[General Topics] cajunflavoredbob:
This thread is to track my dealing with HTC and their service department over the current Twitter Tab (HTC Peep) outage. Please don't PM me about it, I'll just make fun of you for not reading and searching.

The current outage has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the Peep security updates published back in February. For information on the past update, please refer to this post.

I am reaching out to everyone who uses this application to bug the crap out of HTC until they fix this problem. Please read this post all the way through so you can contact them with a bit of information. I originally tried to ask about it as simply as possible, but only got an idiotic response. The communication log will be posted in the next post.

Basically, for anyone experiencing issues with Peep, simply read the post I linked to and the following post. This will give you enough information to be able to contact HTC and make some noise. If you do contact them, please use proper grammar and be respectful. Typing like a pissed off high school girl (no offense to pissed off high school girls) will get us no where.

A brief history of Peep outages

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Since the very beginning of HTC Sense, most experienced users have known about Peep's security flaws and have either decided to live with it, figuring that it wasn't very important to them, or simply used another client for Twitter. The problem is that Peep was accessing the Twitter API through use of unencrypted HTTP headers which exposed your username and password to anyone who might be eavesdropping on the connection via cellular data IP or WiFi.

Twitter experienced some headlines last summer where several celebrity and high profile accounts were compromised due to lax security features. This caused them to begin shifting their API towards a more secure end. In doing this, they notified the developers of Twitter clients of this shift and to update their applications accordingly. HTC was one of the few who did not update their applications.

Late last year, HTC's Peep application experienced some outages. HTC, instead of repairing the problem, petitioned Twitter about the outage and, after several weeks, the functionality of Peep was restored through an exception made in Twitter's API. This was the easiest solution for HTC, but the worst solution for the customers, since it still left the user's data exposed to risk and was only a temporary solution.

Then, sometime in late January/early February, the members of Tadong blog released their security information to the general public after trying for months to get HTC to fix the security flaw in Peep as outlined above. Subsequent to the release of the information, HTC finally release the security updates for Peep that corrected half of the problem. The initial log in attempt now used OAuth to establish a secure connection over HTTPS on TCP port 443. This fixed the update Twitter rolled out shortly after where some users got the "Forbidden" errors when trying to use the tab. It did not fix the remainder of the session where Peep would request data from Twitter. The rest of the time, Peep requested data over unencrypted HTTP basic headers just as it always had. This, as most of you know, caused problems with the most recent update to Twitter's API.

Twitter rolled out an update again at the end of April that broke the Peep client again. The problem wasn't really Twitter, though. Twitter has now disallowed any new requests to access it through unencrypted channels. This, of course, blocks Peep again. The sad thing now is that this would not be a problem if HTC had simply fixed the problem last year during the first outage or even produced a secure client in the first place.

This brings us to the present. I have contacted HTC with all the information I could gather about this problem. The conversation is listed in the next post. I encourage everyone reading this to learn a bit here and contact HTC via their support page. Any serial number should work as long in the contact form as it matches the correct device. The only Rhodiums to receive the Sense update were the Euro and AT&T ones, as far as I know. Leos ship with it, and I'm sure there were other devices that got Sense updates as well, such as the Photon and Topaz. I'm not up to speed on the models of those devices that got Sense, though. If you contact them, please post in here your conversations. If you need help crafting a proper response to the HTC support techs, please PM me. I will try to assist as best I can.