Tech News: Elon Musk Agrees to Buy Twitter. . . . Again

Elon Musk went ahead and switched gears yet again. Actually, to be fair, he did that on Monday, but the news broke on Tuesday. And what I mean by all this takes us back to the sprawling, chaotic and messy Twitter acquisition. All right, let's get a previously on segment in here to really kind of sum arise what has been going on with this whole saga back in April two. At this point, it feels like it happened an eternity ago.

Ellen Musk revealed that he had purchased, uh, let me see, I think the technical term is a metric buttload of Twitter stock, like just under ten percent. This was enough to merit an invitation to join Twitter's board of directors, and Musk considered doing that, but then he saw on the fine print that if he did join the board of directors, he would have to agree to a limit

on how much stock he could own. Now, whether Musk was already considering buying Twitter outright, I don't know, but at some point it became clear that that was what he decided he wanted to do. So. Musk then goes on to make an offer on Twitter to buy out all existing stock at fifty four dollars twenty since per share, which would bring the total cost of acquisition to around

forty four billion with a B dollars. Must then win about securing financing for this deal, which included a meeting with investors who would put up some of the cash to fund it, and also banks that would loan out more money against Musk's considerable personal assets. Oh and um, one really important part of this initial agreement is that Musk agreed to waive due diligence, which I think a ton of folks have said was a curious strategy, which

that's what the kind people are saying. Others are saying it was just playing dumb. You wouldn't agree to buy a house without first having an inspector walked through and make sure you know the foundation is solid and all that kind of stuff. But things seem to be set in motion for a Musk acquisition of Twitter. The board of directors were happy with this idea. Uh, there was the requirement to hold a shareholder vote to see if shareholders agreed, and that didn't happen until this past September,

but ultimately shareholders voted in favor of that too. However, in July, so not that long after the wheels were in motion, Musk appeared to have second thoughts about this acquisition, and there's been a lot of speculation about this. Musk was arguing that Twitter had misrepresented its value at the early negotiations, and he claimed that the platform was absolutely riddled with bought accounts. Twitter claimed that, based upon its own process, bots made up less than five of all

monetize able accounts. Musk argued there was way way more than that, possibly as much as nine, which seems absolutely unrealistic to me. But then I also think the less than five percent number is at least hard to believe. It might be true through, but it's hard to believe.

Lots of folks suggested a hypothesis that the financial downturn that we've seen this year meant that Musk's own assets were worth way less than what they had been when he first made the offer, and that it was possible that he was also starting to hit some resistance with financing As a result of this, plus, Twitter itself started to look like a less valuable purchase, helped in no small part by the fact that Musk himself was slagging

off Twitter pretty much at every opportunity. And he might say, ha, that seems weird that you would bad mouth something you were planning on buying, since you'd actually be creating a larger gap between the price you had agreed to pay and the value of the thing you were buying. But then you're not the world's richest man, right, You just don't see the big picture anyway. Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk in an effort to force him to go

through with the acquisition. Twitter was our guing that the deal Musk signed didn't leave him the option to just back out, and that's true. Musk can't back out of the deal unless certain specific criteria are met. For example, if Musk could legally prove that Twitter purposefully misrepresented its value to a significant degree, he could potentially walk out of this deal. The details get a little more complicated

than that, but that's the basic idea. But even then, Musk would still have to cough up a billion dollars just to walk away. Twitter's lawsuit is set to go to court on October seventeen, so it's getting here soon. Musk's legal team had tried to push for a later date. They wanted it to happen as late as early, but the judge wasn't having it. Twitter was arguing for it to be earlier. In fact, so the October date, in

some respect was kind of a compromise between the two. Now, the judge has largely been sighting with Twitter on pre trial decisions, and that kind of brings us up to this week's news. On Monday, Musk filed a letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission Twitter recommending himself to acquiring Twitter and the agreed upon terms that were made way back in April of this year. But he did ask

that this happened uh on a couple of preconditions. One of those conditions is that if his financing falls through, he would be allowed to pay the billion dollar penalty and then walk away. The other condition is that Twitter could please drop its lawsuit please. The lawsuit was starting to look like it was gonna get real ugly for all involved. In fact, not starting the lawsuit was clearly

going to be ugly for both Elon Musk and for Twitter. Already, Elon Musk's personal text messages have been entered into the court pre trial proceedings, which does not paint a good picture.

