Joseph Cannon has no clue what he’s talking about, as he has demonstrated in several blog posts where he makes things up as he goes along, without any technical knowledge to back it up.Wow. So Gooding's BE means that the Yfrog pictures in my "gdowson" account aren't there? Fancy that. It seems that I am imagining that stuff. And so are the zillions of others (including people working for major news organizations) who replicated my experiment -- at least until Yfrog decided to plug the security hole.
I say this as a web developer with a BE in Computer Engineering, and an avid Twitter user.
But waitaminute.... If I'm wrong, then why is Yfrog plugging that security hole at this time (as ABC News verifies)? That's an awfully damned suspicious thing for them to do.
Let's get back to Gooding. He relies on an analysis by Gateway Pundit, which I have already dealt with (line by line) and rendered risible. Gooding's work is almost as funny. Let's study his post and have a laugh:
As has been pointed out by Gateway Pundit by now, you can use Yfrog’s image service without ever signing up for Yfrog, and more importantly, they cannot cross-post to Twitter without authorization.What does this have to do with anything I wrote? How do these words contradict my (proven) contention that you can invisibly place a pic on someone else's Yfrog account?
"On May 28th, I posted a picture to Twitter with the TweetDeck application from my phone. TweetDeck and other applications use Yfrog as an image service by default. I had not signed up or in at Yfrog prior to this, and did not need to do so in order for images to be pushed to Yfrog from TweetDeck.So? On May 28th, I had lunch at McDonalds. Does this mean that Gooding or Weiner did as well? Gooding is making a presumption that everyone else does what he does.
I checked out TweetDeck. It's primarily a desktop app and an iPhone app. You can't download TweetDeck for the Blackberry.Oops. Gooding kinda sorta forgot to tell us that.
Since we know that Weiner was using his Blackberry to Twitter that night, Gooding has shot himself in the foot.
Through using TweetDeck, I gave the application permission to post to Twitter; TweetDeck uses Yfrog without any further authorization from me, as do many other applications. This does not give Yfrog permission to post to my Twitter account!Utterly irrelevant.
A layman way of explaining how this works:Gooding seems to be writing an ad for Tweetdeck. Alas, his ad copy has no link to anything I wrote or to Congressman Weiner's Twitter habits.
I tell the phone application that I want to send an image to Twitter
It sends the image to Yfrog and Yfrog returns a URL to the application
The application then posts to Twitter with the URL and any message I put in along with it
In other words, the application (TweetDeck in my case) is using Yfrog as an asset, it isn’t Yfrog doing the posting to Twitter."
Now, Weiner has stated on the record that he had no idea what Yfrog was, and there is no reason to suppose that he ever signed into or gave Yfrog permission to post to Twitter on his behalf.This is pure bullshit.
Weiner stated no such thing. When I originally asked for the proof for this statement, the righties cited an interview with Wolf Blitzer. Absolutely nothing in that interview buttressed the contention. I was a little stunned by the some people's ability to see and hear things that clearly were not there.
Then an interview with Rachel Maddow was referenced. Perhaps Gooding is referring to this interview; if so, his refusal to cite it or quote from it demonstrated crappy scholarship. Unlike him, I am not afraid to offer citations. Here it is.
First and foremost, Weiner is clearly not a tech head. He says in the interview "You completely lost me with all of the technical stuff" -- in reference to a not-particularly-technical comment by Rachel Maddow. Here are some more quotes:
"This thing was sent by someone else. They were on my Twitter page. I have since read a few articles like you have that it's not that hard to do."
"As far as the Yfrog account, I'll be honest with you, I didn't really know for sure what that thing was until this thing popped up. And then I clicked on it and it directed me to where these photographs were being kept. And I kind of quickly deleted it and moved on with my life."From those words, Gooding thinks that he has proof that Weiner changed all of his usual Twitter habits and used an app called Tweetdeck. Unbelievable!
This is a classic example of a partisan attack dog parsing a statement for every hemi-demi-semiquaver of pseudo-meaning until he can make it say something other than what it plainly says.
Did Weiner sign up for a Yfrog account? Yes. Indisputably.
