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Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

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Though admittedly of small import, I decided to leave Twitter last night, cold turkey.

For now, I’m on Post.news @fasteddieb. Also signed up for Mastodon, but having trouble getting the app to work properly, so I’m concentrating on Post.news for now.

Like I said, small import, but I virtually always had my Twitter feed open on the right of a split view on my iPad. I’m sure I’ll adjust, and I’ve already found many of the folks I followed on Twitter over on Post.news and have followed them there.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
Though admittedly of small import, I decided to leave Twitter last night, cold turkey.

For now, I’m on Post.news @fasteddieb. Also signed up for Mastodon, but having trouble getting the app to work properly, so I’m concentrating on Post.news for now.

Like I said, small import, but I virtually always had my Twitter feed open on the right of a split view on my iPad. I’m sure I’ll adjust, and I’ve already found many of the folks I followed on Twitter over on Post.news and have followed them there.
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Have to wonder how Mastodon will do. Not tried it, but the very fact that people seem to always be asking about how to even use it suggests it will have no chance against Twitter, or some alternative.

The fact is that open-source stuff which involves any knowledge at all is going to fail compared to something that is extremely intuitive like Twitter.
 
The single biggest opportunity Post has to bring in a wave of users...and they stick you on a waiting list for access. I agree with most of the criticisms about the other Twitter alternatives like Mastadon and CounterSocial in terms of user-friendliness, but at least I can use them right now.
 
MinnesotaBrant said:
That thing with the stalker and his kid sounds fake
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It's hard to tell. Something like that might have happened, but assuredly not because of the flight account on Twitter.

That being said, Musk is completely and entirely full of **** so there's a higher than average chance it's entirely bull ****.
 
MinnesotaBrant said:
That thing with the stalker and his kid sounds fake
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I'm leaning towards this as well. Here's the scenario that makes sense to me. Granted, there's a bit of speculation here and there.

1. There's some event involving some random driver and the car Elon's son is in, probably minor road rage or a fender bender.
2. Somewhere in the telephone game to Musk's ear, it gets exaggerated into a stalker physically attacking the car.
3. Musk overreacts and bans the jet account, utterly convinced that this is where it stemmed from (even though this is impossible).
4. As Musk starts to calm down, he realizes that the incident wasn't as bad as he initially stated.
5. Reporters start to fact check his "stalker" theory, and show evidence that conflicts with his story.
6. Musk panics and tries to shut them up rather than admit that he was wrong.
 
Can we just skip ahead to the part where he sells Twitter for fractional pennies on the dollar to some tech giant?
 
kookbreaker said:
Can we just skip ahead to the part where he sells Twitter for fractional pennies on the dollar to some tech giant?
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That becomes the question though, who would even want it? Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately, but none of it is good. Everything that's come out since Musk's takeover has been absolutely terrible. Musk is putting together a master class on how to look like a complete and total dip **** while driving a business into the ground.

Honestly, it's his (mostly at least) money. If this is how he wants to spend it then more power to him. If any tech giant does buy it, though, it'll be for the infrastructure, and from what I've read even that is aging.

My prediction is Musk will eventually run it into the ground, and that'll be that. At first, as someone else has said, I thought it would take awhile, but Musk is speeding up that timeline right now.
 
plague311 said:
That becomes the question though, who would even want it? Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately, but none of it is good. Everything that's come out since Musk's takeover has been absolutely terrible. Musk is putting together a master class on how to look like a complete and total dip **** while driving a business into the ground.

Honestly, it's his (mostly at least) money. If this is how he wants to spend it then more power to him. If any tech giant does buy it, though, it'll be for the infrastructure, and from what I've read even that is aging.

My prediction is Musk will eventually run it into the ground, and that'll be that. At first, as someone else has said, I thought it would take awhile, but Musk is speeding up that timeline right now.
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The highlighted. I think you mean dysfunctional.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683/twitter-whistleblower-disclosure.pdf
Page 26
54 Twitter did not actively monitor what employees were doing on their computers. Although against policy, it was commonplace for people to install whatever software they wanted on their work systems. Twitter employees were repeatedly found to be intentionally installing spyware on their work computers at the request of external organizations. Twitter learned of this several times only by accident, or because of employee self-reporting. In other words, in addition to a large portion of the employee computers having software updates disabled, system firewalls turned off, and remote desktop enabled for non-approved purposes, it was repeatedly demonstrated that until Twitter leadership would stumble across end-point (employee computer) problems, external people or organizations had more awareness of activity on some Twitter employee computers than Twitter itself had.
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A fundamental engineering and security principle is that access to live production environments should be limited as much as possible. Engineers should mostly work in separate development, test, and/or staging environments, using test data (not live customer data). Over a decade prior, companies like Google moved development to segregated test systems. But at Twitter, engineers built, tested, and developed new software directly in production with access to live customer data and other sensitive information in Twitter's system. This ongoing arrangement, almost unheard of at modern tech companies, causes repeated problems for Twitter in bad software deployments and significantly reduces the work an attacker needs to do to acquire credentials with extremely sensitive access. Twitter's practice was a huge red flag for job candidates, who universally expressed disbelief. One particular candidate for Vice President of Information Technology considered withdrawing his application on the (accurate) rationale that Twitter's lack of basic engineering hygiene in their arrangement presaged major headaches.
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"51% of the ~11 thousand full-time employees had privileged access to Twitter's production system"

