The code on which the social network Twitter is built is no longer a secret. At least a part of him. The most amazing? It has been publicly available for months on GitHub, an incredibly popular service among software developers, without the company realizing it.
Last Friday, Twitter’s legal team sent a legal request for its withdrawal based on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), the law that protects intellectual property in the US. Twitter has also asked the web service for all the data related to the user. who posted it to try to find out who might be behind the leak.
The list of suspects is long. Twitter believes that it is a former employee affected by the first round of layoffs that occurred after the purchase of the social network by Elon Musk. Musk then removed nearly 5,500 employees and 5,000 outside collaborators, many of them engineers who might have had access to the company’s source code.
The user published the code under the pseudonym “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” (Enthusiast of Freedom of Expression), in a clear reference to Elon Musk, who has flagged that concept to justify the reinstatement on Twitter of accounts previously blocked for violating the rules of the platform, like that of the ex-president of the USA, Donald Trump.
“FreeSpeechEnthusiast” went live on GitHub on January 3 and published the code that same day. Since then he does not appear to have accessed the web or contributed any further code to any project.
It is difficult to know the scope that the leak may have had. According to the request of the legal team, it is only a fragment of the code that would be necessary to replicate the platform, which, in any case, is not very complex either. Those responsible for the company, however, fear that the code could be used to find vulnerabilities and attack the social network or extract information from users.
As it happens, Elon Musk has promised to publish the code that governs Twitter’s recommendation algorithm this very week – not the code for the app itself, just the code related to recommendations.
Musk has ensured that this code is quite complex and little understood even within the company. “It will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to a rapid improvement in the quality of the recommendations,” he said.
He initially promised to release this code last week, but has pushed the release date back to this week.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
