Twitpic is a program that lets Twitter users share photos, but it is not owned by Twitter.
(Credit: Twitpic)
It seemed like celebrity deaths were contagious last week. After the sad news about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon dying, a wave of viral death notices went out on Twitter for Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Goldblum, and P. Diddy. But all are safe and sound.
"Britney has passed today," the bogus tweet announced on Sunday. "It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come."
The message was immediately taken down and Spears' staff tweeted that her account was hacked into and that, "She is fine and dandy spending a quiet day at home relaxing."
Similar messages were put up on the other celebrities' accounts, says Mashable, a social-media news site. They believe hackers got access to these celebrities' Twitter accounts through Twitpic, a program that lets Twitter users share photos but is not owned by Twitter. To post to Twitpic, users can e-mail a photo with a subject line, put in their PIN, and the post will be immediately tweeted.
According to The Associated Press, once discovered, the morbid tweets were taken down and Twitpic temporarily shutoff part of its service, announcing they were "implementing a fix immediately."
Twitpic fixed this vulnerability by Monday and in an apology letter explained that the hackers tried every PIN combination possible until one worked. Now, Twitpic says a "fix has been put in place to prevent this from happening," and that less than 10 users were affected by the hack and "no account information was compromised."
This isn't the first time Spears' Twitter account has been toyed with. At the end of April, a hacker got access to a Twitter administrator password by guessing the secret question to reset the password and broke into Spears' and other celebrities' accounts.
The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.
This photo, of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River Thursday, brought so much traffic to TwitPic that the site, which allows users of several mobile phones to post pictures to Twitter, saw its servers get overloaded. Click image for larger version.
(Credit: Janis Krums)TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums.
According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a large number of people and then picked up by several news sites, including Silicon Alley Insider, the resulting traffic was too much for the site's servers.
Everett called it a "snowball effect."
In fact, Everett said this wasn't the first time someone had used TwitPic to post a photo of an airplane accident. He explained that a passenger on a Continental Airlines plane that went off the runway in Denver in December used the service to post a photo. But that time, the service was able to stay up.
Perhaps because of the national interest in an airplane accident taking place in direct view of Manhattan, the traffic produced by Krums' photo was higher than in the case of the Denver accident, Everett suggested.
And while the circumstances of Thursday's accident were unfortunate--though, miraculously, no one died in the crash--Everett admitted that the fact that Krums' photo got so much attention was validation of the utility of TwitPic.
"We haven't gotten so much press coverage before," Everett said.
"It's shocking, and it's a good feeling--though (also) not a good feeling because it's bad news," Everett said.
He also said that he's got additional servers that are soon going to be in place.
"In a month's time (something like) this will not affect us anymore," he explained. "We're working to be able to handle our growth, but this is definitely a wake-up call showing the power of breaking news and TwitPic."
Everett said that there had been about 7,000 views of the picture before the site went down, and that there were about 500 additional requests to view it every 15 or 20 seconds.
He also said that while he couldn't be immediately sure, it was likely that Krums had used an Apple iPhone to take the picture, given that it was 600x800 pixels, the average size of an iPhone picture.
By 2:35 p.m. Pacific, about two hours after the photo was taken, TwitPic was back up.
Everett said, "I hope it stays up. I'll be working on this through the night."
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