While taking a look at the top trending topics on Twitter this morning, one of them (#inappropriatemovies)is giving me "no results" when I click on it. How can it be a trending topic if there are no results?

Interestingly enough, if you search for "inappropriatemovies" with Twitter search, there are plenty of results (hashtag and all):

As you can see from the above screenshot, I am not the only one to have noticed this. The question is, is this a glitch or has Twitter intentionally blocked results for this trending topic (though I can’t imagine why they would). If I’m not mistaken, this has been a trending topic in the past with results that worked just fine.

Meanwhile, the rest of the trending topics appear to work fine. Of course trending topics are part of Twitter Search, and we know it is far from perfect.

Have you ever seen an issue like this on Twitter? Tell us about it.

Update: Robin Wauters is pointing out anoher bug, where Twitter is not shoing the correct application being used on individual Tweets. It’s showing everything as from the web.

A quick, church-sermon-esque Twitter search on "lost followers" reveals hundreds of tweets about them. Some have lost in the tens, others in the hundreds, and others report losing half to 75% of their follower lists.

Twenty or so disappeared from my own account. Jeff Pulver, who is also a Twitter investor, reports the loss of 400 followees and 700 followers overnight. The subsequent resounding question throughout the abbreviated Twittersphere: WTF?

According to that post:

"To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following too many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review."

While the spam initiative has some interesting timing in relation to this morning’s phenomenon, it was clear early that not only spammy followers were lost, but also friends. Anna, who goes by ShoeSmitten on Twitter, says she lost 120 friends, accounting for half of her list. She told WebProNews many of them were "dear" friends and "far from spammers."

Pulver, too, indicated some larger problem. "I seemed to have lost 400 people who followed and 700 people who followed me," he said via email. "I’m still at 5,000+ ‘real people’ so maybe that is ok. I don’t know yet who got removed by accident and how many of these people where designated as spam.

"This issue is a sign of a bigger problem/challenge/learning that is ongoing."

Pulver also said that when Twitter launched in 2006, the founders "could not have appreciated the space they would be filling in the life of others and the unintended consequences that would prevail." He said this was part of the challenge of maintaining a "real enough time (RET) communication network."

Stone responded to request for comment saying the data loss was not because of recent spam efforts, but instead is a bug. "The followers/followees bug is unrelated to our spam initiatives," he said. "We worked on it last night but we’ll be looking more into the follower bug today."

There is a broader question here that may be very difficult to define. In April of this year, Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron briefly put his Twitter account up for auction on eBay, which brought into question whether one’s list of followers/followees has real monetary value. Baron pulled his auction, so we may not know, but bids reached about a dollar per follower. Could Twitter be liable for lost data then?

Pulver declined to put any specifics on the value of a Twitter account, but agreed there was value, however you define it, in them. "I believe that our social graphs have value. Understanding and levering your social graph is the subject for a fun conversation. But with 5,000 friends on Facebook and 5,000 followers (post twitter spamm issue) I believe there is ‘value’ there.

Posed the same question, Stone had not yet responded by press time.
 

UPDATE: There was a notice on the Twitter corporate blog early this morning warning of a loss of follower counts: 

"We’re still in the process of recovering from the missing follower/following problem that occurred earlier today. Over the next several hours, you may see inaccurate counts or timeline inconsistencies as the correct data is propagated to all parts of the system."

Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

Tinic Uro has a condensed list of bugs which have been fixed since the last release version – 9.0.64.0.

Here is a quick list of the new/enhanced features;

• New audio/video options with H.264/HE-AAC codec support
• Improved Performance through multi-core support for rendering, hardware scaling in full-screen, multi-threaded video decoding, a new algorithm for image scaling, and the Flash Player cache for local caching of common platform components to reduce SWF sizes and app loading times
• Support for full-screen mode for Linux
• MSAA Accessibility support for the plugin
• Mac OS X Leopard support
• And bug fixes

You can download the Flash Player Datasheet (PDF) from Adobe. Visit and Download the new Flash Player.

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Now, this isn’t entirely awful – a story by our own David Utter was featured in Google News’s “Entertainment” section this morning, and more exposure for him is fine by me.  Yet the apparent glitch did annoy other onlookers, including “jaker99,” who pointed out the problem to the Google News Help group.

“[W]e’ve confirmed that there’s a bug on our end that’s preventing Google News from refreshing,” replied “Google News Guide 2.”  He then assured the group, “We’re working on a fix . . .”

