He never struck me then, or in any interview or write up since, that he's impulsive, or prone to taking actions like what he's done to Twitter, in a cavalier way. He saw something bad and thinks something should be done to address it.
He likely made that decision because the culture at Twitter is as bolloxed as he states (maybe worse), and that it's one thing to fire a guy, but to do so to hide damning truths, and expect that person to just accept their fate AND let you get away with it without a cost is in this day and age, a farcical hope. Your "Mudge knows the implications of "whistleblowing". He has been a security consultant and even testified to Congress. He's not some noob that doesn't understand security or how systems work together to provide services like disclosure to FTC. The idea that Twitter PR can pooh-pooh away his concerns is shockingly stupid." is spot-on.
I know people have thought Twitter was mismanaged for a while, but seems like it's a lot worse than I thought it was (and the CEO seems more vindictively bad than I would have guessed).
Plus the total lack of principles around speech and just doing whatever Russia, India, or KSA wants? Including hiring foreign agents? Also covering up bad security issues in reporting? It'll be interesting to see what happens from here as more comes out.
The internal Twitter email: https://twitter.com/austen/status/1562150058727919616?s=21&t...
I'm no fan of Musk (he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech) but that doesn't mean that Twitter leadership is any better. Just not as well PR'd.
Dorsey himself was mostly an imbecile who drank too much of his own Kool Aid. Twitter has for years been the standard bearer for the most opaque, and incoherent content management; from user feedback to bots, just a village with only idiots. It was eventually going to catch up to them, the question now is to whom does the bulk of the suffering land on, not whether it lands or not.
High assurance comes from the overall systems design and testing, not the software itself. Afterall, radiation can cause any piece of software, including those written in Ada, to completely skip instructions.
A lot of stuff is still going on legacy stacks that Ada was created to replace
He waived all of that to force Twitter to agree to the deal (because it'd be basically impossible for the board to reject it). This made sense at the time, because the board was looking for ways to weasel out of it because (imo) they politically don't like Musk. Then the market crashed and suddenly he was overpaying a ton for Twitter, then he complains about bots (this isn't new information from when he made the deal).
Whether or not the bots thing is true isn't even relevant based on the deal he put forward.
I think he earnestly wanted to buy Twitter for principled reasons around speech which I agree with. He structured the deal in such a way where Twitter's board couldn't reject it (because it was so favorable to shareholders). Then when the market tanked the deal way overpriced Twitter, but he had already committed to it so he's trying everything to get out of it. I suspect he actually believes the things he's arguing (he's always seemed pretty earnest to me), I just think he's wrong in this case and it's mostly driven by motivated reasoning.
That doesn't mean Twitter isn't a disaster, just that they're in the right with regard to him having to close the deal.
That's not how business valuations work (it's how speculation works). If Twitter was fairly valued by Elon Musk before the crash then it would be fairly valued now - the fundamentals of the business haven't changed.
Implicitly, this was always, "I'm going to trade X% of Tesla for 100% of Twitter." Then the valuation of both Twitter and Tesla dropped, so to the extent that you think the "value" of a business is wholly determined by its fundamentals, then okay, they're both still the same "value" but now have lower prices.
Except that he hadn't sold the Tesla yet, so he was trading Tesla (at new lower price) for Twitter (at old higher price), and if you previously thought that X% of Tesla was worth Twitter, and Twitter is still worth the same thing, it's now X+Y% of Tesla.
Of course, it's not like the fundamentals of Twitter didn't change. Twitter's revenue comes from advertising, and it's entirely reasonable to believe that it was actually materially affected by the economic downturn, not just in terms of the speculation of the stock, but by how the business functions.
(None of this is to take the position that Musk ought to be able to back out of the deal: if the market had gone even hotter and now Musk could've traded less than X% of Tesla for the agreed upon, now conservative price for Twitter, it's not like the deal would've been renegotiated.)
