Filed under: Business, Internet, News
Twitter's internal documents: stolen, boring
Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published some of them anyway, because Twitter's financial projections and the details of the Twitter TV show pitch have "so much news value."Most of the arguments against revealing this information have been made on ethical grounds, resulting in TechCrunch's Mike Arrington responding with a lecture about the history of news, and citing cases where published info has been obtained in similarly shady ways.
Fair enough. That's the news business sometimes, and Twitter can take action if they don't like the decision to publish. In fact, Biz's blog post suggests they're looking into it. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents," he writes.
My problem with sites that publish this stuff is that it's ultimately pretty boring, and the attention and extra pageviews that come their way are because of the controversy, not because of some inherently interesting new story. The story here is "hacker compromises Twitter documents" not "we now know a little bit more about the Twitter TV show."
Wake me up when this is all over.
UPDATE: The hack wasn't due to weak passwords, says Twitter's Evan Williams.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
phez said 6:44PM on 7-15-2009
You guys should rename your blog to twittersquad.com :(
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Mark said 7:24AM on 7-16-2009
Completely agree!
Too much Twitter news...!!
adorno said 7:58PM on 7-15-2009
Arrington is unethical anyway. He will do anything to garner page views.
I hope he gets sued. Remember the flap he cause with his unfounded allegations against Last.fm?
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Matthew Tommasi said 8:08PM on 7-15-2009
Cool
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Rocketboy said 9:35PM on 7-15-2009
Yes, illegally obtained documents have been news before, but only in situations where it was newsworthy. The only newsworthy thing about this is how easy it is go find the answer to many of the 'secret questions' because a lot of people live an open life online now.
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