Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/27/dont-set-your-twitter-birthd.html
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Oh, hey, the old “hit Alt-F4 to get +op” trick has come 'round again.
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POKE 59458,62
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This is no place for your PET peeves.
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Dang, what about “role” accounts.
(surely you aren’t going to make corporations wait until they reach the age of majority.)
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That’s some fine trollin’, boys and girls!
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A clever way to illustrate how dangerous automated account management systems are
I’m sorry - can someone explain to me how this is “dangerous”?
If you’re gullible enough to do it the consequences are - you get kicked off Twitter. Oh no! I may have to create a new free account to use Twitter! Or, if I’m internet famous enough, I may have to confess to Twitter that I’m a gullible moron who got myself suspended because I made Twitter think I was a 12 year old so they’ll give me my account back!
Dangerous is automated account systems that ban people for talking about breast cancer or being gay or whatever because the hidden rules that nobody understands have determined that they’re having conversations of a sexual nature in a forum where that’s not allowed. Or automated account systems that boot people for posting pictures that have “female presenting nipples” that it’s detected on a picture of the New York skyline. Or automated systems that allow a record company to claim “copyright violation” on work that isn’t theirs but automatically blocks the account anyway with no verification. Or automated account management systems that can be gamed so that a whole bunch of assholes can gang up on someone and get the victim of their bullying booted because they’re all reporting the same thing, even if what they’re reporting is bullshit.
Calling “I told Twitter I was 12 years old and they booted me because minors aren’t allowed to use their system” an illustration of “dangerous account management systems” trivializes the idea of dangerous account management systems.
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Obligatory?
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Back in high school, I learned an early lesson. I was just a novice programmer working with a DEC PDP-11 system, and I was trying to do something, so I called out in the computer lab asking for the correct command. A “helpful” upper-classman said “just type ‘pip/ze,’” which I dutifully did. That command deletes all of the files in the directory without confirmation. I had deleted hours if not weeks of code.
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Oh sure, that’s just what they want you to believe. They just want to keep the easter egg for themselves. Are you going to let them do that?
Has anyone pointed this out to Trump yet?
“Only loooosers don’t change their birthyear to 2007.”
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Getting someone to accidentally trash their code was a running sport in my BASIC class in high school. That, or getting access to someone’s floppy and changing their boot code. We were mostly assholes.
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setting your brithdate to 2007 in Twitter will not grant you access to an easter egg. It will get your account automatically suspended
That sounds like a pretty good easter egg.
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Probably should consult their magic 8 ball for help…
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Came here for that! Thank you!
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My thought precisely. Just one a slightly grander scale.
Better tricks can be done on people who don’t know keyboard shortcuts.
Back in school when we had to take a Visual Basic class, I wrote a program that would display a dialog box. With a close button. That’s all it did.
Oh, and it ran away from the mouse pointer. You couldn’t click it. The only way to close it was Alt+F4, which nobody knew about.
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“Barack Obama says you shouldn’t tell Twitter you were born in 2007.”
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