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Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

The big issue I see is that Twitter detects and delete gibberish as spam. So at best case your posts randomly get filtered when you use this.

At worst case after posting a bunch of gibberish Twitter bans your account.

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Let's be real - if Twitter automatically deleted gibberish as spam, the majority of Tweets from the average Twitter user would be removed.

Encode your secret message as a bunch of numbers, xor them your OTP, and then look up users with those numbers and simply re-tweet their most recent message.

Now your message is encoded in the userids of who you retweet.

Aren't go just publishing the otp and not the message? Or did I miss something?

They're publishing the encrypted ciphertext, which is the plaintext message xor OTP (aka the key). The encrypted ciphertext would be the user id's of all recent retweets.

The receiving party would have to know the OTP to decrypt the message.

good suggestion. you probably want to encode some redundancy so you can pick plausibly interesting people to retweet, rather than your xor'd number being an obvious bot, or it's still suspicious.

Might be less obtrusive to favorite instead of retweeting.

(Edit: This assumes you can get a list of favorited tweets ordered by when they were favorited. I just noticed the web interface orders them by time posted, not time favorited.)

I don't really see how Twitter could identify these as "Gibberish". They're normal English sentences, albeit meaningless because they lack any real context.

How could or why would Twitter be able to identify these seemingly undetectable tweets as spam? They don't look like gibberish.

this doesn't seem to be true. https://twitter.com/ColorlessG

context: http://colorlessgreen.net/about

Check the bottom of the post. The tweets themselves are actual sentences from a book, not gibberish.

How do you think Twitter tells the difference between a Bot and a human? I get that they are sentences, but they aren't contextually relevant, they don't look like tweets, they look like spam.

If you randomly start posting "Four score and seven years ago" and the rest of the speech out of order you are going to get flagged.

I used to build tweet spam bots, I am very familiar with how they get detected.

Put quotes around the whole thing and Twitter will think you're just another 13 year old girl who thinks she's clever by incessantly quoting literature.

> I used to build tweet spam bots, I am very familiar with how they get detected.

I would have thought that the content of a tweet is quite low down on their detection list. IP address, user account, frequency of tweets etc would be much higher.

I wouldn't use this with a bot account, since, as you say, it would become easy to detect those as anomalies.

Instead, I was thinking that you might intersperse these in between your normal tweets, in coordination with the people you're communicating with.

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