Vending machine tweets on your behalf when you buy a snack

Holly tweets every time someone at the Nottingham Hackspace in Nottingham, Britain, buys something from the vending machine. But Holly, counter her deceivingly humanoid name, is not some weird, passive-aggressive person tweet-shaming her colleagues about their snack choices. “She” is a computer server — and thanks to an ingenious hack by James Fowkes, she not only knows who buys snacks, but what they bought, when they bought it and how much they paid.

Now everyone will know about that Twix bar. A hackspace in the UK created a vending machine named Holly that tweets every single time someone gets a candy bar — and names the snacker (although not the snack of choice) by name. Unsurprisingly, the hackers at Nottingham Hackspace have started to rebel. “We have turned it off in recent weeks because people are arguing with it and getting quite angry that it was telling everybody that they were eating on a regular basis,” hacker James Fowkes told Computerphile in a video interview. Of course, this isn’t Twitter and vending machine’s first marriage.