Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

The available  evidence continues to support Anthony  Weiner’s contention that the controversial weiner picture on Twitter was sent by someone else. It wound up taking  bloggers to determine what happened with social media sites. Cannonfire demonstrated that this technically wasn’t a case of someone needing to hack Weiner’s Twitter account as it was possible to fake the sending of the twitter picture due to a “feature” of yfrog. In order to get the photo  site to send out a photo as a tweet it appears that it is only necessary to find someones yfrog email address:

Believe it or not, when an outsider sends a pic to someone else’s Yfrog account in this fashion, the action creates a message in the “twitterstream.” The message seems to originate with the Twitter account holder — but it doesn’t. It comes from somewhere else — from someone mailing a picture to the account holder.

This is a serious security flaw in the design of Yfrog and Twitter. It allows a malicious outsider to “spoof” a tweet that seems to come from someone else.

In addition, the post looked at problems in the url, arguing  that  “The anomaly in the header indicates that the image was not sent by Weiner. It had to have been sent by someone else.”

Next step was to track down the culprit. It appears that the picture was posted by a conservative who posts under the name Dan Wolfe who first claimed to find the picture. It turns out that the picture supposedly found by Wolfe has irregularities which cast doubt upon Wolfe himself.  “The date stamp on this image is May 30, not May 27. The EXIF data is strange in other ways”   Not surprisingly, Dan Wolfe has been acting pretty strange today:

Explaining his hesitation to speak on the telephone, Wolfe wrote that his ex-wife (working in conjunction with a former girlfriend of his) had twice secretly recorded him and that the resulting tapes had “gotten me in a lot of legal trouble.” As a result, he contended that if his ex-wife’s attorney “got a hold of a call recorded with me on it they’d have a field day with that. I want to try to avoid.”

While not addressing who would make such a recording, how it would surface, or why it would do harm to him, Wolfe concluded, “I am screwed. If all this comes out along with everything I’m dealing with here–I don’t know what to do.”

Update (June 6, 211): Key word in the title is “appears.” Anthony Weiner admits to sending picture. Nancy Pelosi has called for an ethics investigation of Weiner.