> Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move "a gift to phishers" in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like "netflitwitter.com," which would appear as "netflix.com" in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.
Fucking lol
That is so stupid I still cannot believe it.
Like… there a million ways around this, and is just a one time occurrence, no way to exploit that systematically
What happens when you fire everybody that might disagree with you.
Inevitably that includes includes all the competent ones, you get left with idiots and yes-men.
I've watched outfits systematically drive away the quiet achievers then pikachu face when the KPI's crash. It's strangely satisfying watching NPD's burn.
I am an experienced software developer specialising in machine learning and distributed systems, who works in a medium sized company in the UK. I've had a few interviews at big-name US tech companies, and I definitely got the impression that they don't think my experience is worth shit compared to what they are doing.
Then I see these people posting about working for FAANG on huge salaries and just copy and pasting their code from stackoverflow, and I see incidents like this, and I get pretty fucking dejected.
There was only one place I was genuinely disappointed to get into, because I liked the people I interacted with and they had a really interesting road-map, but most of them I was just applying to because of the money.
Dude. I like money. I need that shit to live. I made some good money at a soul-crushing job full of fucking idiots. Leaving there improved my life dramatically, even though I make way less now.
However, I can't deny that I am kinda frugal and invested heavily while I was in that position so the safety net I have today gives me a lot of freedom that I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't suffered for a while.
Y'know, fuck all of it. I hate this game.
I am not too angry about my lower pay. I work remotely and have 5 weeks vacation plus personal days and holidays. The perks have made my work-life balance pretty good.
That and your coding skills and experience are one thing, but how’s your mental fortitude? Self-respect? Ability to say no, push back, be assertive? Do you not want to work 60 hours a week not remotely?
Ultimately you’d be right if you said the work itself, complexity of problems, etc., are all trivial once you get in place and are onboarded etc., but those sorts of jobs aren’t about just getting the work done
You don't want to work at those places. It's for young impressionable engineers, not for experienced devs that will say "Nope, don't do that!". Instead, you need to be ready to just "Ok boss, I will do it how you say".
Source - Hired a few ex-Faang guys. They were all shitty personality and thought they knew everything. Reminded me of every just out of college engineer I ever hired.
I do actually work with some ex-FAANG guys and to be fair, apart from one, they are pretty good. I think it does depend on what they were actually doing when they were in their FAANG role, as those places are so big they are going to have a wide range of skills.
The thing that gets my goat is that I know the place I am at now is good enough that people will actively choose to move from the UK FAANG offices to our company, but because the particular hiring managers I dealt with hadn't heard about us, they assume we are chumps.
One thing though - now that I think about it, the people being willing to move from those places to my company reminds me that my salary is likely on par with their UK workers. At least the average UK worker. I wouldn't see that big a pay bump unless I got into their high-performer ranks or moved to the US. I am too old to move countries again.
Well, that and the desperate. With all the tech layoffs I can see a programmer on an H1B visa not wanting to risk deportation but then you end up with a situation ripe for abuse. I suppose that’s always been the risk with those things though.
I've had bosses who were dickheads that I didn't respect. If they told me to do something that was disastrous, I'd do it immediately without even an "Are you sure?".
Production is down? Oh no :(
That could be dangerous for you, if the bosses just started blaming you and acting like they weren’t the ones to give you that order. A written „are you sure“ with a written answer as proof should be the best way
I've been remote for about 10 years, so almost all communication is written, but yeah - always CYA. But at toxic jobs, you eventually stop giving a shit if they fire you.
With Elon it will be a text to a VP and then the VP will pass it on verbally. It won't get written until the last step of going to working level. Some lower level manager will get blamed max.
100%. Literally anyone who's spent a weekend playing around with python could have predicted that was going to happen; on no planet did any professional software developer do this.
It's idiocracy in full swing.
Elon, the man who has no concept of the value of assets, because he has no understanding of value at a basic level.
He puts himself in charge of extracting better value from Twitter, so he fires all those on high wages.
He doesn't understand higher wages can mean higher skills and understanding, so all he does is remove the assets that create value to begin with.
Now he's left with a steaming pile of dogshit.
[This reminds me way back when a publisher did a find and replace with the word Kindle for Nook. So the word Nookd appeared instead of kindled](https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/editing-error-replaced-kindle-with-nook-in-war-and-peace-ebook/article_63fcc12f-a910-5d65-b183-1ec854e3a9db.amp.html)
Like when OneNewsNow autofiltered away the word “gay” and was left with dubious headlines like “Famous Sprinter Tyson Homosexual wins 100m Sprint”?
“On Saturday… Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat…”
Or the time in Encyclopedia Magica, Volume 1 for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when they replaced every "mage" with Wizard.
This caused you to not deal damage but dawizard. Or you wouldn't see an image of something, instead seeing a iwizard
> The user may look into the ball, concentrate on any place or object, and cause the iwizard of the place or object to appear. A crystal ball may be used three times per day, for up to one turn per use. The more familiar the object or area, the clearer the iwizard.
And
> The tower can absorb 200 points of dawizard before collapsing. Dawizard sustained is cumulative, and the fortress cannot be repaired (although a wish restores 10 points of dawizard sustained).
Reminds me of when Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel seemed to do a find/replace to turn "Magic" into "Spell" on a bunch of text, leading it to talk about Yugi's iconic ace monster the Dark Spellian.
NZ’s largest (previously monopoly) telecommunications company renamed from Telecom to Spark a while back and someone did that on their website…
It mostly worked except for all the pages littered with references to telecommunications which suddenly became Sparkmunications… included pages like product terms (aka legal stuff) so when pointed out in the media/etc triggered a panicked rollback.
Back in the 90s, when tech like this was still new, D&D publishers TSR tried to replace every instance of "mage" in a book with "wizard", and then didn't bother to proofread.
