94 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Plea to Twitter
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date: 2020-12-14
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---
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**NOTE**: This is a very different kind of post compared to what I usually
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write. If you or anyone you know works at Twitter, please link this to them. I
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am in a unique situation and the normal account recovery means do not work. If
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you work at Twitter and are reading this, my case number is [redacted].
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**EDIT**(19:51 M12 14 2020): My account is back. Thank you anonymous Twitter
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support people. For everyone else, please take this as an example of how
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**NOT** to handle account issues. The fact that I had to complain loudly on
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Twitter to get this weird edge case taken care of is ludicrous. I'd gladly pay
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Twitter just to have a support mechanism that gets me an actual human without
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having to complain on Twitter.
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On Sunday, December 13, 2020, I noticed that I was locked out of my Twitter
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account. If you go to [@theprincessxena](https://twitter.com/theprincessxena)
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today, you will see that the account is locked out for "unusual activity". I
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don't know what I did to cause this to happen (though I have a few theories) and
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I hope to explain them in the headings below. I have gotten no emails or contact
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from Twitter about this yet. I have a backup account at
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[@CadeyRatio](https://twitter.com/CadeyRatio) as a stopgap. I am also on
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mastodon as [@cadey@mst3k.interlinked.me](https://mst3k.interlinked.me/@cadey).
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In place of my tweeting about quarantine life, I am writing about my experiences
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[here](http://cetacean.club/journal/).
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## Why I Can't Unlock My Account
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I can't unlock my account the normal way because I forgot to set up two factor
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authentication and I also forgot to change the phone number registered with the
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account to my Canadian one when I [moved to
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Canada](/blog/life-update-2019-05-16). I remembered to do this change for all of
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the other accounts I use regularly except for my Twitter account.
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In order to stop having to pay T-Mobile $70 per month, I transferred my phone
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number to [Twilio](https://www.twilio.com/). This combined with some clever code
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allowed me to gracefully migrate to my new Canadian number. Unfortunately,
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Twitter flat-out refuses to send authentication codes to Twilio numbers. It's
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probably to prevent spam, but it would be nice if there was an option to get the
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authentication code over a phone call.
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## Theory 1: International Travel
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Recently I needed to travel internationally in order to start my new job at
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[Tailscale](https://tailscale.com/). Due to an unfortunate series of events over
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two months, I needed to actually travel internationally to get a new visa. This
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lead me to take a very boring trip to Minnesota for a week.
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During that trip, I tweeted and fleeted about my travels. I took pictures and
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was in my hotel room a lot.
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[We can't dig up the link for obvious reasons, but one person said they were
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always able to tell when we are traveling because it turns the twitter account
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into a fast food blog.](conversation://Mara/hacker)
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I think Twitter may have locked out my account because I was suddenly in
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Minnesota after being in Canada for almost a year.
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## Theory 2: Misbehaving API Client
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I use [mi](https://github.com/Xe/mi) as part of my new blogpost announcement
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pipeline. One of the things mi does is submits new blogposts and some metadata
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about them to Twitter. I haven't been able to find any logs to confirm this, but
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if something messed up in a place that was unlogged somehow, it could have
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triggered some kind of anti-abuse pipeline.
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## Theory 3: NixOS Screenshot Set Off Some Bad Thing
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One of my recent tweets that I can't find anymore is a tweet about a NixOS
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screenshot for my work machine. I think that some part of the algorithm
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somewhere really hated it, and thus triggered the account lock. I don't really
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understand how a screenshot of KDE 5 showing neofetch output could make my
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account get locked, but with enough distributed machine learning anything can
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happen.
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## Theory 4: My Password Got Cracked
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I used a random password generated with iCloud for my Twitter password.
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Theoretically this could have been broken, but I doubt it.
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---
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Overall, I just want to be able to tweet again. Please spread this around for
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reach. I don't like using my blog to reach out like this, but I've been unable
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to find anyone that knows someone at Twitter so far and I feel this is the best
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way to broadcast it. I'll update this post with the resolution to this problem
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when I get one.
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I think the International Travel theory is the most likely scenario. I just want
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a human to see this situation and help fix it.
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