That's a big if - I think a lot of this stuff is more speculation than any sort of fundamental cash flow valuation. A lot Twitter's actual value (its network effect and influence) is hard to measure anyway.
Some "fundamentals" of a business like twitter's value are:
1. Product/market fit, finances, etc. What you mean by "fundamentals" I think.
2. How easy it is for them to raise money (i.e. the "public sentiment" of VC towards their company and the industry)
3. How likely it is for regulation to stifle their growth, which is a derivative of public sentiment.
4. How much shares can be sold for, i.e. the public sentiment about how much it's worth.
5. Predicted future sentiment of their users and of advertisers, both of which impact expected future revenue.
2-5 all change with public sentiment, and a market crash changes public sentiment of many companies at once.
It's self-evident that elon musk is overpaying more now than before unless you insist that twitter's value is not actually related to 2-5 above, or 2-5 above should have been trivially predictable 100% accurately already as part of its "fundamentals", both of which seem obviously silly.
Twitter is a tyre pyre, but he should have thought about that before putting ink on that deal.
How often has that happened in the entire history?
Profoundly dumb people have been heads of state, CEOs etc. So why not the richest person in the world?
Alternative suggestion would be that he doesnt actually believe that the reason he is trying not to buy twitter is the reason he was buying twitter.
It's simple to explain away - other people have appointed heads of state. And I have not heard of an idiot (in medical sense) top20 Forbes list CEO who's also been there since day 1 (i.e. the founder, not some figurehead appointed by a board for an arbitrary reason).
Can you appoint yourself the strongest person in the world or the fastest 100m runner in the world?
[0]While someone like the Saudi king or Putin can in theory allocate their respective states' funds to themselves and thus become the richest, that would simply be converting power into money, and not a result of some kind of entrepreneurial ability.
>If 5 billion people flip coins all day long one of them will eventually flip only heads all day.
This argument is flawed since that would assume a person would win some money every time they flipped correctly, when in reality nobody is going to pay anyone for succeeding in a flip. And applying that directly to business also breaks down because it is self-evident that the ways to lose money greatly outnumber the ways to gain money.
I tend to like people that blow up social norms and conventions
That’s not a “major error in judgement”. That’s the behavior of a completely deranged individual.
That's quite a large exaggeration. I can think of some much much worse things that an actual "completely deranged individual" would do.
Musk was butthurt and lashed out. That does not equal "completely deranged individual"
Lashed out in a way where, given his influence, he could easily ruin the person's life. Which is bad in and of itself. But he did it while the man was actively involved in trying to save a dozen children from immediate death. And then doubled down later.
That is deranged.
When you have the kind of audience and pull he has, unless you are totally daft to it (which he shows no sign of) then yes it's very abusively deranged.
Twitter is most definitely not doing whatever Russia wants. It's markedly hostile to Russia and frequently removes "pro-Russia" acocunts, which speaks to your initial point, that it has a total lack of principles around speech.
A) an old hand and doesn’t know how to run a security program with the tech today
B) a strong tech hire who can’t lead a program.
But Mudge is still… Mudge, and he’s also proven his ability to collaborate so if he was a bull in a china shop a twitter, that would be surprising.
There’s also a broader trend here of well known security leads that originate from that time working at social media and leaving quickly, like Alex Stamos, who also u-turned out of Facebook.
So are the odds higher that Mudge did a bad job, or this set of companies are not great internally and old guard security leads are pointing it out? The twitter CEO letter framing him as a bad employee doesn’t address this context.
He seems to have tried to escalate things to people above Agrawal nearly constantly. He was hired by Jack Dorsey, and felt accountable to him and to the board, but he reported to Agrawal, who believed that Mudge had a responsibility to follow the chain of command very rigidly.
I have previously had managers who want you to rigidly follow the chain of command, and if you are a "hacker" type, they are a shock (and you are a shock to them). They are often very interested in controlling information that goes upward and how mandates flow downward through them (both to control their reputation and make sure everyone gets information in "proper context"), to the point that they see it as an attack on their position to even speak with their manager. A "hacker" would rather put the information in front of the people who need it, instead of filtering it through the hierarchy.
