How to Wreck a Service

Going on twenty-four hours, a good part of the Twitter API is down, and third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot are DOA. Reports are that inquiries from app companies to Twitter about the situation have gone unanswered.

Is this the result of a lack of support or software engineers at the "new Twitter" or sleazy self-sabotage? Whatever the reason, it's no way to run a company.

Let the third-party clients back in, Twitter!

https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/13/tweetbot-twitter-apps-still-broken-elon-musk-api/

From 9to5 Mac:

There’s a real possibility that Elon Musk only recently learned that there’s an ecosystem of third-party Twitter apps out there. These apps use the official Twitter API and are (or were) sanctioned by Twitter. The apps don’t, however, show any advertisements on behalf of Twitter.

Regardless of Twitter’s reasoning, this is an awful situation, and, unsurprisingly, Twitter’s communication has been disastrous and cowardly. If the company was planning to make changes to the Twitter API, those changes should have been well-communicated to developers ahead of time.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt on Craving Attention

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s TED Talk on social media and the attention market that has emerged from it, and how that can effect creativity.

2011 RSA Hack

As non-disclosure agreements expire, new details emerge on the infamous 2011 RSA Hack, which threatened the future of a security cornerstone. From Andy Greenberg at Wired:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-rsa-hack-can-finally-be-told/

The piece lays out an interesting tale of success and failure when faced with the consequences of a catastrophic security intrusion.

Handcrafted Blog Posts

Reading all the steps Cory Doctorow takes in composing a blog post made me feel like a wimp when I grumble under my breath about having to stop to hand-edit markup on something I’m posting. Doctorow’s process is… intense. But he’s been at it for twenty years, and no matter how he publishes, he always has interesting posts.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

Cory Doctorow by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons

Space Debris

No wonder interstellar life just keeps driving right on past earth. We leave 170 million wrecked cars on our lawn. I wonder if there is a scientifically sound story idea about a natural or man-made event that would cause all the space debris to be pulled down to earth? You know, a nice summer disaster flick? It could star John Cusack, and he could run around the world trying to save his onscreen family from flaming shrapnel from the sky? Hell, we could even slap a sequel label on it and call the movie Gravity II: Homefront!

Yeah… why are all my middle-of-the-night story ideas so really, really, really bad?