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Twitter Says Parts of Its Source Code Were Leaked Online

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According to court documents, portions of the software code that runs Twitter were stolen online, posing the biggest challenge for the social networking platform since Elon Musk’s turbulent $44 billion acquisition of the business late the year before.

Twitter
Image Source: upi.com

According to the documents, on March 24, Twitter served a lawsuit on the website GitHub after discovering that a user going by the name “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” had uploaded unauthorized portions of Twitter’s source code there.

Also Read: Twitter to Begin Culling Legacy Verified Marks From April 1

According to Twitter’s legal representative, the aim of the lawsuit is to locate the person who distributed the code. The paperwork was received by The U.S. District Court, Northern District, California.

The firm told CNBC that GitHub responded to Twitter’s request & erased the code the following day. As per a corporate representative, in the spirit of openness, the business discloses all DMCA takedowns, which happen when something is taken down from a site at the demand of a copyright owner.

Comment requests from Twitter did not right away receive a response.

Musk has already asserted that on March 31 Twitter will make the code used to suggest tweets publicly available. He claimed that he anticipates that people would discover silly problems and that initially disclosing the source code will be very embarrassing.

“Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things, but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found! We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source. Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.” He said in a tweet.

Source: shrty.rf.gd

“GitHub does not generally comment on decisions to remove content. However, in the interest of transparency, we share every DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedown request publicly,” a GitHub spokesperson told the BBC.

Source: bbc.com

Also Read: Google begins opening access to its ChatGPT competitor Bard

Elon Musk, a billionaire who purchased Twitter last October for $44 billion and afterward took the firm private, faces new difficulties as a result of the leak. Ever since it has descended into disarray as a result of widespread layoffs and the exodus of advertising.

As per documents disclosed in a congressional report, the Federal Trade Commission is looking into Musk’s mass firings at Twitter and attempting to access his private communications as a part of its ongoing investigation into the social networking firm’s privacy as well as cybersecurity practices.

Tesla

Tesla Could Start Making Cars in Mexico Next Year, Governor Says

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Tesla corporation may start manufacturing cars next year in Mexico, with the electric vehicle manufacturer near to receiving final approvals enabling factory development to start in Nuevo Leon, adjacent to the US-Mexico boundary, the governor of the state stated on Monday.

Tesla
Image Source: mexico-now.com

“They are waiting for the final permits … once that’s done, they can start, hopefully, this very month, in March,” Nuevo Leon Governor Samuel Garcia said in an interview.

“I think by next year, in 2024, there will be the first autos.”

Source: reuters.com

Also Read: Tesla’s ‘Master Plan’ Fails to Impress Investors: What Went Wrong?

A request for clarification was not promptly returned by the firm.

 Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, officially confirmed the financing the other week, asserting the Austin,  company based in Texas had chosen Mexico to build its next “gigafactory,” with the goal of manufacturing a “next-generation vehicle.” 

Also Read: Germany planning to ban Huawei, ZTE from parts of 5G networks

Mexican officials have stated that the manufacturing company will be the world’s largest for producing electric vehicles, with an investment of 5 billion dollars. 

Garcia stated that future stages of the plant could include the manufacture of parts such as chips & batteries.

“That’s why they bought a very large plot of land,” he added.

Source: reuters.com

According to the city politician, the location in Santa Catarina, close to the state capital of Monterrey, extends so many thousand acres.

Garcia stated that the funding would act as an “anchor” hoping to attract Tesla distributors and that the approval granted after the latter showed concerns about water scarcity, sent a positive signal to other potential investors. to Tesla Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who is the President of Mexico. 

“It’s like a kind of guide, that when they want to come set up here, it’s very important they follow the law,” he said, noting he had sent Lopez Obrador technical memos about the state’s industrial water supply.

“The president, by authorizing and backing Tesla, sent a message to the world that they should come to Mexico.”

Source: reuters.com

Also Read: Taiwan’s TSMC to recruit 6,000 engineers in 2023

It is anticipated that by 2025, 20 percent of all emerging world car sales would be electric, increasing to 40 percent by 2030. As per investment bank UBS, nearly all cars worldwide sales will be electric by 2040. According to a Thomson Reuters study, even if all sales of new cars are electric by 2040, half of the cars on the roads will still be fueled by gasoline or diesel.

