Il name change from Twitter to X it was a semi-flop and over a year after Musk’s announcement, the vast majority of people continue to call the social network by its original name: we have it written on Italian Tech a few days ago, and the company is evidently aware of the problem too. Who’s trying to make up for it, even with clumsy actionsa little ridiculous and potentially dangerous.
The latest, which became known around April 10th (no he wrote Ars Technica, for example)concerns the forced change of wording twitter.com in x.com in all user posts, even those from the past: by writing twitter.com in a tweet, after publication it was seen changing to x.com. The change, which concerned only the iOS version of the applasted a few days and would have been suspended after protests, complaints and inevitable mockery.
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twitter: An example of an edited tweet
Because it’s ridiculous
As mentioned, this type of intervention is not only ridiculous and a little’ embarrassing but also dangerous from an IT security point of view. Let’s see why, starting from the first point.
This is ridiculous and embarrassing because what Musk’s company is trying to do is delete any reference to Twitter from the platform: having failed to do so by good means (boisterous announcements about the name change, change of logo, giant X-shaped sign on the roof of the San Francisco headquarters), try by hard means. “You write twitter.com? And I’ll change it to you x.com – seems to be the concept – And I also change all the tweets from the past, from a year ago, from two years ago, from five years ago”. When X didn’t even exist, among other things. More: it is ridiculous and embarrassing both because it is a clear surrender to yet another failure by Musk in the social network management and because X itself continues to use the term twitter despite not wanting others to use it: before editing words it doesn’t like in people’s tweets, perhaps the company should stop using twitter.com as your main address of your site. Uses x.com and set a good example, if you believe so much in this name.
That’s not all: there is also the fact that intervening is like this how to use a club to clean a jewelry store. It is obvious that collateral damage will be caused, which brings us to the second point.
twitter: the netflitwitter.com problem
Because it’s a dangerous thing
The problem of changing all the wordings twitter.com in x.comnot only retroactively but also and above all for the tweets that will come, is that it is “a gift for those who do phishing”, as they explained various cybersecurity experts (here, for example).
The point is that on Twitter the wording twitter.com was changed to x.com not only when it was written alone but also if it was contained within a longer word. To understand, the example that everyone has given is useful, but there are many others: a possible one netflitwitter.com was being transformed into netflix.combut also fedetwitter.com in fedex.com, xbotwitter.com in xbox.como setwitter.com in sex.com. The problem lies here: if a hacker built a fake Netflix website, with the graphics, logos and appearance of that of Netflix for the purpose of stealing users’ login credentials and credit card information, called him netflitwitter.com and then shared the address in a tweet, that address would be converted (and indeed it was converted) to netflix.com. And that’s how people would have seen it, mistaking it for the real thing.
The same thing could be said for the various ones fedex.com, xbox.com, carfax.com and for who knows how many others sites, so much so that there are users who have told of bought themselves the address netflitwitter.com (and others) to “prevent their use for criminal purposes”, while the Twitter app was then quickly updated to exclude this type of site from the change. An embarrassing one reverse geardefinitely not the first since Twitter changed ownership.
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All this without considering the implications from the point of view of freedom of expression he was born in content control. As usual, the former seems dear to Musk only if people speak as he wants them to speak (not by writing twitter on Twitter, that is) but it is the second point that is perhaps the most important and the most disturbing, even if there is little discussion about it online.
With this intervention, Twitter has demonstrated that it is quite easily capable of stick your hands in people’s tweetseven retroactively and after they have been published, violating another of the golden rules of social media, valid since Facebook was born, that is, for over twenty years: what is published remains published, unless it is deleted. However, if it is modified, it must be clear to those who read it that it has been modified. For Twitter all this was worth even more, it was precisely one of its founding characteristics: if you got a tweet wrong, you had to delete it and redo it. Precisely because the idea was that what you publish remains over time. And this is why the social network founded by Dorsey was among the last to allow the editing of posts, only in 2022.
Today, however, not only can tweets be modified, but Twitter can also modify them without the user being aware of it: you write one thing and then you see another published. It’s right? It’s correct? Is it legal? What would happen if someone used the same trick and found a way (for example) to change all the Milan in Inter? All the Sony in Microsoftoppure in Nintendo? All the Apple con Google? Or all the writing Jesus con Allah, Perhaps? Not exactly a good idea, but that’s the idea Musk had.
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– 2024-04-16 04:09:54