At the first opportunity Agrawal had to clean house, he cleaned out Mudge because he didn't want to work with him. House cleaning is normal for a new CEO. From Agrawal's perspective, Mudge did a terrible job, since he wanted to circumvent Agrawal.
Agrawal's memo, in contrast, reeks of insecurity. The combination of how he's treated mudge and Rishi Sunak and the potential consequences of this complaint (particularly if FTC investigates and finds Twitter has not been following the consent decree) boxes him into a corner -- he won't be able to recruit the talent to solve these security problems and will be seen as an impediment to compliance/mitigation. I could easily see the FTC et al insisting on his resignation as part of a settlement. It's an own-goal.
With $10mm cash bonuses on the table it’s extremely obvious why Agrawal would insist on being MITM
Aha, eg:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10258453/Twitters-n...
So his performance bonuses is more than 10x his salary - incentives to fake good numbers and hide the bad stuff, indeed!
The content of the complaint is all that matters, and it should be judged on its own merits. It never matters who said what, and attempting to make it matter is ad hominem fallacy; it is what is said that matters.
That said, I can't quite fathom why Twitter's cybersecurity matters any more than the cybersecurity of any of the myriad of online forums, HN included: the "data" simply isn't all that important; it is all public, it is all talk, and talk, as we know, is cheap. Say Twitter is completely overrun by foreign state actors who delete everything. The outrage is going to be minimal. "Dang, I really enjoyed mouthing off on Twitter. Oh, well."
Secondly, private messages between people are not public either. Opening that data up or allowing it to be read or manipulated by other entities will drive a lot of outrage and the data contained within is important!
When gaming services leak IPs, they too can get DDoS'ed. E.g. during tournaments or when someone is losing their match.
Seriously, so what? Twitter's IP does not affect national security.
>and as the public square of present, Twitter essentially drives public discourse...
This is being awfully kind to a platform that 77% of Americans have absolutely nothing to do with.
>especially when a large portion of the legacy media has been reduced to sourcing their stories and directly quoting from Twitter.
Ah, legacy media, conservative politispeak for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc. Can't get away from Twitter on the major networks anymore, it's Twitter all the time? Just what in the heck are you talking about? Turn the news on sometime. The only reason for Twitter to be in the news is Elon Musk (previously, Trump). Or, you know, give one example of a major news outlet using Twitter as source for a story. Real journalists do not do that. They use legitimate sources.
> Secondly, private messages between people are not public either. Opening that data up or allowing it to be read or manipulated by other entities will drive a lot of outrage and the data contained within is important!
Absurd. No one cares what you say in private to a complete stranger you'll never meet.
Governments and their respective departments (at all levels: federal, state, local, etc.) communicate with their constituents via social media, Twitter in particular as well as via the media outlets that will report on said statements from Twitter.
Change the algorythm such that those messages no longer reach people and you can bet the respective countries will pass legislation and puninitive measures against Twitter.
>This is being awfully kind to a platform that 77% of Americans have absolutely nothing to do with
Except I outlined some of the other ways people interact with Twitter, even without accounts. You seem to be incredulous that other forms of media rely on Twitter... You should look a bit closer next time you turn the TV on.
I just did and there was a segment about Russia playing titled "'Slower burn' of Russia's economy has begun". Guess where almost all of the footage they aired came from? Twitter. Guess how the reporters are finding people on the ground to interview? Twitter. Guess how analysts are keeping abreast of military developments (e.g. troop movement, statements released by governments, etc.)? Twitter.
>Absurd. No one cares what you say in private to a complete stranger you'll never meet.
Many service providers conduct customer service via DMs these days. My ISP's preffered lines of contact are Twitter and WhatsApp. Even if we take a step back, do you truly believe that there are no people sharing sensitive information between each other via private messages?
