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Comment by rideontime | Hacker News Reader

The block is very amateurishly implemented, and can be circumvented by appending any query param to the URL, like so: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/read-the-jd-vance-dossier?...

Update: I guess someone at Twitter reads Hacker News, because they finally forced me to delete the posts containing those links, a few hours later.

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That's hilarious because their filters are sophisticated enough to block archive.is links to the same URL ... but can still be defeated with a query param. Seems like one of these was implemented at Twitter 1.0, and the other at Twitter 2.0.

Well, looks like they finally figured it out - but it's a hacky fix, they're still not using a proper URL parser. Here are some of the ways you can trick badly implemented URL parsers (haven't tested all of them on twitter specifically, but at least a couple do indeed work):

   authority:   https://user:pass@host/[..]
   anchors:     https://[...]/path#anchor
   path params: https://host/path;param/[...]`
   port:        http://host:80/[...]`

I'm quite sure they're reading this thread. Fully expecting you to post again in 20 minutes haha.

I'm sure Uncle Musk is scrolling through this thread yelling at his people asking "Why aren't we doing this!? Can we do this?"

wow, I suppose this is the quality you get when you fire all the workforce

"it's just code after all"

I hope it's some developer implementing Elmo's order of "Block this exact url" with malicious compliance, knowing about the possible workarounds.

(Could you replace e.g. an "a" with %61 and keep the URL working?)

"Elmo"? Why the nickname?

It has been widely speculated that Elon, or someone close to him, has operated a large bot farm for the past decade focused on influence operations around his persona. References online to 'Elon' show a marked difference in bot activity than those that refer to him as 'Elmo.' Language ambiguity is a good tool to employ against influence operations.

I've long speculated that fixing the "bot problem" means the problem of his bots being removed.

Because Elon likes nicknames. Remember "pedo guy"?

Here, it’s slightly gratuitous, but on Twitter, even pre-Musk Twitter, Musk was one of the people who it was best not actually to name when talking about them, as mentioning his name tended to summon his weird fans. So, nicknames.

Traces back to 2022: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-insiders-users-calli...

> It began as a joke, one of the people said, given the close spelling of the Muppet's name to Musk's own and the irony of Musk's temperamental personality in contrast to that of the kind and curious "Sesame Street" character.

> However, use of Elmo to discuss Musk has become more commonplace in recent weeks, as Musk has turned Twitter into "a dictatorship," one former employee said. There are potentially fewer repercussions from criticizing your billionaire boss if you can argue you were discussing a puppet, not the CEO.

> Elmo is also gaining traction as a nickname for Musk on Twitter itself. Thousands of recent Tweets and comments clearly discussing Musk only mention the Muppet by name. Discussing Musk under his new nickname keeps the CEO from trending and it keeps critics out of his mentions.

Yup what a total muppet. Guy seems to have a problem with names. What makes me laugh is he just can't make "X" stick. Every time I see it written X (formerly Twitter) am thinking it's less characters to just type Twitter. Everyone still calls it Twitter. Only journalists swallowed the X thing, and they're tiring of it now. Fuck it, just change the name back to Twitter and admit defeat. Using X in any sentence looks ridiculous and ambiguous, If people used to tweet what do they do now? Send kisses?

"The president XXxed (formerly tweeted) yesterday on X (formerly Twitter)..." sigh

I thought everyone was going to work hardcore to offset that. Oh well.

Imagine being an original Twitter employee that's still stuck around. You could ask for a 7-figure salary, and your toughest job would be implementing a regex filter for the JD Vance leak.

Musk would have identified the bug if only the programmer had printed their code.

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