"A Turkish guy named Bora Kırca figared out accidently that if you tweet "accept username", for example billgates, then bill gates will follow you.
it's so stupid; but true." - gizmodo
well radical eh? so for a few hours after gizmodo and some other blogs posted about it, [i was sleeping]
people were being forced followed by people so its like lady gaga following John Li or Barack Obama following Alibaba.When Twitter found out they went nuts, everyone's follow numbers shot to zero, and Bora's Twitter account was suspended. But how did he find this thing in the first place?
Bora LOVED this group called ACCEPT and he decided to twit this [ ACCEPT PWNT ] instead of that twit appearing, a person called pwnt started following him ! well how crazy is that? well after experimenting for awhile, he told his girlfriend and posted a blogpost regarding that and soon twitter was messed-up. imagine bill gates, obama, lady gaga, adam lambert following some guy you never heard of.
Twitter's Response. Their official line so far is written like a bug report:
"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to "force" other users to follow them. We're now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place. Follower/following numbers are currently at 0; we're aware and this too should shortly be resolved."
It seems obvious that this bug had been lingering for a while, and that it was just a matter of time before someone caught it. It also seems obvious that Twitter should have caught it before rolling the "ACCEPT" feature into the main site.
So for hours people had the power to force people to follow them.
In the end, Twitter will clean this up. But the fear will, and should, remain: What if this was a little worse? What if a command gave people access to others' Twitter accounts beyond the ability to force a follow? This was an inconvenience; that would have been a disaster.
So this was how a band called ACCEPT nearly destroyed twitter.Twitter sure is delicate.
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