Let’s meet our cast of characters.

ah, come in! we’re so glad you’ve come Snake ‘n’ Bacon!

i’m crisp delicious bacon

sssss

glad you asked. it seems there’s a group of hackers, and we want you to go in under-cover

i go great on a sandwich

sssss

When Twitter came back online yesterday afternoon after their networking attacks, I got a torrent of @cr_snake_bacon tweets. Wasn’t sure why, but it seemed suspicious. Twitter’s API had flopped around for most of the day, so the logs were full of Exceptions and … oops! … re-connect attempts!

Of course I’d built the bots to re-tweet on an Exception. They’re all configured to wait 60 seconds, then try again. But of course until I fixed the configuration over night, they did exactly what a bot would do … acted <blink>conspicuously</blink> …

The service attacks on Twitter continued through today, and I’m sure that the birdy techs are furiously building black ice fortresses in Scala even now. Again, I saw a burst this afternoon from all of my bots. Pokey the Penguin, Conet Project, and Chewbacca all had several things to say, all at once. Obviously I had fucked something else up, so I hurriedly checked the logs. And nope … actually, my change had worked … Twitter had just un-blocked my IP.

*Whew*

Thanks, guys. Sorry that we looked like a vicious autonoma for a while there. Glad to be back.