The Old Spice Guy Forced Himself on Me!



  • So I was browsing through my twitter timeline and I see a message from @TheOldSpiceGuy (or maybe @OldSpiceGuy) saying something like "Look left. Look right.  Now you're following me without even knowing it."   I didn't think much of it, I figured someone just retweeted a not-so-funny meta-joke. 

    Then I notice this jackass is all over my timeline with his somewhat witty remarks.  So I click on one of the tweets to see which person I'm following, is retweeting the Old Spice Guy every 3 minutes.  I turns out I'm following him.  Which is weird, because I didn't choose to follow him.  Rogue Javascript?  Any ideas?

     



  • Anyone else think the thread title sounds creepy?



  • It was a Twitter bug, which they claim to have fixed. The details are here: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hack-lets-you-force-people-to-follow-you-2010-5, amongst many other places on the Web.

    And BTW, it only took me one Google to find this out. Do you feel properly embarrassed now?



  • @Cad Delworth said:

    It was a Twitter bug, which they claim to have fixed. The details are here: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hack-lets-you-force-people-to-follow-you-2010-5, amongst many other places on the Web.

    And BTW, it only took me one Google to find this out. Do you feel properly embarrassed now?

    That bug was months ago. I presume this thread is in response to a recent event... maybe I'm wrong. More likely he's been using Twitter to OAuth on other sites, and one of those sites his sold his login token to Old Spice.

    Do you feel properly like a dickweed now?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Do you feel properly like a dickweed now?

    Or maybe like a Depicted Cakewind?



  • @Cad Delworth said:

    It was a Twitter bug, which they claim to have fixed. The details are here: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hack-lets-you-force-people-to-follow-you-2010-5, amongst many other places on the Web.

    And BTW, it only took me one Google to find this out. Do you feel properly embarrassed now?

    Why would I feel embarassed?  It happened last night, so I doubt this bug was fixed.  It was easy to resolve without Google.  I just unfollowed the account. 

    I thought it was a funny anecdote and wondered if anyone had any ideas as to the root cause.  BTW-  That link is over a year old and I am using "new" Google, which wasn't available then.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    More likely he's been using Twitter to OAuth on other sites, and one of those sites his sold his login token to Old Spice.

     

    Good point.  I think I'll be logging out now.  I don't think that was an official Old Spice account.  I think it was someone being funny/annoying.  One of my twitter friends also got hit at the same time, so I'm not 100% sure it was an OAuth thing.  Better safe than sorry though.



  • @frits said:

    Good point.  I think I'll be logging out now.

    Logging out isn't good enough. Go to Settings -> Applications and you'll see a list of applications that are authorized to use Twitter on your behalf. Hit "Revoke Access" on all the ones you don't trust. OAuth is shit, but this is one detail they got right on the first try.

    If none are listed, then there's probably a new bug (unrelated to the one fixed a year ago) that allows the same behavior. But I haven't seen any reports of it from anybody else, so...



  • I just check out the account : http://twitter.com/#!/theoldspiceguy

    The account has ~400,000 followers and it is not an official Old Spice account, nor is Ismael what-his-name's account.  Something is fishy (or Old Spicey, if you will).

    Edit:

    I just figured it out.  Dave Chappelle changed his username, picture and info.



  • @frits said:

    I just check out the account : http://twitter.com/#!/theoldspiceguy

    The account has ~400,000 followers and it is not an official Old Spice account, nor is Ismael what-his-name's account.  Something is fishy (or Old Spicey, if you will).

    Hm. Googling on the Twitter name, it does look like the "official" Old Spice account for that campaign. Probably guerrilla marketing? Any agency that would use an exploit would be out of business soon, so it's actually really weird-- makes me wonder if it's some 14-year-old hacker using the exploit for lulz and just picking the @TheOldSpiceGuy account at random.

    The other terrifying possibility is that Twitter is now offering "force people to follow me" as a paid feature for advertisers... I wouldn't put it past them, frankly. Still, given all the possibilities, I still think the most likely explanation is that you're OAuthed to some third-party site which sold out to a guerrilla marketing firm hired by Old Spice. That way, they're technically not using an exploit, and probably not violating any Twitter rules.



  • Blakeyrat,

    See my edit above.



  • @frits said:

    Blakeyrat,

    See my edit above.

    Feh. I am disappointed by your WTF's twist ending.

