meet in order to help prevent their home from being burgled. You can of course go above and beyond that, but I think anyone who meets that baseline standard doesn't deserve blame.

Back on topic, I think lots of people would agree that allowing low level employees the ability to completely hijack the accounts of some of the most prominent people on the planet with zero oversight is not a reasonable level of security.

> Our European visitors are important to us.

> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area

So we're not important to them then? Gotcha!

Block us, fine, whatever, but don't give us this BS about being important to you then.