Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[ti-amie]

This was the announcement from Elmo's folks.

[ti-amie]

And from Elmo:



Micah
@bougiekitty@mastodon.online
As if we needed more reasons to believe Musk has absolutely No idea how software engineering works

#twitterdown

https://mastodon.online/@bougiekitty/109978012712622442

[ti-amie]

How a single engineer brought down Twitter

/ Elon Musk’s steep layoffs have left Twitter with so few engineers that only one person was on a major project involving the platform’s API.
By ZOE SCHIFFER and CASEY NEWTON
|10 Comments / 3 New

Mar 6, 2023, 4:00 PM EST|

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple of hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

(...)

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with.

But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.

Musk was furious, we’re told.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted later in the day, after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen posted a screenshot showing that the company’s API failures were trending on the site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Some current employees are sympathetic to that view, which places at least part of the blame for Twitter’s problems on technical failures that predate Musk’s ownership of the company. The fail whale became an icon of the old Twitter for a reason.

“There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” one current employee says.

Still, when Musk took over the company, he promised to dramatically improve the speed and stability of the site. His associates screened the existing staff for their technical prowess, ultimately cutting thousands of workers who were deemed not “technical” enough to succeed under Musk’s leadership.

But nonstop layoffs have left the company with under 550 full-time engineers, we’re told. And just as former employees have predicted from the start, the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages.

Monday’s errant configuration change was at least the sixth high-profile service outage at Twitter this year:

On January 23rd, Android users temporarily couldn’t load new tweets or post them.
On February 8th, an error message told users that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” preventing them from posting.
On February 15th, tweets stopped loading.
On February 18th, the timeline broke and replies disappeared.
On March 1st, the timeline stopped working.
“This type of outage has become so frequent that I think we’re all numb to it,” a current employee says.

And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base.

In many ways, Monday’s outage represented the culmination of Musk’s leadership at the company so far. In a single-minded effort to cut costs on his $44 billion purchase, he has been slashing the staff and reducing Twitter’s free offerings.

This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on.

And with few knowledgeable workers on hand to restore service, it took Twitter all morning to fix the problem. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.

Inside Twitter’s HQ, however, the mood was almost light. “We’re laughing all the way down,” says a different current employee.

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.



https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627 ... -shut-down


The comments!

[ponchi101]

ALL code is brittle, by frigging definition.
Remember a few weeks ago, when I updated to 3.3.10. We were down for several hours. Why? Because during my upload, some of the forms in php were not loaded OVER the existing ones, and when the new code ran (and was compiled) it had to look for ONE SINGLE NEW VARIABLE in the new forms, and when the code did not find it, it did not have a specific error code escape routine to avoid it.
ONE LINE.
So, If Musk wants to re-write it, go for it. Let us know when TWT will be up again. Much easier said than done.

[ti-amie]

ALL code is brittle, by frigging definition.
Remember a few weeks ago, when I updated to 3.3.10. We were down for several hours. Why? Because during my upload, some of the forms in php were not loaded OVER the existing ones, and when the new code ran (and was compiled) it had to look for ONE SINGLE NEW VARIABLE in the new forms, and when the code did not find it, it did not have a specific error code escape routine to avoid it.
ONE LINE.
So, If Musk wants to re-write it, go for it. Let us know when TWT will be up again. Much easier said than done.

It goes to show that all the hype about him being some kind of genius was just that, hype. Jack Dorsey wasn't perfect but he knew what he didn't know and to left well enough alone when it came to actually running and maintaining a site. Your example about what can happen on a message board is perfect. Was this one guy familiar with what he was tasked to do? Did he have anyone to ask if he ran into something he didn't understand? Did Elmo's security team beat the crap out of him for embarrassing Elmo? So many questions.

[ponchi101]

One final tech thing. All software is tested on parallel, and loaded on the real thing only after being tested for destruction. By that is meant: any really good company has a bunch of people there deliberately trying to do something, on the parallel server, trying to make the software crash. Because, and easy to see, if you have a billion users and there is one way for somebody to make it crash, it will happen.
So better do it in house before the major release.

[ti-amie]

DrJackBrown@mstdn.social
Paris Marx
@parismarx@mastodon.online

Not only does Elon Musk not have a clue what he’s talking about, but this is *exactly* what he tried to do at PayPal, claiming it needed a full “V2” rewrite of the code when it didn’t.

Instead, it shifted resources away from key areas, caused PayPal to lose much more money to fraud, and eventually got him ousted as CEO.

Last month, I wrote about Elon Musk’s time at PayPal and how he’s repeating his mistakes from that period: https://www.disconnect.blog/p/elon-musk-wa


https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/109982182514133646

[ti-amie]

Elmo is really on one isn't he?

Twitter just let its privacy- and security-protecting Tor service expire

/ The Tor Project says it’s contacted Twitter about renewing the site’s certificate.
By ADI ROBERTSON / @thedextriarchy

Mar 7, 2023, 5:23 PM EST

Twitter has allowed the certificate for its Tor onion site to expire, effectively killing off a privacy- and speech-protecting service that it introduced last year. Visiting the Tor-specific onion site address will now deliver a warning that the certificate verifying the site’s authenticity has lapsed; proceeding past that point (which is highly not recommended) currently delivers a Twitter error page. The certification expired on March 6th, just shy of two days before the site’s one-year launch anniversary.

