Category Archives: phishing

Protection vs Censorship

The title might sound a bit harsh, but with all these “good” people trying to protect you, where is the line between protection and censorship?

Byron Acohido (@byronacohido) just posted this tweet

tweetI personally hate these short URLs, but I thought this sounds interesting. The reason I hate these short URLs is that you don’t know where they take you (this one takes you from bit.ly/1eUu9e2 to t.co/yzm89jFvxS ;-) In this case it leads you to this:

pic1Wow… That’s what I preach almost daily… Watch out what you click on!!! And now I have to be saved by twitter??? Let’s have a look what this page really is all about:

pic2I can confirm that this is neither a “web forgery” or a “phishing site”. It’s also not a “site that downloads malicious software onto your computer”, nor is it a “spam site that requests personal information”. There is no iframe, not even javascript on this page. Only a couple of external references (e.g. youtube)..

Now I don’t care too much about whether TouchID has been hacked yet, but this almost crosses the line for me where twitter’s security team has been a bit too “motivated” to block content that is definitely not malicious.

What’s next? What other pages will be blocked in the name of security?