Twitter (or Failover Twitter) runs on Google App Engine? | Hacker News Reader

Twitter (or Failover Twitter) runs on Google App Engine?

7920074.appspot.com

50 pointsyarapavan17 comments

It's a proxy for Twitter. s/twitter\.com/7920074.appspot.com/ on any Twitter URL and the site will show you the same page as Twitter. It's probably a hack to access Twitter in an environment where Twitter is blocked or a phishing site.

Could be a phishing attempt!

More likely someone just filled in the default HTML for their app with Twitter's front page. The login form submits to https://twitter.com/sessions, so it doesn't appear to be phishing.

Doubtful, the sign in link goes to twitter.com

http://twitpic.com/13y3d0

Opera reports that as Fraud

Might be worth editing a warning into the title (that it might be a scam)?

Kinda strange, lots of pages are cloned straight from twitter.com, even the trending topics are upto date. Most interestingly though, if you login with fake details. It redirects straight to twitter.com, presumably recording the details along the way?

Certainly is a good clone, either that or twitter really liked the jaiku source code...

Mat

Tried logging in using a throwaway account and got "403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it."

I am able to access it from my office network. Is this real though? I am not sure if I will login into here.

I am able to access it from my office network.

It might be just that - a proxy.

Looks like a failover node, just in case

I noticed similar this morning for a mirror of my own twitter account at http://retwite.appspot.com/_rahim

Googling retwite I found this project on github: http://github.com/int/retwite and this discussion: https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thre...

It may have been constructed as a dumb mirror initially, but variants could be trivially reworked in to phishing sites.

Looks like a failover or clone to me. Twitter dns points to verio as the host / datacenter.

It could be a development version as well, they've hosted their blog on [corrected from comment below]Blogger for as long as I can remember...

[Google] http://blog.twitter.com/ -> http://whois.domaintools.com/74.125.113.121

[NTT/Verio] http://search.twitter.com -> http://whois.domaintools.com/168.143.162.123

[NTT/Verio] http://twitter.com -> http://whois.domaintools.com/128.121.146.228

Their blog is hosted on Blogger, not AppEngine, which is also part of Google.

It looks like a proxy for the twitter landing page, but I won't use it to login.

my work blocks as phishing site

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