Twitter has a nice feature: You can send a short message (SMS called in a lot of areas) and send a status. You just need to verify your mobile phone and you are done. But with growing interest in twitter bad things can happen. Nitesh Dhanjani from O’Reilly published a way to spoof messages to twitter. Since than twitter has added a PIN (Personal Identification Number) to every update to send. But very few people know about that and use it. So here is a little script that you can use to check if you have set up a PIN. If you don’t, login to twitter, browse to your settings, next “Phone & IM” and choose a PIN. I really think Twitter Inc. should remove the “optional” part and make it mandatory. It would be better…
Try it yourself:
Once you have set up a PIN you can use the SMS service again by adding your PIN in front of your message. Like: “1234 just added a pin to twitter”. If something goes wrong you get a SMS with “Wrong PING”.
By the way: this is only for demo and education purposes. Don’t abuse it. This service will be shut down in a few days!
“You have just updated your status! Magic!”
Trotz PIN? Ein Update fand übrigens nicht statt. :p