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Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

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Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#71

I've never understood why people even wanted to use this. For the styling? So you can just copy some random stuff from Twitter and it looks like Twitter but is also interactive? Just with the Facebook like-Button, you're exposing your visitors to the tracking of Twitter. For what? Just so you can quickly copy one snippet and be done with it, instead of manually copying author name, content and link and spending 10 se…

I mean it's fairly easy to understand why people used this.

It's very convenient (just click share or use a WordPress widget to embed tweet), it always look pretty, and there are multiple actions available from the tweet: go to profile, reply, share ...

So more features for less time to set-up. This is a service like all other Service, you usually tradeoff something like privacy for convenience. Why use Dropbox when you can have your own NAS ?

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse, it seems like most of the time you'd want a screenshot to preserve the original text. Which takes less styling to look right.

For Twitter specifically, a link to the tweet is much more genuine than a screenshot, as screenshots can be faked, where tweets cannot be edited

Screen shot image linked to the tweet. No 3rd party JS still then.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#74

I've never understood why people even wanted to use this. For the styling? So you can just copy some random stuff from Twitter and it looks like Twitter but is also interactive? Just with the Facebook like-Button, you're exposing your visitors to the tracking of Twitter. For what? Just so you can quickly copy one snippet and be done with it, instead of manually copying author name, content and link and spending 10 se…

Worse, it seems like most of the time you'd want a screenshot to preserve the original text. Which takes less styling to look right.

If you use a screenshot it is a good idea to also put the text below it or in the picture's alt attribute, for screenreaders.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#75
post #7

fix the title please An apostrophe as a possessive marker in its is nonstandard: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s#Etymology_2

Yes, please. It's also not the title of the post, so as long as HN is editorializing, might as well do it correctly.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#76

Well, any third-party script that you embed on your website can edit your site and do many other nefarious things (key logging, credential stealing, ...). I never got how people can just copy/paste some random JS into their own websites (often without even using integrity tags). Social embeds in particular have turned the web into a surveillance machine for large corporations, as every FB/Twitter/Instagram/... embed…

You have to have some level of trust - our ASP.net website loads quite a few Nuget packages we regularly keep up to date. Theoretically any of them say Stripe or Paypal could add nefarious code into our site to steal a bunch of stuff - there's no practical way for us to review the source code before updating. For Javascript if you're paranoid you can add the `integrity` attribute, and most of the time you can self ho…

The difference is that you have a contractual relationship with Stripe or Paypal when you use their services. When you embed FB/Twitter/... content there's no such relationship, that's the issue.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#77

I've never understood why people even wanted to use this. For the styling? So you can just copy some random stuff from Twitter and it looks like Twitter but is also interactive? Just with the Facebook like-Button, you're exposing your visitors to the tracking of Twitter. For what? Just so you can quickly copy one snippet and be done with it, instead of manually copying author name, content and link and spending 10 se…

Twitter has display requirements. https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-req...

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#78
This is why I never use these iframe widgets. They are not only useless and untrustworthy, they are also damn slow. I take a screenshot of the tweet I want to reference, put it into a bucket behind a CDN and then embed an of the tweet inside an which links back to the tweet. If the tweet gets deleted then the link will break and users will see that the tweet was deleted, but my screenshot stored on my own servers will remain forever and my website will continue to make sense.

Own your data, own your blogs, own your words, own what you create/write/do on the web. Don't rely on third party services uphold a common sense contract or what most people would expect is the ethical/correct/good thing to do.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#79

Functionality aside embedding random scripts from twitter seems like a big risk for security and privacy. At a minimum, it should probably be embedded in a sandboxed iframe. Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues.

> Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues.

And have none accessibility.

Re: Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted

#80
post #26

Functionality aside embedding random scripts from twitter seems like a big risk for security and privacy. At a minimum, it should probably be embedded in a sandboxed iframe. Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues.

There should be an HTML tag or something that downloads and embeds HTML from a remote site without scripting

Ok, but then Twitter is just going to make that return a 404. How does this solve the problem?
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