As I noted earlier, vis-a-vis this very same quote:
Take a few seconds to feast your eyeballs on this very site. Blogger works in a strange way: The images that appear in the center column (that is, within the posts themselves) are uploaded via Blogger's in-house service. But all the images on the right and the left -- as well as the really cool cannon picture up at the very top -- have to be uploaded to the internet via a third-party image storage service.Gooding's BE cannot change the fact that Weiner clearly DID have a Yfrog account of his own (even if this non-techie didn't really "know for sure" what Yfrog was all about).
In my case, the name of that service is Imageshack. Imageshack is Yfrog under another name.
But y'know what? If you had asked me a year ago -- two years ago, three years ago -- to name a good online image storage facility, my response might have been: "I dunno."
Would that response have made me a pants-on-fire liar? No. That response means that I use the Imageshack interface maybe once a year. During the in-between times, I usually forgot the name of the thing. On the rare occasions when the need for a new image upload arose, I would hit Google. After the name "Imageshack" sprang up, it would trigger a memory: "Oh yeah. Those guys."
(Russian proverb: "Memory is a crazy old woman who picks up scattered bits of rag while ignoring diamonds.)
Weiner twittered or tweeted or twitted using his Blackberry. The first time he tried to transmit an image, he had to go through a sign-in rigamarole -- and during the rigamarole, the name "Yfrog" no doubt passed in front of his eyeballs. He clicked through, and then forgot all about it. The vast majority of Blackberry-based twitterers surely do the same.
Weiner's unfamiliarity with Yfrog hardly matters. It has no bearing whatsoever on the case. The "Professor Harold Hill" types on the right are simply tossing around techno-jargon to bamboozle the easily bamboozled.
How do we know that he had an account? Because he hopped onto Yfrog and deleted the images. And we have EXIF data for at least one of these images. It was made on a Blackberry. Also see this post, which has an agonizing number of details about Weiner's Twitter usage, and which proves the Yfrog connection:
Weiner's history shows he has tweeted links to yfrog pictures 7 times (excluding the now deleted tweet.). On six of those occasions, he did so by posting "via Twitter for Blackberry". (4 times on May 5, 2011; once on November 3, 2010, and once on September 26, 2010.) On the other remaining occasion (on 2/25/2011) he posted "via Yfrog."To repeat: You can't use TweetDeck from a Blackberry.
And the tweet said "via Twitter for Blackberry." And the tweet said "via Yfrog."
Game set and match. George Gooding is a proven liar.
Gooding bases his entire non-argument on the presupposition that, on one night and one night only, Weiner used an app that is not in evidence. Using that app would have required Weiner to use a device other than the one he habitually uses.
Oh, but it gets better than that: He would have had to take a picture snapped with a Blackberry (the EXIF data on the 800x600 does not specify make or model, but it does tell us that a Blackberry was used) and transfer it to a PC or an iPhone (but why?) on the same night that he was provably using his Blackberry as usual. Then he transmitted the pic using an app unfamiliar to him, and which he would have downloaded and learned for that single occasion.
All to send a crotch shot to a female who was, as far as he knew, 73 years old.
If you believe that scenario, Jonathan Lebed has some penny stocks he would like to sell to you.
Quite a few of the people who have replicated the "dowson" experiment did use Blackberries. The results did indeed cause tweets exactly resembling the one attributed to Weiner. The proof is in my "gdowson153" Yfrog account. I've shown screen shots. So have lots of other people, working in total independence.
By the way: If I'm wrong about the URL thing, then what's the explanation for the screen caps I presented? Once again, Gooding is blowing smoke.
The fact is, a whole lotta people replicated my little experiment. A lot of those people were avid Twitter users, as Gooding claims to be. (Everyone knows my own feelings about Twitter.)
Not only that. My post -- and posts based on my post -- were read by many thousands of people. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. It's fair to presume that many of those folks have computer skills which equal or match those of Mr. Gooding.
Gooding's basic honesty (or lack thereof) can be judged by the fact that he neglects to tell his readers that Tweetdeck is not for the Blackberry. That's called "lying by omission," folks.
Gooding also bases his argument on a weird (and patently deceptive) misreading of Weiner's words. As good old Uncle Aleister once said: "Never forget how easy it is to make a maniac's hell's broth out of any proposition, however plain to common sense."
Incidentally, our old friend milowent has an achingly technical (and quite convincing) analysis of this very this topic. Here it is.