One has to wonder if the refresh bug is related to whatever made the Google News site blank when Philipp Lenssen visited it this weekend.  Or if everything went kablooie as a result of YouTube videos getting introduced to Google News – the timing seems about right.

In any event, Google might want to be especially careful with its news site; because there are so many good alternatives out there, users could be quicker to abandon it than Google’s other products and services.

iPhone Could Be Playground For Attacks

Though the blogosphere has chattered incessantly about Apple’s iPhone firmware update, and the unpleasant side effects of having their shiny toys turned into doorstops, there is other news iPhone owners should note in passing.

Security firm F-Secure cited researcher H.D. Moore, the hacker who has been responsible for projects like the Month of Browser Bugs, as being hard at work in building iPhone support into Metasploit:

These and other developments in the field will make iPhone security research very interesting. The fact that Apple is actively defending iPhone locking makes it a very tempting target for skilled hackers – both as worthy challenge and for bragging rights. This means that we’ll probably see more details about the iPhone’s internals in the future. It’s already safe to say that the iPhone is probably the most well-known and understood closed system there is.

Unfortunately the amount of technical information makes it likely that sooner or later someone will misuse that information to create worm or some other malware. This will create an interesting problem for the security field as the iPhone is currently a closed system and it’s not feasible to provide Anti-Virus or other third party security solutions for it.

So if someone were able to create a rapidly spreading worm on the iPhone, protecting users against it would be problematic.

F-Secure also reasonably noted that previous iterations of mobile device viruses have proven slow to spread. If someone does find a way to get one swirling through iPhones, Apple would likely have time to push out a correction.

Plenty of work aimed at learning more about the iPhone has unveiled ways to unlock it, ways that Apple recently thwarted with a firmware update. As noted, Moore has completed some iPhone research already; Apple may get tested sooner rather than later.

BostonNOW Works Out Bugs, Prints Blogs

The saga began on April 17, according to the paper’s blog.  “We’re pleased with our first edition and the launching of the first stage of our website (the bloggling [sic] functionality will be up soon!)” wrote John Wilpers, BostonNOW’s editor-in-chief.  Later that same day, Wilpers lost his connection to the Internet.

On April 20, there was a flap over some “lifted” content from Bostonist.  Wilpers apologized on behalf of BostonNOW, and the gaffe appears to have been forgiven, if not forgotten.

A few days later, yet another post appeared, this one announcing that “[w]e’re so close to blogging functionality.”  Then – at last! – a request to “[s]end us a link to your blog” on April 30.

BostonNOW has truly hit its stride.  A broad column titled “CommunityNOW” runs down almost the entire right side of its website’s main page, and the paper itself has gained the attention of The New York Times.  “While most newspapers are trying to stake bigger claims online, one new publication is pulling material off the Internet to be printed in ink,” noted Luke Jerod Kummer.

“With a current circulation of about 85,000,” Kummer continued, “BostonNow potentially offers a much larger readership than most local bloggers are used to.”  Bloggers aren’t paid for their contributions, but “[t]he greater exposure could translate into increased ad revenue for their own sites.”

As for the quality of the writing, Wilpers assured the Times’s Kummer, “We’ll be running the blogs through the same fairness and quality standards we run our own reporters through.”

Some good things have come out of Boston, including the hilarious radio Car Talk.  In the opinions of some area bloggers, BostonNOW might be even better.

An $84 million restatement of earnings due to improper option granting practices may not faze the diehard Apple fans who will descend on San Francisco for next week’s Macworld. New product announcements, and Apple will need to wow the crowd and excite the media, should help salve their wounds during the company’s winter of discontent.

Apple exonerated its iconic CEO after an investigation into inappropriate option grants to executives. The company said it would have to restate $84 million in earnings to account for stock-based compensation, but otherwise said they have “complete confidence” in Jobs and senior management.

Federal authorities may have something to say about the situation, as both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission could take further action against Jobs and Apple.

A Wall Street Journal report said Jobs helped select the most favorable dates for granting options. These dates would be the ones where Apple stock traded at its lowest point.

Jobs was also implicated in similar date selection for his animation company Pixar, now part of the Walt Disney Company. “Pixar granted options to executives at the lowest closing prices of 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2003 — a highly improbable pattern,” the article noted.

While the executives and the board brace for outcomes involving possible criminal or civil procedures, Apple engineers will be bedeviled by security issues being released to the public. Through January, the Month of Apple Bugs blog claims they will have a new Apple issue each day.

