The Twacking of Richard Dawkins and lessons for Twitternuts

Richard Dawkins, inventor of selfish genes and memetic theory. and who has more recently become the god of atheists everywhere, is on Twitter - but this morning I was intrigued to see the following series of posts from him:

- While I still have 1700 of you paying attention, I just wanted to say: Whatever you believe, respect others beliefs.
- It's not wrong to be kind to people who don't believe the same as you. You don't have to be militant atheists.
- People who claim to be Christians can be hypocrites, but they're just people, and all people make mistakes. Try to be good to one another.
- That is my message of peace to all of you. Love one another. It's ok.
- Consider that being hostile towards others has never won any followers. Richard Dawkins is just an old man trying to leave behind a ...
- legacy. Just like I, a Chrisitan do not follow Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, don't be mislead by someone just because they share your...
- belief system. It's easy to be against people who are different than you, but try not to be like that. Take the high road, unlike RD.
- Thanks for listening and following along. Have a nice day.

Assuming for the moment that Mr Dawkins has not had a Damascene conversion, then his Twitter account has clearly been hacked (Twacked?). A very un-Christian act I am sure, but there you go. I don't know how it has happened (hackers, man-in-the middle etc) but this got me thinking about the impact of hacking in different comms media:

Email - the hack potentially goes out to to your adress list (your "tier 1" social network), and it can be transmitted on to your "Tier 2" but it remains hidden until then, and there is a transaction cost (forward) for any of your contacts to do it. Email Groups are not really different, though because everyone in the group knows its a group message it could change the dynamic (more likely someone will realise its a scam?).

IM / Skype - its far harder to spam IM as many systems only put up sessions for 1-1 online chats, and not everyone records them. Those that do have address books that allow mass messaging are in a similar position to email, except the transaction costs of re-sending the message on to others are higher because by and large they are clunkier than email systems

Chatrooms - an address can be taken over and everyone on the chatroom can see it, like in Twitter or an email group, but most Chatroom stuff has very low persistence and is certainly not linked to the web.

Synchronous (Reciprocal?) SocNets (eg Facebook) - where links are 2 way - ie you only get my messages if I agree to be your friend. Situation is similar to email above,except that as they are web documents, rather than on users PC's they are theoretically exposable with lower transaction costs. It starts to depend more on the privacy controls of the service supplier.

Asynchronous SocNets (Twitter et al) - are different. Firstly, the linking is asynchronous in that (i) I can link to your posts without you knowing me, and (ii) anyone who knows me and sees me talking to / about you can look at your posts too, unless they are held private. Most people do not do this. Secondly, there is a public timeline that can be picked up unless posts are held private. And Twitter links to the Internet, so that post is stamped there too. Whole new ballgame of risk if the account is hacked.

A lesson for us all to keep a close eye on how we manage more public comms like Twitter etc.

Update - The Twacking was not so much a man in the middle attack, but an avatar-sitting impostor, a Fake Richard Dawson (I note he has now declared himself on Twitter). Thanks to Rae's comment below for the link to (we hope) the Real Richard Dawson:

Yet again, some impostor is pretending to be me. I do not Twitter, I had never even heard of Twittering until this thread alerted me to it, and I most certainly have not signed up for it. I am told there are numerous Facebook pages purporting to be mine. None of them is. I do not have a Facebook page, or anything comparable.

The impostor's agenda is religious, so thats why I never got a response to my query on Memetics I know avatar-theft goes on in Facebook, and in Friendfeed people are now group-squatting, but this is the first Twitter example I know of.