1y ago

Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com”

arstechnica.com

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1y ago

Elon Musk’s X botched an attempt to replace “twitter.com” links with “x.com”

arstechnica.com /tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musks-x-botched-an-attempt-to-replace-twitter-com-links-with-x-com/

26 comments

Regex is hard y'all
- Well, they can be, but fucking this particular one up took outright ineptitude
  
  If "Twitter" in urlField then Replace urlField "Twitter" "X"
  Jobs finished boss
- It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.
- But something that you should probably be able to figure out over the course of 12 months of development and testing.
- 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.
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!
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
  One post replying to bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor asked whether he liked “Japanese girls” and another response to a post about FTX employee Caroline Ellison included the reply “I [heart] librarians”.
  Confirmation of operating the account
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
In 3 . 2 . 1 copyright claims from Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc

26 comments