Twitter ban 370 keywords

Attempting to provide more security to users, social networking site Twitter has prohibited 370 words to be used as password as it can easily guessed.

The micro-blogging service rejects certain passwords when new users sign up if it thinks they are too easy to guess. However, bloggers recently discovered that the list of banned passwords is embedded in the source code of the page itself.

Twitter rejects certain words like “123456” and “password” to be used as passwords because it thinks they are too easy to guess and put users data at risk.

For a website so popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise – and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files.

 

Is twitter, a Pimp?

Twitter is a closer competitor to Facebook, but why do a growing company need to end up like Myspace.

A quick search on a particular Friend’s name ended up in a result, in which most of the user’s  profile pages depicting adult content.

The phenomenon is particularly troubling on Twitter.  Twitter is attracting an older crowd that’s far more likely to be shocked or offended. The  facebook on the other hand had taken some steps  to keep its user from receiving spam. Both in twitter and facebook, anybody can join, and create profiles, but facebook still exist them to be real people. Why can’t twitter do so?

Making matters worse is that reporting spam on Twitter is way too cumbersome a process. There’s no “report spam” button as there is a “block” or “message” button on someone’s Facebook profile. You have to follow an account called “spam,” and then copy the URL and send a direct message to that account with the complaint.

If it takes the same number of steps to flag a spamming account as it takes to create one, users will never win the battle. There’s no reason why Twitter shouldn’t be catching spam, or at least making it easier to report.

 

Twitter to use geolocation information in tweets

Twitter says it will soon enable tweets to include geolocation information. The feature will be implemented on an opt-in basis, and app developers will be given a special API for using the information. It could spell revenue opportunities for the service, but the idea of tweeting one’s specific location could create some security issues, especially if the user does not mean to share the info.

It will also offer a new API (application programming interface) so developers can add latitude and longitude data to any tweet.

Thanks for this release, we almost took 2 weeks to track a user, who was using our company’s name as a profile, if we could know long., and lat., much better to track.

The geolocation feature will be set to off by default, and users will have to manually opt in, cofounder Biz Stone told TechNewsWorld, and Twitter’s servers will not store any user’s location-based data for very long.

Developers will be given early access to the API, so it will be available on third-party Twitter apps before it is available on the service. Twitter does not give  a precise date when the API will be released, and probably the features available to developers in the next few weeks.

As Twitter’s investors see third-party companies such as Dell(Nasdaq: DELL) make money from using Twitter, they have been pressuring the service to monetize.

Although Twitter has yet to start earning actual revenue, investors and other companies see its potential. Facebook reportedly bid $500 million in stock for Twitter in November but was turned down.

This new feature might be a treasure, or trouble for twitter, this has many security concerns to face. Easy to track a user without their knowledge, hackers might benefit also. Better the twitter watch..!