I haven’t been following the recent twatter drama all the closely. After Musk pulled out I somewhat lost interest, but other people told me things were not so simple.
CNBC:
A whistleblower is alleging “extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter” related to privacy, security and content moderation, according to complaints filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.
The complaints, obtained by CNBC, were filed by nonprofit law firm Whistleblower Aid, which is representing Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko. Whistleblower Aid, which also represented Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, verified the authenticity of the documents with CNBC.
Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security.
Shares of Twitter were down more than 5% in morning trading.
In a complaint with the SEC, Zatko alleges that he “witnessed senior executive engaging in deceitful and/or misleading communications affecting Board members, users and shareholders” on multiple occasions in 2021, during which CEO Parag Agrawal asked Zatko to provide false and misleading documents.
I wrote about Parag Agrawal when he was parachuted to the twitter CEO position by none other than famous vulture capitalist (((Paul Singer))). It does not surprise me in the slightest that he’s been asking the underlings to engage in unethical behaviour. After all, he’s there to do the dirty work that the Paul Singer’s of the World want done, but don’t want to be responsible for.
The whistleblower complaint mentions misrepresentations by Twitter to Elon Musk, who is locked in a legal battle seeking to back out of a deal to purchase the social media company, over the Tesla CEO’s “doubts on the accuracy of Twitter’s claim in legal findings that <5% of accounts are ‘bots,’ or automated spam accounts.”
This was all from three days ago. I saw it at the time, and thought very little of it. Fast forward until today, or perhaps yesterday depending on when you read this.
“The claim being made that Twitter is substantially infested with bot accounts and interactions, which skews the actual value offered by the company, is bolstered by these allegations,” said Dr. Christopher Whyte, assistant professor in the homeland security and emergency preparedness program in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University.”And the claim that the company just doesn’t care about cutting back on bot access particularly plays in Musk’s favor.
Though the issues of bots is serious, “it’s the second complaint, however, that may prove more important in the long run,” said Mike Chapple, IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and author of Cyberwarfare: Information Operations in a Connected World.
“Zatko, a highly respected cybersecurity professional, alleges that Twitter’s infrastructure runs out-of-date software and contains massive security vulnerabilities,” said Chapple, who is also a former computer scientist at the National Security Agency (NSA). “If true, this is the type of security issue that can easily lead to a major security incident. Unpatched software was the root cause behind the massive Equifax data breach in 2017 and thousands of smaller breaches that occur every year. A single critical vulnerability in the wrong system could provide the foothold that an attacker needs to wage a highly successful attack.”
Elon Musk, while kind of a retard, is fun, and this twitter saga is turning into a lot more fun that I originally anticipated.
Having said that, this article is labeled “tech companies,” and yet no tech companies are mentioned. You might think twitter is a tech company, but it isn’t. In reality twitter is just a shitty website in a winner take all market. What they do can be done by third year computer science students as a semester project.
The value of twitter is entirely the userbase, not the utterly pedestrian technology behind it or anything else, which is why it is so comically absurd for koshervatives to be out there spinning their fake libertarian bullshit about how trillion dollar multinationals should be allowed to censor whomever they want. The reality is that they aren’t just a bad tech company, their technology is out of date even for shitty websites. But no one can come along and outcompete them, because the value is the userbase. Until such time as political change occurs, you are unlikely to get a twitter account again, assuming such thing would be a productive use of your time in the first place.
In the meantime Rosenblatt is big mad with twitter stock value.
I say let the twats who twatter on anti-social media get their panties bunched.
Let them be concerned about this and lose sleep, or more importantly lose REM (dream) sleep, speaking of which REM was a real twat band – how obnoxious can you get? Well there’s U2, green day, a whole lot of whining twats and I digress. I was gonna get into what they dream about but it get’s too sick to talk about and frankly who cares?
From what I can tell, Twitter is riddled with street shitters, both the rank & file and in management — these people are mediocrities, the type who won’t rock the boat since living in America is better than living in India — so they don’t want to take any risk, and will go along with anything — the worst and most unethical people I’ve worked with in high tech have all been Asians, including Indians.
To point out the obvious: Twitter isn’t a real company that produces anything of value — it’s just a shell, a holding company for an entity that hopes to sell enough advertising to earn a profit — it’s literally the same for all of these ‘social media’ companies — it’s all a ridiculous bubble of ‘new economy’ bullshit that will collapse eventually.