So far LMH and Digital Munition founder Kevin Finisterre only have a QuickTime exploit, a stack-based buffer overflow, posted from January 1st. Several hours into January 2nd, we’ve yet to see the next bug release.

Something that may or may not be seen once Macworld kicks off is the much-rumored Apple Phone. It won’t be called the iPhone because Cisco owns that trademarked term.

There should be plenty to see whether or not Jobs comes out wearing a court-issued ankle bracelet. MacRumors said Mac OS X Leopard, the iTV, and a full video iPod are among the possible shiny candidates for a Macworld debut.

Software bugs, federal thugs, and those telephone rings…which will be among Jobs’ favorite things? Macworld starts January 8th.

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There is nothing quite like firing up a new program and watching it return something to standard output that looks more like a cat walked across a Cyrillic keyboard than the results one expected to see.

Developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio can take steps to help avoid the pain of invoking the debugger yet again, by proactively preventing some of the more common bugs from cropping up in code.

Author Peter Aitken has worked on several programming related books, including ones about Visual Studio.

He recently posted some commentary to InformIT that aims at placing the virtual flyswatter in developers’ hands and turning them loose on those bugs.

Even the most dedicated programmer who follows Aitken’s suggestions on good programming practices might still end up having to track down a belligerent byte or two of buggy code.

Just like the well-known maxim ‘divide and conquer’, breaking up one’s code can help a programmer narrow down the section where the bug lives.

Aitken suggests using breakpoints to find that critter.

“While the program is paused, you can take various actions to help find a bug,” he wrote.

Those actions include modifying the conditions that trigger the breakpoint, or specifying a hit count for each time the breakpoint is passed.

Once the program pauses, it’s time for the sheer joy of single-stepping through the code.

Aitken pointed out some useful keyboard shortcuts for when the program enters break mode. The developer can continue to the next breakpoint, or step into, over, or out of running the next statement.

Sometimes seeing the value of variables can help identify the problem.

By setting watch expressions for program variables through the Debug menu will show those values as the program executes.

If a variable reaches an unexpected value, that would indicate some kind of issue impacting it.

Go get those bugs. (Ok, maybe not those bugs. You know what I mean.)

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Well, part of the problem may be about to get some attention: Andrew Morton asserts that the Linux kernel is ‘getting buggier’ and that part of the reason may be from the strong influence of corporate money (from ZDnet article):

One problem is that few developers are motivated to work on bugs, according to Morton. This is particularly a problem for bugs that affect old computers or peripherals, as kernel developers working for corporations don’t tend to care about out-of-date hardware, he said. Nowadays, many kernel developers are employed by IT companies, such as hardware manufacturers, which can cause problems as they can mainly be motivated by self-interest.

It’s not even enlightened self interest. For example, SSH is arguably one of the most important communication protocols in use today, and OpenSSH is probably the most important implementaton. Yet Theo de Raadt (lead developer of OpenBSD) complains at http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39259042,00.htm:

OpenSSH, a secure network connectivity tool project that is developed by the OpenBSD project, has received no funding from vendors, despite the fact that the tool is used by many operating systems to encrypt Internet traffic.

“OpenSSH is included in every Unix-derived operating system, yet the total amount of assistance we’ve ever got from vendors is zero,” said DeRaadt. “It’s astounding. I don’t know what to do about it.”
Part of that problem comes from the licensing model of BSD: it doesn’t require any “give back”. Couple that with corporate interests and it would be surprising if they did get any assistance.

Corporate influence is not going to go away. Programmers are ordinary humans who need to eat, sleep, and pay their bills. Without employment by companies with a stake in Linux development, they’d need to treat their Linux work as a part time hobby and no doubt Linux would suffer even more from that.

And I’m not even sure that Andrew Morton’s concerns are all that important. Support for old hardware surely isn’t going to make or break Linux. It definitely isn’t going to slow Linux adoption in the rest of the corporate world. Sure, it affects third world usage, but do we care about that? That’s bleeding heart whacky liberal-think, isn’t it? Who cares?

Well, I hope somebody does. In truth, I expect Andrew’s call for a bug-fixing cycle will be met with silence and apathy. There’s no money in it, so even if the developers themselves agreed, the folks who sign their paychecks may tug on the reins rather sharply and tell them to ignore it.

I hope I’m wrong.

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com