There's a complete tit involved here all right.....

Trouble is, it's the tit who has decided that officially issuing critical warnings like this via something with as many gaping security holes in it as Tw@ter is a good idea.

Providing even the least talented s'kiddies with a cast-iron, gift-wrapped method of causing mass panic? Very clever I'm sure.

The tactics used may be reprehensible, but I doubt that any number of warnings as to the many risks involved in using something like Tw@ter as an official communication channel for critical information would have been taken quite as seriously as this has. Whatever the perpetrators' motives may have been, I reckon they may have done the good citizens of that part of the world a favour, assuming Andi Arief gets the obvious message....

Why on earth

would anyone choose to use twitter , or presumably facebook, for this sort of thing? If nothing else it depends on foreign infrastructure.

Local licenced radio and TV stations, and loudspeaker cars can't be hacked.