cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14106579
On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically.
If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.
And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in "Twitter.com" to "X.com."
Without clicking through to the article myself I want an example of this, can't think of any websites that end in Twitter.
The concern is that scammers can create fake phishy versions of sites that end in "__x.com" as ___twitter.com to trick Twitter users into divulging passwords or other sensitive info. Because to the Twitter user it'll look like the genuine site that ends with __x.com on the Twitter app but it won't actually be.
Some examples of sites already made to prevent scammers from using them are:
Netflitwitter, Ametwitter, Fedetwitter, and Roblotwitter, dot com, which falsely showed as Netflix, Amex, FedEx, and Roblox, dot com.
Though I think they (xitter programmers) already manually added exceptions for the examples that trended which stopped that from happening, for those specific examples.
Oh damn, smart
Thanks
The problem is that you can make websites that end in twitter. An example used in the article is someone makes a site called "netflitwitter.com" and posts a link to it on twitter. Twitter will now display it as "netflix.com" and if you click it it sends you to "netflitwitter.com"
Twitter is now a phishing paradise, in other words.