Twitter Accidentally Shows Users Someone Else’s Timeline | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Accidentally Shows Users Someone Else’s Timeline

techcrunch.com

8 pointssammville5 comments

Every time I use Twitter, I ask myself, "How long can this amazing and terrible zeppelin of bubblegum, balsa wood and toilet paper possibly stay aloft?"

I'm not sure if aloft is even the right word, there hasn't been a time in recent memory where I wasn't able to trigger a "Whoops! Something went wrong, please try again," or, what I'm getting now: "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing..."

This happened to me (refresh and see my timeline, refresh someone else's, AJAX refresh in my tweets in someone else's timeline, etc) and I'm now seeing the old web interface. Odd.

I love how showing other peoples timelines, retweets and who-knows-what is not a security issue.

These aren't the bugs you're looking for. Move Along.

Their rationale could be that (if this is only affecting public tweets) no private data was exposed.

Or, maybe, since you can't steal anyone's password or anything, it's not a security issue.

What were you talking about?

I am sure that technically it is not a security issue. But when a large scale system is interleaving peoples data and the "don't worry move along" tagline from the BigCo is "This is not a security issue" to downplay the incident is used - it strikes me as funny.

We should all go "OK Cool. Your streams are all cross-farking, but not a security issue. Got it." -- I find that amusing.

I think twitter has an amazing position in the world, but the incessant barrage of technical glitches that appear to plague it make me really curious about what is going on there. Now, I did interview recently there - and while I did not get the job there was a slight bit of behind the kimono and my take-away was that the environment is chaotic. Sure, it could be organized chaos, manageable chaos, good-growth chaos, but chaos none-the-less.

I regret I was not selected to participate.

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