Twitter bans security maven for sharing naughty link A well known security researcher was banished from Twitter for more than two days for including the address of a malicious website in a two-month-old dispatch. On Tuesday, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for anti-virus provider F-Secure, found his Twitter account suspended with no explanation. Every one of his tweets …
I messaged a relative with a RFC1738 compliant URL containing a username and password. It seems Facebook software decided to strip out the credentials. They don't seem to like me sharing private family photos which they are not themselves authorised to vet. I had to send him the URL outside Facebook using ordinary email.
I think I'll stick with email. At least I can run my own email server and decide for myself what to relay and I don't have to put up with corporates deciding for me what I'm allowed to communicate and how I'm allowed to communicate.
...then they're taking editorial responsibility for everything on the site. Wow! That's brave!
(OK, perhaps not. Perhaps the law says that someone can munge your words so as to deny your freedom of speech and misrepresent you in public without penalty. Yeah. I expect it does.)
(In my darkest nightmares, that is.)
The corporate communications policy mandates no more than 140 characters in any memo, e-mail message, circular or formal document.
And judging by the appallingly unprofessional response given to one of the big names (such as there are) in computer security, I think it might be true.
Clearly a bunch of tweets.
To be fair to Twitter, live filtering does not solve the problem - they need a system that can filter retrospectively.
Most modern malware can spread very quickly, often way before AV and URL-filtering companies have a chance to react. In other words, live filtering of Twitter posts will not work for a new, fast-spreading malware pandemic.
That said, it seems the best solution would be to combine live filtering (for known malware sources) with retrospective filtering (for malware sources *recently* identified).
On both counts, Twitter currently fails. Lack of live filtering creates too large a threat window for known malware, and a slow retrospective scan merely compounds the problem. Added to that, one or more levels of indirection (TinyURL and their ilk) can be automated and compounds the issue. This could be 'solved' by implementing a Twitter-managed URL linking system, but this could also present user acceptance, scalability and further redirection issues.
Not an easy one to solve, but you can't be seen to be ignoring the problem either.
Oh I'm sorry, is Twitter trampling all over your human rights by removing links that point to malware sites?
If you really think that Twitter, Facebook and a bunch of other personal info gathering sites for some reason owe you something like privacy, freedom of speech or even a fair policy on using their services then you need to think again.
They can do what they like with any information you voluntarily submit to them.
I'm quite flabberghasted. Not by Twitter attitude (although suspending the account and removing all posts might have been a bit extreme) but by the reaction it raises. If you want to share serious info, why don't you do it on your website, or even on your blog? You can host those yourself for peanuts, or get them on a hosting platform for barely more. Then you can post links to that on twatter if you really have to use that bog-standard platform. But complaints about random filtering on a free "microblogging" service? Seriously?
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