That's not what's dangerous.
Instead, dangerous things include manipulating the algorithms so that "news" of ones choice get lots of visibility. Then a foreign state can influence the elections
I think this is bollocks. 23% of Americans say they use Twitter. 61% of Americans voted in the last Presidential election. So with my bad math, say a foreign state somehow gets every possible Twitter users vote going their way, at best it's going bamboozle 14% of weak-minded Americans. That's at best, the perfect and unbeatable score. The reality is that most Twitter users are not obsessed with the platform, and most Americans are not on the fence with their votes. This concern is not really supportable.
In addition to that, the manipulators / nation states don't attack only via Twitter, and, everything combined ...
I worked with Mudge (not super close, but enough to see how he worked across teams etc) and can certainly say this is not the case. At least when I saw him Mudge was excellent at the program leadership aspect of his role. At one point he ended up a DARPA PM. You can't go from L0pht to DARPA without getting really good at working with other people and leading projects.
While he was always a notable presence, he was also never prone to drama, and very good at having ego when it was important but never letting it get in the way.
Additionally all of the details sound like every KPI chasing consumer facing tech company I've ever worked with. I think we all know a few very competent people who have stood up to leadership at insane tech companies and ultimately gotten fired for it.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/08/23/peiter-mudge-...
* L0pht / @stake: security research, red teaming, and source code auditing, IIRC.
* BBN: research.
* NFR: technical advisory board.
* DARPA: Managing a program that provided grants for new security products and tools.
* Google ATAP: Google's "invention studio".
* CyberUL: Testing of security products.
Again, I don't doubt Mudge's bonafides. I don't doubt his security knowledge. But this job was nothing like any he's had in the past.
I also don't doubt his claims. Everything he's stated is almost certainly true. It does take more than a year to fix most of these problems and I wonder if he just got frustrated with the political battles that occur in these situations.
Decades of experience as a rebellious hacker? Well, that's not commercial experience. Founded a security consultancy? Too small, they just don't know how to operate in a large bureaucracy. Worked at a secretive company as an individual contributor? They've been completely silent in public, clearly they haven't achieved anything interesting in years. Working elsewhere as an individual contributor? They just don't know how to build a team. Decades as a senior manager at a huge multinational corporation? Out of touch bullshitter, stale coding skills, doesn't know how we really do things these days.
I mean, if an auditor publicly reports an audit finding that is ignored by the company and his ethics demand its reporting, is he branded a "whistleblower"? I do not think so, instead it is an "auditor finding". Why does that not apply here?
It kind of dovetails with how pathetically organized IT in general is from a professional standpoint. Lawyers, Doctors, ... ?Accountants? and the like have centuries-codified procedures, principles, and the like for ethics. You generally don't get to hire one of those and tell them how to breach ethics (now, there are a lot of corrupt lawyers and a lot of corrupt accountants see: Arthur Andersen).
The exploit industry has the 0day and x days of forewarning process, so there is that, but the fact a security consultant/professional gets accused of whistleblowing when... um, isn't that sort of the point? You hire a security consultant kind of like an auditor. And if auditors find major failings and they aren't addressed, aren't they supposed to report them?
I'm pretty sure the security IT industry does not have even accountant levels of professional conduct and organizations.
As IT subsumes and infiltrates, now to the point that fundamental bill of rights / human rights are dependent on secure and functioning IT systems, it gets... a bit more important. Arguably more important than the ethics around accountants and doctors. Lawyers, because they deal with the law, are probably more important still, but it shows that IT security may be rising in import to that level.
[0] Companies want the letter to say whatever their regulators and/or contractual obligations demand that it say.
Twitter is a publicly held company.
I'm sure there are conflicts of interest and some degree of confidentiality for auditors and clients, but there is a fundamental public interest of disclosure, at a minimum to the government, in the event of irregularities.
