X Account Hacked and Locked Behind Authenticator App

My X Account @SolarEnergyMaps Was Hacked and Locked by an Authenticator App — 10 Days Later, Still No Help

Ten days ago, my X (formerly Twitter) account was hacked. The attacker added an authenticator app I don’t control, changed the email address, and effectively locked me out of my own account. Despite filing multiple support requests, I still haven’t received a single response from X customer service. This ongoing silence is frustrating and deeply concerning.  

How the Hack Happened

The attack occurred without warning. I was logged out of my account, and when I attempted to log back in, I was prompted for a two-factor authentication (2FA) code from an app I had never set up. It was clear that the hacker had enabled a new authenticator app and locked me out completely.

The Recovery Process (Or Lack Thereof)

I followed the official protocol:

• Submitted the X Account Access Form
• Detailed my account handle, original email, and the nature of the hack
• Requested assistance specifically because I could not generate the 2FA codes

I have filed several emails and support tickets without any response. Not even an automated confirmation. It feels like I'm shouting into a void.

Why This Is a Big Problem

• 🔒 Lost Access to Important DMs and History: Years of communication, followers, and posts are now out of reach.
• 📉 Business Impact: If your account is tied to your brand or business, the loss can result in lost revenue or reputation damage.
• ⛔ No Clear Support Channel: X offers no phone number, no live chat, and no guaranteed response timeline.

Is There Any Way to Escalate?

Currently, there are limited options to escalate the issue:

• Re-submit the form using a different email address
• Tag @XSupport publicly in a post explaining your situation (results may vary)
• File a complaint with the FTC if your account is tied to business or financial activity

Protecting Yourself in the Future

This experience has been a wake-up call. To protect your online presence, consider:

• Using strong, unique passwords with a password manager
• Setting up 2FA yourself before hackers can
• Linking your account to a backup recovery method (phone/email)

Conclusion: X Needs Better Support

It’s unacceptable that users with legitimate, documented hacking cases can be ignored for more than 10 days. While X claims to support free speech and online expression, the complete lack of customer service for hacked users is alarming.

If you're facing the same issue, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, right now, all we can do is keep submitting forms and hope for a response that may never come.

Have you had a similar experience? Share your story, tag @XSupport, and help raise awareness about the need for reliable support on one of the world’s biggest platforms.

How Elon Musk is Fighting Social Media Censorship by Fact Checking

Elon Musk, a renowned entrepreneur and technology visionary, has taken a stand against social media censorship by championing the practice of fact-checking. 

How to Find Topics on Twitter Spaces on Desktop?

Twitter Spaces did not have an official catalog or directory

Why Does Gmail Think So Many Emails Are Spam?

 

If Gmail consistently marks legitimate emails as spam, there are a few possible reasons for this behavior. Gmail employs various algorithms and filters to automatically detect and filter out spam emails. However, these filters may occasionally generate false positives, mistakenly categorizing legitimate emails as spam. Here are some factors that can contribute to Gmail's spam detection:

Content Analysis: Gmail's spam filters analyze the content of emails to identify potential spam indicators. This includes looking for specific keywords, phrases, or patterns commonly found in spam messages. If your emails contain certain elements that trigger these filters, they may be marked as spam.

Sender Reputation: Gmail considers the reputation of the sender's email address or domain when determining whether an email is spam or not. If the sender's email address or domain has been associated with spam in the past or has a poor reputation, it can result in legitimate emails being flagged as spam.

User Feedback: Gmail takes user feedback into account when assessing email deliverability. If a significant number of users mark emails from a particular sender as spam or move them to the spam folder, Gmail's filters may learn to categorize similar emails as spam.

Authentication and Encryption: Emails that lack proper authentication, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), may be more likely to be treated as spam. Similarly, emails that are not encrypted using TLS (Transport Layer Security) may receive higher scrutiny from spam filters.

If you find that Gmail consistently marks legitimate emails as spam, here are a few steps you can take:

Check the Spam Folder: Make sure to regularly review your Gmail spam folder and mark legitimate emails as "Not Spam." This helps Gmail learn that those emails are not unwanted.

Whitelist Senders: Add the email addresses or domains of legitimate senders to your Gmail Contacts or create filters to ensure their emails are not marked as spam.

Request Whitelisting: If you are a sender and notice that your emails are consistently marked as spam by Gmail, you can ask your recipients to add your email address to their contacts or whitelist your domain to improve email deliverability.

Review Email Content: Avoid using language, formatting, or content that resembles typical spam messages. Ensure that your emails are well-written, relevant, and personalized to reduce the chances of them being marked as spam.

Remember that Gmail's spam filters continually learn and adapt based on user feedback and new spam patterns. By actively managing your inbox, providing feedback, and following best practices, you can help improve Gmail's accuracy in distinguishing between spam and legitimate emails.what these companies are doing today is based on the influence of money and not the public good. 

Does the FCC regulate or do anything about SPAM phone calls?  Not really we get tons of spam phone calls daily.   There are ways to prevent spam phone calls but do they even work?  Are spam phone calls driving you insane? 

