Ask HN: What is this? 158268a350000000

Can't find anything related to this account, so I'd speculate it could be C&C for a botnet.

The keys it is sending appear to be in pairs, in sets of 16, if you concatenate them you get the 32bit entire key. All of the keys are presented in hexadecmial format, you will notice none of the letters go above f. Most of the keys sent end in eight 0's, this would me to believe that this is padding and infact, the two keys concatenate to build up one 32bit string, but if you look carefully you will note that some of them only have 7bits of padding on the end, so I will disregard this assumption.

These tweets appear to originate from Russia.

Now, common uses of 16bit (and 32bit) encryption keys are for WEP keys, traditionally used in router password protection, which can be provided either in a full ASCII spectrum or in merely hexadecimal format.

Taking these points together I can conclude that these could possibly be the encrypted WEP keys of a Russian router.

Or I could be totally wrong, but I really wasn't given much to work with :)

Wow I was looking at this exact account after that globe post haha. Bizarre.

Also there is an (inactive) GooGuns_Staging: https://twitter.com/googuns_staging

As a note, the last nine digits just alternate between 200000000 and 350000000. On staging they're simply ba0000000.

This is highly relevant for the conspiracy theorists.

Random number radio stations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

    A numbers station (or number station) is a type of shortwave radio station 
    characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words,
    but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading 
    streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code.

Now, if you take a look at any random tweet, you will notice that the location that it was tweeted from changes every time (often in the middle of the Sea). This could also be a hidden chunk of information that encodes/hides other relevant data.

It is certainly not by accident that the lat/lngs change on each Tweet. If I had the time as an experiment, I'd probably try and find patterns between the lng/lats to see if the decimal equivalent means anything? How hilariously awesome would it be if when mapped on a globe, it builds up a large picture. (Fair warning.. this runs WebGL and will most likely nuke your browser for a few seconds http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search/ )

That account has almost as many followers as I do on twitter :'(

To me it looks like trying to bruteforce something and post the current sequence every 5 min.

I wonder if this odd placeholder site has anything to do with it...

http://www.googun.com/

It probably has nothing to do with this but there is another account https://twitter.com/googuns which claims to be associated with google . . . . In particular the page has a title "Google Notifications".

  "screen_name":"googuns"
  "created_at":"Tue May 05 19:13:53 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_dev"
  "created_at":"Thu Sep 24 19:21:47 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_staging"
  "created_at":"Tue Jul 28 22:48:11 +0000 2009"

  "screen_name":"googuns_prod"
  "created_at":"Tue Jul 28 22:49:22 +0000 2009"

There's also a https://twitter.com/googuns_dev account - but 0 tweets

I suspect what you are seeing is the output of a password cracking program that is dumping out cracked MD5s or similar. The zeroes at the end is a technique that's been seen before to mark a password as cracked, see for example with the dump of the LinkedIn hack: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309

The pattern of the gap between the times that they are tweeted is somewhat interesting too... 1 minute, 4 minutes, 1 minute, 4 minutes, 1 minute, 4 minutes, etc.

Anyone could spoof geolocation, plus why would spies use twitter of all things. this sounds more like a prank

Here's a way to easily pull down the data without all of that extra gui stuff: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_...

The maximum is 200, but you can move down the line by using since_id or max_id optional parameters. 'xml' can be replaced with 'json' or 'rss' if you'd prefer a different format.

Looking over the data briefly reveals the additonal fact that the 'source' field is populated with a link to Google. That, combined with the other accounts including one that outright says it's associated with google on its profile. So this is either google maybe doing some sort of recruiting thing, or somebody that wants us to think it's google for whatever reason. One guess is that the account name could mean Google User Notification Service.

Additionally, the tweets are published at a (more or less, this is the web) regular interval. Always around the HH:M9:30, HH:M0:00, and HH:M4:30 and HH:M5:00 marks. As stbullard speculated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697813), there could be two instances of whatever this is running, publishing every 5 minutes independently, with one instance having the code baf200000000 associated with it and another having the id of 2350000000. Note that the length of these two are different- the former is 12 while the latter is 10. This could mean a variety of things regarding the format in which the data is published, or variance in the data itself.

It might be worth looking at the unique parts of the 235 ones as color.

If anyone can pull these tweets down into a single file and share them that would be amazing.

It could also be a distributed game of battle ships...

each shot is defined by one unique hash and a geo location.. waiting to see a tweet about "hit" or perhaps "miss" but those wouldnt need to be ACKed

It could be part of someone's crazy Twitter-based deployment strategy, using Twitter as RPC or pub-sub.

It's clearly a viral marketing ploy. Standard theme: create some type of countdown website (or some other cryptic message) then seed a few high popularity forums by pretending to have stumbled across this thing nobody would ever actually find.

Yeah, I'm looking at you DonnyV.

I collected the last 3244 tweets (a limit of the Twitter API) and posted them here in JSON for your enjoyment:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/7huqe8

I was actually planning on doing something like this for fun. In my case, the numbers would be generated from a random function and wouldn't mean anything. YMMV.

Well, here are two plots from the data earlier today showing some patterns: http://i.imgur.com/q2Qc0.png

Left one for the data ending with "f200000000", right one with "50000000". For these I just assumed the numbers were 64-bit little endian integers.

I poked around the data a bit (I uploaded a JSON file below). First, I separated the tweets into two sets based on the last eight hex digits (00s and 50s). In each set, I parsed each 16-digit message as an integer, converted that to a binary string, and reversed the binary digits. Parsing that as an integer again gives numbers that roughly increase over time.

Here is a chart of the 00s (plotted against tweet number):

http://i48.tinypic.com/svl4jm.png

and of the 50s:

http://i46.tinypic.com/2mn1wg7.png

It's rather strange that the data isn't perfectly monotonic.

I'll look into the tweet coordinates next.

Probably trying to reverse-engineer the Twitter geolocation database instead of buying one.

This is the next stage of Google's Interview Process, post riddles on the Internet, hire the people who solve it.

The birth of Skynet?

Seems like some sort of coordination effort I'd have to guess. Perhaps for a region where Google traffic might normally be blocked, it's an alternative way to get a message in?