Bring me the head of Adam Croot

I don’t know who Adam Croot is. I’ve never met him, spoken to him, or – as far as I’m aware – set eyes on him. He’s probably a decent fellow – kind to his mother, careful with litter, etc. – but he’s really starting to get on my wick.

It seems other people are starting to despise him as well, and with a lot more vitriol than that which I can muster.

So why is he the target of hatred for myself and other people, none of whom know him from… well… Adam?

Well, for some reason, there are quite a few sites on the internet which, due to poor programming, spontaneously redirect you to Adam’s Twitter feed. To any non-nerds it looks for all the world like Adam is some kind of ‘elite’ techno-criminal who’s managed to hack into Twitpic and Photobucket, and other affected sites to make them forward to his site. This is not the case.

A bit of poking around in source code reveals that the sites in question are trying to open an <iframe> containing the page https://api.twitter.com/undefined#blahblahlotsofstuffhere. Since Adam’s Twitter name is ‘undefined‘, this redirects you to his Twitter feed.

The <iframe> is generated on-the-fly by the Javascript code in the file http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js. This script is part of the Twitter @Anywhere API – a framework for integrating Twitter apps into your site. It seems that through a combination of bad programming and poor error-checking, the code is trying to create an <iframe> using a variable which has not been defined, hence it uses undefined instead, hence you get redirected to Adam’s Twitter feed. This has nothing to do with Adam, who I imagine is probably starting to get sick of random strangers verbally abusing him.

So, if you are someone who this is happening to, and would like to stop it, and you have an advert-filtering plugin (like AdBlock Plus on Firefox), then simply add the following filter…

https://api.twitter.com/undefined#*

…and if you don’t have an advert-filtering plugin, pester Twitter to implement better error-checking!

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