Twitter no longer has a communications department to ask about the change, but the Tor Project confirmed the service’s lapse to The Verge. “The onion site is no longer available seemingly with no plans to renew. The Tor Project has reached out to Twitter to look into bringing the onion version of the social media platform back online,” said communications director Pavel Zoneff in a statement. “People who rely on onion services for an extra layer of protection and guarantee that they are accessing the content they are looking for now have one fewer way of doing so safely.” You can still visit Twitter.com via a browser running Tor, but you won’t get the added benefits a Tor-specific onion site confers.

Onion sites, sometimes called hidden services or “dark web” sites, must be accessed via a browser that uses the anonymous and encrypted Tor network. (This keeps the user’s web traffic and point of origin secret, and it also lets users get around government censorship efforts like those of Russia and China.) The services’ perks include an extra layer of security and an aid for distinguishing good-faith encryption users from malicious botnets. While onion sites are far from mainstream, you can access ones for Facebook, Reddit, and several major news organizations, among other sites. Twitter, until now, was a welcome addition to their ranks.

Despite the Tor Project’s efforts to reach Twitter and resurrect the service, its future doesn’t seem rosy. “The people who built it — at least all those I interacted with — are all gone,” security engineer Alec Muffett, who helped launch the service last year, told The Verge over Twitter direct message. “I’m pretty sure that it’s going to stop working totally at some point, unless Elon takes an interest.” Twitter has slashed its headcount in multiple rounds of layoffs, including members of core operational teams, and it’s had problems with the basic stability of its main site, let alone its Tor alternative.

I’ve sadly expected Twitter’s onion site to go down for some time now. It was launched by a pre-Musk version of the company that put an emphasis on global free speech and privacy, and it probably didn’t contribute much to Musk’s current goal of boosting Twitter’s revenue. But it’s still a shame to see it happen — so happy almost-first birthday, Onion Twitter, it was good while it lasted.


https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/7/23629 ... te-expired

[ti-amie]

Instagram is down. It was down, came back up, and now is down again.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

[ponchi101]

They do have a reputation that their manufacturing is NOT the greatest standard.
But a loose steering wheel would be a humongous assembly problem.

[ti-amie]

WhatsApp would not remove end-to-end encryption for UK law, says chief
Meta’s head of chat app says it would not comply with the requirements set out in online safety bill

Alex Hern
@alexhern
Thu 9 Mar 2023 14.07 GMT
WhatsApp would refuse to comply with requirements in the online safety bill that attempted to outlaw end-to-end encryption, the chat app’s boss has said, casting the future of the service in the UK in doubt.

Speaking during a UK visit in which he will meet legislators to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, described the bill as the most concerning piece of legislation currently being discussed in the western world.

He said: “It’s a remarkable thing to think about. There isn’t a way to change it in just one part of the world. Some countries have chosen to block it: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.

“The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”

“End-to-end” encryption is used in messaging services to prevent anyone but the recipients of a communication from being able to decrypt it. WhatsApp cannot read messages sent over its own service, and so cannot comply with law enforcement requests to hand over messages, or pleas to actively monitor communications for child protection or antiterror purposes.

The UK government already has the power to demand the removal of encryption thanks to the 2016 investigatory powers act, but WhatsApp has never received a legal demand to do so, Cathcart said. The online safety bill is a concerning expansion of that power, because of the “grey area” in the legislation.

Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to comply with without removing end-to-end encryption. If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.

Similar legislation in other jurisdictions, such as the EU’s digital markets act, explicitly defends end-to-end encryption for messaging services, Cathcart said, and he called for similar language to be inserted into the UK bill before it passed. “It could make clear that privacy and security should be considered in the framework. It could explicitly say that end-to-end encryption should not be taken away. There can be more procedural safeguards so that this can’t just happen independently as a decision.”

Although WhatsApp is best known as a messaging app, the company also offers social networking-style features through its “communities” offering, which allows group chats of more than a 1,000 users to be grouped together to mimic services such as Slack and Discord. Those, too, are end-to-end encrypted, but Cathcart argued that the chances of a large community causing trouble was slim. “When you get into a group of that size, the ease of one person reporting it is very high, to the extent that if there’s actually something serious going on it is very easy for one person to report it, or easy if someone is investigating it for them to get access.”


https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... afety-bill


Ian Betteridge
@ianbetteridge@mastodon.me.uk
I really look forward to Rishi Sunak explaining to the British people why they can no longer use WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage and RCS.

https://mastodon.me.uk/@ianbetteridge/1 ... 0557777547

[ponchi101]

And WA is HUGE around the world. The UK has no leverage on this.
I do have 4 contacts in the UK. I only call via WA.

[ti-amie]

A little update on using Mastodon.

Many "instances" or "silos" require you to be screened. Many do not. Scrolling through until you find one that doesn't is pretty easy.
Only one "silo" or "instance" has shuttered since I joined and that was .party. Go figure.

Once you've chosen you "instance" or "silo" the best way to navigate is using hashtags. Activity on #tennis has picked up a lot these last few days as well as #WTA and #ATP. If you have other interests search to see if there is a hashtag for it. If not create one of your own. You can also opt to follow you chosen silo's timeline or the Federated Time Line which aggregates posts from all of the silos. It moves fast but you can adjust its speed via settings. To see what you've been up to or to find a toot you've reblogged click on your profile and your own time line comes up.

As soon as they make it easier to copy a post along with accompanying photos or video I'll be happy. They make updates and changes almost daily and if you follow fedi.tips you'll always know what they're up to.