twitterprobe
Inspired by some investigation of some tweets going (temporarily) "missing", for example this discussion:
I hacked together this script that uses txtorcon (and hence Twisted and txsocksx) to download a public Twitter timeline for a given username over several different Tor circuits/exit-nodes and then look for a different list of visible Tweets.
This does not use the Twitter API, it is parsing the HTML and
impersonating a Firefox user-agent (probably poorly; just setting
User-Agent). Also, it will only see the first 20 tweets in the
timeline.
(So far, I have not seen a different list).
Obviously, this is pretty basic. Also, it inspires me to actually do something soon about meejah/txtorcon#125
Contributions welcome!
If You Read Only One Thing Read This
If you're actively twittering while running this, of course you're going to see the Fearsome Warning that some tweets weren't visible from some exits.
So, don't do that.
Running It
To run this in a virtualenv, do the following:
git clone https://github.com/meejah/twitterprobe cd twitterprobe virtualenv venv ./venv/bin/pip install -e . twitterprobe --help
Alternatively, install the dependencies "by hand" and simply run
probe.py.
This will connect to a locally-running system Tor at the usual
controller address; mess with the call to
build_local_tor_connection if this is not suitable for you. If you
want to follow along with the Tor instance to see what it's doing, I
recommend using carml monitor from https://github.com/meejah/carml