Twitter

Twitter Cuts More Engineering, and Product Jobs to Curb Costs

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Twitter Corporation fired more employees late Saturday in a new round of cost-cutting measures at the social media corporation presently controlled by Elon Musk.

As per individuals acquainted with the matter, the layoffs affected staff members across the corporation, such as engineering as well as the product. Some employees were informed of their dismissal via email late Saturday, according to the sources, while others learned of their dismissal when they were unable to enter the internal network.

Twitter
Image Source: gulfbusiness.com

It’s uncertain how many staff members were affected, but dozens, according to sources. The Information priorly stated that more than 50 people had been laid off.

Read More: Twitter to start charging developers for API access

Outside of normal working hours, Twitter did not reply to a request for comment from Bloomberg News.

Esther Crawford who was one of the chief executive officers of Twitter Blue, the app’s subscription plan, was one of the employees let go, Platformer’s Zoe Schiffer disclosed in a tweet on Sunday.

In the days that followed Musk’s acquisition of Twitter last year, she famously posted on Twitter a famous post that staff members will often have to #SleepWhereYouWork to stay on schedule and fulfill deadlines.

Crawford wasn’t quick to react to a comment request which was sent out after normal business hours.

A few young entrepreneurs who entered Twitter through takeovers in recent years, along with the founders of the newsletter enterprise Revue as well as the design company Ueno, wrote on Twitter on Sunday that they, too, had been fired.

Originally, Twitter avoided laying off founders to avoid having to accelerate the disbursement of greater stock grants, according to people who are acquainted with the business.

According to three persons acquainted with the compensation packages, several pioneers got additional compensation packages as a result of the purchase of their businesses, presumably raising the cost to fire them off because their stock and incentives are compensated out.

Read More: Will Twitter now start charging for SMS two-factor authentication?

Saturday’s other round of job cuts was the biggest as Mr. Elon Musk informed staff members in late November at a meeting held internally that there were no further intentions for job cuts.

The layoffs accompanied a widespread layoff at the start of November when Mr. Elon Musk fired roughly half of Twitter’s working population just a week after taking over the corporation.

Elon Musk cut over 3,700 job positions at Twitter the previous year, which represents fifty percent of the firm’s workforce, in an attempt at cost reduction succeeding his $44 billion takeover.

two-factor authentication

Will Twitter now start charging for SMS two-factor authentication?

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According to Twitter’s announcement on Friday, only Twitter Blue subscribers will have access to text messages as a two-factor authentication process.

The change will happen on March 20. Two additional free options for Twitter log-in authentication will be available to users: a security key and an authentication mobile app.

two-factor authentication
Image Source: techspot.com

Users that utilize two-factor authentication, or 2FA, must first input their password and then a security code to access their accounts. This is one of the main ways users keep their Twitter accounts secure.

Also Read: Why suddenly are Twitter feeds flooded with Elon Musk’s tweets?

The company noted, “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately, we have seen phone-number-based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers.”

Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue get a blue checkmark on their account. For Android and iOS users, the monthly subscription fee is $11. According to a Twitter account security assessment, only 2.6% of Twitter users had 2FA activated as of 2021, and of those, 74.4% used SMS authentication.

Nonsubscribers of Twitter Blue will have 30 days to stop utilizing the text authentication option and join up for another 2FA sign-in option, according to Twitter. According to Twitter, deactivating text message 2FA won’t immediately separate the user’s mobile number from their account. Musk replied “Yup” to a tweet that claimed Twitter lost $60 million annually “to Pump 2FA SMS”.

SIM hacking—where “bad actors” obtain access to users’ accounts by taking their phone numbers and impersonating them to be them—is a widespread occurrence, making the SMS method one of the least secure kinds of two-factor authentication. In 2019, the method was used to effectively hack Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter.

Also Read: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down after nine years

One user commented that they “don’t think the site has had a single positive change” after Elon acquired it for $44 billion and seized control of the massive social media corporation. Online reactions have varied from amazement to dismissal.

Musk stated earlier this week via video conference at the Global Government Summit in Dubai that he is still considering leaving his position as Twitter’s CEO and “guesses” he will find a successor before the end of 2023. Musk stated. “I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out.