    2/10.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @frits said:

    Blakeyrat,

    See my edit above.

    Feh. I am disappointed by your WTF's twist ending.

    2/10.

    Sorry.  I'm a regular M. Night Shyamalan.


  • Garbage Person

    I'm still trying to figure out what in the hell twitter is good for. I've never seen a meaningful use case beyond publicly calling out companies and getting your dick sucked to shut up about it. So what on earth is there beyond the extortion racket?



  • @Weng said:

    I'm still trying to figure out what in the hell twitter is good for. I've never seen a meaningful use case beyond publicly calling out companies and getting your dick sucked to shut up about it. So what on earth is there beyond the extortion racket?

    There are some people in the world that just can't accept the fact that other people aren't exactly the same as them, and other people exist who might like things that they do not, and that other people sometimes spend time in ways they would not spend time. These people aren't content to let other people do their own thing. No, instead when exposed to those other people, they are owed, in fact they demand, an explanation.

    A good way of identifying those people is to say "I use Twitter" in a forum.

    That's a practical use for it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Filed under: seriously, we don't need to explain ourselves to you, don't use it, if you don't like it, this is going to get mutilated when CS re-sorts the tags
    OK, now what's going on?



  • @intertravel said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Filed under: seriously, we don't need to explain ourselves to you, don't use it, if you don't like it, this is going to get mutilated when CS re-sorts the tags
    OK, now what's going on?

    When entering tags, CS uses a comma as a separator between multiple tags.  If you try and type a long sentence as a tag, with commas in it, CS will treat each clause between commas as a separate tag.  Then it re-orders them when it displays the post - I have no idea whether it relates to popularity or length or any other kind of ordering, but the overall effect is that if you try and type in a long sentence with multiple commas as a tag, it gets chopped up into pieces and rearranged randomly, which gives a William-Burroughs-alike cut-up effect.

     



  • I think people should focus on praising me for my incredibly witty response to Weng rather than the not-at-all witty tags.


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    There are some people in the world that just can't accept the fact that other people aren't exactly the same as them, and other people exist who might like things that they do not, and that other people sometimes spend time in ways they would not spend time. These people aren't content to let other people do their own thing. No, instead when exposed to those other people, they are owed, in fact they demand, an explanation.

    A good way of identifying those people is to say "I use Twitter" in a forum.

    That's a practical use for it.

    Har har. No, seriously, I have no problem with people using it, and I can accept "because I choose to" as a reason for personal use - I just can't understand why every corporate entity on the planet is wet-panties over it when the only reason I can find for them to be there is to be extorted by disgruntled customers.

    Hell, it's to the point where you can't have a god damned printed advertisement without a twitter and facebook logo on it. As if I could click the printed ad to follow them.


  • @Weng said:

    Har har. No, seriously, I have no problem with people using it, and I can accept "because I choose to" as a reason for personal use

    Well you're mixing in with the 40,000 other wags on tech forums who have to do the whole "I don't know why anybody would use Twitter!!!" thing ANY FUCKING TIME SOMEONE BRINGS IT UP. Even if I wasn't annoyed to shit and back having to read the same basic post from a million people on a hundred different forums, I'd still be fucking annoyed to shit and back over the condescending tone they all carry-- "oh I'm too GOOD for Twitter... only idiots use Twitter...".

    It's fucking worse than mentioning you saw a web ad. ("You should install AdBlock!" Yes, we fucking know. Every fucking tech forum every fucking where for the last fucking 5 years, whenever someone says the word "ad", 37 people respond with "ADBLOCK!" We know. We fucking know. Go away.) It's worse than XKCD references. It's like forum cancer.

    Now there is a slim, extremely slim, chance that you don't actually visit any tech forums *and* weren't posting that to be a condescending douche. In which case, I apologize.

    @Weng said:

    I just can't understand why every corporate entity on the planet is wet-panties over it when the only reason I can find for them to be there is to be extorted by disgruntled customers.

    Gee! Maybe because, for the first time in history, "corporate entities" can not only observe their customers giving word-of-mouth recommendations, but impact the process in real-time? If you're a marketer, that's pretty damned world-changing, frankly.

    @Weng said:

    Hell, it's to the point where you can't have a god damned printed advertisement without a twitter and facebook logo on it. As if I could click the printed ad to follow them.

