Twitter’s Silence on State-Sponsored Attacks | Hacker News Reader

Twitter’s Silence on State-Sponsored Attacks

threatpost.com

85 pointsbootload17 comments

In the last twelve months I have stopped using Twitter. It used to be fun but it just became a mess of marketing and moral posturing and bullying. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just happened.

It's like the photos of the woman scorned - the guy with his car trashed and clothes thrown out, he's probably getting back together with her after an apology. The guy with his stuff neatly folded and packed on the front is gone for good because she moved on.

It's one thing to think of a Twitter boycott over some issue like this, but when it fails to meet the standard of providing value so you just move on, well that's a lot worse for Twitter.

I have restarted using Twitter recently; after not using it for years.

The content you see depends entirely on who you choose to follow. I only follow the people who regularly publish awesome content, initiate discussions, and have a positive outlook on things. Also some credible news sources, and add a few personal idols like Elon Musk.

I did see some people become toxic, start bullying and so on, I unfollow them, or make another decision, depending on the circumstances.

It feels like you make your own community on Twitter. You need to moderate it too.

You're correct, but it seems like too much work and random people just one day blow up your feed with some type of rant. The signal/noise ratio requires too much tuning

I follow the national weather service for my area (US). It's awesome they're total geeks about weather and share it.

Everything else is mostly meh.

This is good advice. I love Twitter, and find you need to be ruthless in unfollowing anyone who ruins the experience for you. Unlike Facebook, there usually aren't social / real-world consequences for unfollowing someone on Twitter.

For people who are noisy but you still want to follow, shuffle them off into a Twitter list you check occasionally. I love @SwiftOnSecurity, but she's too noisy/frequent for my main feed, so I don't follow her and only include her in my Infosec list (that also includes @troyhunt and @tqbf).

You'll probably enjoy Twitter a lot more if you use 3rd Party clients like Tweetbot (Mac / iPhone) and Fenix (Android). Zero ads and more flexibility with features like Mute Filters (eg muting specific hashtags as well as specific users). The official Twitter experience is terrible.

Don't feel obligated to follow friends. This is often the fastest way to ruin your Twitter experience.

>> “It’s just scary to think somebody wants to know something about me and I have no clue whether it’s the NSA, the German police or North Korea,”

Well, Twitter is alerting about 'attacks' by nation states. So it won't be the NSA or German police. They need not attack and/or steal anything to get such information. But if they did, Twitter would certainly not be informing the target. So of the three options above, it must have been NK.

> Well, Twitter is alerting about 'attacks' by nation states

May I talk about something that's been irking me?

I often read people talking about "nation states" when they are actually just talking about states.

As far as I know, Twitter will still alert you if the state that's attacking is not a nation, like say Canada or the UK. Or for a more likely attacker, China describes itself as a multi-national state.

I believe the reason for "nation states" is to avoid confusion with US states. I am from Europe, for the record.

Why is the article singling out twitter? One reason is, a minor market correction is adjusting the perception of the value of Twitter. This type of criticism happens when new tech companies are formed, when there's large amounts of money involved and the market corrects, criticism is magnified. [0]

[0] Guardian, Jana Kasperkevic, "Stock rout demotes Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey from billionaire to millionaire" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/twitter-sq...

Not sure why Twitter is being picked on here, Google, the originator of this practice, is equally silent on the cause for these notifications.

It's become popular to pick on Twitter since they've previously made some shit decisions about how to handle free speech and user rights. My thought is that any company handling user data and accounts that state-level actors might want access to is at fault; the very least they can do for user privacy (and rights) is tell those users that someone is targeting them.

from the story:

> Twitter is not alone in starting to alert users targeted by state actors. Facebook did so beginning its notification service in October, followed by Twitter on Dec 14 and Yahoo eight days later.

and with regard to

> “However that [Twitter stays] quiet now does probably more harm,” Kubieziel said. “Some people suspect that Twitter might have received some gag order and isn’t allowed to say anything. However, even if it was only some bad algorithm which misjudged the situation, it would be better to tell the truth. I think it would help many of us to sleep better.”

it seems most likely to me that, yeah, they've been told not to tell who it is that wants the info.

The real problem is that you don't know what to conclude if they are silent or not. In theory we don't have proof of either outcome but it is prudent to assume the worst.

I'm not sure why this is a problem, considering that if one nation-level party is interested in you, probably multiple are? As long as the users in question know someone is poking around, they can take steps to reduce their online presence, or migrate to new online identities, at the very least.

The point I suppose I was trying to make is it sounds like a lot of finger pointing since people are afraid and don't know whose door to bang on.

We (Google) have tried to find the balance with this since day one back in 2012 "If you see this warning it does not necessarily mean that your account has been hijacked. It just means that we believe you may be a target, of phishing or malware for example".

The aim is to give the users useful information that they may be targeted without totally compromising the detections and protections we have in place. It seems whatever a company says they are either going to be accused of being too vague or making statements that can't be proven.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com