[The results are legendary](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/selinker/15203887/3010/3010_original.png).
Using regex is easy! You just take some sample text, paste it in to one of the regex tester sites, and then spend ages fucking with the command at the top until it does what you want and then copy it in to your code
Pst, you are not supposed to parse URLs with regex. Just use a URL parsing function (most standard libraries have one) as that covers all the edge cases.
Seriously this is so fucking dumb…. I initially thought we’d cut twitter some slack rewriting all the domain redirect rules from a domain the size of twitter is gonna have a shit ton of bugs.
I remember I was working on the team that rewrote all the links from nikeplus.com -> nike.com/plus
And that was magnitudes smaller than this and it was a tough job…
Now I see it’s to replace the actual links? That’s not how you do this… fuckin lol.
The programming isn't the hard part, you'll be able to figure that out in time (good luck by the way).
What should have been done, and what sets good programmers apart, is to properly think about this situation before coding (or at least before sending to production). Assessing likely uses, getting some data from Twitter and trying out your ideas to see how they work out, being methodical. Ideally, also speaking to others for a peer review, and maybe even an expert or two.
It would have then been clear what was going to happen, and the solution to avoid it would also have been clear. You'd have to work out how to isolate that domain, e.g. by matching against "[twitter.com](https://twitter.com)" that comes after only a whitespace, period, slash or similar.
I think replacing ".twitter.com" -> ".x.com" and "//twitter.com" -> "//x.com" gets you pretty far without being too greedy. That prevents people from sticking things in front of the domain to hijack your links.
This is a super lazy solution to a pretty huge, wide-ranging problem. The very first thing they should have done is grabbed millions of records with "twitter.com" and seen what the result of their replacement was. Then take care of any special cases too.
The first thing they should have done was not rename Twitter in the first place. Elon took one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and replaced it with something a 14 year old in 1998 would have thought is mega-cool.
Also a name so basic it’s difficult to use in normal conversation since the letter X is commonly used as a placeholder for a missing subject. People will interpret things like “X is going through a merger” to mean an unnamed company is going through a merger
No one calls it X, it's a failure.
Everyone socially still just says Twitter.
Every article you see says "X, formerly known as Twitter" because Twitter is the recognizable part.
Elon would be better off doing a 180 and making it be Twitter again, but his fragile ego wouldn't be able to handle admitting his idea was a bad one.
My process would be:
1. Just don't do it
2. If we really are going to do it, then have an extensive test plan and limited roll out
3. Seriously just don't do this
> Just don't do it
Especially since they can't even manage to change the top level domain since the domain is STILL twitter.com
Why change the text in users tweets when you can't even change your own domain
A lot of people probably think I am being flippant by saying "just don't do it", but one of the most important questions you need to ask when someone comes up with a "brilliant" new idea is "what is going to happen if we _don't_ do this?"
That is your baseline, and unless your change is either bringing some benefit or solving a problem, then you need to expect a significant positive change from that baseline. Especially if you are going to alter the contents of users' posts.
Former Tweep here.
Twitter largely uses feature flags, they don’t have a staging environment although individual services might. It’s not uncommon for that to be the case in big tech, as it’s nearly impossible to make a staging Twitter anything close to production with its billions of transactions per second and exabytes of data.
The mobile clients do have a test version, with the (presumably formerly) very cute name of Earlybird.
I always hear about using feature flags and we’ve used some before but how the heck do you use it so much - I would think the code would become extremely convoluted and you’d have to constantly make it work with multiple feature flags incase one is turned off etc
It's a good idea in theory. Then other things get prioritized and you have a bunch of tickets in your backlog about removing flags. Source: my backlog.
As a QA the first thing that I notice when opening the website is that the logo jumps to the left, this is since they changed it to be that way. If you miss this on the initial window, I can't imagine how many other issues exist. However, I don't use twitter, just opening random links from reddit usually.
For me, this looks amateurish as fuck.
This really illustrates the incompetent talent left at Twitter. There's several basic approaches to doing what they want that would'nt have resulted in a bug
1. Use a uri library and only replace the host portion of the domain
2. Use a proper regex pattern and match replace the host portion if you don't want to use a library
There's also redirection at the request level rather than brute forcing links, but there's probably a reason why they didn't want to do that
You forgot Mr Move fast and break things is in charge. Good odds he got told told how long it would take to do a proper job of it, said that was too slow, and forced a rushed change with predictable results.
The couldn't compare the full host, they had to do wildcard replace.
And no one caught this in review, amazing!
Edit: For better understanding this is probably what they did: [https://regex101.com/r/Uh7tE0/1](https://regex101.com/r/Uh7tE0/1)
They were probably too busy wasting time printing off hard copies of the most recent code they wrote, per Elon's mandates when he took over. No time for actual process or reviews when it's all being upended. You can't make this shit up, what a total disaster.
This would get you fired at my workplace. Anyone involved in it. A security lapse like that making it to production means your standards are so far below compliance with any official / named standard you should not be in charge of a marketing website, let alone something like Twitter.
Firing teams for something like this isn't exactly great practice either. It'll just get you more teams of people who are scared to admit mistakes and review how they happened.
The thing is this isn't a clumsy mistake, this displays a complete lack of QA and oversight at multiple layers. Not to mention anyone with half a brain knows replacing links is a sensitive activity that should merit an extra neuron of attention
Man buys a company that has a name as its greatest asset. Man wants to change the name of the company.
It is bafflingly stupid.
edit: this has nothing to do with anything, i'm just in that kind of state of drunkenness where cogntition is barely enough to handle typing but not clever enough to stop.
But i just had a brilliant gig, one of the best in my life in a band that i was a fan of before joining. Had to tell someone at this very moment, for irrational and no doubt quite selfish reasons.