If you are small and are trying to send emails to people you don't know you are screwed and your email is likely to go into a spam folder.  Don't waste your time! 

The Role of Social Hiring and Social Intelligence in Quality Employee Recruitment

As more companies continue to leverage technology to improve efficiency and service delivery, human resource managers are also using social media platforms to recruit the best employees. The term social recruiting refers to the process of hiring potential candidates through the use of social media profiles. Social hiring gives the hiring team a background information check of the potential candidate without interfering with his/her privacy.

Today, more and more companies are adopting social hiring concept as their new way of hiring employees. By using popular social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, hiring managers can find the best top-cream candidate on the market for a specific job vacancy.

Social hiring is beneficial to the recruiting team in many ways including:

• It gives comprehensive background information about a potential employee to ascertain his/her integrity. It helps you review and flag any user-generated content regarding racism, acts of violence, illegal activities or even sexually explicit materials.

• Getting candidate with the best skills and experience faster

• It takes less time to hire a potential candidate as compared to the conventional method of recruiting

• Social hiring helps in increasing quality employees' referrals to potential recruiters

As a recruiter, it's essential that you understand the social hiring concept better to save time and target the right potential candidates. To achieve this, you must ensure that you are using the right keywords at any given social media platform to filter more relevant data.

Also, there are various social platforms that deal with specific types of professionals. For instance, if you want to recruit a graphic designer, there are specific social platforms such as Dribble that deal with graphic designers only.

Joining useful social media groups and applications can also help recruiters find qualified candidates faster. Different social media platforms have different groups and boards where one can join and filter the right candidate for the job.

Social Intelligence Hiring

Social intelligence concept helps organizations in hiring a large number of employees at all levels faster and at a low cost per hire. With this concept, the recruiter can get the best candidates who are up and running.

Social intelligence hiring focuses on hiring candidates based on their self-mastery skills, innovative, interpersonal skills, reasoning, applied technical knowledge, influencing ability, passion for work, resilience and affecting ability.

These innovative hiring methods help recruiters hire all-round candidates who are not only passionate about the job but, with uncompromised integrity. The risk of wrong hiring is also low compared to the traditional hiring methods.

Social intelligence hiring is also very useful when it comes to hiring employees who will be charged with key decision-makers in any organization. It helps recruiters, select managers, with abundant real-time experience and inputs that can be absorbed immediately after the hiring process.

These innovative modern hiring methods are ideal for startups and large companies looking for multiple hires. It takes a lot of time for companies to recruit large numbers of staff using the traditional hiring methods but with the adoption of social intelligence and social hiring concepts, recruiters can now get qualified candidates within the shortest time possible.

It's the high time that companies appreciate the importance of these new recruiting concepts and take advantage of social platforms to hire the best employees who are equipped with the required skills and experience.

Insta360 VR Live Stream 360 Degree Camera is Awesome!

Insta360 unveiling new Virtual Reality camera at CES 2017 https://t.co/vmms5fkA4s

— Can Bal (@canbal) January 5, 2017

What a great way to broadcast a your kid's game or an event to family and friends who cannot attend?  Would love to hear your feedback on the camera quality.

You can stream the video on a 4G network and also using WiFI.  4K video at 25 to 30 frames per second.  Available for Android, iPad and iPhone.

Here is a video of the Director of AR and VR for Twitter talking about the product.  

Why AT&T or Verizon Should Buy Twitter

U.S. wireless carrier Verizon is reportedly among a handful of other contenders (probably AT&T) are considering buying social media Twitter.  The renewed speculation around a potential Twitter deal comes as Verizon attempts to navigate its way through a headache at Yahoo, which recently revealed a hack that impacted more than 500 million accounts. Reuters reported. As of yet, it remains unclear what the breach will mean for the Verizon-Yahoo deal.

However, we think AT&T or Verizon should buy Twitter because in my view the carriers provide the worst customer service on the planet compared to any industry.  Twitter in my view could be a much better customer service tool vs a social media tool.  It can be much quicker to get a response versus calling support which typically doesn't help much. Carriers get thousands of Tweets per day to their customer support Twitter handles.  See all the Tweets at Verizon and AT&T customers service in real time below.

Tweets about @vzwsupport
Tweets about @attcares

J.D. Power Call Quality Performance Study

I question the size, qualification and transparency of survey participants in this latest J.D. Power Call Quality study. I have many questions with regards to the relevance of the latest wireless study from a survey that only reaches 27,754 customers. The headline of the study says, "The Gap in Call Quality Performance among Carriers Narrows" when they have only surveyed .011% of the 260,000,000 million U.S. mobile phone users (Wikipedia).

The 2009 JD Power Wireless Call Quality Performance Study—Volume 1 is based on responses from 27,754 wireless customers. The study was fielded between July and December 2008. The semi-annual study measures wireless call quality based on seven problem areas that impact overall carrier performance: dropped calls; static/interference; failed connection on the first try; voice distortion; echoes; no immediate voicemail notification; and no immediate text message notification.

