The Perfect Storm

A few weeks back, my Twitter account was successfully phished.

Since I have an image of myself as a person who does not enter passwords willy-nilly on spurious websites, cognitive-dissonance reduction has kicked in to assure me that I couldn't have not entered my password on that fateful day. I was at the mercy of the perfect storm.

Let me introduce all the moving parts in this sequence.

About a month ago, I moved to Toronto. Since I figured I'd need to stay connected to the internet, I sniffed out the cheapest smart-phone & plan possible to get me started. My friends were playing a music festival in town, so I let them crash with me for a few days. Since the place was small, sharing beds was inevitable. Since one of my guests is a total shutterbug, there were plenty of photographs taken at inappropriate times, and threats of ruined political-careers flying about.

A few nights into their trip, we were all dispersed within a single pub, mingling with the locals. My friends and I had been using Twitter to stay in touch while we were apart, so when I got a direct message alerting me to a 'funny picture' of me making its way online, I didn't suspect its veracity. I had seen some of the incriminating photos on his phone, so I clicked on the link to see what the damage was.

The phone I've been using is a piece of junk. It's an Acatel 980S, and it's plagued with a grotesque lack of memory, so it regularly flushes the browser-cache to keep things moving. It's not unusual to be logged out of a website I was just using, so when I clicked on the link from within my TweetDeck app and was presented with the Twitter login page, it didn't set off any alarm bells. I wasn't thinking too much about what I was doing, other than pretending to still be interested in the Canuck droning on about how cool Ireland was when he visited as a nipper.

I wasn't on the real Twitter site, and I didn't realize until I had entered my username and password (probably incorrectly, since the tiny screen makes the onscreen keyboard worthless) and hit submit. The error page wasn't quite right. Something was wrong. I went looking for my friend in the pub and asked him if he has sent me a picture. He had no idea what I was talking about. I had just done something incredibly stupid.

Serves me right for being such a rude prick.

From there on, it was actually quite tricky to change my password - I couldn't find the option on the Twitter mobile site, and the regular Twitter site kept redirecting me to the mobile version. Eventually I had to Google 'Twitter password change' to be brought to the page I wanted.

Lesson learned: pay more attention to links you click on. Fundamental of internet-security proven: having different passwords for different services is essential, and in this case I was quite relieved to think that the password I volunteered to the phishers wouldn't get them in anywhere other than my fairly unimportant Twitter profile.

Misadventures in Twitter

I signed up for Twitter at the same time as a few of my friends, but six months later, few of them are tweeting regularly - indeed, some of them haven't done anything on Twitter since that first week of use. After lamenting at @jmeehan5's lack of tweeting, he scoffed at what a pointless waste of time Twitter was - my response was an unsure "I've found uses for it", but I didn't have any examples to hand.

I've been on twitter since March, and according to my profile page, I've posted 201 tweets, follow 50 users, and have 43 followers (I gave up on pruning the spammers over a month ago). As is typical of this misanthropic blogger, I've engaged little with other Twitterers - only partly because I'm not entirely au fait with the lingo and etiquette, yet I've found uses for Twitter that no other web service (that I'm aware of ) can match:

Manual Videogame Matchmaking

Since getting a decent broadband connection I've been enjoying online gaming on my Xbox 360, and when my friends aren't in the mood for a game, it's rarely difficult to get a game going with randomers since most developers appreciate how difficult it is for gamers to make acquaintances. Since Halo 3:ODST's multiplayer mode didn't come with a matchmaking system, I used twitter to find some playmates:

I got about six replies, and after suffering through ten minutes of a game with a piss-poor connection, I threw in the towel. Chalk it up as a failure, but ten minutes of gameplay with a shoddy connection was better than what I'd have got without Twitter, and once the number of people around me with Twitter / Xboxes increases, so will my chances of finding a suitable match. [Sure, I could have gone to a gaming forum, but that'd require registration and hassle!]

Tapping into your social brain

I didn't do so well with maths in school, and even though I can manage numbers in my head fine, I'm functionally retarded when it comes to theorems and formulas and whatnot. So last week, when I needed a smart person to help with a matter at work, I asked Twitter, knowing that my intelligent friends would be able to steer me right.

The problem arose from a missing invoice - €827.50 was paid for X amount of goods @ €6.50, and Y amount at €4.50, how could I figure it out how much of X and Y were needed?

I got 5 responses - 1 from a non-follower who was interested in the hashtag. Each reply told me that my equation made no sense, and didn't help my problem all that much, but it gave me hope for any future legitimate mathematical quandaries I may find myself in (perhaps once I bone up on my maths language).