When are the right-wingers going to give it up? Even Breitbart now admits that the man called Dan Wolfe was the likely author of these events.
Come out, come out wherever you are 'Dan Wolfe' @patriotUSA76! Stop hiding behind anonymity! Own up to your role & motivation.Is that a statement open to manifold interpretation? I don't think so.
I may not agree with Breitbart, but he (unlike most of his ideological confreres) is bright. Bright enough to understand the implications of Dan's emails to him, which were recently leaked. Dan bragged "we have more." Those three ominous words indicate that the crotch shot was part of an orchestrated campaign, not a happenstance find.
But we already knew that, of course...
On May 5, Wolfe floated a rumor that compromising photos of a “big time” congressman were in the hands of a “top 5 Right Wing blogger.” He tweeted, “@RepWeiner are you this Congressman?” He reprised this photo rumor in a May 11 tweet.Come on, rightwingers. If you don't even have Breitbart on your side any more, it's time to give it up.
It is achingly obvious that you righties want to go on a fishing expedition. You want an investigation for one purpose: So you can ask Weiner humiliating questions about his entire life history. But it won't happen. This isn't Whitewater redux. No laws were broken or even touched, and the lady in question says that he never tweeted an inappropriate word. If you say otherwise, then you are calling her a liar.
13 comments:
I was ready to be mad at ABC for stealing your discover, but low and behold they gave you credit!! Congratulations, great investigative reporting, too bad the 'reporters' don't do any.ttp://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/06/anthony-weiner-twitter-photo-may-have-posted-via-security-loophole.html
OK, you clearly have no clue what you're writing about, at all. Stop digging yourself further into the abyss.
Your post is rife with strawmen and further proof that you do not grasp the technology you pretend to understand.
A few examples, first, a strawman:
"So Gooding's BE means that the Yfrog pictures in my "gdowson" account aren't there? Fancy that."
Have I ever stated that his pictures aren't there? No, I haven't. Problem is, the images being there does not demonstrate what you sought to prove.
Then, logical fallacy:
"If I'm wrong, then why is Yfrog plugging that security hole at this time (as ABC News verifies)? That's an awfully damned suspicious thing for them to do."
Just because you have pointed out an obvious potential security flaw in Yfrog's system, which has been known about for ages, doesn't mean anything regarding the Weiner incident. All it does is make Yfrog's security flaws more public, and thus, they want to get them out of the limelight.
Then, you demonstrate that you don't know anything about Twitter and its various third party apps:
"I checked out TweetDeck. It's primarily a desktop app and an iPhone app. You can't download TweetDeck for the Blackberry.
Oops. Gooding kinda sorta forgot to tell us that."
Blackberry functions in the same way as TweetDeck, and various other Twitter-connected apps. They all use Twitter's API (you know what that is, right?), and all have to play by the same rules.
That there is no TweetDeck app for Blackberry is irrelevant, as it is only an example of what such applications do, which I pointed out in my post. You obviously do not want to learn anything about how this works, and invent conflicts where there doesn't exist any.
Again, you show that you don't understand that I was using TweetDeck as an example:
"From those words, Gooding thinks that he has proof that Weiner changed all of his usual Twitter habits and used an app called Tweetdeck. Unbelievable!"
The quote from Weiner demonstrates precisely what I said in my post: that he wasn't familiar with Yfrog at all, and never logged into it, until he sought to delete the images from it. Which is exactly what I wrote.
The rest of your rant relies on the fact that you never understand that TweetDeck is just an example of an application one can use to connect to Twitter, and that the rules are the same for Blackberry and the myriad of other Twitter apps.
It's a shame that you are so invested in defending Weiner that you can't accept simple truth from someone who actually knows what he's talking about.
For all you doubters……
http://placidair.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/for-all-you-doubters/
OK, the conclusion is, TinEye can't find the image via a file or a link. Not too many photos of microphones in their shorts. Please see (details) on blog.
Any hoo, it looks like a prank photo...NOTHING there is real. So, NO it isn't Weiner's microphone.
Woman Voter
George, you can't deny the fact that you essentially lied by omission when you neglected to mention that there is no TweetDeck for the Blackberry.
