An “amateur hour” Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk’s “temporary emergency measures” to stop web scraping.

  • LostCause@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It‘s pretty clear to me this guy knows nothing other than “how to throw money at intelligent people to make them make more money”, but with Twitter he somehow didn‘t do that. Instead he went the opposite way, to not pay bills and fire the intelligent people. I can only surmise, that this is an effort to destroy Twitter, maybe it was a thorn in some countries side?

      • LostCause@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah I feel you, it‘s like the “rich person at a carnival” parable:

        Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
        Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
        Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
        Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

        Maybe this is just a miss. I tend to see plans or conspiracy sometimes, when it could just be incompetence.

    • xuxebiko@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Last week a billionaire imploded the sub he was piloting because he thought he could outsmart the laws of physics.

      Never being told “no” makes a person stupid.

    • madcc@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      He thought that Twitter’s appeal to the best developers is the same as SpaceX’s and Tesla’s on their own tech areas, but to anyone else it’s pretty obvious that Twitter isn’t that special.

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      It’s like every room he walks in to just agrees with what he says, and if it doesn’t then he just fires people until they do. Leadership 101.

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This is just too funny:

    It’s currently unclear when this bug went into production, or how much it’s actually impacting their traffic, so it’s hard to determine whether this bug inadvertently inspired Twitter to block unregistered access and add rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the rollout of those changes.

    • Chog@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Do they not have version control? How can they not realise when the code snippet got added to the source code!?

      • AshLassay@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Could be a poison pill by a disgruntled ex employee. So maybe they’ve obfuscated the addition of the code snippet across several commits hidden inside legitimate commits.

  • rubikfrog@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Lol. I’ve only been following this from a distance because I don’t have any real interest in Birdsite anymore, but hadn’t appreciated that they themselves may have caused the increase in API requests that cause them to introduce rate limits. That’s hilarious.

  • Xeelee@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Thanks guys, that was a really good laugh to start the day with. Business genius doing business genius things again.