Reading the [potential] customer's mind

After bemoaning how Floola turned 14.3GB of my iPod's HDD space from 'Music' to 'Other' on Twitter one evening, I got a response from CopyTrans, shilling their alternative software:

Useful? Potentially - I didn't bother to click the link they sent, but being able to see what internet users are saying about yours and your competitor's products online is a boon for any business.

Appreciating those stalwart bloggers

Okay, indulge me on this one - after noticing an additional flurry of hits on my blog from strange places, I saw that it was because @NiallOK took a shine to my post about Matthew McConaughey's campaign to lean against every woman in Hollywood and shared it on Twitter:

I got quite a kick out of seeing this, which was amplified by seeing the people who were kind enough to propagate it. As a blogger, this kind of genuine reaction to a blog entry shows me that shorter blog entries that can be appreciated by more people with less investment will get shared, but five-thousand-word, self-indulgent, esoteric rants about how stupid the word 'sweater' is just turn people off coming back... But where's the fun in that?

Tomorrow, as an early Christmas present to my regular readers, I'll post part one of my 4,000 word treatise on the absurdity of manners! [I kid!]

Religiously motivated elitism? Sign me up!

More twitter spam of a religious nature to report (and in case you were wondering, no I don't write about every instance of spam I receive!), but this one takes an approach to religion that resonates with me.


After getting a retarded tweet aimed directly at me, I decided "I've ten minutes to burn, why not scoff at some nonsense for a while?"

The tiny URL lead to a website called "Spirit of Wisdom", let's have a read of what they have to offer:

When people feel like they are all alone, they often say that they feel as if they are on an island. The truth maybe that you have simply come to place in your walk that your companions are unable to ascend to. The reality is that you are not on an island at all, but standing on top of a mountain surrounded by water.

The top of the mountain is surrounded by water? An odd metaphor but I'll go with it . Hang on - it's not a metaphor - it's 'the reality'? Kinda like the Matrix? Okay, I can follow that...

For those that God has called to do a special work in life, isolation and loneliness are an inevitable. You must realize that you cannot take everyone with you. They cannot handle the altitude that you are being called to. You will begin to notice, as you continue to ascend in the will of God, that the number of people who have the ability to share your perspective of life are few and far between.

What's that? A spiritual reason to be an elitist prick? And since spirituality isn't frowned upon by society, I can practice my elitist prickery with open disregard for mere plebeian!

Therefore, your feeling of separation and isolation are not indications that something is wrong. It simply means that you have risen above the sea of mediocrity and ascended to a place that few others are able to witness.

Now we're talking! Fuck anybody who disagrees with me - I've risen above the sea of mediocrity and ascended to a place that few others are able to witness.

Your perspective is everything. Change your perspective of your situation and don't allow the enemy to cause you despise what God is doing in your life. You are not stranded on an island, but standing on the top of a mountain!

Damnit! You had to ruin it with that retarded metaphor, didn't you? Forget about the top of the mountain already! There's nothing to do on top of a mountain except climb back down.

It's difficult to deny the value of certain religious rhetoric that offers a crutch for the downtrodden, but twaddle like this actively promoting the building of walls between Jesus-freaks and common-folk is pretty evil. Guess I'll have to find another way to retroactively justify my holier-than-thou disposition.

Twitter Spam: Hummingbird

Twitter sent me an exclamation-mark laden e-mail yesterday to draw my attention to the two new web-denizens who subscribed to my fun-sized narcissistic twaddlings. Feeling that the occasion called for a cursory glance at these two random people, I decided to have a look:


When I saw this, I did what I always do whenever an attractive woman shows interest in me - I reacted with a great deal of skepticism. I clicked through to their profiles to begin my investigation:

Superficially, things seemed to be in order, (in that all her tweets were of a purely superficial nature), but I found the lack of any tweets aimed at other members was a little odd.

When I noticed that essentially the same message had found its way onto both profiles, I knew something fishy was going on:

One click on a tinyurl later, and I'm reading about 'HummingBird: Professional Marketing Tools for Twitter', and trying to contain my mirth.

Yes friends, that's a $197 pricetag

It seems that absolutely every bandwagon will be jumped on by enterprising peddlars of nonsense who are happy to deceive for monetary gain - you should bear in mind that a viable business model to monetize Twitter has yet to materialise.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh before really examining this product. Let's consult the 'is it a scam?' checklist:

#1. Does the product claim to reveal some arcane-knowledge kept from the public by a group conspiring to hold power?


#2. Does the product offer vague, specious information whilst implying that the product in question is the only thing keeping you from becoming a guru yourself?

