- Apr 1, 2009
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Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may soon go through
- Thread starter Specter Von Baren
- Start date
couple of times already Elon has called in to Alex Jones show pretending to be merely a fan of his (a fan of elons, I mean: sad lol) when trying to defend some weird bullshit someone else on there has claimed, and not bothering to put on a different accent, etiquette or ideology -- however been having trouble finding any footage of either moments beside this video hosted by strangers covering the first where even David Icke was calling out the obvious duplicity, and 2 Knowledge Fight podcast episodes.
is poss my search engine query skills are just getting way worse. oooooorrrrrrrr.....
www.businessinsider.com
mashable.com
the myopic financial system can't even fulfill the foundational promise of improving quality of basic services for the end user while record profits andfucking monopolies market control funnel the capital to shareholders/CEOs instead of investing it back into the services.
is poss my search engine query skills are just getting way worse. oooooorrrrrrrr.....
Google is getting worse as it loses its fight against search engine spam
Aggressive SEO tactics are ruining search results on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, a team of researchers in Germany says.
www.businessinsider.com
It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse
A new study by German researchers found that Google Search is plagued with SEO spam.
mashable.com
the myopic financial system can't even fulfill the foundational promise of improving quality of basic services for the end user while record profits and
Okay, so there's only so much Icke, Jones and Musk I can listen to so I'll be giving that a miss. And I heard about Elon calling in pretending to be someone else but... clearly that is Musk speaking, please tell me that's not him pretending to be someone else and that is just a clip of Musk as Musk... please. I know he's really fucking stupid but I need for one of the richest men to ever exist to not be that stupid.couple of times already Elon has called in to Alex Jones show pretending to be merely a fan of his (a fan of elons, I mean: sad lol) when trying to defend some weird bullshit someone else on there has claimed, and not bothering to put on a different accent, etiquette or ideology -- however been having trouble finding any footage of either moments beside this video hosted by strangers covering the first where even David Icke was calling out the obvious duplicity, and 2 Knowledge Fight podcast episodes.
is poss my search engine query skills are just getting way worse. oooooorrrrrrrr.....
Google is getting worse as it loses its fight against search engine spam
Aggressive SEO tactics are ruining search results on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, a team of researchers in Germany says.
It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse
A new study by German researchers found that Google Search is plagued with SEO spam.
the myopic financial system can't even fulfill the foundational promise of improving quality of basic services for the end user while record profits andfucking monopoliesmarket control funnel the capital to shareholders/CEOs instead of investing it back into the services.
Unfortunately, it's more than likely he is that stupid. This is the same man that can't read the room pretty much throughout the entire globe. The same man that he thought he would get nothing but praise and cheers at a large comedy show in Los Angeles with Dave Chappelle for just being there. Nearly every person in that auditorium or stadium or whatever booed the crap out of him and he couldn't take it. Chappelle can screw off of that as well. I don't know what the hell he was thinking or why he thought it was a good idea.
You may have missed a couple of his many shenanigans along the way if it's still a surprise by this point, lol, but yeah it ain't out of character within their current trajectory, am sorry to say.
Though tbf it's not likely we'll get official confirmation unless they do it more and slip up, or if the account reveals themselves as a real separate human to a verifiable degree. Problem for me is trying to describe the alternative out loud when taking it at face value:
"look, let's not be conspiratorial, stand back, breathe in and be reasonable....they're just a committed Elon fan guy who just happens to sound exactly like Elon, with same talking habits and ideological quirks, same politics, same overdefensiveness towards perceived criticism, no identifying data, who started calling in to Alex Jones not long after he was reinstated on twitter, who Alex treats with extremely weird levels of respect no other random callers ever get, who...omg it just goes on and on!"
He might have been down the k-hole.
But hey, it's not abuse, it's for depression. Or as Musk puts it, "sort of a … negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess, or depression that’s not linked to any negative news, and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind."
Because it's fucking amazing what you can pay doctors to prescribe when you're rich. As long as they don't accidentally kill you, they'll probably get away with pretty much anything.
Court Says Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against Anti-Hate Group Is an Attack on Free Speech
A court ruled Musk's lawsuit aimed to "punish" researchers for reporting a rise in hate speech on X.
gizmodo.com
As I've said before: Elon Musk considers "freedom of speech" to be giving everyone the ability to voice his opinions.Court Says Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against Anti-Hate Group Is an Attack on Free Speech
A court ruled Musk's lawsuit aimed to "punish" researchers for reporting a rise in hate speech on X.
adding link n co separately underneath as backup against sporadic thread nuking whims
theintercept.com
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the other 2 older article links in thread;
theintercept.com
Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance
Elon Musk and X postured as defenders against government surveillance but sold user data to Dataminr, which facilitates such surveillance.
theintercept.com
Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance
Musk made hay of his legal battle against secret surveillance but continued selling X user data to a company that facilitates government monitoring.
