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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

There is another possibility, which is that they didn't work out what was going on until Thursday.

And anyone whose account has been compromised has received an email, a far more likely way of seeing the message than relying on everybody to occasionally check Twitter's blog for news.

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The official Twitter release was titled "Keeping our users secure". My gut response after reading the first couple of paragraphs was, "Are you fucking kidding me?" That title, combined with the day/time of release really has the cynic in me riled up.

EDIT: It'd be great if anyone willing to downvote would explain why it's OK for Twitter to title a notice involving a breach of security resulting in the exposure of 250,000 records containing sensitive information, "Keeping our users secure". Because it really kind of pisses me off when I read it.

EDIT, EDIT: Highest karma volatility (up, down, up, up down, etc) of any comment I've ever posted on Hacker News. I really am genuinely interested in counter points.

HN meta: It would be interesting to see per-comment volatility as an indicator of moderation convergence. Anyone know if the HNSearch dataset is rich enough to do this?

Okay here's a few counter points:

1) There is no evidence that all of the records were compromised. So Twitter is keeping users secure by proactively resetting passwords.

2) People need to get over this Friday afternoon release. Twitter is a global company so it's not Friday everywhere and regardless it could purely be coincidental.

"Twitter is a global company so it's not Friday everywhere ..."

You're right. In some places it's the middle of the night, and in some places it's Saturday morning... prime time for a press release.

The Friday release thing doesn't aggravate me nearly as much as the title.

Security is tough. Really, really tough. I'm not here to crucify them for the breach, but the title glosses over the event in a way that is disingenuous at best. When you border on dishonesty with your title, people begin to question your motives.

The title isn't meant for anyone who's account was compromised. Mine was, I got an email. The subject was "Twitter has reset your account password". No beating around the bush there.

I'm not upset, it sounds like they detected it quickly and went out of their way to make sure everyone was not only notified but ensured that their account was safe. 250k users is a very small number of their accounts. A literal drop in the bucket. It sounds to me that they're going after the hackers and I appreciate that.

Was your account compromised?

Settle down. "Keeping our users secure," just means "There was a problem, and here is what we have done to mitigate it." You have correctly observed that they chose, in their announcement, to downplay the breach and focus on what steps they've done to address it. What did you expect?

Let's all take a deep breath and remember: It's. Just. Twitter.

Though twitter seems trivial to a lot of people, Wikipedia has 4 different suggestions[1] when you search for 'twitter revolution'. So perhaps it's not so trivial and celebrity-focused as it seems to us non-users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Revolution

And if someone used Post-it Notes in a novel way to aid revolutionary efforts, we'd suddenly decide that they are a critical piece of infrastructure that needed to be super-secure, too, right?

It's just twitter.

It doesn't really matter to me who the message comes from. When did the truth cease to matter? I'm not naive. I recognize that this kind of thing happens all over the place, but that's exactly why I get so frustrated at this type of communication, and frankly, at your response. If your attitude becomes, "Oh well, it's just Twitter, so the dishonesty doesn't matter," then we can only expect more of the same. Everyone around Twitter will watch as they perpetrate falsehoods in communication, and they will follow suit.

It's not that "dishonesty doesn't matter" it's that you really shouldn't expect a company to go out of its way to call attention to its own screwup. They only want to bring this to the attention of people who need to know for security reasons, and they directly emailed all of those people. The sole purpose of the blog post was "oh, in case you heard about a security breach, you'll be happy to know that we've mitigated the problem. Aren't we doing great?" Even if you think the answer is "no," there is really nothing dishonest there.

Yeah, the title is misleading and sounds so boring that a lot of people might not even bother reading any further.

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