From the SEC:
"In addition, we will continue to focus on auditors. As the Supreme Court noted nearly 30 years ago in U.S. v. Arthur Young & Co., 465 U.S. 805 (1984), auditors play a crucial role in the financial reporting process by serving as the “public watchdog.” So, it is important that we carefully monitor their work and ensure that they fully comply with their professional obligations. If there is a significant restatement or if we learn about improper accounting from a whistleblower, our proactive efforts, or the media, then you can expect that we will scrutinize not only the CEO, CFO and Controller, but also the engagement partner, engagement quality reviewer, and the auditing firm as a whole. We are going to probe the quality of the audit and determine whether the auditors missed or ignored red flags, whether they have proper documentation, and whether they followed professional standards.
And it is important to remember that our ability to bring Rule 102(e) bars against auditors extends beyond instances where there are accounting irregularities at a public company. Our Rule 102(e) program is remedial in nature and meant to protect the integrity of the Commission’s processes. As a result, we can and have investigated auditors when their audits fail to meet the most basic standards, regardless of whether there was an actual problem with the auditing client. By pursuing actions over these bad audits, we can fully leverage the Division’s resources and close off access to those who shirk their responsibilities as gatekeepers to the securities markets."
From there you can see legal and institutional gravitas, ethics, and expectations of accountants and auditors of public companies. That's kind of what I'm getting at re: elevating security and certain IT roles to higher responsibility and codification.
Now, is this a smear attempt by Jack Dorsey in relation to the Elon Musk lawsuit? Eh, maybe.
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
(search for "resign")
The SEC quote is about requiring auditors to meet their professional standards. Those standards require them to follow certain processes, things like needing to see evidence for certain things, and not both preparing the books and auditing them, and require that they not issue letters they don't actually agree with. Those standards do not require informing the public or regulators about problems they find.
There's certainly something to be said for having some codified professional standards for infosec professionals, but if public or regulator notice is something you think is important to be in those standards you shouldn't model them off of the standards for auditors, because auditors have no such professional responsibility.
In that talk he told of his time at Intel and running crack on a shiny new sparc and all the problems that caused.
The focus of it was a "how not to get into trouble as a contractor".
Somewhere, I've still got my pink camel book with duct taped edges (for durability) with his signature on the inside title page.
Twitter is going to be in a lot of hot water now, and I can't imagine Musk isn't going to milk this to the last drop.
Lol, did the same thing for a government entity I was working for, also without prior permission. It showed 1/4 of the people used the name of the entity as there password, including 2 users with domain admin credentials. Both of the domain admins weren't even IT people, there were the director and his assistant, who demanded to be admins, because they were 'admin' within the org.
In my case, I didn't get scolding, but probably should have. As you're prior boss said, it was not good to do it on a running production server. Now a restored backup running on a private network...
Now looking at the chaos, damage control and the PR disaster that is happening at Twitter HQ after this, I have zero confidence in whatever Twitter HQ and the CEO is saying other than admitting their total incompetency towards how they handle information security at the company. All attempts to make this disaster disappear will not only fail, but will eventually backfire.
So what else was Twitter lying about?
There is nothing more evident about the fatal flaws in social media than when news concerning a platform is suppressed on the cited platform.
It highlights the failure of democracy they always purport, and it shows that they really shouldn't display a social "trending" page, because it is subject constantly to the politics and profit making of each platform.
Twitter's trending timeline had long been regarded as an accurate beacon of real life trends, but that really needs to be reevaluated by everyone as the company has regularly displayed "somewhat questionable" behavior in how they manage timelines alone. There is no real way this wouldn't trend somehow on Twitter in my opinion, as it's been on the front page of CNN and many other sites for a long time now.
The security breaches are factual, they have published many incidences of it themselves over years... Their actual reputation for lax security is what works against them most, but it's all on record.