"Just because you have pointed out an obvious potential security flaw in Yfrog's system, which has been known about for ages, doesn't mean anything regarding the Weiner incident."
Yes it does. The timing is telling.
"Problem is, the images being there does not demonstrate what you sought to prove."
Yes it did. It demonstrates that you can upload pictures onto someone else's Yfrog account. That's what I sought to prove.
"Blackberry functions in the same way as TweetDeck, and various other Twitter-connected apps. They all use Twitter's API (you know what that is, right?), and all have to play by the same rules."
And people replicated my experiment using Blackberries as well as other machines. People with Blackberries also create Yfrog accounts.
"That there is no TweetDeck app for Blackberry is irrelevant, as it is only an example of what such applications do, which I pointed out in my post. You obviously do not want to learn anything about how this works, and invent conflicts where there doesn't exist any."
I am always willing to learn, though I do not always like being taught, as Churchill said. What I'm learning here is that you're engaging in presupposition.
"The quote from Weiner demonstrates precisely what I said in my post: that he wasn't familiar with Yfrog at all, and never logged into it.."
You don't know that. Neither do I. I do know that there is an image tweet from him marked "via Yfrog."
You seem to have a phobia for exact quotation. I don't share your problem.
"As far as the Yfrog account, I'll be honest with you, I didn't really know for sure what that thing was until this thing popped up. And then I clicked on it and it directed me to where these photographs were being kept. And I kind of quickly deleted it and moved on with my life."
Look again. "I didn't really know for sure..." The meaning is clear. He had come across the name Yfrog before as part of his Twitter experience, but he wasn't sure just what it was that it did.
Stop parsing plain English to make words have unintended meanings.
(Cont)
"The rest of your rant relies on the fact that you never understand that TweetDeck is just an example of an application one can use to connect to Twitter, and that the rules are the same for Blackberry and the myriad of other Twitter apps."
Oh come off it. So you are saying that an image posted by a Twitter user on Blackberry won't leave a tweet? That flies against the evidence of a lot of other people.
Now, I don't mean to startle you, but am going to have to make a concession. You were unaware (as was I, until just now) of a fact which buttresses your TweetDeck theory.
But before you get too excited, let me warn you that the theory will be undermined soon.
It turns out the the congressman really did use Tweetdeck that night, against his usual habit. This is from milowent:
"Weiner has never posted a yfrog link via any other Twitter posting option. However, his tweets on the evening of May 27, the first of which came no more than a few minutes after the dicktweet, all came from "Tweetdeck." It would be odd (though not impossible, granted) for Weiner to send a pic "via Twitter for Blackberry" at the same time he was on Twitter via Tweetdeck. TweetDeck is a desktop application, and though there are Android and IPhone versions of it, there is no Tweetdeck app for Blackberry available yet."
So it looks like he was on the PC that night. Now that I think of it, this fact was implied by his statement that he hopped onto Yfrog. (Tweetdeck handles Facebook as well. I wonder if this has any link to Weiner's Facebook problems?)
George, George. I can hear you snickering and dancing. Stop it. You're being premature.
You wrote (in boldface):
"Yfrog lacked authorization to cross-post to Twitter"
You don't know that. You never establish that. Your ENITRE argument is based on this statement:
"Because there is no evidence that Weiner had ever given Yfrog permission to post to his Twitter account."
On February 25, 2011, he posted "via Yfrog." (See milowent's piece.)
So that's that. You're wrong.
More than that. You haven't established that the crotch picture was twittered anywhere. Gennette never received it.
More than that. For all your smoke-blowing, it is nevertheless the case that if you have a Yfrog account of any kind -- as Weiner certainly did -- other people can upload pics to your account, and the result would look exactly as I have shown. Screencaps and all.
Time for another experiment. I'm downloading Tweetdeck. And -- god help me -- I may even use (shudder) Twitter.
I'll use a completely new nick.
See ya soon. And don't worry too much about being wrong about the "via YFrog" thing. We were BOTH wrong about the use of TweetDeck on the night in question.
Sorry but Rep. Weiner used TweetDeck to post the now famous 30Rock tweet on May 27. So, yes he used TweetDeck.
Tweet:
Heading to 30 Rock to chat with Rachel at 9. #Thats545InSeattleIThink
27 May via TweetDeck
Followed by the Tivo reference also from TweetDeck...