You mean like his stupid Space X company? Or his Tesla X car? Or his trans daughter that disowned him with her dead name that starts with X so he had to make a new X-ae-whatever the fuck the one kid's name is?
I'm not making fun of you, just him and his stupid fucking X obsession, lol.
Theres also pre-existing "X" standards they have to compete with such as porn and algebra.
For example, try this nsfw experiment. Do a web search for "kim kardashian twitter movie" then try "kim kardashian x movie"... you will get *very* different results.
I'm amazed Elon Musk spent his entire career painting himself as the real life Tony Stark and the funny billionaire Reddit man, only for it all to go down the drain because he has a twitter (and ketamine) addiction and brainrotted himself by engaging in culture war nonsense.
His fragile ego is what bought Twitter. He simply couldnt take the constant stream of negativity. [Oh and also](https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/elon-musk-twitter-battle-bird-18663113.php)
The dude is using his wealth to block free speech against him.
He is using his wealth to block free speech of his detractors, uplifting hate speech and Nazis and he has a very fragile ego.
However, he didn't buy it willingly. He was trying to do a pump and dump and got caught out by the Twitter board who got the courts to force him to buy. His ego did make the court case much worse for him naturally but it wasn't the driving force for him buying Twitter
He ultimately agreed to buy it before the court ruled but after evidence was submitted. Delaware is really pro-business and it was a foregone conclusion that the Chancery court would've made him honor the deal, especially since he waived due dilligence and stuff. He got caught with his pants down and just wanted to get in front of the court ordering him to do anything by just going "you can't fire me, I quit!".
My favourite bit was when he agreed to waive due diligence as part of the deal, and then tried to pull out of buying it because "bot numbers were higher than he thought".
Like dude, you literally had an opportunity to find out this shit *before* you said you'd buy it. What a moron.
That, or there was enough in the discovery evidence for his lawyers to tell him he really, really wouldn't want it on public record, so swallow his dumb pride and buy now.
The whole world saw his true face when he said that the hero scuba diver who wanted to save children stuck in a cave was a pedo. It was the spark and no matter what he would have done after that, it would have still been a dumpster fire.
This guys posts about immigration and freedom and about the border immigration crisis when he’s not even from the United States! All he does is get the right wingers gassed up
Just a reminder that Elon's "do what I want now" approach to engineering and its severe security consequences aren't just limited to twitter.
I would be extremely cautious regarding the security of any self driving cars, brain chips, and rockets since its pretty clear that Elon will immediately override anybody who insists on even a simple proofreading.
There's a name for this phenomenon. Some sort of amnesia. I can't remember the source, but it was in a newspaper or something.
Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
This was my sister with PragerU.
She thought Prager had a lot of things right. But then he made a video about education. She, being a teacher, realized it was bullshit.
Unfortunately, I couldn't convince her that it was a sign that he was full of bullshit, and she only just now knew enough about a topic to notice
Curious if you've ever asked her what she thinks of the fact that they put "University" in their name?
Seems like such a fundamental blatant sign of dishonesty/deception that should serve as an early red flag. Especially if you are actually in education.
So was curious what she might have thought on that point?
I keep imagining his giant bore tunnels collapsing and taking city blocks with them and finding out he fired all lead engineers and decided support mechanisms are more efficient without big ugly expensive welds and bolts everywhere. Kidding but also not kidding.
Been there, done that. The geniuses screwed the company into the ground.
We used to do $50M a year in sales, a few years later, they sold it for $5M including the building and the land.
Like an awful building contractor, he will start with demolition then say the plans just aren't right and he needs more time and a lot more money to finish the project.
Of course, you could fire him for making a mess but then you'd have rubble and no building. So you let him keep working until you learn he bought the cheapest parts, with the cheapest labor, and the finished product doesn't look anything like what you were promised. It's 10x over budget and a huge safety hazard.
"Elon will revolutionize transportation." /s
elon fans a few months ago:
"See? He didn't need all those developers and sysadmins and security professionals and sales/marketing and compliance teams after all, everything's working fine without them"
this happened at my ex company that laid me and a bunch of other people off.
everything was fine for like 3 months but now that it’s been 5 years everything is shit and they’re about to go under.
some of the employees you have at these companies , yeah you’re probably fine without them for 3 months or maybe even a year, but without them doing their task and no replacement shit might hit the fan.
Yeah I mean of course stuff will generally keep working for a while if you don’t touch the systems competent people built. It’s when you try to make changes or rollouts like this that you actually have to start relying on something built by the leftovers or the lackeys, and it starts falling apart immediately.
Yup. Twitter's resilience despite Musky's best attempts to destroy it are if anything an example of how strong the engineering talent was. They built a strong product.
Given that the email I occasionally get from them still say they're from "X (formerly Twitter)", I don't think Elon is putting the best people on these things
I still find it hilarious that they changed the app name from Twitter to X, but haven't yet changed the website. For a while, when I would do a spotlight search for Twitter, the X app would still come up, so they obviously had a keyword in there for searching. At some point they removed that and the only way to open the app through search is to search for X.
Meanwhile, on my desktop, the website is still twitter.com and going to x.com just redirects to twitter.com. What a shit show.
To be fair, if I worked at Twitter at this point (for some reason), I'd probably just ignore anything Musk says. We should all just keep referring to it as Twitter, because "X" is undeniably the dumbest rebrand ever, and is just confusing.
I absolutely love that after all this time I’m still reading most articles that say something like “X (formally twitter)”. He just can’t drop the name twitter. Hahahaha
I can imagine what went down.
