Echofon for Firefox – Authentication failed. Incorrect signature

For the past few days, Echofon for Firefox on my main desktop started acting funning, popping up an error dialog every second: Authentication failed. Incorrect signature

The only way to actually use Firefox was to quickly log off Twitter in between those error dialogs.

My laptop which also had Echofon did not experience this issue, so it doesn’t appear to be account related nor a global problem. I decided I would try to resolve the issue when I got home.

When I got home, I tried removing and re-adding my Twitter accounts from Echofon, revoking the OAuth access on Twitter’s website, and even clearing my cache and cookies without any success. Those darn annoying error dialogs always came back. A quick search online didn’t result in any quick solution either. Most people saw this error on their iPhone/iPad and associated it with some timing/clock issue. There were a few tweets that said they had the same issue on Firefox, but resolved it by removing and re-adding the account.

As a last measure, I decided to uninstall the addon and re-install it. Apparently that fixed it. Not sure if this solution will work for everyone, but worth a try.

Update: I believe I’ve found the culprit. This has to do with https. I was using HTTPS-Everywhere and the fact that HTTPS-Everywhere was enabled, but Echofon was told not to use SSL for Twitter made things go wacky. Go into Echofon preferences and enable “Use SSL for all requests”. Afterwards, I still had to uninstall and re-install the add-on for the error messages to go away. Maybe restarting Firefox would’ve worked too. Ben has confirmed below in the comments that you’ll just need to restart Firefox and the issue should go away. For folks hitting this issue, give it a try and let me know if it worked for you.

13 Replies to “Echofon for Firefox – Authentication failed. Incorrect signature”

  1. THANK YOU. I have tried everything short of the uninstall/reinstall solution but I felt like I was going crazy because no one else was having this problem with Firefox.

    The only other thing I noticed was that the problems started after I installed the latest Echofon update. I don’t know whether that was a cause or a coincidence.

    1. Same to me. I use Echofon/Firefox (latest update) on three computers and have the problem on one of them. Neither delete/reconfigure of the account data nor remove/reinstall of the plugin helps.

      1. I believe I’ve actually found the issue. I believe you’re probably using HTTPS-Everywhere. What you need to do is in Echofon preferences, enable “Use SSL for all requests”, save the setting, uninstall the add-on, and re-install it.

        Let me know if that works for you.

  2. Hi,

    Thanx a lot for this post. Since Firesheep I have been using the https everywhere addon and that was causing the problem. I have been looking everywhere and now Echofon works again. I like it so much because you can send tweets when you see something interesting on the internet.

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