Twitter: Who are these men are in this picture and how are they in my tweet? | Hacker News Reader

Twitter: Who are these men are in this picture and how are they in my tweet?

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36 pointsfortran7711 comments

KellyM > Maybe one has nothing to do with the other but it’s unsettling that this has happened when tweeting photos of bath time.

Ryan Dalton > RIIIIIIGHT!

Twitter seems to encourage this reactionary, fearful behavior. What would be more likely to cause this photo to appear: a technical glitch or a malicious act?

Twitter is the Jerry Springer of the internet.

Good luck getting through to Twitter’s useless “support team”. I’ve been locked out of my account for four years and it’s pretty much impossible to get the attention of anyone over there.

Hash collision?

For sure a hash collision in their content-addressed storage system for images. Probably they take a thumbnail of the image and pass it to a md5 function or something instead of truly making sure there are no duplicate IDs.

It is a hash collision. I think jef_poskanser's take was correct.

But why not include the timestamp? How many image uploads can Twitter have within whatever resolution time you'd use? I wouldn't have thought it was that many.

Including the timestamp defeats the content-addressing. You want to not having to store two duplicate images if they are uploaded at different times.

4chan has an issue where if two posts are made at the exact same time, the photos attached are swapped, which makes for some funny posts. Not sure if the two problems are related, but if they find the men in the photo, I wonder if they posted a picture of a doll.

This is pretty neat - just tried from two separate networks, got two separate results.

The most interesting part of this tweet, is that when faced with a situation that you have to decide if it was technical glitch or the Illuminati, people just go on and believe it was the Illuminati.

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