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Today — 18 May 2024Main stream

How a smear campaign against NPR led Elon Musk to feud with Signal

18 May 2024 at 08:00

Rightwing media personalities on X transmuted a screed against NPR’s CEO into a fight over encryption via the Transitive Property of Bad People

For nearly two weeks, an esoteric debate has raged on X, formerly Twitter: could users concerned about privacy and security trust the messaging app Signal, or was the Telegram platform a better alternative? X’s chatbot, Grok AI, described the trending moment as “Telegram v Signal: a crypto clash”.

Signal is an app for sending end-to-end-encrypted messages to individuals and small groups. Telegram offers broadcast channels and messaging but is not end-to-end encrypted by default. Debates over their relative merits have popped up over the years, though largely within the confines of online spaces inhabited by cybersecurity, cryptography, privacy and policy geeks. This time, the conversation came to broader attention – Elon Musk’s following of 183 million – due to X’s most notorious capability: mutating isolated facts into viral conspiracy theories for the entertainment of rage-riddled crowds. As a bit player, I got a ringside seat to the manufactured controversy.

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© Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters

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© Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters

Yesterday — 17 May 2024Main stream

Twitter URLs redirect to x.com as Musk gets closer to killing the Twitter name

17 May 2024 at 11:43
An app icon and logo for Elon Musk's X service.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Twitter.com links are now redirecting to the x.com domain as Elon Musk gets closer to wiping out the Twitter brand name over a year and half after buying the company.

"All core systems are now on X.com," Musk wrote in an X post today. X also displayed a message to users that said, "We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same."

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and turned it into X Corp. in April 2023, but the social network continued to use Twitter.com as its primary domain for more than another year. X.com links redirected to Twitter.com during that time.

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Before yesterdayMain stream

Elon Musk’s X dodges Australian order to remove church stabbing video

13 May 2024 at 13:31
Elon Musk’s X dodges Australian order to remove church stabbing video

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator's request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk's platform X (formerly Twitter).

The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online.

Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens "accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney," AP News reported. Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.

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Elon Musk’s X can’t invent its own copyright law, judge says

10 May 2024 at 17:20
Elon Musk’s X can’t invent its own copyright law, judge says

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

US District Judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.

X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip

By: Beth Mole
9 May 2024 at 13:29
Elon Musk, in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. Musk predicted his Neuralink Corp. would carry out its first brain implant later that year. The first implantation took place in January 2024.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. Musk predicted his Neuralink Corp. would carry out its first brain implant later that year. The first implantation took place in January 2024. (credit: Getty | Nathan Laine)

The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant's brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.

It's unclear what caused the threads to become "retracted" from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.

Neuralink touts that its invasive implant includes 64 flexible threads carrying a total of 1,024 electrodes that can detect neuronal activity. Those flexible threads—described as thinner than a human hair—are inserted individually into the brain by the company's proprietary surgical robot. The goal is for the threads to be placed near neurons of interest so that signals detected by the electrodes can be recorded and decoded into intended actions, such as moving a cursor on a computer screen.

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