Information Madness

Twitter’s 140 character limit has been hacked. Twitter customers were stunned when they saw that people have managed to write over nine hundred characters in a tweet when they know that the maximum limit is 140.

Stack Exchange has posted that this strange message contained backlashes and a bunch of numbers. The message was posted in Russian. It contained Unicode surrogate points that were not properly encoded as UTF-8. The CESU -8 encoding utilized in the tweet is accepted by some Twitter interfaces but for display purposes as the social network expects valid UTF-8 sequences. Each surrogate code point ends up being displayed with twelve characters since three bytes on each of these sequences are displayed as 3 C style octal escape sequences of 4 characters each.

Some technicians feel that it is possible since each group of characters that begins with a backlash represents an escape sequence which is considered as a valid character constant. Some of the escape sequences available are control characters. These characters tell the computer to move the cursor to move left or right or delete the characters to the left maybe. They can be used quite effectively to confuse Twitter.