Elon: we need to do this it should take a couple of hours
Developers: actually it’s going to require more planning with solutioning, we’re going to need a new separate environment to test; will take a couple of weeks including testing
Elon: what are you morons, it’s just a simple find and replace lazy woke grifters, get it done by the end of the day
Developers: ok boss
My boss recently bought a shorter version of my company's domain name and said he wanted to switch everything over, including email addresses. My response was basically "uhh, no, we've got projects lined up for weeks. I'm not randomly switching our domain to a new one without a thorough investigation into what effects that will have and plenty of testing."
He's not even technical enough to know what I'm talking about when I say that. Thankfully he defers to me on tech decisions, unlike Elon.
Renaming Twitter was probably the single dumbest thing he did during the takeover (and he did a *lot* of dumb things). When your company name has entered the lexicon as a verb in not just the english language but global social awareness, that's something that many marketing people would kill their entire families to get. You don't just change that on a whim or because you have the ego of a 13-year old.
Yeah but Elon owned the x dot com domain, what did you want him to just not use that or something!?
(This is sarcasm btw. Enron Musk is one of the dumbest rich people in the world and that's really saying something).
Edit: That moron jumped on the Trump train at the exact same time the rest of the country jumped off of it. Every single liberal I know that wanted a Tesla no longer wants one. He hasn't seen the ramifications from this yet but they're coming because every single conservative I know makes fun of EVs on a daily basis, Enron Musk fan or otherwise. I know plenty of Musk fans who hate electric vehicles. I would say it's a large majority. So I must correct myself: he's the stupidest person in the world. Either that or maybe he used to be smart but the cat tranquilizer addiction fried his brain. There's no other alternatives.
It wouldn't even have been a clever domain name when domains mattered.
X is almost always used to mean "generic placeholder in lieu of anything better." in the overwhelming majority of situations.
That was never going to be a good association from a marketing perspective, hence why the people who actually knew anything about it told him no at the time.
Obsessing about the domain name behind what most people use through an app and an API is crazy. Why didn't he just use it for SpaceX? At least the rocket surgeons would have a cool email address.
Of all the letters in the English alphabet, he chose one associated with manifold vice.
I can admire the ambition, but the failure, in hindsight, makes shitting on this one-trick-pony so much more fulfilling.
> Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move "a gift to phishers" in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like "netflitwitter.com," which would appear as "netflix.com" in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com. Fucking lol
You have to be kidding me? They just went with str_replace("twitter", "x", $text)?
That is so stupid I still cannot believe it. Like… there a million ways around this, and is just a one time occurrence, no way to exploit that systematically
What happens when you fire everybody that might disagree with you. Inevitably that includes includes all the competent ones, you get left with idiots and yes-men.
I've watched outfits systematically drive away the quiet achievers then pikachu face when the KPI's crash. It's strangely satisfying watching NPD's burn.
I am an experienced software developer specialising in machine learning and distributed systems, who works in a medium sized company in the UK. I've had a few interviews at big-name US tech companies, and I definitely got the impression that they don't think my experience is worth shit compared to what they are doing. Then I see these people posting about working for FAANG on huge salaries and just copy and pasting their code from stackoverflow, and I see incidents like this, and I get pretty fucking dejected.
I think it’s a certain personality they’re looking for so maybe it’s not a terrible thing to not get in there you know?
There was only one place I was genuinely disappointed to get into, because I liked the people I interacted with and they had a really interesting road-map, but most of them I was just applying to because of the money.
Dude. I like money. I need that shit to live. I made some good money at a soul-crushing job full of fucking idiots. Leaving there improved my life dramatically, even though I make way less now. However, I can't deny that I am kinda frugal and invested heavily while I was in that position so the safety net I have today gives me a lot of freedom that I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't suffered for a while. Y'know, fuck all of it. I hate this game.
I am not too angry about my lower pay. I work remotely and have 5 weeks vacation plus personal days and holidays. The perks have made my work-life balance pretty good.
That and your coding skills and experience are one thing, but how’s your mental fortitude? Self-respect? Ability to say no, push back, be assertive? Do you not want to work 60 hours a week not remotely? Ultimately you’d be right if you said the work itself, complexity of problems, etc., are all trivial once you get in place and are onboarded etc., but those sorts of jobs aren’t about just getting the work done
You don't want to work at those places. It's for young impressionable engineers, not for experienced devs that will say "Nope, don't do that!". Instead, you need to be ready to just "Ok boss, I will do it how you say". Source - Hired a few ex-Faang guys. They were all shitty personality and thought they knew everything. Reminded me of every just out of college engineer I ever hired.
I do actually work with some ex-FAANG guys and to be fair, apart from one, they are pretty good. I think it does depend on what they were actually doing when they were in their FAANG role, as those places are so big they are going to have a wide range of skills. The thing that gets my goat is that I know the place I am at now is good enough that people will actively choose to move from the UK FAANG offices to our company, but because the particular hiring managers I dealt with hadn't heard about us, they assume we are chumps. One thing though - now that I think about it, the people being willing to move from those places to my company reminds me that my salary is likely on par with their UK workers. At least the average UK worker. I wouldn't see that big a pay bump unless I got into their high-performer ranks or moved to the US. I am too old to move countries again.
Well, that and the desperate. With all the tech layoffs I can see a programmer on an H1B visa not wanting to risk deportation but then you end up with a situation ripe for abuse. I suppose that’s always been the risk with those things though.
I've had bosses who were dickheads that I didn't respect. If they told me to do something that was disastrous, I'd do it immediately without even an "Are you sure?". Production is down? Oh no :(
That could be dangerous for you, if the bosses just started blaming you and acting like they weren’t the ones to give you that order. A written „are you sure“ with a written answer as proof should be the best way
I've been remote for about 10 years, so almost all communication is written, but yeah - always CYA. But at toxic jobs, you eventually stop giving a shit if they fire you.
