Avid Halaby
7,185 posts
Avid Halaby
@AvidHalaby
same handle on protonmail | בעל תשובה | gulf coast Straussian | nuclear family enjoyer with @airportgrinch
Bay Area
Joined June 2020
- The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the "Twitter files" but it's much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention. Going to do a thread on some of the craziest things, in no particular order.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyTwitter didn't monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices
- Replying to @AvidHalabyTwitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyIn 2020, Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis. Meanwhile, Parag Agarwal was lying about how secure Twitter was.
- The UHC CEO assassination as the unhinged id of Acela America lashing out against middle American success
- Replying to @AvidHalabyOn 1/6, Mudge (the whistleblower) wanted to take action to prevent potential sabotage by a rogue employee. He learned it was not possible for Twitter to secure its production environment.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyTwitter knowingly allowed itself to be infiltrated by, or otherwise a tool of, many governments.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyMudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter's data. He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyA few months later, that exact eventuality almost came true, and only herculean effort by Twitter engineers prevented "permanent, irreparable failure."
- Replying to @AvidHalabyThat's all I have the energy for tonight, I highly recommend reading the full report. PDF here: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2218…
- Replying to @AvidHalabyTwitter had no software development lifecycle, and misled both the FTC and its Board about this fact for a decade.
- Replying to @AvidHalabyTwitter did not keep backups of employee computers. They used to, but then the system broke, was never fixed, and execs decided this was good because it meant they couldn't comply with regulators.
