RT to Win: 50 Lines of Python Made Me the Luckiest Guy on Twitter
Hunter Scott recounts writing an autonomous Python bot that programmatically entered thousands of Twitter retweet contests, winning multiple daily prizes for months.
Summary
Architecture and Background
In this talk, I'll share how I won 4 Twitter contests per day, every day, for 9 months straight. I'll discuss the methods I used, the delightfully random and surprising things I won, and how to run a Twitter contest to prevent people like me from winning.
Vulnerability Analysis
Hunter Scott is an electrical and computer engineer with over 7 years of experience designing and implementing hardware systems. He has lead electrical development on a variety of projects, from robotics to communication systems.
Exploitation and Demonstrations
He has experience in improvising and quickly building prototype and proof of concept designs as well as implementing mission critical, high reliability designs. He has a degree in computer engineering from Georgia Tech and is currently working at a startup you've never heard of (yet!).
Remediation and Defensive Strategies
His work has been featured in publications such as Gizmodo, Quartz, Engadget, CNN, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and NPR. His other projects can be seen at hscott.net.
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