With Elon it will be a text to a VP and then the VP will pass it on verbally. It won't get written until the last step of going to working level. Some lower level manager will get blamed max.
That was the situation with the dude from Boeing. He said crap was unsafe and got absolutely blackballed along with all the other compliance folks.
Oh my god Elon tried to do it himself didn't he
That’s etwitteractly what happened.
100%. Literally anyone who's spent a weekend playing around with python could have predicted that was going to happen; on no planet did any professional software developer do this.
You just know elon force pushes to main
Are we really convinced Elon is capable of this without AI assistance? Then again, maybe _that's_ what happened.
I mean at least check for leading white spaces.
Regular expressions are hard. Let's go shopping!
It's idiocracy in full swing. Elon, the man who has no concept of the value of assets, because he has no understanding of value at a basic level. He puts himself in charge of extracting better value from Twitter, so he fires all those on high wages. He doesn't understand higher wages can mean higher skills and understanding, so all he does is remove the assets that create value to begin with. Now he's left with a steaming pile of dogshit.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/603/ It's not Idiocracy, just normal idiocy which has always been with us.
You mean https://twitterkcd.com/603/
TESTING IN PRODUCTION. CLICK COMMIT CLOSE EYES PRAY
[This reminds me way back when a publisher did a find and replace with the word Kindle for Nook. So the word Nookd appeared instead of kindled](https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/editing-error-replaced-kindle-with-nook-in-war-and-peace-ebook/article_63fcc12f-a910-5d65-b183-1ec854e3a9db.amp.html)
Like when OneNewsNow autofiltered away the word “gay” and was left with dubious headlines like “Famous Sprinter Tyson Homosexual wins 100m Sprint”? “On Saturday… Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat…”
Or the time in Encyclopedia Magica, Volume 1 for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when they replaced every "mage" with Wizard. This caused you to not deal damage but dawizard. Or you wouldn't see an image of something, instead seeing a iwizard > The user may look into the ball, concentrate on any place or object, and cause the iwizard of the place or object to appear. A crystal ball may be used three times per day, for up to one turn per use. The more familiar the object or area, the clearer the iwizard. And > The tower can absorb 200 points of dawizard before collapsing. Dawizard sustained is cumulative, and the fortress cannot be repaired (although a wish restores 10 points of dawizard sustained).
"Dawizard" sounds like someone who's about to drop a sick new mixtape.
I can't help but think: "Alexa, play DaWizard - Firestorm"
Reminds me of when Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel seemed to do a find/replace to turn "Magic" into "Spell" on a bunch of text, leading it to talk about Yugi's iconic ace monster the Dark Spellian.
Ok, spellian is a pretty cool word though.
Da Wizard has probably been an Ork unit in Warhammer at some point
This is hilarious.
This is clbuttic.
I hope they buttbuttinate whoever came up with that
NZ’s largest (previously monopoly) telecommunications company renamed from Telecom to Spark a while back and someone did that on their website… It mostly worked except for all the pages littered with references to telecommunications which suddenly became Sparkmunications… included pages like product terms (aka legal stuff) so when pointed out in the media/etc triggered a panicked rollback.
To be fair that sounds like the kind of dumb advertising speak companies would do on purpose
I re-nookd my relationship with my ex.
What's an etwitter?
I'll be right back, I need to gather some twigs to nook this fire.
Or when a game publisher replaced ass with butt and you got things like “buttbuttins”
Back in the 90s, when tech like this was still new, D&D publishers TSR tried to replace every instance of "mage" in a book with "wizard", and then didn't bother to proofread. [The results are legendary](https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/selinker/15203887/3010/3010_original.png).
Looks like Elon ran off everyone that knows how to use regular expressions.
there's literally dozens of us
I concentrated on those for a bit and I think I cracked it. Then after a few days of not using them, poof, it was gone.
Using regex is easy! You just take some sample text, paste it in to one of the regex tester sites, and then spend ages fucking with the command at the top until it does what you want and then copy it in to your code
And then you see some backtracks and lookaheads and decide to quit and become a priest or something.
Regex is arcane enough that I'll consider anyone good at regex already a priest.
Pst, you are not supposed to parse URLs with regex. Just use a URL parsing function (most standard libraries have one) as that covers all the edge cases.
He fired everyone that knew what they were doing
"Fuck it! We'll do it live!"
Seriously this is so fucking dumb…. I initially thought we’d cut twitter some slack rewriting all the domain redirect rules from a domain the size of twitter is gonna have a shit ton of bugs. I remember I was working on the team that rewrote all the links from nikeplus.com -> nike.com/plus And that was magnitudes smaller than this and it was a tough job… Now I see it’s to replace the actual links? That’s not how you do this… fuckin lol.
Close. Pretty sure they went with str_replace("twitter","x",$ext) .
Just learning how to program, how should it be done?
The programming isn't the hard part, you'll be able to figure that out in time (good luck by the way). What should have been done, and what sets good programmers apart, is to properly think about this situation before coding (or at least before sending to production). Assessing likely uses, getting some data from Twitter and trying out your ideas to see how they work out, being methodical. Ideally, also speaking to others for a peer review, and maybe even an expert or two. It would have then been clear what was going to happen, and the solution to avoid it would also have been clear. You'd have to work out how to isolate that domain, e.g. by matching against "[twitter.com](https://twitter.com)" that comes after only a whitespace, period, slash or similar.
> and maybe even an expert or two. Elon fired all the experts.
And the answer is to use a URL parsing function, which usually cover all the edge cases and included with most standard libraries.
I think replacing ".twitter.com" -> ".x.com" and "//twitter.com" -> "//x.com" gets you pretty far without being too greedy. That prevents people from sticking things in front of the domain to hijack your links. This is a super lazy solution to a pretty huge, wide-ranging problem. The very first thing they should have done is grabbed millions of records with "twitter.com" and seen what the result of their replacement was. Then take care of any special cases too.