Yes, they just said that "Dell and Woot.com are earning Millions of Dollars on Twitter"

#3. Does the product establish itself as a way to bypass hard work, generate instant satisfaction, or generally get-rich quick?


#4. Does the product feature statements that are heavy in superlatives but light on specifics?

• "Hummingbird is completely unmatched in power"
• "unmatched performance"
• "If you're comparing Hummingbird to all the little free apps & web sites that do a couple of functions at a snail's pace, you would be misleading yourself. I didn't create this software with the everyday user in mind... this is for the top dogs"
• "Literally I can tweet a link and get a few hundred hits within the minute"
• "Massively increase your ability to interact with an untapped gold mine of customers"
• "Hummingbird makes you #1 in your niche."

#5. Does the product feature endorsements from dubious sources?

Alan? Alan!? Who the @*€# is Alan?

#6. Does the product attempt to imply celebrity endorsement without explicitly stating it?

Well, they do show Digg founder Kevin Rose's Twitter page in their promotional video, that's got to count for something, right?


So that's six out of six - we could go through the others on the list, including "excessive use of buzzwords" and "poor grammar on the product information page", but I think it's safe to say that this could be considered a scam.

So what is the tool for? By my reckoning, it's a Twitter account manager that you can use to generate accounts, which can then follow you, which also reach out to legitimate accounts to draw more hits to the product page. What it also means is that there are dozens of profiles spewing out identical status updates to give the impression of authenticity at first glance.

When I typed one of the updates at random into the Twitter search engine, here's what I got:

(Note the use of attractive/slutty girls in the profile pics - it's possible that the program comes with a stockpile of 'em.)

So there you have it - the latest episode of my Twitter sleuthing. Now that I've got that off my chest, I'll be blocking these fake groupies, sadly causing my followers to drop back to single digits, so feel free to remedy that!

Twits are down with Christ

Early last month, I caved into the mounting media hype and signed up for a Twitter account, partly to ensure I’d get a half decent username before everybody else jumped on the bandwagon, but mostly out of curiosity.

I still don’t know what to do with my Twitter account – should I just contribute to the overload of chaff online by posting about old jumpers I find in my closet, or the chores I undertake on any given day? Should I use it as a privacy-free platform for talking with my friends (which is already facilitated by Facebook and Bebo)? Pimp my blog? Share cool links? All mind-bogglingly exciting possibilities.

Well, I've found at least one person out there who has a focused purpose for Twittering - they came up on my radar after becoming my eighth follower, and the excitement caused was only quelled when I inspected their profile. The name should have been enough, shown here next to the solitary tweet on the account:


Where does waytoheaven1522 link to? Why HeavenTruth.org, of course, the home of 'An Important Message Explaining the Truth About Going To Heaven'!

Come with me if you want to live

Yep, it's a load of twaddle about how you're a bad person, and some (conspicuously white) bearded bloke from Israel died just for you, and you're too much of a miserable fuck to even say thanks. He's so pissed about this lack of gratitude that he's lined up some bad men to poke you up the bum with hot pointy things (or if you're into that kind of thing, cold blunt things), but if you decide to go around telling everybody about how great he is, he'll give you an all-access pass to the greatest amusement park of all time, but with no lines! All you have to do is tell everybody about how great he is! Quite the sweet deal.

I've bookmarked the site, if only for the marvellous pictures that they provide, should Sully's Blog ever decide to have a caption competition.


After apparently coining the word 'tweetvangelism', then looking to see if people were using another word for the phenomenon, I did a Google search which lead me to a rather hilarious slice of web-real estate promoting Twitter Evangelism!

That's right, Twitter (among other sites) is the next frontier on which religious nuts (who mean well, bless their deluded hearts) will badger us incessantly. And why not? They've crunched the numbers, this Christ guy will have a lot more friends if they can tap into this lucrative 'social networking' craze.

The number of members of Social Networking websites today far exceed Dunbar's 150. Myspace alone, for example, has 168,112,249 members with more joining every day.

I urge you - don't pass up this opportunity to reach the world for Christ! The secular-world is employing this phenomenon to its great benefit. Why not the Church?

Too often, we Christians conclude that we need to avoid, like the plague, any practice with which we are either unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Where would be today if our Church Fathers refused to do that which they found uncomfortable?

The cherry on top?



They're selling this noble call to arms! If you want to join in the great online crusade for Christ, you'll have all you need to know for $7!

Seven dollars? I think I'll pass. Come back to me when the price is $9.95 and comes with a FREE!!! bottle of Soul-Clenze, valued at $15.95!

UPDATE 02/05/09: Twitter has blocked the account - swift justice like this makes me very happy indeed.

Suck it, Christ fans!