Elon Musk gestures as he attends the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, on Nov. 1, 2023, in Bletchley, England. Photo: Toby Melville/Getty Images
Ten years ago, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.
Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.
In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”
The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.
However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.
Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
While national security letters allow the government to make targeted demands for non-public data on an individual basis, companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms. Dataminr provides its customers with customized real-time “alerts” on desired topics, giving clients like police departments a form of social media omniscience. The alerts allow police to, for instance, automatically track a protest as it moves from its planning stages into the streets, without requiring police officials to do any time-intensive searches.
Although Dataminr defends First Alert, its governmental surveillance platform, as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises, the tool has been repeatedly shown to be used by police to monitor First Amendment-protected online political speech and real-world protests.
“The Whole Point”
Dataminr has long touted its special relationship with X as integral to First Alert. (Twitter previously owned a stake in Dataminr, though divested before Musk’s purchase.) Unlike other platforms it surveils by scraping user content, Dataminr pays for privileged access to X through the company’s “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform.
Watching everything that happens on X in real time is key to Dataminr’s pitch to the government. The company essentially leases indirect access to this massive spray of information, with Dataminr acting as an intermediary between X’s servers and a multitude of police, intelligence, and military agencies.
While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business.
“Dataminr has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter, whereby we have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available Tweets,” a representative of the surveillance company wrote to the Secret Service in a July 2023 message about the terms of the law enforcement agency’s surveillance subscription. “In addition all of Dataminr’s public sector customers today have agreed to these terms including dozens who are responsible for law enforcement whether at the local, state or federal level.” (The terms are not mentioned in the emails.)
According to an email from the Secret Service in the same thread, the agency’s interest in Dataminr was unambiguous: “The whole point of this contract is to use the information for law enforcement purposes.”
Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance. (Neither X nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.)
“X’s legal briefs acknowledge that communications surveillance is ripe for government abuse, and that we can’t depend on the police to police themselves,” said Jennifer Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But then X turns around and sells Dataminr fire-hose access to users’ posts, which Dataminr then passes through to the government in the form of unregulated disclosures and speculative predictions that can falsely ensnare the innocent.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users,” Adam Schwartz, the privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of X’s Supreme Court petition. “For example, platforms must not provide special services, like real-time access to the full stream of public-facing posts, to surveillance vendors who share this information with police departments. If X is providing such access to Dataminr, that would be disappointing.”
“Glaringly at Odds”
Following a 2016 investigation into the use of Twitter data for police surveillance by the ACLU, the company went so far as to expressly ban third parties from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” and “monitoring sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)” using firehose data. The new policy went so far as to ban the use of firehose data for purposes pertaining to “any alleged or actual commission of a crime” — ostensibly a problem for Dataminr’s crime-fighting clientele.
U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr
These assurances have done nothing to stop Dataminr from using the data it buys from X to do exactly these things. Prior reporting from The Intercept has shown the company has, in recent years, helped federal and local police surveil entirely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and abortion rights rallies in recent years.
Neither X nor Dataminr have responded to repeated requests to explain how a tool that allows for the real-time monitoring of protests is permitted under a policy that expressly bans the monitoring of protests. In the past, both Dataminr and X have denied that monitoring the real-time communications of people on the internet and relaying that information to the police is a form of surveillance because the posts in question are public.
Twitter later softened this prohibition by noting surveillance applications were banned “Unless explicitly approved by X in writing.” Dataminr, for its part, remains listed as an “official partner” of X.
Though the means differ, national security scholars told The Intercept that the ends of national security letters and fire-hose monitoring are the same: widespread government surveillance with little to no meaningful oversight. Neither the national security letters nor dragnet social media surveillance require a sign-off from a judge and, in both cases, those affected are left unaware they’ve fallen under governmental scrutiny.
“While I appreciate that there may be some symbolic difference between giving the government granular data directly and making them sift through what they buy from data brokers, the end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF.
It’s the kind of ideological contradiction typical of X’s owner. Musk has managed to sell himself as a heterodox critic of U.S. foreign policy and big government while simultaneously enriching himself by selling the state expensive military hardware through his rocket company SpaceX.
