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Sriram Velamur
Sriram Velamur

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A Brave* adventure and a bird that sounds out of context.

Why would a bank say they can't handle wads of cash, because they couldn't identify you? Confusing, right? Hey! Twitter, do listen.

Earlier today, had an interesting situation while uploading a screenshot to Twitter mobile. A repetitive concern this, has opened up a channel to read up on fingerprinting and security. Read on, for what went wrong where is a funny lapse.

The last few times I had tried uploading on Twitter mobile, things failed with a large image size message. And, some actually were large indeed at 12MB odd a piece, for the profile images. For some context, each of them were using the Brave web browser which has become my default these days. Speaking of default, you should migrate too; impeccable choice.

Cutting to the chase, I didn't do what any researcher of situations would do; try another browser or image. Downloading a browser for this test and signing in were pains in increasing order, I'll be honest. So what should have ended up with clarity long back, took until a while back, when a 50kb odd screenshot would fail.

Now that raises a brow or two even for the lazy bone like me, does it not? How could an image of about 50kb be large for resizing? To quote Twitter, "One or more images exceed the size limit and cannot be resized". Rather odd a message for Twitter to respond with there.

This time around, tried something else without another browser to test things. Turned off all the safety toggles in Brave and voila! the upload went through fine. Next, turned on everything except the fingerprinting protection and things worked fine too. Once that gets turned on, things fail again.

It is beyond me why Twitter would say the image is the concern when the underlying issue is elsewhere. Possible that this is an extreme of extreme situations when it comes to handling errors on a service. But, that doesn't quite warrant showing an unrelated error message to confuse the user.

On that note, digging into Brave's source to see what exactly happens under the hood. And things are interesting to say the least. If you'd like to read up a bit more on what fingerprinting protection is, this one from Brave browser is a good place.

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