Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com”
(arstechnica.com)
from dvdnet62@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.ml on 12 Apr 2024 08:08
https://feddit.nl/post/13648015
from dvdnet62@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.ml on 12 Apr 2024 08:08
https://feddit.nl/post/13648015
#technology
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk’s clumsy brand shift from Twitter to X caused a potentially big problem this week when the social network started automatically changing “twitter.com” to “x.com” in links.
It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like “netflitwitter.com,” which would appear as “netflix.com” in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.
Even if the change had been implemented smoothly, auto-replacing “twitter.com” with “x.com” doesn’t do much to help Musk cement his branding shift because x.com still redirects to twitter.com.
Please be aware that there is a potential for this feature to be exploited in the future, by acquiring domains containing “twitter.com” to lead users to malicious pages.
Krebs quoted Sean McNee, VP of research and data at DomainTools, as saying that “bad actors could register domains as a way to divert traffic from legitimate sites or brands given the opportunity—many such brands in the top million domains end in x, such as webex, hbomax, xerox, xbox, and more.”
Today, when we emailed X’s media contact address, press@x.com, we got the standard “busy now, please check back later” auto-reply.
The original article contains 644 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Regex is hard y’all
Well, they can be, but fucking this particular one up took outright ineptitude
Jobs finished boss
With skills like this you too could be working for the fascist billionaire manbaby’s personal vanity social media service
Thank you capitalism 🤗
Meet the new Gilded Age, same as the old Gilded Age.
Which one do you mean?
Good point, I should probably have said “working for a fascist billionaire manbaby”
Again, that doesn’t really narrow it down.
It wasn’t supposed to narrow it down, quite the opposite
Musk is too weaksauce to be called a fascist. He is just a crybaby with loads of money working for US government.
At this point I have to assume it’s malicious compliance by staff to make Elon look bad.
why would he need any help when he’s doing so much on his own?
But something that you should probably be able to figure out over the course of 12 months of development and testing.
It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.
actually url/uri spec is surprisingly complex, I’m not even sure it’s possible to fully/correctly match it with regex without false positives or negatives, especially in twitters case where even things like “google.com” are accepted as valid urls (without the protocol part, which is otherwise mandatory)
When he was forced to actually buy it (instead of just being a memelord), I immediately thought he would try to tank it (to the ends of whatever money juggling bullshit that rich people get up to).
Stories like this aren't doing much to change my mind.
This looks like an embarrassing mistake. If someone were to try to “tank” Twitter, it wouldn’t really make sense to do this on purpose.
I genuinely think he’s trying to scuttle the site to hide negative press for him and other billionaires.
Sure he could have just shut it down immediately as he bought it but if he did that, everyone would go to a single alternative, doing it slowly means that the people leaving go to a myriad of smaller (weaker, less likely to survive and less influencial) sites instead.
This idiot isn’t thinking that far ahead.
<img alt="" src="https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/ed4146c9-09fa-4a21-a5da-78f66d7e8b21.webp">
I mean, my impulse is to say what a fucking idiot, but maybe he’s secretly trying to destroy Twitter and we should support the effort I dunno
He had to admit it court that he owned and operated the burner account where he acts like a toddler and talks about his ex-wife in that character
What
Elon is fucking weird.
The account
Confirmation of operating the account
In 3 . 2 . 1 copyright claims from Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc