Fishy Twitter

Here’s a comment I left on one of Ed’s posts, “Surveillance and Censorship”

This post reminds me of the Twitter “algorithm” post I saw a few days back. Someone found in the source code Musk made available the parts where political tweets and accounts could be boosted or stifled. There were very obvious a variable name like “GovernmentRequested” and object values like “author_is_republican” or “democrat.”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/04/02/researcher-twitters-algorithm-reveals-government-intervention-tool/
Granted, it’s pre-compiled code so that wouldn’t have gotten to the end user. But either it’s:

1 – Horrible OPSEC. Using obvious names instead of coded ones is the height of stupidity. I have trouble believing a NETSEC analyst or even a tech lead would approve of this code being in production.
2 – This is doctored source code to make us think Elon exposed the shenanigans and plugged the holes, when really nothing has changed. “Cooling the mark,” as it were.

Here’s a screenshot of code, which I stole from this tweet:

I have to admit their code is nicely-written and semantic. No idea what language this is (don’t feel like Googling it), but it’s from a .scala file type—something I don’t know about either (also don’t care to Google it). Looks very object-oriented; you can get a decent feel for what it does just by reading it plainly.

Ed might disagree, but I maintain this is more likely fake code than real, and Elon is posing himself as free-wheelin’ open source guy while greasy fed surveillance nerds are right behind him with their stethoscopes on all the wall surface. I’ll admit that the developers never thought their pre-compiled stuff would ever be released like this, so they felt free to be obvious about everything they were doing.

But I mean, it’s not hard at all to just come up with codenames for this stuff, that only the development team knows. There’s a ton of informal codeword schemas you can use: mythological gods, Russian oblasts, bird species, desserts (Android kinda did that), Star Trek characters. You don’t need hundreds of names for this stuff. I know I’d like to use “author_is_spock” or “CarrionRequested” (“EagleRequested” hits too close) variables and properties in my code.