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The code on which the social network Twitter is built is no longer a secret. At least a part of it. The most surprising thing? It's been publicly available for months on GitHub, an incredibly popular service among software developers, without the company noticing it.
Last Friday the legal team of Twitter sent a legal request for the withdrawal of the same based on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), the law that protects intellectual property in the US Twitter has also asked the web service for all the data related to the user who published it to try to know who may be behind the leak.
The list of suspects is long. Twitter believes that it is a former employee affected by the first round of layoffs that occurred after the purchase of the social network by Elon Musk. Musk then eliminated nearly 5,500 employees and 5,000 outside contributors, many of them engineers who may have had access to the company's source code.
The user published the code under the pseudonym "FreeSpeechEnthusiast", in a clear reference to Elon Musk, who has flagged that concept to justify the reinstatement on Twitter of accounts previously blocked for violating the rules of the platform, such as that of former US President Donald Trump.
"FreeSpeechEnthusiast" registered on GitHub on January 3 and published the code that same day. Since then he does not seem to have accessed the web or contributed more code to any project.
It's hard to know the extent of the leak. It is – according to the request of the legal team – only a fragment of the code that would be necessary to replicate the platform that, in any case, is not very complex either. Those responsible for the company, however, fear that the code could be used to find vulnerabilities and attack the social network or extract information from users.
It just so happens that Elon Musk has promised to publish the code that governs Twitter's recommendation algorithm this week – not the code of the application itself, only the one related to recommendations.
Musk has assured that this code is quite complex and little understood even within the company. "It will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to a rapid improvement in the quality of recommendations," he said.
It initially promised to release this code last week, but has pushed back the publication date to this week.
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