There will be more gnashing of teeth in the #weinergate saga tonight.
A few hours, ago, Twitter was abuzz with promises that the Weiner Twitter “hack” was solved.
Cannonfire, a leftwing blogger who said first that the picture was faked, then that another picture lacked Blackberry data, has come across a novel third excuse, a secret email hack that doesn’t require a password. Lefties all across Twitter are screaming this proves Weiner was framed.
Too bad they’re ALL wrong.
Yfrog, like every other service out there (including Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, Blogger, and Tumblr), has a photo upload service by email. If you are logged into your account, you have access to that email.
Furthermore, if you authorize Yfrog to do so, you can post a picture to Twitter from the account using your secret email.
It looks like this.
When you sign into your yfrog account, you can do so with Twitter, which authorizes you to post to Twitter.
It’s not a hack. It’s a security feature that requires you to be logged into Twitter to sign in, just like Facebook connect.
If you go into your Twitter settings, you can find out if yfrog is authorized to post pictures to your account. It’s under Settings>Applications. It even tells you the date and time you logged in. Ben Evans from 24thstate demonstrated this and took the screenshot.
If you have never logged into yfrog before, there will be no authorization to post to Twitter.
And Anthony Weiner tells us today that he has never even seen yfrog before that night. This is from the CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer explaining how and why he deleted all of his photos.
I mean, I’ll tell you what happened that night. I mean, I was literally there tweeting about hockey. For those of you who follow my Twitter, my bloody TiVo didn’t record enough time, so I missed the end of the Tampa Bay-Boston game. I’m a big hockey fan, and I tweet about hockey.
And I see this thing pop up. I immediately delete it. OK? I immediately delete the photo – I thought I deleted – I mean, I’m not a hundred percent sure – I deleted the photo and then this – this – without any password or anything, I was able to get into the account where this photograph was hosted somehow. And I deleted that and other photographs in there as well, although it was nothing very controversial in there. But I deleted everything, and I immediately tweeted “my system has been hacked.” You know, darn it.
Weiner was able to get into yfrog that night because he was logged into Twitter. He says he had never been there before. You can see how he got it from the Twitter login above. Prior to him approving the yfrog login, no one could have posted a photo to his Twitter account. Go ahead and try it. Go to the Twitter settings, remove authorization for yfrog, then send yourself a photo from the secret email address. Nothing happens.
Far from being a security flaw, or evidence of a hack, yfrog demonstrates how not to let someone into your account unless you approve it.
Why is this important? Ben Evans explains:
“Weiner’s Blackberry was used to post yfrog pictures from his Blackberry for Twitter app in the past.
It’s the hosting service tied into the Blackberry mobile application, and it does not require you to set up a yfrog account to use it. In fact, most people don’t ever need to log into their yfrog account. In the picture above, you can see the picture says “via Twitter for Blackberry.” When you email or MMS a photo to yfrog, it says, “via yfrog.” From Weiner’s statements, he had no clue this was the case (most people don’t).
When he saw the picture pop up in his Twitter stream, he clicked on the yfrog link, and without a password, logged himself into the system via Twitter login., authorizing it for the first time. In other words, no one could have sent the picture from yfrog until after Weiner logged in to yfrog and authorized his account.
If Weiner had not deleted all of the photos, or if he opens his computer to forensic examination, this could be cleared up in a few minutes”
Poor Leftwing loons. It must suck being wrong all the time.
Weiner is out there saying he can’t tell you if the weiner pic is his or not, and they’re left pretending a common feature requiring passwords and approval is some kind of super secret Twitter hack.
Computers are hard. I guess those gender studies classes didn’t pay off as well as some would have hoped.
The answer is clear. We need an impartial police investigation of Weiner’s computers to find out the truth. Yfrog email photo games prove nothing, no matter how many foul tweets the Left sends.
Founding Bloggers has more on the hacker hoax.
UPDATE: Just so you know… Rachel Maddow’s blog agrees – “There is no proof of a spoof.”