“While X’s efforts to bring more transparency to the National Security Letter process are commendable, its objection to government surveillance of communications in that context is glaringly at odds with its decision to support similar surveillance measures through its partnership with Dataminr,” said Mary Pat Dwyer, director of Georgetown University’s Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. “Scholars and advocates have long argued the Dataminr partnership is squarely inconsistent with the platform’s policy forbidding use of its data for surveillance, and X’s continued failure to end the relationship prevents the company from credibly portraying itself as an advocate for its users’ privacy.”
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the other 2 older article links in thread;
Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
Artificial intelligence firm Dataminr is making questionable use of its Twitter firehose privileges — and not for the first time.
theintercept.com
This is why I always hate it and never have any respect for Twitter to begin with. Even before Elon took over, they are full of crap but at least somewhat tried. But the fact that they lied about using people's data or giving it or selling it to the government, speaks how full of crap they've always been. I'm not surprised as it's the same company that tried to be "apolitical/neutral" when it involved anything Trump being president at that time. Going to ban all his stuff or other Ultra conservatives when he lost the election. Fuck them and all the other social media sites that did this!adding link n co separately underneath as backup against sporadic thread nuking whims
Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance
Elon Musk and X postured as defenders against government surveillance but sold user data to Dataminr, which facilitates such surveillance.
--
the other 2 older article links in thread;
Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
Artificial intelligence firm Dataminr is making questionable use of its Twitter firehose privileges — and not for the first time.
Welp. I think I've officially lost any reason to visit Twitter.
Once they demanded people be logged in to actually see any posts I started using Nitter, a third party website that provides access without requiring log in. Earlier this year, the parts of the API Nitter uses to allow this functionality was discontinued, so it's been very seldom that I've managed to access any new posts by any profile I'm interested in.
Meanwhile, bluesky has reached enough of a userbase that they saw fit to open the platform to the public, so it is now in the state of Twitter pre-Musk.
Once they demanded people be logged in to actually see any posts I started using Nitter, a third party website that provides access without requiring log in. Earlier this year, the parts of the API Nitter uses to allow this functionality was discontinued, so it's been very seldom that I've managed to access any new posts by any profile I'm interested in.
Meanwhile, bluesky has reached enough of a userbase that they saw fit to open the platform to the public, so it is now in the state of Twitter pre-Musk.
Rusting Cybertrucks...
www.cbsnews.com
Tesla's chief engineer has handily popped up to tell us that they aren't actually rusting, it's just surface contamination of the stainless steel with iron, and it's the iron rusting. So that's okay then, I guess...
I also want to point out this little gem from another article:
"One such person is the YouTuber Bearded Tesla Guy, who posted a video last week explaining that the rust people have seen on the pickup is actually oxidation"
I think someone needs to go back and redo high school chemistry.
Tesla Cybertruck owners complain their new vehicles are rusting
The EV's stainless-steel exterior is seemingly incompatible with common outdoor elements, some owners say.
www.cbsnews.com
Tesla's chief engineer has handily popped up to tell us that they aren't actually rusting, it's just surface contamination of the stainless steel with iron, and it's the iron rusting. So that's okay then, I guess...
I also want to point out this little gem from another article:
"One such person is the YouTuber Bearded Tesla Guy, who posted a video last week explaining that the rust people have seen on the pickup is actually oxidation"
I think someone needs to go back and redo high school chemistry.
I remember one particular owner proudly proclaiming he liked it because it gave his truck a 'unique patina'Rusting Cybertrucks...
Tesla Cybertruck owners complain their new vehicles are rusting
The EV's stainless-steel exterior is seemingly incompatible with common outdoor elements, some owners say.
Tesla's chief engineer has handily popped up to tell us that they aren't actually rusting, it's just surface contamination of the stainless steel with iron, and it's the iron rusting. So that's okay then, I guess...
I also want to point out this little gem from another article:
"One such person is the YouTuber Bearded Tesla Guy, who posted a video last week explaining that the rust people have seen on the pickup is actually oxidation"
Imagine if I was on trial for stabbing someone to death and my defense was that the victim died of exsanguination rather than bleeding to death.
Iirc, another found an elegant solution to this problem: simply never drive his truck in the rainTeslatwats...
I was wrong. Despite some profiles existing on bluesky, most have accounts that only exists as a back-up, in case Twitter gets so horrendous that they cannot continue using it.
Speaking of reasons to stop using Twitter...
^the third entry describes what the acronym means, for those blissfully unaware.
It's slightly more complicated than that, because the air is filled with moisture and oxygen than it can react with. What you actually need is a kind of forcefield that blocks access of any reactive oxygen-containing compounds to the steel (iron).
You could even call such a thing "paint".