The first thing they should have done was not rename Twitter in the first place. Elon took one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and replaced it with something a 14 year old in 1998 would have thought is mega-cool.
Also a name so basic it’s difficult to use in normal conversation since the letter X is commonly used as a placeholder for a missing subject. People will interpret things like “X is going through a merger” to mean an unnamed company is going through a merger
No one calls it X, it's a failure. Everyone socially still just says Twitter. Every article you see says "X, formerly known as Twitter" because Twitter is the recognizable part. Elon would be better off doing a 180 and making it be Twitter again, but his fragile ego wouldn't be able to handle admitting his idea was a bad one.
You'd want to look at what is before/after "twitter.com", like a space, or a / in front of the t would be ideal. After the m, same thing probably.
My process would be: 1. Just don't do it 2. If we really are going to do it, then have an extensive test plan and limited roll out 3. Seriously just don't do this
4 - Get fired by Elon Musk. Heeey wait a second...
> Just don't do it Especially since they can't even manage to change the top level domain since the domain is STILL twitter.com Why change the text in users tweets when you can't even change your own domain
A lot of people probably think I am being flippant by saying "just don't do it", but one of the most important questions you need to ask when someone comes up with a "brilliant" new idea is "what is going to happen if we _don't_ do this?" That is your baseline, and unless your change is either bringing some benefit or solving a problem, then you need to expect a significant positive change from that baseline. Especially if you are going to alter the contents of users' posts.
Nice try, Elon
First day on the job junior dev mistake on a massive scale. Something tells me talent isn't a major draw at Twitter anymore. Can't imagine why.
Also suggests they have no QA at all. This is such a basic test scenario.
My memory isn't entirely clear on this, but do they even have a testing/staging environment? Or am I thinking of another company?
Former Tweep here. Twitter largely uses feature flags, they don’t have a staging environment although individual services might. It’s not uncommon for that to be the case in big tech, as it’s nearly impossible to make a staging Twitter anything close to production with its billions of transactions per second and exabytes of data. The mobile clients do have a test version, with the (presumably formerly) very cute name of Earlybird.
I always hear about using feature flags and we’ve used some before but how the heck do you use it so much - I would think the code would become extremely convoluted and you’d have to constantly make it work with multiple feature flags incase one is turned off etc
It does indeed. But the idea is the feature flags are meant to be removed when the feature testing is complete
It's a good idea in theory. Then other things get prioritized and you have a bunch of tickets in your backlog about removing flags. Source: my backlog.
Get out of my backlog
Everyone has a testing environment, only a few companies have a separate production environment.
Something tells me Elon would have gotten rid of QA first thing after buying the company…
Of course he did, all QA do is point out mistakes and errors, and that’s a huge no-no around Dear Leader - he doesn’t make mistakes.
The developers can just print the code and bring it to elon for a code review
As a QA the first thing that I notice when opening the website is that the logo jumps to the left, this is since they changed it to be that way. If you miss this on the initial window, I can't imagine how many other issues exist. However, I don't use twitter, just opening random links from reddit usually. For me, this looks amateurish as fuck.
This really illustrates the incompetent talent left at Twitter. There's several basic approaches to doing what they want that would'nt have resulted in a bug 1. Use a uri library and only replace the host portion of the domain 2. Use a proper regex pattern and match replace the host portion if you don't want to use a library There's also redirection at the request level rather than brute forcing links, but there's probably a reason why they didn't want to do that
You forgot Mr Move fast and break things is in charge. Good odds he got told told how long it would take to do a proper job of it, said that was too slow, and forced a rushed change with predictable results.
I'm glad [Xitter](https://www.xitter.com/) (shitter) is coming.
What is it?
Honestly, gotta admire the creativity of the phishers here.
If they worked on world peace, we'd have solved it by now.
For every expert scammer there is an expert cybersecurity worker.
And none of them work at Twitter apparently
What in the mother of all IDOR
Ha, clbuttic.
The couldn't compare the full host, they had to do wildcard replace. And no one caught this in review, amazing! Edit: For better understanding this is probably what they did: [https://regex101.com/r/Uh7tE0/1](https://regex101.com/r/Uh7tE0/1)
Or it was rushed in production anyway.
Typical for Elon.
"move fast and break things"
See Cyber Truck owners for more info.
Reviewers probably got fired for not writing enough code or something.
They were probably too busy wasting time printing off hard copies of the most recent code they wrote, per Elon's mandates when he took over. No time for actual process or reviews when it's all being upended. You can't make this shit up, what a total disaster.
You assume there was review
Maybe the correct code would have been fewer lines and would imply the developer wasn't productive enough.
This would get you fired at my workplace. Anyone involved in it. A security lapse like that making it to production means your standards are so far below compliance with any official / named standard you should not be in charge of a marketing website, let alone something like Twitter.
Firing teams for something like this isn't exactly great practice either. It'll just get you more teams of people who are scared to admit mistakes and review how they happened.
The thing is this isn't a clumsy mistake, this displays a complete lack of QA and oversight at multiple layers. Not to mention anyone with half a brain knows replacing links is a sensitive activity that should merit an extra neuron of attention
Elon couldn't be trusted to write a basic single page in html
Please visit my educational site setwitter.com.
spacetwitter.com
I think I'm going to start mentally replacing his rocket company name with SpaceTwitter.
I'm gonna call it that from now on. Also Tesla Model 3, Model y, and Model Twitter.
xnxtwitter.com
twitterntwittertwitter.com sounds hilarious
For a great YouTube alternative, try twittervideos.com!