    I've never seen this in my life.



  • @DaveK said:

    @intertravel said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Filed under: seriously, we don't need to explain ourselves to you, don't use it, if you don't like it, this is going to get mutilated when CS re-sorts the tags
    OK, now what's going on?

    When entering tags, CS uses a comma as a separator between multiple tags.  If you try and type a long sentence as a tag, with commas in it, CS will treat each clause between commas as a separate tag.  Then it re-orders them when it displays the post - I have no idea whether it relates to popularity or length or any other kind of ordering, but the overall effect is that if you try and type in a long sentence with multiple commas as a tag, it gets chopped up into pieces and rearranged randomly, which gives a William-Burroughs-alike cut-up effect.

     

    I got all that - it appeared that Blakey's tags weren't re-ordered, though. (I had assumed it was alphabetical, but come to think of it CS would never do something so logical or consistent.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    Hell, it's to the point where you can't have a god damned printed advertisement without a twitter and facebook logo on it. As if I could click the printed ad to follow them.

    I've never seen this in my life.

    And you call that living?


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    Now there is a slim, extremely slim, chance that you don't actually visit any tech forums
    Actually, I make it a point to avoid all tech forums except this one, because the cast of characters you get on them (including irritating twitter-hater-dude, oddly enough) bother the hell out of me. Oh, and people giving false or incomplete information.

    @blakeyrat said:

    *and* weren't posting that to be a condescending douche.
    Generally speaking, almost everything I write about a social topic can be construed as my being a condescending douche, at at a minimum dripping in vitriol and sarcasm. In this case, however, I'm talking about business practices and am just trying to make sense of what I perceive as being nonsensical bullshit with a negative cost-benefit ratio.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Gee! Maybe because, for the first time in history, "corporate entities" can not only observe their customers giving word-of-mouth recommendations, but impact the process in real-time? If you're a marketer, that's pretty damned world-changing, frankly.
    Which then raises questions as to why people consider the corporate entity's input on their personal recommendations to be any more valid than any other form of marketing. Or, hell, why they bother giving recommendations in a forum where they'll be crowded by corporate doublespeak.

     @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    Hell, it's to the point where you can't have a god damned printed advertisement without a twitter and facebook logo on it. As if I could click the printed ad to follow them.

    I've never seen this in my life.

    I see it daily. Flyers in Chic Fil A's drivethrough window, all sorts of advertising on commuter vehicles and infrastructure, on bloody plumbing vans even. 

     

     

     



  • @Weng said:

    I'm still trying to figure out what in the hell twitter is good for. I've never seen a meaningful use case beyond publicly calling out companies and getting your dick sucked to shut up about it. So what on earth is there beyond the extortion racket?

    I am a consumer of Twitter more than a producer of content. There are several reasons I enjoy the service.

    • It's a place to network with a bunch of people who listen to an obscure radio show on Sirius that I like. 
    • I can "follow" very funny but obscure comedians (and wannabes), who post free hilarious jokes all day.
    • I can select to get updates from business I don't mind being targeted by; such as UFC, and certain bands etc.
    • I can follow anyone else that seems interesting, such as technology bloggers.


  • @blakeyrat said:

    I think people should focus on praising me for my incredibly witty response to Weng rather than the not-at-all witty tags.

    Okeley-dokely-do!

    @blakeyrat said:

    There are some people in the world that just can't accept the fact that other people aren't exactly the same as them, and other people exist who might like things that they do not, and that other people sometimes spend time in ways they would not spend time. These people aren't content to let other people do their own thing. No, instead when exposed to those other people, they are owed, in fact they demand, an explanation.

    Yes, those people are dreadful, aren't they?  By an astonishing coincidence I had a near-identical experience recently when it emerged that I like to use an older version of a certain browser.  Some intolerant so-and-so decided I owed him, no in fact he demanded an explanation.  His name escapes me right now ....

    EDIT: P.S, here, have some non-breaking commas on me: ‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚



  • @blakeyrat said:

    There are some people in the world that just can't accept the fact that other people aren't exactly the same as them, and other people exist who might like things that they do not, and that other people sometimes spend time in ways they would not spend time. These people aren't content to let other people do their own thing. No, instead when exposed to those other people, they are owed, in fact they demand, an explanation.

    Oh blakey, you're such an independent, take-no-guff badass! You showed Weng!


Log in to reply