Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 5, 2008 – 9:47 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A Next Web reader sent me a message tonight. Well, basically a cry for help. He’s confused. Some of his friends have some sort of weird ability to time travel.
They beam themselves to the next day and then write something on his wall. He already checked whether this is just a timezone accident, but this unfortunately wasn’t the case.
Prevent this poor chap from going him mental and assure him it’s just a bug. I’d really appreciate it.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 20, 2008 – 10:45 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
This morning my iPhone crashed. Must have been a bug. But what is a ‘Bug’ really? Why do we call programming errors ‘Bugs’?
Apparently we call them bugs because Grace Hopper found the first computer “bug”: a moth stuck between the relays on the Harvard Mark II on September 9, 1945. These early computers were attracting lost of moths who got stuck between the light-bulbs inside the machines. At times there were so many relays malfunctioning that they had a full time bulb changer working to fix find all the ‘Bugs’ stuck between relays.
Hopper created the first compiler for a computer programming language and worked on the development of COBOL, one of the earliest high-level programming languages that allowed programmers to use words instead of machine codes.
Grace pasted the actual bug in her log, as you can see above, as the “first actual case of bug being found.” The term “bug” had meant a computer error beforehand but it became a popular term after Grace found an actual bug.
Besides being credited with finding he first real computer bug Grace is also known as the first person to say the now famous line:
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.“
Found in a post titled “The Wonderful World of Early Computing” over at Neatorama.
Written on August 10, 2008 – 12:03 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.
Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.
For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