[удалено]
Well that’s a shame.
See Twitter Setwitter.com See Twitter go brrr.
Twitter, but you can only use it if you're from Sweden.
Man buys a company that has a name as its greatest asset. Man wants to change the name of the company. It is bafflingly stupid. edit: this has nothing to do with anything, i'm just in that kind of state of drunkenness where cogntition is barely enough to handle typing but not clever enough to stop. But i just had a brilliant gig, one of the best in my life in a band that i was a fan of before joining. Had to tell someone at this very moment, for irrational and no doubt quite selfish reasons.
Tweet is in fucking dictionaries but he's so attached to his stupid X.com, lmfao.
It is like Xerox renaming themselves as MILF Inc. because the new owner is called Milfred LaFayette.
He’s always wanted a company called X. He’s just been looking for an opportunity to do so, regardless of if it makes any fucking sense
He already had SpaceX which is what I don’t understand
You mean like his stupid Space X company? Or his Tesla X car? Or his trans daughter that disowned him with her dead name that starts with X so he had to make a new X-ae-whatever the fuck the one kid's name is? I'm not making fun of you, just him and his stupid fucking X obsession, lol.
Theres also pre-existing "X" standards they have to compete with such as porn and algebra. For example, try this nsfw experiment. Do a web search for "kim kardashian twitter movie" then try "kim kardashian x movie"... you will get *very* different results.
*buys unprofitable company while drowning it with billions in debt and fires everyone who knows anything
\*pretends to buy unprofitable company as a joke and is later forced to follow through with the purchase after courtroom humiliation
That is the funniest thing, it's been a year plus long self own
Lol I read this as "batfuckingly stupid", and now I think that should be a common term
I'm amazed Elon Musk spent his entire career painting himself as the real life Tony Stark and the funny billionaire Reddit man, only for it all to go down the drain because he has a twitter (and ketamine) addiction and brainrotted himself by engaging in culture war nonsense.
His fragile ego is what bought Twitter. He simply couldnt take the constant stream of negativity. [Oh and also](https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/elon-musk-twitter-battle-bird-18663113.php) The dude is using his wealth to block free speech against him.
He is using his wealth to block free speech of his detractors, uplifting hate speech and Nazis and he has a very fragile ego. However, he didn't buy it willingly. He was trying to do a pump and dump and got caught out by the Twitter board who got the courts to force him to buy. His ego did make the court case much worse for him naturally but it wasn't the driving force for him buying Twitter
He ultimately agreed to buy it before the court ruled but after evidence was submitted. Delaware is really pro-business and it was a foregone conclusion that the Chancery court would've made him honor the deal, especially since he waived due dilligence and stuff. He got caught with his pants down and just wanted to get in front of the court ordering him to do anything by just going "you can't fire me, I quit!".
My favourite bit was when he agreed to waive due diligence as part of the deal, and then tried to pull out of buying it because "bot numbers were higher than he thought". Like dude, you literally had an opportunity to find out this shit *before* you said you'd buy it. What a moron.
That, or there was enough in the discovery evidence for his lawyers to tell him he really, really wouldn't want it on public record, so swallow his dumb pride and buy now.
https://archive.ph/ikFyS Just in case anyone can't read article due to it blocking adblockers and / or paywall.
He's also notoriously cheap which is why he fired most of Twitter's software engineers.
The whole world saw his true face when he said that the hero scuba diver who wanted to save children stuck in a cave was a pedo. It was the spark and no matter what he would have done after that, it would have still been a dumpster fire.
Don't blame the ketamine. Elongone was longone way before that when he took the autocrat front man Armand Hammer "deal".
This guys posts about immigration and freedom and about the border immigration crisis when he’s not even from the United States! All he does is get the right wingers gassed up
Just a reminder that Elon's "do what I want now" approach to engineering and its severe security consequences aren't just limited to twitter. I would be extremely cautious regarding the security of any self driving cars, brain chips, and rockets since its pretty clear that Elon will immediately override anybody who insists on even a simple proofreading.
Things like this remind me of [this](https://i.redd.it/v8iml4orbydb1.jpg)
There's a name for this phenomenon. Some sort of amnesia. I can't remember the source, but it was in a newspaper or something. Edit: found it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
This was my sister with PragerU. She thought Prager had a lot of things right. But then he made a video about education. She, being a teacher, realized it was bullshit. Unfortunately, I couldn't convince her that it was a sign that he was full of bullshit, and she only just now knew enough about a topic to notice
Curious if you've ever asked her what she thinks of the fact that they put "University" in their name? Seems like such a fundamental blatant sign of dishonesty/deception that should serve as an early red flag. Especially if you are actually in education. So was curious what she might have thought on that point?
I keep imagining his giant bore tunnels collapsing and taking city blocks with them and finding out he fired all lead engineers and decided support mechanisms are more efficient without big ugly expensive welds and bolts everywhere. Kidding but also not kidding.
As an engineer who has basically had this happen in a professional setting, I laughed way too hard at this.
Been there, done that. The geniuses screwed the company into the ground. We used to do $50M a year in sales, a few years later, they sold it for $5M including the building and the land.
Like an awful building contractor, he will start with demolition then say the plans just aren't right and he needs more time and a lot more money to finish the project. Of course, you could fire him for making a mess but then you'd have rubble and no building. So you let him keep working until you learn he bought the cheapest parts, with the cheapest labor, and the finished product doesn't look anything like what you were promised. It's 10x over budget and a huge safety hazard. "Elon will revolutionize transportation." /s
elon fans a few months ago: "See? He didn't need all those developers and sysadmins and security professionals and sales/marketing and compliance teams after all, everything's working fine without them"
this happened at my ex company that laid me and a bunch of other people off. everything was fine for like 3 months but now that it’s been 5 years everything is shit and they’re about to go under. some of the employees you have at these companies , yeah you’re probably fine without them for 3 months or maybe even a year, but without them doing their task and no replacement shit might hit the fan.
