Hakiri

Twitter is full of bots. It should be no big surprise to you, I hope. Bots make the service essentially less useful. For example, how do you know how many out of the 2000 followers are real people with opinion that is valuable to you or your community? You don’t know! Any newbie programmer can code up a simple script to post thoughts, retweet and sync feeds and do other things to the extend you no longer can differentiate between real and spammy traffic.

This is primarily due to the fact that twitter relies on smaller contributions from its userbase (140 characters message), which is significantly easier to imitate than a whole blog post for example. Moreover, messages can be as vague as it can get and in fact, most of them are. Now add the easy to use programmatic access and you have a recipe for disaster.

This leads us to the obvious (to some) conclusion that twitter is not a reliable source of information. Clearly, it can be abused and it is evident that it is abused but not to the extend we will see it getting abused in the future. Twitter is quite popular, no doubt about that, but is it useful? Probably not! I will stick with blogging!

Simply put New is a very relative word. New to whom? And how do you prove that something new is new indeed? You cannot. Perhaps you can suggest that something is new as nothing like it has been documented before, but again this is very subjective.

You often see rants about what is new and what is old in the security scene: underground and aboveground. Some people will complain that nothing new has been discovered when a presumably new type of vulnerability/research is released. Others will simply take it as new without even questioning it and essentially start a hype.

Perhaps new should be changed with fashionable. Like in the fashion business new things are often well forgotten old things, i.e. ideas always circulate. And new things are simply not possible without the help of old things because we require access to technology, whether it comes in terms of knowledge or tools, to build them. In that respect nothing new is actually new.