Tech Haus

Trying out some new themes tonight, hoping to find the one that screams german technology with a minimum level of Hasselhoffness.

I’ve migrated Twisp from the lowly residence on this blog to google code: http://twisp.googlecode.com. I’ll be using SVN to track changes, and hopefully having a centralized site will help generate more interest, and in-turn inspire me to keep working on it.

Twisp is a TWitter SPam fighting Powershell script that searches through your followers and provides insight into the most likely spam candidates.

Download it now: Twisp 1.0

Note: After putting in your credentials, the script is going out to Twitter.com to pull down your full followers and full friends list. This may take some time. I’m working on a new version which will either offer a progress bar, or at least give some feedback that the script is still running.

So what does it do?
Twisp first gathers a list of all your twitter friends and compares it to a list of people who follow you. Anyone who follows you (who you aren’t friends with) goes into a list of potential spammers.

This list is further refined by comparing:

• How many friends do the potential spammers have to how young the account is.
  (If the account is only a few days old, but they already have friended 500 people, they’re probably spammers)
• The ratio of their friends to their followers and the total number of their friends
  (If they are only followed by a quarter (or less) of the number they friended, they’re probably spammers)
• Their bio to keywords such as “media expert” and “SEO”
• If they don’t have a profile picture

The index of spamitude is calculated, then displayed next to the potential spammer’s name in a simple GUI. Use the checkboxes to select multiple users, then either click Block to simply block the users, or Report which will first send a Direct Message to @spam with the spammers usernames (thereby reporting the users) before blocking the users.

Note: The Blocking feature requires that you are a follower of @spam and can send Direct Messages to @spam.

Twisp by Pezhore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://pezhore.com/ContactMe

Here we go, on to a new blog. This one will be primarily focused on interesting stuff I find throughout the day, as well as act as a central point for any of my scripts/reviews/etc.