đŠđ„” Twitter is in HOT Water
Happy Sunday everyone! Hope you all are doing well.
Hereâs some news to brighten your day: a Canadian candy company is hiring a Chief Candy Officer to serve as head taste tester and try over 3,500 products each month. Applicants can be as young as 5 years old and must reside in North America. If chosen, you could make up to $100,000 Canadian dollars ($78,167.70 U.S. dollars) per year! Might have to give it a shot, and you know, get a bunch of cavities in the process.
In other news this week:
SpaceX and T-Mobile Plan to Link Starlink Satellites to Cellphones
T-Mobile and SpaceX announced that Starlink satellites launched next year will be able to connect directly to the carrierâs phones over existing cellular bands. The companies hope to enable global roaming wherever satellite coverage exists, and the service may potentially be added for free to existing T-Mobile plans.
âItâs a lot like putting a cellular tower in the sky, just a lot harder⊠Your phone doesnât really know itâs connecting for space. Itâll think itâs connected to a cell tower.â - Mike Sievert, T-Mobile CEO
Google Researchâs AI image noise reduction is crazyâŠ
In low light, taking a good photo can be almost impossible. But recently, Google Research released an open-source project called MultiNerf, which takes the raw image data and uses AI to figure out what the image âshouldâ look like without the noise generated by imaging sensors. Itâs hard to describe through words but to see how it works, check out the video here.
Netflix tests âgame handlesâ amid development of social gaming features
Netflix is developing features that would allow members to play its mobile games with one another and competitively rank themselves on gaming leaderboards. The news follows the recent reveal that Netflix has been hiring engineers and product managers with backgrounds in cloud gaming.
Jack Dorsey says his biggest regret is that Twitter was a company at all
The idea that Twitter should never have been a company might sound strange, but itâs possible that Dorsey doesnât really mean that the project should have never existed. Instead, he may be implying that he shouldâve steered Twitter towards being a decentralized entity rather than a company.
In April, Jack tweeted âI donât believe any individual or institutions should own social media, or more generally media companies. It should be an open and verifiable protocol. Everything is a step toward thatâ.
Twitter Whistleblower Drops Bomb
The Elon Musk vs. Twitter drama continues, as this week, a whistleblower sounded the alarm on Twitterâs handling of usersâ personal data.
Peiter Zatko, a longtime cybersecurity executive whoâs worked for DARPA, Google, Stripe, and Twitter, alleged there were âegregious deficienciesâ in Twitterâs defenses against hackers. For instance, Zatko claims that some of Twitterâs servers were running out-of-date software and that executives had withheld information about breaches and lack of protections for user data.
The whistle-blower document also alleged that Twitter prioritized growth over reducing the number of spam accounts, and even offered executives cash bonuses of as much as $10 million related to increasing the number of daily users.
Hereâs the catch with Zatko though: In January, he was fired for ineffective leadership and poor performance. According to Twitter, âZatkoâs allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders...â
But regardless, Zatkoâs allegations are pretty serious and if his claims are verified, Twitter would be in violation of a 2011 agreement with the FTC. Twitterâs 2011 settlement with the FTC banned the company for 20 years from âmisleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information.â
What does this all mean for the Elon Musk vs. Twitter case?
Elon has been arguing for a while that Twitterâs disclosures regarding spam/bot accounts were misleading. According to Elon, around a third of Twitterâs 230 million users could be bots (Twitter claims only 5% are bots).
According to Bloomberg, the whistle-blower report âonly marginally bolsters Muskâs case with Twitterâ. Muskâs central claim is that Twitter is misleading investors about its daily active users.
However, Zatko says that Twitter is âalready doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of DAU (daily active users).
Ultimately, itâll be up to the Delaware Chancery Court to decide whether Muskâs abandonment of the deal is justified, which is set to start on October 17th. But based on how Twitterâs stock has been moving since the initial announcement in April, it seems like the market believes that the deal wonât go through or will go through at a price lower than the originally agreed price of $54.20 per share.
Chart of the Week
Central banks around the world are getting involved in digital currencies, but some are further ahead than others. Government-issued digital currencies would have the same value as the local cash currency but instead, be issued digitally with no physical form.
They would also be controlled by a central bank and are likely to be easily trackable, which explains why China and Russia are among the few countries to have already launched a pilot program.