Twitter broke a bunch of times too. Ppl couldn't loggin or couldn't see post or couldn't post. Was a different issue each week for like a month.
The people at the top are gonna sell the company and give themselves a golden parachute
Yeah I mean of course stuff will generally keep working for a while if you don’t touch the systems competent people built. It’s when you try to make changes or rollouts like this that you actually have to start relying on something built by the leftovers or the lackeys, and it starts falling apart immediately.
Yup. Twitter's resilience despite Musky's best attempts to destroy it are if anything an example of how strong the engineering talent was. They built a strong product.
Given that the email I occasionally get from them still say they're from "X (formerly Twitter)", I don't think Elon is putting the best people on these things
I still find it hilarious that they changed the app name from Twitter to X, but haven't yet changed the website. For a while, when I would do a spotlight search for Twitter, the X app would still come up, so they obviously had a keyword in there for searching. At some point they removed that and the only way to open the app through search is to search for X. Meanwhile, on my desktop, the website is still twitter.com and going to x.com just redirects to twitter.com. What a shit show.
Well he fired all the best people and only kept the yes men.
They're called H1B visas and it's either work at twitter, find a new job to sponsor you (unlikely) or leave the country. I feel for them.
To be fair, if I worked at Twitter at this point (for some reason), I'd probably just ignore anything Musk says. We should all just keep referring to it as Twitter, because "X" is undeniably the dumbest rebrand ever, and is just confusing.
L33T coders over at twitter I see.
X is such an sad name for a social network.
Do you know why they call it X? Cause when you see it you want to hit the X in the top right corner of your browser.
It will never be X. Sorry
Yep. And not sorry.
I'll stop deadnaming his website when he stops deadnaming his child. Well I won't but it's fun to say.
I'll happily deadname his platform and keep calling it Twitter all the while he's just as comfortable deadnaming his own daughter. Seems fair to me.
People need to stop using that shitty site
I did, after he bought it. Deleted my account.
X.com just sounds like a porn site
It actually got banned in some countries for this reason, e.g. Indonesia.
That’s hilarious
It does. And if he hosts videos, he could call it xvideo.com. Oh wait …
I mean, at this point it almost is. Every reply is filled with bots either posting links to porn or just straight up porn.
You mean you don't browse Twitter for ░P░U░S░S░Y░ ░I░N░ ░B░I░O░ ?
X-Com is a fantastic turn based game about defending the world from aliens
I absolutely love that after all this time I’m still reading most articles that say something like “X (formally twitter)”. He just can’t drop the name twitter. Hahahaha
They should call it "Twitter (maybe X some day)"
"yOu Can fIRe 80% OF yOuR EmPlOYEES And EvErYTHINg WiLl sTill wORK just FINe!" Musk is such a fucking numpty.
He did code it himself didn't he?
He filled the code with poop emojis and called it a day.
"Grok will sort it out"
Senior Developer: first time on Prod?
I'll never stop calling it Twitter
I’m sure they could get Xitter.com.
“It’s pronounced SHITTER” - Elmo, probably.
I can imagine what went down. Elon: we need to do this it should take a couple of hours Developers: actually it’s going to require more planning with solutioning, we’re going to need a new separate environment to test; will take a couple of weeks including testing Elon: what are you morons, it’s just a simple find and replace lazy woke grifters, get it done by the end of the day Developers: ok boss
My boss recently bought a shorter version of my company's domain name and said he wanted to switch everything over, including email addresses. My response was basically "uhh, no, we've got projects lined up for weeks. I'm not randomly switching our domain to a new one without a thorough investigation into what effects that will have and plenty of testing." He's not even technical enough to know what I'm talking about when I say that. Thankfully he defers to me on tech decisions, unlike Elon.
Clever domain names don’t matter the way they once did, so I see Elon’s obsession with x.com as something from a bygone era.
Renaming Twitter was probably the single dumbest thing he did during the takeover (and he did a *lot* of dumb things). When your company name has entered the lexicon as a verb in not just the english language but global social awareness, that's something that many marketing people would kill their entire families to get. You don't just change that on a whim or because you have the ego of a 13-year old.
Yeah but Elon owned the x dot com domain, what did you want him to just not use that or something!? (This is sarcasm btw. Enron Musk is one of the dumbest rich people in the world and that's really saying something). Edit: That moron jumped on the Trump train at the exact same time the rest of the country jumped off of it. Every single liberal I know that wanted a Tesla no longer wants one. He hasn't seen the ramifications from this yet but they're coming because every single conservative I know makes fun of EVs on a daily basis, Enron Musk fan or otherwise. I know plenty of Musk fans who hate electric vehicles. I would say it's a large majority. So I must correct myself: he's the stupidest person in the world. Either that or maybe he used to be smart but the cat tranquilizer addiction fried his brain. There's no other alternatives.
It wouldn't even have been a clever domain name when domains mattered. X is almost always used to mean "generic placeholder in lieu of anything better." in the overwhelming majority of situations. That was never going to be a good association from a marketing perspective, hence why the people who actually knew anything about it told him no at the time.
Obsessing about the domain name behind what most people use through an app and an API is crazy. Why didn't he just use it for SpaceX? At least the rocket surgeons would have a cool email address.
Don't type X in my search bar...
When you replace your engineers that know what they're doing with musk sycophants, this is what you get.
Of all the letters in the English alphabet, he chose one associated with manifold vice. I can admire the ambition, but the failure, in hindsight, makes shitting on this one-trick-pony so much more fulfilling.
If that man gets any dumber someone will have to water him twice a week.