.:Computer Defense:.

This would normally go on SSLFail.com but due to a server outage, I decided to just post it here...

Tim Callan, SSL Evangelist for Verisign, has posted a brief comment that Twitter now enjoys the added cost... um... protection... of EV SSL. I decided to check this out, so I visited https://www.twitter.com and was greeted by my biggest internet pet peeve, a website where only the www or non-www version works properly.

I decided to remedy this and use https://twitter.com, however I still couldn't get any green demonstrating EV SSL

Of course, this was probably just a Firefox problem... I'll use the new kid in town, Chrome...

Hrm... now I'm confused, perhaps Firefox and Chrome both have some sort of problem, because I should be getting the glorious green that is EV SSL somewhere in my address bar. I figured I'd try Internet Explorer first though because I don't want to be accused of prematurely pointing out why Tim's comment is wrong and why EV SSL is useless.

Again, mixed content errors... this time complete with the famous IE pop-up.

Alas, all is not lost... EV SSL and the glorious green bar is available on Twitter. You simply need to provide your credentials on the page with the "broken SSL" and then, after login, you'll be presented with the wonderful green bar.

Now maybe it's just me... but it seems that this is sending the wrong message to most users.

So previously I'd posted about writing my own curses twitter client, partially to use and partially to start playing with curses. It was quickly pointed out that I had used an older version of twyt (python library to access the twitter API) -- this taught me to think twice before running apt-get install in the future.

Anyways, I was a little delayed (due to a quick trip to Atlanta) but now I'm back at a computer and I decided to fix up TwCuP to make use of the latest twyt (0.9.0). Everything is cleaned up and working, and at Marcin's request, I've set it to make use of the API over HTTPS (twyt uses HTTP by default).

Once you have all the required modules (twyt.twitter, twyt.data, getpass, sys and curses), you'll only require a single file (client.py).

You can get this file via websvn here.

I plan to add the rest of the twyt API and then start tweaking... expanding on just what can and can't be done. In the mean time I'm open to comments and feature requests.

Those of you that follow me on twitter may have noticed that yesterday I was posting quite a bit more frequently and most of them contained the word 'test'. I was playing around with twyt and decided to build a curses-based Twitter GUI. I've never done any curses programming before, so this was my way of learning the functionality. I implemented command-line support in a style I found more to my liking (even though twyt already has this) and then started buliding the curses GUI. If I go very far with this, I may eventually rewrite the API to fit in with the rest of my code, but for now I'll use twyt on the backend.

The code is very basic, but already it can do a few things:

• Display latest friends list updates.
• Display recent replies.
• Display recent sent and received DMs.
• Update your status.
• Send a DM.

Unfortunately the next update is most likely a week away, but when I get around to it, I plan on splitting the screen into multiple windows with your current status always displayed, along with a regularly updated friends list. Right now everything is jammed into a single window.

I do need to figure out how to get Twitter to display my client name (apparently I need to contact them for that) but so far, so good. Anyone wishing to take a look at my (very alpha) code, can check it out here.

For those of you wondering about the name... TwCuP kinda reminds me of 'hiccup', so I found it slightly amusing at ~4am when I was trying to come up with a name.

Eventually this will (hopefully) be a client that can be left idling in a screen session... that's my goal anyways.