@RepWeiner
Anthony Weiner
my tivo ate the hockey game! #WhoCanISue?
27 May via TweetDeck
Joe
Joseph, it doesn't matter whether he used Blackberry, TweetDeck, HootSuite, or any other application. They all use the same API to interact with Twitter, and all interact with Yfrog in the same manner.
When you want to post a pic to Twitter through one of these apps, this is what happens:
1. You choose the picture
2. The app uploads the picture to Yfrog
3. Yfrog returns a URL for the picture to the app
4. The app places the URL into the tweet
5. You can add a message along with the URL
6. The tweet is posted
Yfrog never needs permission to post anything to Twitter, because it is not the one doing it - it's the app you are posting through that does this.
Now, you state that it said "via Yfrog" on some picture he recently posted on Twitter. That happens when you use Yfrog via some of these apps.
Case in point, I posted this image to Twitter May 28th: https://twitter.com/#!/GeorgeGooding/status/74531497721331712
There it says "via Yfrog". However, I posted it using TweetDeck on my phone. I had never been to Yfrog's site, and had not given Yfrog permission to post to my Twitter until I tested this out today.
So, again, no one has established that Weiner ever signed in to Yfrog and authorized them to post to Twitter, and thus, cannot establish the possibility that someone posted to his feed through the email feature.
Weiner's own statement to Maddow has him only first going to Yfrog when he needed to delete the pictures - which you can only do it you sign in to Yfrog with your Twitter account, thereby authorizing it.
This is Yfrog's entire business model, they provide a free image service to any application that wants to use it, and lures people in eventually to either delete a photo or have more control over the photos that are there.
Also, you need to come to the realization that the "header" on Yfrog will only be empty when there is no tweet associated with the picture. The "header" is in fact just a tweet-display.
If you email a photo via Yfrog to Twitter, it will post a tweet with at least the URL to the photo, and this tweet will then show up on the Yfrog page for that photo.
If you delete that tweet, like Weiner did, the tweet will then also disappear from the Yfrog picture page.
Comprende?
Joseph Joseph Joseph.
Why do you insist on feeding that Troll?
Nothing you say. No amount of damning evidence can sway an ideologue. It matters not what the truth is Joe. These people have a genetic flaw where the truth is concerned, If it does not fit their narrative, then it must be wrong!
BTW... Congratulations Joe. Just love the way you continue to show the "Establishment Media" how to do their job!
Ah, now I see that the image I posted the Twitter link to shows both "via Yfrog" and "via TweetDeck". Twitter seems to add the "via Yfrog" thing at the bottom of the picture to show that the photo is stored at Yfrog, but the app that sent it to Twitter is still noted as TweetDeck.
Weiner's timeline from that day shows he was using TweetDeck (probably from an iPad, since he was watching TV), and TweetDeck uses Yfrog as an image service by default.
Mr. Cannon, if you wish to absolve Weiner of all wrongdoing, you're going to have to establish that Weiner had actively gone to Yfrog and authorized it to interface with Twitter.
Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely, something Weiner's own comments lend credence to. He says himself that he was not aware of Yfrog until he needed to delete the photos, at which time he finally authorized Yfrog.
Before that, he would never have had to authorize Yfrog to store images there, thus meaning that the email feature would not have worked, since Yfrog wouldn't have had his permission to post to his Twitter account.
The tweet Weiner sent earlier that day about what time it was in Seattle is also something that neither you nor Weiner nor any of his fans have sought to explain. Obviously it cannot be explained in any reasonable manner, and meshes too nicely with him sending a lewd pic to a woman in Seattle, so you have to just downplay and ignore it.
How funny that you harassed me about TweetDeck, only to realize that that was in fact the very app that he had been using that day. Hope you have learned your lesson!
I'm not a partisan gun-slinger, and you shouldn't treat people as if they are just because they challenge you on the facts.
Please read this. It might put things into a more decipherable context.
Harangue, harumph and harass.
http://wp.me/p5dEo-3d7
101st Chairborne Tactics Revealed
You know, George, for a moment there I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I was replicating everything. I had established a Twitter account under the name "Chalice153." (Chalice is a fictional character in a story I wrote.) Then she and gdowson started tweeting each other. She used TweetDeck and he used Firefox. It was sweet.