I just looked at the Trending panel and "Mudge" is #12 for me, with 4333 tweets. #11 is "Taco Tuesday", with 4172 tweets. #7 is "Virgo" with 98,500 tweets. So I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of suppression. I think it's just a pretty niche story. I think the allegations are important and worth investigating, but the specific nature of them looks way more interesting to tech insiders than general-audience users.
If you follow tech personalities, there's a higher chance you'll see the news.
On my music account on Twitter, I don't follow tech personalities and tech news outlets, but I do follow CNN Breaking News, and nothing about this major story has popped up all day long.
This is how the Twitter trending timeline is artificially baked... This story is a very big deal for everyone on Twitter, yet only a fraction of its user base will see the story. Privacy is important to every user on the platform, you'd think Twitter leadership at least would be trying to get a grip on the story first within the platform in a very public manner.
It happens on every major social platform at key points too, highlighting the conflict in their ability to maintain proper social credibility as platforms that report on trends that news channels and other institutions regularly cite.
You seem to be saying that people should be interested in this story. I'm not sure I agree, but I definitely believe most Twitter users won't be. Is it a good headline? Sure. But does it have much direct and immediate relevance to their personal lives? Not for most Twitter users.
Sure.
Just an opinion mind you, but not from a hater or a "dunce".
This is a huge story of significant relevance to Twitter and all users on the platform.
"Suppressing unfavorable news" these days is just as big and profitable an industry as disinformation is.
- This Congress is ill-equipped to understand tech, much less hold it accountable. As long as the people are happy, Congress is happy.
- Lord knows the people are ill-equipped to get how bad this is. They already watched this company allow a rogue employee to shut off the account of the President of the United States (before they chose to do it as policy; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/02...) and watched this company deploy a username-to-telephone lookup service publicly where they'd intended to deploy a security protocol (https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/08/twitter-confirms-that-a-da...). The public doesn't understand why they should care.
- The only group who could really hold Twitter accountable are shareholders, but why should they care if the public and Congress don't? The money will roll in either way.
Unless they've managed to commit an SEC violation (in which case, slap on the wrist incoming), there are no consequences for this kind of bad behavior until someone powerful gets seriously hurt. I'm glad Mudge is doing the right thing, but extremely pessimistic much will come of it. My recommendation is to shed Twitter as a user.
There's an article I was introduced to yesterday: Do We Need a New Digital Regulatory Agency in the U.S.?
It argues that it it is the agencies and the experts within the agencies that need to become more technologically literate to be able to advise creation and implement the laws that have tech impacts.
Congress isn't supposed to be experts on subjects, they're supposed to be the representatives of their people with occasional domain knowledge in certain areas of importance to their constituents. We can't (and shouldn't) expect every member of congress to be an IT expert.
https://techpolicy.press/do-we-need-a-new-digital-regulatory... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32555365 )
I never understood why tech people have such a strange enamor towards Twitter. Can’t be an industry power dev without it. Can’t start a company without it. Having a healthy Twitter following is often more important than having actual users—even to investors. Twitter is digital hype.
I agree. It’s time to replace Twitter. The only question is what exactly is it that anchors people to the platform? Even though it’s hard to imagine, we know that news motivates people (it happened with the WhatsApp -> Signal exodus). Where’s the “Signal for Twitter” we can all migrate to?
If the key is not just creating a social platform, but also a hype engine, maybe what a competitor needs to realize is that hype doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have to do silly algorithmic things so that content can go viral. Maybe the secret is to be open about how you manufacture hype rather than do it behind closed doors? Maybe in a way that people can verify it was done fairly?
If I had to take a stab, it's a combination of networking effects (obviously), simplicity and the short text limit, which forces authors to mostly be concise and optimize for a 140 character attention span. This is also supercharged by the fact that you can (mostly) access everything anonymously - if I'm linked to Twitter, I know I can read/watch it and it will mostly be concise. I don't even bother clicking a link to FB, for example.
> - The only group who could really hold Twitter accountable are shareholders, but why should they care if the public and Congress don't? The money will roll in either way.
