[ExI] question for twitter hipsters

Mr Jones mrjones2020 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 1 13:52:26 UTC 2011


2011/5/31 spike <spike66 at att.net>

> So now here is my  question for hipsters: assuming someone guessed this
> guy’s twitter password, does twitter have some means of tracing the actual
> phone number from which the tweet was tweeted?


I'm not sure if Twitter keeps track of IP's used to send a particular
'tweet' or not.  Most likely they do.  When you 'tweet', it will generally
tell you the means by which someone 'tweeted' as well; for instance whether
or not they used TweetDeck, Seesmic, an iPhone or some other program/plugin
etc.  It wouldn't so much have to do with their phone number, as their IP
address/client used.

As for being anonymous on Twitter...  You'd only ever be as Anonymous as the
account you're posting to.  If you make a fake Twitter account, and always
make sure you use a proxy to connect, you could potentially keep your
identity a secret.  Anonymously accessing a Twitter account, that typically
isn't accessed through an anonymous fashion, would in and of itself throw up
flags I'd guess; unless said person was in China or some firewalled location
where the proxy was necessary to get past barriers.

This is all pretty generic, shallow explanations...especially the anonymous
stuff.  There's a lot that goes into that, so I apologize to any tech gurus
I've offended with my partial answers.  I hope you find this somewhat
helpful though Spike.

Also, regarding this politician's account...rather than acquiring his
Twitter password, someone could have taken over his entire system.  This
level of access would not only give the 'hackers' carte blanche to his
Twitter, but any other accounts he used on the system as well.  Add to that
the ability to post to Twitter (or anything else for that matter), from the
politician's actual computer, thus making an IP trace moot.

So in the end...COULD someone go through all this to burn this guy.  Yes.
 Did they?  No idea.  Would it be very costly/difficult?  Not really.  My
intuition is the guy got busted with his pants down ;)  and now he's trying
to cover his tracks.
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