Comments on: The Semi-Great Twitter Experiment

By: Beelzebud

Beelzebud — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:21:02 +0000

Somewhere a village is missing its idiot.

By: Brian Walsh

Brian Walsh — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:25:11 +0000

If everyone is sharing their stories… I used to work for a company in the building maintenance department. We had just rezoned the parking lot and I was to send a picture of the new parking map to all users. I sent a .bmp. Apparently, those are quite large. To make matters worse I typed the keyboard randomly to name the file. The file name was something like hdjdudjndjxjzujdnfkfkgjfugsgrjfmrirurjrjfndjdidin.bmp. My sysadmin was not amused.

By: Beelzebud

Beelzebud — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:13:04 +0000

Heh, well one thing was proven by this “survey”. I made the right choice when I decided not to drink the twitter kool-aid.

By: uksceptic

uksceptic — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:04:13 +0000

It is how you respond to criticism and your mistakes that mark you out as decent or not. I think once you realised your mistake you did everything in your power to amend it.

I might add that I don’t see anything wrong in a bit of selfless publicity, especially when it is promoting skeptism.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:04:20 +0000

So Brian, will you be at the next BlackHat conference telling people how to pwn! twitter? Hehehe.

By: Dionigi

Dionigi — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:45:01 +0000

Personally I find Twitter, facebook, and yahoo groups nothing but spam for every interesting thing I have dozens of “thanks for that”, “Nice Photo’s” or “I’m just scratching my bum” Which means that a useful tool is ignored because I can’t be bothered to wade through the junk.
This article shows just where the problems lie with this type of program.

By: kabol

kabol — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:41:19 +0000

twitter is annoying. and it sux.

By: Brian Dunning

Brian Dunning — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:31:56 +0000

I guess you didn’t read this very closely…. :-)

By: Nicole G

Nicole G — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:27:29 +0000

“Now, before I describe what happened, let me state outright that it was shockingly naive of me not to foresee what would happen.”

That’s the thing about experiments. You can’t always forsee how they will work! Interesting lessons were learned by all, no biggie.

By: Ranson

Ranson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:18:11 +0000

Yup. In those days, any user with some savvy could launch a DOS attack on any other user on the college network with three lines of code. That little quirk about the email notice could also be used as an instant messenger on the network, without an email attached. Sending to “all” was possible, but that was only done by admins to warn of shutdown, people who made a mistake, or idiots trying to be funny. One .bat file later, and the person was effectively locked out of all function. We’d usually fill up their email limits with a similar tactic, with an email script linked to a random content generator.

Hell, our little podunk college had so much infighting between admins, they’d launch DOS attacks against each other’s servers with nothing but ping floods. That would usually go on until one guy walked three steps across the lab and hit the other.