I’m guessing probably towards the end of the year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company. I think it should be in a stable position at the end of this year.”

Twitter

Why suddenly are Twitter feeds flooded with Elon Musk’s tweets?

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Since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in October, users of Twitter have been paying closer attention to him. It seems like some people can only see Musk on Twitter right now.

Some Twitter users discovered on Monday that, with the exception of the occasional promotional message, their “For You” feeds on the social media platform were stuffed with tweets and responses from the tech mogul, some of which were several days old.

Twitter
Image Source: businessinsider.in

People complained that recent tweets from accounts that don’t follow Musk were flooding their feeds. In a tweet sent out early on Tuesday, Musk appeared to recognize the problem, writing: “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm’.”

Also Read: iPhone 15 and 15 Plus to get redesigned camera. What to expect?

Musk tweeted on Sunday that he had worked hard all day long at Twitter headquarters with the technical team to fix two problems. First off, up to 95% of his tweets were not delivered at all since the “Fanout service” for the “Following” feed was overloaded when he tweeted. Several users’ queued tweets were also ruined by this problem.

Second, the Recommendation method used an absolute block count rather than a percentage block count, which resulted in the deletion of accounts with a large number of followers even when blocks represented only 0.1% of followers and made it “simple” to bot spam profiles with blocks.

This change comes in response to Musk’s criticism that his tweets were not getting enough views, which led him to temporarily make his account private and even sack an engineer because of it. It appears that a number of right-wing profiles that Musk engages with also saw a decrease in their reach as a result of some algorithmic modifications made by Twitter.

The oddity occurs less than a week after users of the social network reported a number of widespread issues affecting their use of the platform on February 8. Users lost access to direct messages, received error messages stating they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets,” and had to schedule tweets before posting them.

The same day, Twitter made the announcement that it will begin charging $100 each month for a “basic tier” to utilize its API, which programmers and researchers use to examine public tweets.

Also Read: What is the new RGB lighting feature in Windows 11?

On February 10, Twitter also made it possible for US Twitter Blue members to send tweets with 4,000 characters instead of the standard 280.

Many who use the network have taken offense at Musk’s decision to charge for services that are generally free, particularly because the modifications are made quickly and without much notice. In an attempt to give users the coveted blue checkmark, Twitter launched an upgraded verification system last year, but it failed.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk Forced Algorithm Change to Help Boost His Tweets

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As per Platformer, Elon Musk made Twitter Corporation professionals work late on Sunday to change his social network’s algorithm and take priority in his tweets, giving rise to a flood of them appearing in users’ feeds on Monday.

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is believed to be dissatisfied with the number of individuals who saw his Super Bowl Twitter post.

According to Platformer, as a consequence of Musk’s requirement, Twitter exempted Musk’s Twitter posts from filters intended to enhance the quality of consumers’ timelines and artificially increased those by a factor of 1,000. On the day after Super Bowl, users on Twitter made complaints about receiving an influx of the owner’s tweets.

Also Read: Elon Musk to unveil Tesla’s ‘Master Plan 3.’ What to expect for us?

Musk explained his group in person late on Sunday night. Around 80 individuals were brought into it to assist with the project, which had quickly already become the firm’s primary concern. Employees worked all night to explore specific theories as to why Musk’s Twitter posts weren’t attaining quite so many persons as he assumed they should and also to test alternative solutions.

James Musk sent an important message to Twitter staff at 2:36 on Monday morning.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem? This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

Source: theverge.com

Musk’s affirmation of his backing for the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday gained tremendously less involvement than a similar message from US Vice President Joe Biden. According to the report, the firm has become increasingly interested in and also infuriated by his interaction figures, which have begun declining in recent weeks.

Also Read: Twitter to start charging developers for API access

Musk seems to have almost 129 million followers on Twitter, while Joe Biden has 37 million. Before actually taking the business private in a 44 billion USD agreement in October, Tesla Corporation CEO Elon Musk stated that he wanted to equalize the playing field as well as reduce bias in the structure.

Twitter did not reply instantly to an emailed inquiry for clarification. Musk tweeted regarding Twitter as well as its features just after the report was published, but he did not address its material. He had previously tweeted a meme implying that his tweets would be forced-fed to Twitter users. He also stated that the algorithm was being tweaked by the company.