Some of whom were installing spyware at the behest of other organisations (see above)
b. Access control to systems and data: On the issue that led to the FTC complaint in 2011 and the July 2020 hack,90 the materials did not contain the overall numbers, which were getting worse. Instead, the materials took a small, cherry-picked subset of data that could be made to look like a positive trend, and turned that into a graph with a downward trajectory. The graph misleadingly suggesting that Twitter was making significant progress in reducing access to production systems. Mudge knew that the actual underlying data showed that at the end of 2021, 51% of the ~11 thousand full-time employees had privileged access to Twitter's production systems, a 5% increase from the 46% of total employees in February of 2021 that Mudge had shared in his initial findings delivered to the Board in early 2021.
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And quite a lot more.
 
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MinnesotaBrant said:
That thing with the stalker and his kid sounds fake
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Honestly it doesn't matter what, if anything, happened. Someone sharing publicly available information regarding Elon Musks private jet has absolutely nothing to do with his child being subject to a "crazy stalker".

All it shows is that Elon Musk is a terribly inconsistent and highly arbitrary in how he personally and directly chooses to moderate Twitter. Incredibly unprofessional.
 
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plague311 said:
That becomes the question though, who would even want it? Twitter has been getting a lot of attention lately, but none of it is good. Everything that's come out since Musk's takeover has been absolutely terrible. Musk is putting together a master class on how to look like a complete and total dip **** while driving a business into the ground.

Honestly, it's his (mostly at least) money. If this is how he wants to spend it then more power to him. If any tech giant does buy it, though, it'll be for the infrastructure, and from what I've read even that is aging.

My prediction is Musk will eventually run it into the ground, and that'll be that. At first, as someone else has said, I thought it would take awhile, but Musk is speeding up that timeline right now.
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The only thing inconsistent with the theory that this is a purposeful tanking of a forum that has been essentially a lifeline for investigative journalism and general dissent is that wow that's a lot of money.

Monied interests have been mucking about in that space. Buying up media and defanging it if not co-opting it.

Dark money is hard to trace and who knows what guarantees and whatnot are out there. Maybe not some concerted plan but the idea that really powerful people would rather twitter be useless for those purposes and if it totally goes under it's money well spent isn't outlandish.

But that is an awful lot of money.
 
Arcade22 said:
Honestly it doesn't matter what, if anything, happened. Someone sharing publicly available information regarding Elon Musks private jet has absolutely nothing to do with his child being subject to a "crazy stalker".

All it shows is that Elon Musk is a terribly inconsistent and highly arbitrary in how he personally and directly chooses to moderate Twitter. Incredibly unprofessional.
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As someone else on Twitter pointed out: It's really quaint how one of the big "scandals" of the Twitter Files was seeing that competent moderation staff were carefully deliberating how to handle the unthinkable scenario of a president trying to violently overturn an election. Compare that with Elon having a damn meltdown because people are making fun of him.
 
Aridas said:
Objection - The Drag Story times that have become a cultural flashpoint have NOTHING to do with porn. They're going after them because, in short, they feel that uniting via fear and hatred of the other will grant political advantage. There's obviously a lot more to it than just that, of course, but that's why it's actually a cultural flashpoint.
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To clarify: My point was that they think that drag queens and porn are the same because they are stupid.
 
"Musk, once the richest man in the world, sits at a desk in a dark room with his laptop scouring Twitter for content he doesn't like and personally banning people. Is reality falling apart, are have you entered The Twi..."

Rod Serling: "Whoa, whoooaa, don't look at me. You can't make this stuff up. Shut up and pass the popcorn"
 
Anyone have a few billion to help out poor Elmo?

From: The Verge
Musk is trying to get more investors for Twitter at the original $54.20 per share price he bought the company at...

So, Musk offers to buy Twitter, tries to back out of the deal before eventually agreeing to it, drives away millions of dollars in ad revenue, stops paying various twitter bills, tanks his own Tesla stock... and then asks people to invest in twitter at the same share price he admitted was too high.

I guess his only hope is some sort of Trumpian "angel investor" (like the one that bailed Trump out of a loan on Trump towers.)
 
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