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Displaying items by tag: Twitter

When I started DecryptedTech it was to counter all the crap marketing I saw from component makers. I wanted to prove people with a clean and simple way of understanding what a product could and could not do. I also wanted to counter the massive amounts of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) that was thrown around from different players in that industry. When I stepped away from the PC component market and began covering the industry I worked in (cybersecurity) I continued this, but only in a narrow way. I did not cover the horrible marketing and FUD efforts that I saw on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (now X). Well… now, things have changed. I am not going to just watch the shit marketing and FUD get pushed around so, to quote John Wick, Yeah, I guess I am back. I will be diving into a recent misuse of X Premium in a marketing effort on behalf of a few major studios. (I will get to gaming, cybersecurity, and other FUD as well).

Published in Editorials

Yesterday (July 5, 2023) Social Networking Giant, Meta launched their competitor to Twitter. This new app is a companion app to Instagram called threads. Ironically, Twitter had a lot of buzz about the new app including from people that routinely talk about how terrible Twitter is under Elon Musk. These Twitter detractors have been posting count down timers, information on how to ensure you can be on threads as soon as it launches and more. It is interesting, if not a bit funny, to see the dialog there. However, there is a very dark cloud (heavy black and pendulous) over the green pastures of Meta’s Threads. This is the very serious concern about Privacy and Security.

Published in News

Twitter is an interesting company. On the one hand they act like they are a bastion of free speech and have stood up for the anonymity of some of the users. They have, in the past refused government interference in how their users post information and respond to tweets on their service. They claim to be against bullying and hate. At the same time, they have suspended accounts, removed tweets and permanently banned people for some very arbitrary reasons. They have stood their ground over this even when proven wrong about the original action. They have also left up tweets calling for violence by some while removing others, very confusing.

Published in In Other News

Twitter has been in the new a lot over the last few years. From deleting accounts of people and groups for very flimsy reasons to censoring posts that contain factual, but non-popular information. It seems that they just cannot help themselves when it comes to abusing community standards. The practice has even accelerated after Jack Dorsey left the company as CEO. The seemingly one-sided application of community standards has led to much criticism of the platform. The level of disappointment even led to Elon Musk buying 9.2% of the company and gaining a seat on the board of directors (not that this will accomplish much).

Published in In Other News

Data collection, monitoring, storage, and mining are simply part of our online lives. If you connect to a site, it is going to collect some information about you. If nothing else it will collect the session information (IP address, time on site, pages read etc.), but will not use that for anything more than understanding traffic. Other sites will collect and maintain more information than that and in extreme cases you will get much more collected than that. However, no one seems to know what use this data is being put to and if there is any benefit to the collection at all.

Published in Editorials

Social Media can be a great thing if used properly. However, lately people tend to use it for… well let’s call it ranting. I cannot count the number of rants and tantrums I have seen on Twitter, Facebook and even Google+. It seems that some people feel that social media sites are their own personal forums to share every thought they have no matter how positive or negative it is. When you point this out to the ranters, you are likely to be told that it is their page and you do not have to read it. Well… that is the problem, you never really know just who might be reading your rant and what they might do about it.

Published in News

Twitter has a keen sense of the word irony now. Almost immediately after grabbing the highest score by the Online Trust Alliance for security and privacy they managed to get hit with a very bad XSS (Cross Site Scripting) bug that impacted their TweetDeck side of the house. To make matters worse the XSS flaw was not some 0-day exploit that hackers used, it was a fairly old one that allowed the hackers to fill the feeds of TweetDeck users with malicious scripts.

Published in News
Monday, 24 March 2014 15:04

Twitter giving up on encrypted messages

Although most things related to the Twitter are public, the company has enabled its users to exchange direct messages that concern only them and whose content is not visible to others.

Published in News
Monday, 03 March 2014 06:04

Twitter getting “old”

After Twitter released its annual financial results for the 2013. from which we could observe a slower increase in the number of users, discussion began on possible reasons for this negative trend . In the latest study, the research house eMarketer presented the growth projections of the number of users of the social network for the next five years. They predict that the negative trend will continue, so in 2014 the number of active users will increase by only 11.6%, and by the 2018 this will decrease even further to 6.4%.

Published in News
Monday, 10 February 2014 20:33

Decline in numbers of new Twitter users

In accordance with earlier forecasts, Twitter ended last business year with a loss of 645 million US dollars, despite revenue growth of 110%. Total annual income of 665 million was not nearly enough to cover the huge costs of the accumulated investment of the company in the sales force, research and marketing.

Published in News
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