TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Twitter Spamming

I saw some referral traffic from Twitter this AM, and went over to see who had Twittered me. At which point, I realized (a) there doesn’t appear to be a way to search Twitter, and (b) Twitter is vulnerable to spamming. Here’s the frontpage that I saw:

Note the “usaid3” posts about Sony buying Microsoft. Breaking news. Can’t see what’s behind the TinyURL. Tempted to click? Well usaid3 wants you to click really bad - its a script that’s bombing the twitter front page, posting the same thing every few seconds:

In the time that it took to write the post, the Twitter being send by usaid3 switched to “Twitter TV” - pointing to the same TinyURL.

Oddly, that TinyURL goes to a defunct MySpace page. Confused? Me too. Looks like a spambot that outlived the page it was trying to drive traffic too.

Of course, I don’t imagine too many regular Twitter users are hanging out on the front page. That being said, it still seems odd that Twitter doesn’t appear to have any anti-spam measures in place - I can’t imagine a much clearer spam flag than the same thing being posted from the same account identically hundreds of times every few minutes.

Perhaps Twitter should write a hook into Akismet, or validate posting IP’s against http:BL. Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.