I would bet a large portion of the 27,754 survey participants are college students or people out of work looking to make an extra buck. Does that qualify them to take such as survey just because they have the extra time on their hands? I think this study could provide more value to consumers and carriers if they were to actually survey those customers who were actually having coverage problems in the past and could reference specific improvements in their local network. It's actually quite easy to find disgruntaled wireless customers if you simply do a Twitter search on "AT&T Coverage", "Verizon Coverage", "Sprint Coverage", "T-Mobile Coverage" or go to Deadcellzones.com. I think the big carriers need to start doing a better job of sourcing customer service information from customers and companies like DeadCellZones.com can help.

In general call quality has likely improved but where, when, on what devices and for whom? What value does that provide to consumers who are still having 3G data issues with their iPhone's etc. If you missed that latest call qualify woes for AT&T at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin see this article in CNET, Geeks depart, but AT&T's SXSW coverage sucks.

The study also reveals interesting trends on calling activity: 52% of all wireless calls are made indoors today, while only 40% of calls in 2003 were made indoors. 30% of wireless calls take place at home, 12% at work, and 10% inside other structures, such as shopping malls. In 2009, the average number of text message notifications per month is nearly 100—more than double the amount reported just 1 year ago of 47.

How Much Does AT&T Charge for Text Message Overage?

Going over your 1000 text message limit will cost you .10 cents extra per message.  Text messaging costs the average AT&T customer $10 per month for 1000 text messages whether you use them or not. $20 per month will get you the unlimited Domestic text plan. It doesn't sound like a lot until you go over your text messaging limit which can add up or if you send International text messages.  Domestic text rates do not apply for International text messages. Charges for international messages sent from the U.S. are $0.25 for Text Messages and $0.50 for Picture/Video Messages. Charges for usage while roaming internationally: $0.50 for each text message sent, $1.30 for each picture/video message sent, and $0.0195 for each kilobyte used. Standard rates apply to all incoming messages as well.

We estimate that each wireless custom free generates .33 cents in revenue per day for text messages which is roughly a $10 billion dollar per year business for AT&T or $30 million dollars per day.  Its also pretty ironic that AT&T (NYSE: T) pays $10 billion dollars per year in dividends

.  Coincidence or a house of cards that is wait to fall?  Here are 10 other reasons why charging for text messaging is a scam.

What if you could save $60 - $240 per year in text messages with free text messaging services?  The average AT&T customer sends out 621 text messages per month which are approximately 20 messages per day.  The cost of text messaging is .33 cents per day which do not sound like a lot.  Free text messaging is growing with companies like Facebook, Google Voice and Apple getting into the game.  Our thesis is that the handset and software manufacturers Apple, Google & Microsoft will soon be getting into the data delivery business and will be subsiding messaging with mobile advertisements.  

Watching Facebook Mobile Live Innovations

Facebook Live Innovations Streaming is Pretty Cool

This is a great tool for Facebook to help explain their products and explain their API for mobile.  Its encouraging to see that 6,000+ people are viewing this but I only found out about it watching Engadget and Tech Crunch.  Facebook needs to do a better job of posting an agenda and promoting that the conference even exists.  I subscribe to all of the mobile blogs and didn't hear a word about it.  Facebook mobile should be their number one priority considering its a $1B business for Google.  Does Facebook have the right marketing people running the business or did they deliberately keep it a small event for select press?  Mark Zuckerberg promoted the fact that they only have a handful of people working on the various apps they promoted.  

False Advertising of Cell Service Availability

David (deadzones.com) vs. Goliath (carriers)

After some increased blogger and social media exposure in rural areas of the US, we have started to notice a groundswell data from customers located in smaller US cities who are falling victim to continued false advertising from mainly the bigger carriers Verizon and AT&T.  We have decided to focus our efforts and begin exposing these areas more prominently in our blog and on Twitter @deadzones to show where consumers are getting screwed.  Our goal is to raise the level of exposure in these neglected smaller cities in order to help improve service in the local area.  The following towns and cities are just some of the areas listed on dead zones map in the last 90 days that specifically highlight that Verizon's Coverage Map is making false claims.

Where Do Verizon's Coverage Maps Lie?
Olinda, California - "No service Verizon even though the coverage map says excellent coverage"
Gresham, Michigan - "Dead zone your coverage maps are a lie"
Bridger, Montana - "Map shows coverage, the whole town is a dead zone."
Madison, North Carolina - "How does Verizon get away with their coverage maps that certainly do not reflect actual coverage???"
Lake Mack Forrest Hills, Florida  - "Bad inside and outside. It was the same with Sprint, but Sprint's coverage map showed I would have trouble Verizon's coverage map shows I should have a full signal. Verizon wants to blame the phone I am using they are FOS."

Verizon Consumer Generated Coverage Map

Why have we picked on Verizon? Because they are the most aggressive about hyping their coverage maps and someone needs to make them accountable to their claims. We will get to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others as well in due time. Here are links to other carriers coverage maps that we recommend you check before claiming their coverage maps lie on our site: AT&T Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, Tracfone, Alltel, US Cellular, Cricket Comm, Qwest Wireless, Metro PCS