Friday, February 25, 2011

A Twitter Bug with snipped URL

I am someone who is not a big fan of retweet functionality of Twitter. I still prefer the old RT style. So I mostly copy paste the tweet and prefix them with "RT @....".

Yesterday, I discovered some problem with twitter. I happened to like a message and wanted to retweet it. On the right pan of NewTwitter, I selected the message and out of sheer habit, pressed Ctrl+C 3-4 times (I know it is weird but I mostly press Ctrl+C multiple times. Thankfully, I don't do so with Ctrl+V ;)). Alas, the link part of the tweet spit null. Check the screenshot to see what I mean.

I tried it with a few other messages, there was no problem. Only difference between this tweet and others was that this tweet had a snipped link nybooks.com/articles/archi.... I tried this with other tweets having snipped links, the bug was reproducible on Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu. However, this issue wasn't found when I tried it on Google Chrome. I haven't been able to try it on other platforms/browsers.

As far as I can guess, the problem is with the Twitter's URL shortner API. I know of no serious consequences of this vulnerability, but I hope Twitter fixes it soon.

Update: The image in the post is not clearly readable. Here is the direct link of the image.