Then I was going to use "the trick" to send Chalice a picture. There were two things wrong with that: Yfrog stopped the exploit. Thanks to me, methinks.
The other thing was this: I could not see the results without signing into Chalice's Yfrog page. But if I do that, I authorize Yfrog to transmit to Twitter.
I saw the screen. It would be natural to hit "Yes" authorizing the use of Twitter. But you are saying he never did that -- based, apparently on your superior ESP.
And that's when it hit me. Your entire argument hinges on the presupposition that Weiner never signed into Yfrog.
And that is unsupported. If he didn't have a Yfrog account, then how did he transmit images?
Are there applications such as you describhe for Blackberry? Yes. I looked it up.
(As you did NOT. Instead, you listed an app that does not apply to the Blackberry, and then you deceptively implied that it did.)
If you use Twitterberry -- ye gods, what a stupid name! -- it will say "from Twitterberry."
Oops. Not in evidence.
There's another app called "Tiny Twitter." I presume that it also appends similar info.
"Mr. Cannon, if you wish to absolve Weiner of all wrongdoing, you're going to have to establish that Weiner had actively gone to Yfrog and authorized it to interface with Twitter."
No, you are going to have to establish that he did NOT, even though all evidence says that he did. The burden of proof is on you.
"Before that, he would never have had to authorize Yfrog to store images there,"
Yes he did. Unless you can point to the words "from Twitterberry" appended to his all of his previous image pics, we must make this presumption.
(Cont.)
"Weiner's own statement to Maddow has him only first going to Yfrog when he needed to delete the pictures"
This is indefensible. I have already given you the exact quotation, and STILL you mischaracterize what he said.
George, you are a proven liar.
"The tweet Weiner sent earlier that day about what time it was in Seattle is also something that neither you nor Weiner nor any of his fans have sought to explain."
He discussed it with Maddow. If he did not explain to your satisfaction, that is one thing. But for you to say that he never addressed the issue means that you never watched an interview that is the basis of your whole fucking argument!
"How funny that you harassed me about TweetDeck, only to realize that that was in fact the very app that he had been using that day."
Alas, TweetDeck is irrelevant, since he did not upload that picture. Dan Wolfe did. Hell, Wolfe's own actions that night prove the point beyond reasonable discussion.
"I'm not a partisan gun-slinger..."
Yes you are. I just saw all your followers! The company you keep, and all that.
In fact, I noticed something about http://georgegooding.com/ that proves the point...
You never existed until I made my now-notorious post!
Until I wrote what I wrote, you never had a site.
I've dealt with this kind of thing before. Ask around. Look up my posts on the Wilkes/Cunningham scandal. I have a good rep for spotting instantly-erected pseudo-sites.
You are a fiction, George. Oh, that may (or may not) be your birth name: I do not know and do not care. And you may or may not have that degree. As far as I know you are Dan Wolfe. Or maybe not.
The only thing that matters is this: You established your site only AFTER my post. You came into existence for the sole purpose of creating a seemingly reasonable, well-educated voice in opposition to mine.
Think about it.
My post about the Yfrog exploit was vetted by all sorts of people, many of them extremely wise in the ways of Twitter, many of them very educated about computers. They all conceded my point, as did Yfrog itself.
Now YOU come along -- out of nowhere -- having never before established a net presence. You create an "instant page" of the simplest design. This demonstrates that you have no intention of blogging in the long term; you were created to counter me.
You offer no background info. No contact info. No email address.
Come on. Did you really think you would pull this off?
I mean, if I had tried to do what you are doing, I would have created a much more elaborate "legend." You know: Snapshots of your recent vacation, a backdated post where you bitch about the kids, a list of your favorite movies. Stuff like that. The kind of things that indicate the presence of an actual human being.
Once this controversy goes away, your site will go away. I've seen this sort of fakery before -- plenty of times.
Next time, don't be so damned obvious. Okay? Put a little work into it.
Why is all this reminding me of Plamegate? The crazies are going wild trying to cover their tracks. Does that mean Dick Cheney is involved? I love the Gorgeous George site popping to life outta nowhere. Burn 'em, Joe. Burn 'em.
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