Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

The author of this post received an unprovoked gifted premium subscription to X/Twitter. Since moving to a paid subscription model, we all know that the requirements for "verified" have dropped drastically.

In many places, Twitter says an account must have a confirmed phone number and agree to the Terms of Service to become a Twitter Premium member. The gifted subscription route should theoretically go through the same requirements as the regular route.

The author of this post's account does NOT have a phone number linked or confirmed on their account. In fact, they haven't even confirmed their email address was 2012! They tested this with several friends and were able to replicate the issue.

Why does any of this matter? Privacy and transparency! This feature was rolled out in 2024, a few months before that year's election. Many of the political accounts that were "based in the US" were recently outed as being elsewhere as "fake news" because of the country indicator that was rolled out. If we take people's identities on Twitter seriously (I am the president of the United States), then this is a lapse in Twitter's security. Good post!