This might be what does it because is it true that the money is and will keep really rolling in? Twitter doesn't pay a dividend and is it reasonable to expect that the company's stock value should increase that much going forward?
Twitter's gross profit numbers aren't as large as you'd think given the household name recognition of the brand. You might be as surprised as I was to discover that meme-stocks like AMC and GameStop are approximately the same size as Twitter in terms of gross profit. Perhaps Twitter is just as much of a big name but ailing dinosaur as those businesses? Or if you want to make comparisons within social media, isn't it surprising that Snap's ~$2.8 billion cap gross profit is right up there with Twitter's ~$3.2 billion. How did that happen? It is also interesting that snap's market cap is only 2/3rds of Twitters despite a much closer delta between the two companies reported profits.
On the whole, things aren't looking too good for the social media right now, take for example facebook losing active users YoY. I often wonder what zeitgeist web properties are going to be remembered as a BIG thing that receded in popularity in the course of about a decade, say like bell-bottom denim jeans from the 60s or disco music from the 70s. Could it be social media for the 2010s?
Anyhow if they aren't paying dividends and they aren't able to keep growing at pace with expectations what exactly are they delivering in terms of value to shareholders?
Given that the allegations are about defrauding shareholders by actively deceiving them and sweeping things under the rug. Twitter's shareholders might be better off revolting against the current leadership to recoup their loses than to look the other way and let this slide.
I agree that, generally, it would be better for the US to have a better regulatory mechanism for large tech companies, but the consent decree is likely a strong tool in this particular case.
"This" congress? There are institutional level problems, here.
Such a 5-year old boy way of naming things.
Then I clicked through and saw it was Mudge.
Ah jeez.
I was going to send the information to our security people in another state but decided it probably wouldn't be a wise thing to do.
I come across the HDD where I have this stuff archived every now and then and it makes me smile. This was also in the "Free Kevin" days.
and cracked it on personal systems
and you kept the files and cracked passwords? Not just kept around, but archived?
Dude.
Those were wild times.
All you do is make public comments that have zero value.
And if this is indeed serious, where the fuck have we landed?
Investors always have the option to ignore rumors.
What I'm trying to say is, you might be able to discredit Twitter, but you won't fix investors trying to invest ahead of the news.
And if some investors lose money then so what? That is an acceptable outcome. Let them suffer, I have zero sympathy.
I agree with you that we have landed in not a great place.
Without it sounding like an endorsement or defense of the guy… I never would have believed without seeing it, just how furious this made the media and other politicians. That you have a guy come in who said forget the system, I’m going talk to the people directly (and say some dumb things now and then).
I still attest that some of the Trump hate is solely because groups of people that control the narrative in the US were excluded from creation and forced to be on narrative-adjustment.
Agreed, this isn’t a good place. One platform should not have this level of influence.
Considering how widely used Twitter is, at this point we can comfortably assume that most politicians and political operatives, even high profile ones, must have very sensitive information in their Twitter DM inboxes.
I'm not defending Twitter, I don't engage with it at all.
I doubt that, and if they really do, they should be either trained or exposed pronto. Twitter is an entertainment platform.
My guess is that the reality is almost perfectly in opposition to what you've described. Anything that introduces plausible deniability is going to be of a major benefit.
My feed is still filled with how all of our public service problems must be caused by the 1-2% that were put on unpaid leave for refusing to disclose their vaccination status. I’m sure the 1-2% could help, but the issues are much larger than that.
Will this testimony show Musk completely miffed his due diligence while building up a huge loan package that would have sent most of Twitter’s revenue to debt service? The timeline is what matters.
Mudge knows the implications of "whistleblowing". He has been a security consultant and even testified to Congress. He's not some noob that doesn't understand security or how systems work together to provide services like disclosure to FTC. The idea that Twitter PR can pooh-pooh away his concerns is shockingly stupid.
I think Twitter is in real trouble here.