Social-Media
A bug meant the Twitter fleets could still be seen after they vanished.
Twitter is the newest social media platform to encourage users to play with the disappearance of content. Fleets, as Twitter calls them, helps its smartphone users to share short stories, such as images or videos of text overlays, which are scheduled to disappear after 24 hours.
But the error means that the fleets were not removing correctly and could still be reached even after 24 hours had elapsed. The error specifics were shared in a series of tweets on Saturday, less than a week after the feature was released.
full disclosure: scraping fleets from public accounts without triggering the read notification
— cathode gay tube (@donk_enby) November 20, 2020
the endpoint is: https://t.co/332FH7TEmN
The bug basically allowed someone to view and download a fleet of users without a warning that the fleet of users had been read and read by them. The implication is that this flaw may be misused to archive consumer fleets once they have expired.
Use an interface designed to communicate with Twitter's back-end systems using its developer API. What returned was a list of the server fleets. Each fleet had its own direct URL, which would load the fleet as a picture or video when it was accessed in a browser. But even after 24 hours had passed, the server would already be returning connections to fleets that had already vanished from view in the Twitter app.
A Twitter spokesperson said a patch was on the way before it was hit. We are aware of a bug that can be exploited by a technological solution where certain Fleets media URLs can be accessed within 24 hours. We're working on a patch that should be carried out quickly.
Twitter admitted that the patch ensures the fleets are already about to expire, said that it would not uninstall the fleet from its servers for up to 30 days—and that it will keep the fleets for longer if it breaks its laws. We tested that we could still load fleets from their direct URLs even after they had expired.
Fleet with care, please.
