Knowing and Making

A really rather odd phenomenon on twitter the other day. I saw a tweet looking something like this: This isn't an unusual format - it comes from someone who has set up an automated retweet command, and at the end of each message is a link back to the original tweet. Normally you can click straight through to the original link, but as you can see in this case, the link itself has been truncated, so I need to first click on the bit.ly link to see what it is. Often I can't be bothered going through this two-step process - Twitter is very much the Internet equivalent of the impulse buy, and two clicks is often not worth it. But this was a story I was interested in. So I click on the link: As expected, it's another shortened link - so I click on that too, in order to read the story. Or so I thought - for some reason, it takes me to yet another landing page: Maybe @myfxdeals  is making his own landing pages for every story in order to generate more clicks? In any ...

If you are at this page, you probably clicked on a "Do Click" link on twitter. Well done - you know how to follow instructions. If you were one of those rebellious types, you might have clicked on the "Don't Click" link which is also propagating on there. Fortunately you aren't like that. If you were, you would probably have been the victim of a cross-site scripting vulnerability (explanation at Coding Horror ). This runs some Javascript which starts posting messages in your name on twitter. In this case the message seems relatively harmless - it simply posts another copy of itself to try to spread itself to other twitter users. But, not having clicked on it, I can't say for sure that it is innocuous. In general it's dangerous to click on this kind of thing. One way around this is to insist on using the 'preview' feature on tinyurl. Any tinyurl link (such as the one that's being passed around with the "Don't Click" message) ...