We've mentioned TechCrunch's recently acquired Twitter internal documents a few times around the StrafeRight forums, but I feel this story has grown big enough to warrant its own thread.
Essentially someone either hacked into, or worked for and stole, a slew of Twitter's internal corporate documents and emailed them to the popular industry blog TechCrunch. Much was made of whether or not TechCrunch should have posted these documents on their website as news. Some believe it is pretty low for a news agency to reveal such delicate briefs which were obviously illegally acquired, while others believe that anything and everything should be public domain.
TechCrunch is in a tough situation because on one hand, should they have not posted this stuff, the person who illegally obtained said information would simply have gone to the next big tech blog until someone would. Yet on the other hand, TechCrunch is pretty well known to post just about anything they get their hands on, often times not citing credible (if any) sources.
While TechCrunch has said they reviewed everything completely and did not share certain sensitive documents with their readers, they certainly have not shied away from posting some rather critical elements such as executive meeting notes outlining relationships and acquisitions with big industry bodies.
Have a look at the link below as it reveals a lot of information about Twitter's plans for the future (sell? don't sell?), who they fear the most (Facebook, Google), who they don't want to be associated with (Microsoft), and even the companies that have wronged them and are essentially on a blacklist.
So what do you think? Should TechCrunch have posted these documents or kept the information to themselves and let the next blog writer take the bullet?
Link -
Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
[Update]: A piece on how the hack actually took place after speaking directly with the hacker:
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack Quote:
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“Hacker Croll” is a Frenchman in his early 20’s. He currently resides in a European country and first discovered his interest in web security over two years ago. Currently in between jobs, he has made use of the additional time he now has, along with his acquired skillset, to break into both corporate and personal accounts across the web. His knowledge of web security has been attained through a combination of materials available to the public and from within a tight-knit group of fellow crackers who exchange details of new, and sometimes unknown, techniques and vulnerabilities.
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