I guess Donald Trump’s twitter account was suspended for a brief 11 minutes yesterday evening — a departing employee took a moment to give us a fleeting respite from the flatulence erupting from the White House. But of course, Twitter was quick to declare this a mistake and to switch the ass-trumpet back on, because they love their popular fascists.
Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.
Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”
That ex-employee deserves praise for doing what the Twitter management is incapable of doing.
Isn’t it about time we left Twitter en masse for a more responsible service?
So on their last day, because they knew they couldn’t be fired for it (as they were already leaving), someone at Twitter finally actually did their job and enforced their usage policies?
Delurking here just to say that tweeter’s only appeal to me is hear what some people as yourself have to say. I also follow a few organizations, like NASA. So if you really moved out I would at least make an account to keep an eye out on what you are saying there.
Masse or no masse, moving is the best way to make twitter less relevant and grow alternative services.
I can honestly say, I have never twitted. I wouldn’t even know about it if other “social media” didn’t constantly tell me what the asshat is saying on it. Why don’t Y’all just stop?
That employee did right – the Tiny Tyrant abuses the hell out of their supposed policy.
Doubting Thomas:
Why do you, or anyone, think shit like this is helpful? I’m trying to put a few dollars in my scant pockets by blogging here (not that I’ve been paid in ages), and social media is helpful in grabbing attention now and then. I tweet all my blog posts, that’s pretty much it.
Here’s a sad fact: most data and computing services designed after 1990 have inadequate access and management controls. Usually that means that if one person on the inside knows the system, they can do whatever they want to it – there are minimal barriers between administrator/user and seldom barriers at all between privileged user/user. In the last 20 years the number of systems I have encountered that have good access management is on the order of: 3 out of hundreds.
This is a great big elephant in the room, that most IT shops ignore and hope it goes away.
Remember the end of Fight Club? There was no need for all that drama – an insider could do it with a couple keystrokes. To make matters worse, many organization’s disaster recovery has single failure modes. If you corrupt the backups, they don’t check them – let it run with corrupted backups for a year and burn it all down, and it’s unrecoverable. I’m surprised that, so far, it hasn’t happened in a major incident. It’ll sure be interesting when it does.
It was so much easier when you had to scratch your puerile abuse into a wall with a chisel.
@6-cartomancer
Will future anthropologists reflect on the great technological leap when humans stopped etching on bathroom walls and started tweeting?
Who knows. This ex-employee may have averted WWIII. Or at least aired out the POTUS bathroom stall briefly. We need a digital version of V.I.Poo.
I’ve was looking into the Mastadon federation recently. This pretty much tipped the scales.
“I’ve was” — lol
HappyHead wrote:
Not to worry. Twitter recently amended their rules to give Trump a blanket permit to do whatever he wants. From those new rules:
Trump’s tweets are always newsworthy and in the public interest because he’s the damned President, therefore the rest of the rules will never apply to him again (not that they actually did before).
At last somebody actually, really “shuts down” Trump, even if ever so briefly. HuffPuff, Alternet, et al please take note and stop using that phrase as clickbait.
Caine: It’s not my job to help you. If you can’t make money blogging about what presnit asshat twiters, maybe you should find something else to blog about.
Well now, don’t you want to see what he’s ‘thinking’? I want to see Prince Charles’ spidery letters. These are his earnest missives to the other worldy powers that be, that we were protected from. Surely, give the duffer a bigger microphone?
Don’t you want to know? Have you so little faith in humanity? In the audience? The Church of England, when not waffling over cucumber sandwiches, was one of the greatest investors in the UK arms industry. A genuine purveyor of Death. It was always curious how old men in skirts could get out of work, and live in the biggest houses, without doing anything more than talking drivel to fuckwits. Well they own the land, and they kill people. There’s your answer. It’s an old answer. Tradition one might say. But please, let’s see it. Discard the veil of Isis.
Doubting Thomas:
I do blog about ‘something else’, every single day, which you could have discovered for yourself with the expedient of a single click, and I’m not looking for your help, asshole.
Unfortunately, the 11-minute-hero (he or she) may be charged with hacking.
…and by charged, it really means, railroaded.
the US really does have some rather unconstitutional laws on the books since the start of this millennium.
@ Ichthyic, #17
Because terrrists!
If you haven’t done anything wrong/don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear.
I’m reminded of an incident from a lifetime ago:
I was in 8th grade when the Columbine shooting happened. Shortly thereafter, some jackass (no, it wasn’t me) set off a firecracker on the bus I rode to school. Everyone on the bus was surrounded by a phalanx of teachers, administrators, and custodians, and marched off to sit in the cafeteria to be threatened and harangued for an hour while they searched for the “gun.”
Everybody knew there was no gun, even the dipstick bus driver; that much was obvious by the fact that no one had bothered to call the police. Nevertheless, the administrators were determined to use it as a pretext to search everyone. Strip search, in fact. It had nothing to do with keeping us safe; they knew they could get away with it, in the fear-soaked atmosphere of the time. Before they could get on with it, however, someone squealed on the firecracker tossing miscreant, and the rest of us were (reluctantly) allowed to leave.
When I got home, I complained bitterly about the obvious abuse of the power by the school administration. My parents gave me the “If you haven’t done anything wrong/don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear” line. I’ll give you one guess as to who they voted for, and still support. All while considering themselves small-government Republicans, naturally.
My hyper-protective grandmother, on the other hand, gave me the number of her lawyer and told me to call him if they tried to pull that shit again. She was a lifelong lefty, and she recognized what the far greater threat was.
The hacking charge is just wonderful. WaPo states that “If this was beyond what the employee was authorized to do, one could argue he ‘exceeded authorized access.’” If the employee had access to turn off accounts, then they didn’t exceed any access. At least not realistically. That’s why we need to have better information security practices worldwide.
I should not have full domain access if I don’t need it, but most companies give that to anyone who needs to adjust user or computer accounts. Just another thing where “exceeded authorized access” is a meaningless term. If you have been given access, how is it unauthorized?
Well yeah. The CFAA is crap, and only exists because a movie scared someone in government.