Twitter seems to be having major problems today. The SKWAWKBOX is receiving reports from huge numbers of people that their tweets are failing.
It appears, at the moment, to be a general problem although some have been worried that it’s affecting their political tweets more than other types. The web version was having problems earlier while apps continued to work, but the issue seems to have spread to all types of access now.
Has Twitter itself suffered a DOS (denial of service) attack or is it simply a technical fault? If you have information, get in touch.
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Centralised systems are vulnerable to incurring a single point of failure in the centre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure
It’s one of the many reasons why I only use or endorse open standards such as email and XMPP. These are federated systems, which means that an outage by one provider only affects users of that provider, rather than the entire network. Even more resilient are peer-to-peer communication protocols:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer
Of course, the simplest, most secure, and most resilient peer-to-peer communication is that which doesn’t involve telecommunications! 😆
I forgot to mention that Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and most other social media ‘platforms’ are corporate, and headquartered in the same country, so they are vulnerable not only to technical single points of failure, but to political ones too!
Please note, however, that while I firmly endorse open standards such as email, most people subject their entire email accounts to automatic spam filters whose complex, heuristical algorithms are – for all but Free software users – proprietary, closed-source, and usually also corporate, thus degrading the independence of email to that of corporate social media.
These proprietary filtering algorithms can be part of a proprietary email client application, such as Microsoft Outlook, or run on the server side, particularly in the case of webmail, such as Google’s Gmail. I strongly urge anyone who is concerned about censorship – which should be every citizen participating in democracy – to disable your spam filters!
Furthermore, as if heuristical spam filtering wasn’t bad enough, I’m aware that Google has pioneered extending the concept of automatic filtering to telling YOU what is or isn’t important to YOU, in the form of an automatic ‘Important’ label and tab, and Steve informed me on the 17th/18th that Microsoft has recently followed suit with Outlook’s ‘Focused’ inbox layout. These invasions of your own sense of importance are – very intrusively – bringing the filter bubble INTO your inbox, and they are enabled by default! So again, if your email service provider is doing this filtering then disable this too!
Or better still – switch providers! It’s not that hard to open a new email account, and note that there are security advantages to using multiple email addresses for different channels of communication. I’ve recently gone as far as using 1 email address per person or group as a means to combat spam without being subject to a filter bubble. The method that I started using over a year ago to achieve this is email ‘subaddressing’, but any means to create multiple email addresses will allow spam to be separated without use of a heuristical filter algorithm.
Brilliant comment, recommend everyone to read and take note!
FB too. Perhaps they read the Tory Manifesto?
Facebook was odd too last night. I had to do one of those “captcha” things for any repost from you, the canary, etc.
Twitter appears to completely down now. Time 18:21
I have had retweeting problems on twitter since the election started
All my political tweets, especially those criticising the winter fuel payments and death tax, were really hard to post and some just disappeared altogether!
Morning S
Yesterday was indeed intersting on Twitter. I lined up some serious ammunition to contra some of the main prongs of the Tory propaganda and around 1400 started a “Timed Release” of all sorts of Charts, grapics and text headers, primarily as responses to some of the more dogmatic right wing elements.
I spent 2 hours and put out nigh on 100. About 10 made it, the rest disappeared.
We are working on setting up an auto system to monitor this on the Dangerous Globe feed, and plan to repeat the exercise but in a more targetted way to see how selective this is
Tony B
DG