The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the "Twitter files" but it's much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention. Going to do a thread on some of the craziest things, in no particular order.
— Avid Halaby (@AvidHalaby) December 12, 2022
Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.
https://x.com/avidhalaby/status/1602127460677844993
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Now playing: Aquatic Ambience (Ephixa Remix) (DKC).mp3
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But actually
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Only cowards need non-production environments. True codechads push every commit directly to production right in the middle of the workday.
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True codechads don't use version control.
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“Yes I ftp my code over and HUP the daemon, why do you ask?”
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@Certifiedbussyoperator
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Better yet, check in changes and leave for the day while the build is in progress.
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My man
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You don’t need a darn test environment, don’t be a kitty. Feature flags are good enough
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Full commit ahead!
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Good thing we don't do that
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lol this is pretty funny cuz this has happened to me plenty of times but I always thought it was because it was small companies.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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It happens at all levels. In 1997, the NSA did a massive hacking attack on US defence to probe whether it was vulnerable, and it was comically vulnerable. Passwords like "password" or "12345", passwords being written on trash that was then collected, and someone managed to get the password of the computers of the Joint Chief of Staff by impersonating an IT guy, calling the JCS and saying they need the password to reset a computer.
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While I don’t doubt the security was lackluster, that’s like me saying it’d be easy to get into my brother’s computer
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They were only allowed to use commercially available technology, and they were also not allowed to disclose that they were NSA. The whole point of the exercise was to detect whether a complete outsider would be able to do this.
What's also funny was that during their own hacking, they detected that outsiders had already penetrated the Pentagon, and those outsiders were most likely the French.
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what the frick why haven't we nuked them
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iirc they only found French IP's, but nothing tangible.
Also everybody spies on everybody, there arent really friendly spy agencies.
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sure but Merica is supposed to be the best at being rats, we literally hire out people who hack us. I will not stand for frenchies looking at my NSA porn records
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How could do this?
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With all those being people fired, it seems like Twitter going down is less likely now.
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https://x.com/AvidHalaby/status/1602132485743480832/photo/1
I'm not transcribing this, but god darn. Basically their systems start up by reading data from other systems, so if everything goes down, there is very literally no way to bring it back up "from nothing". That's right, if all their servers suffer a brief 1-minute power outage, the whole system is fricked basically permanently until a series of manual code changes are implemented to address it.
This thread actually seems way juicier than the "twitter files" shit, at least in terms of actual legal action. I'd bet nothing happens but maybe someone will get slapped for fraud.
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Where's the fraud? It isn't illegal to have a backend that's held together with duct tape and shell scripts, in fact, that probably describes a majority of backends. A bit uncommon for a web property operating at Twitter's scale though.
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You're right, their shitty engineering isn't illegal at all. But lying to the government about your infrastructure and security practices is.
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nothing ever happens
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Holy shit, the rest of that thread.
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Or you can create a free Wordpress account and write a proper blog you troglodyte.
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I believe Elon said it had to be posted on Twitter - good move tbh.
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I choose to believe the title is false, but comically and outrageously so
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If I ran into this dude, first thought would be to GTFO. I have no desire to blown to smithereens if he disagrees with my sandwich topping choices. Second thought would be what is he over compensating for? Is his ego (and various other parts of him) really that tiny and fragile?
Snapshots:
archive.org
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archive.ph (click to archive)
Orange Site discussion:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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