Vint Cerf's Twitter account... hacked?
I've gotten quite into the Twitter thing lately. I'm following close to 100 people, someone of whom I know, some of whom I think are interesting. It's not unlike LiveJournal, except that the messages are smaller and the time to ramp up your number of followers (and people you follow) is much shorter.
One of the people I follow on Twitter is Vint Cerf. For those whom the name does not ring a bell, Vint is best known as the father of the Internet. No, really. Among his other accomplishments, he is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Those two protocols form the backbone of the Internet as we know of. If you load a webpage, send an email, or receive an IM message, you just made use of TCP/IP. The protocol is quite robust and has aged as newer technologies such as the web and Instant Messaging made use of it.
That being said, I noticed some really strange messages coming from Vint Cerf's Twitter feed over the last day or so (http://twitter.com/cerf):
As of this writing, there have been over 45 such messages, which are all variants of what's above. Most of those links (ab)use the site tinyurl.com and will cause you to end up on the site baysearch.net, which appears to be a website that searches eBay. (Yeah, I think their site looks like crap too)
Of course, I think I need to step back and ask what may be an obvious question: is that account really owned by Vint Cerf? I do not know the gentleman personally, nor do I know anyone else who knows him. While this account appears to be legitimate, there is also the possibility that it could have been an attempt to impersonate him, gather loads of Twitter followers, and then spam them with ads.
If there's a lesson to be learned from this incident, it is this: Trust, but Verify.
Maybe what Twitter and other online services need to introduce is some sort of "web of trust" system, not unlike what PGP, GnuPG, and others use. If you know someone's identity because you know them in real life, you could mark their account as "certified". Then, if someone else wanted to trust you to "verify" someone else's identity, they could do so. Who you trust (and if you trust the people they trust) is up to you.
Ironically, despite being the Father of the Internet, I could not find a working email for Vint Cerf. I'm sure he would get LOTS of email, so I can understand if he didn't publish it. Does make it harder to get in touch with him, though...
One of the people I follow on Twitter is Vint Cerf. For those whom the name does not ring a bell, Vint is best known as the father of the Internet. No, really. Among his other accomplishments, he is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Those two protocols form the backbone of the Internet as we know of. If you load a webpage, send an email, or receive an IM message, you just made use of TCP/IP. The protocol is quite robust and has aged as newer technologies such as the web and Instant Messaging made use of it.
That being said, I noticed some really strange messages coming from Vint Cerf's Twitter feed over the last day or so (http://twitter.com/cerf):
As of this writing, there have been over 45 such messages, which are all variants of what's above. Most of those links (ab)use the site tinyurl.com and will cause you to end up on the site baysearch.net, which appears to be a website that searches eBay. (Yeah, I think their site looks like crap too)
Of course, I think I need to step back and ask what may be an obvious question: is that account really owned by Vint Cerf? I do not know the gentleman personally, nor do I know anyone else who knows him. While this account appears to be legitimate, there is also the possibility that it could have been an attempt to impersonate him, gather loads of Twitter followers, and then spam them with ads.
If there's a lesson to be learned from this incident, it is this: Trust, but Verify.
Maybe what Twitter and other online services need to introduce is some sort of "web of trust" system, not unlike what PGP, GnuPG, and others use. If you know someone's identity because you know them in real life, you could mark their account as "certified". Then, if someone else wanted to trust you to "verify" someone else's identity, they could do so. Who you trust (and if you trust the people they trust) is up to you.
Ironically, despite being the Father of the Internet, I could not find a working email for Vint Cerf. I'm sure he would get LOTS of email, so I can understand if he didn't publish it. Does make it harder to get in touch with him, though...