Twitter's dirty laundry is ready to be put on display. Plus, the pre trial stuff may have indicated to Musk's legal team that the chances of winning the case were a wee bit on the slim side, and that would mean that if Musk lost the legal battle, he would still have to acquire the company anyway, his punishments, he has to go through the deal that he already agreed to do. Now.

So far, Twitter has not filed for a stay in court action, and it's kind of understandable because I feel like if Twitter did drop the case entirely, they might not trust that Elon Musk will follow through on his statement that he is in fact going to acquire the company. However, Musk was originally scheduled to sit for a deposition today and that has been postponed, so that part has been delayed,

at least temporarily. Also, Reuter's reports that some banks have held talks with Musk about financing back in the summer, but had since backed out, so it's not entirely clear where all the different financing is coming from. Uh. The ones that are remaining in place are in a potentially really tough position because it's an economically risky time for

banks to get involved in large debt financing transactions. So this could mean that the banks that are still involved in this are in danger of losing a another buttload of money. So what I'm saying is that this deal is not a sure thing. It looks like it's heading towards Elon Musk acquiring Twitter. That seems to be where we are headed, but the details are still a bit fuzzy.

Um Oh. We also heard that before all of this, Musk had been holding some talks with Twitter in an attempt to negotiate a lower price than the one he had previously agreed to. But you know, when the ink is dry on the contract, it's pretty hard to come up with a convincing argument to get the seller to reduce the price. Anyway, now we are all caught up until later today, probably in which case I'll have to

do another update next week. Well I might as well put this story next because we're already talking about Elon Musk. Tesla released an announcement stating that it will be shifting to a camera only approach in its driver assist technology. That means the company is phasing out stuff like ultrasonic sensors. It is already h taking out things like like LDAR, So this is testas stripping out some of the technologies that uses for computer vision really is what it comes

down to. Now. The ultrasonic sensors we're mostly used for stuff like parking assist and collision prevention. And it's really interesting to me because generally speaking, the trend you see an autonomous vehicle company ease goes the opposite way. And by that I mean most companies that are working in that field are really building out a robust suite of

technologies to support computer vision. They're not relying on a single one, but a whole array of different array is almost a pun, but a whole array of different technologies to try and provide computer vision for these complicated autonomous systems. Tesla says, no, we're just gonna go pure optical camera. We're gonna we're gonna simplify things. So yeah, it's kind of a it's kind of a reversal of what everyone

else is doing. As Tesla does this, the company says drivers should expect certain features to be unavailable at first when they purchase a new Tesla that is camera only. So those features include stuff like park assist uh summon, where you get your car to magically drive up to wherever you are. Auto park is another one. So these kind of things that the ultrasonic sensor was specifically designed to handle, you know, to to maneuver a car without

having it bump into stuff that's close by. Those are the things that will not be available initially as Tesla moves to this camera only approach. Now, the company claims that the features will return, but it will take time because the company has to ensure that the camera only version can complete these tasks as reliably and as safely

as earlier Tesla models that had ultrasonic sensors. Now, I imagine this move could bring down the cost of production of the vehicles, they won't need as many different components, so it will probably mean that making a Tesla vehicle will be less expensive, which could mean that we'll see reduced sticker prices on future Tesla's, But with so many complex economic factors at play, I wouldn't count on that, just because we have other things like you know, inflation, recessions,

semiconductor shortages, all these kind of things play into that. So I'm not saying that the Tesla's next year are going to be cheaper than the ones this year. Okay, I've got a lot more stories that have nothing to do with Elon Musk coming up, but first let's take a quick break. We're back on Tuesday, a fire in Amazon's JFK eight warehouse in New York temporarily shut down operations.

Amazon sent the day shift home with pay while working with the fire department, which Amazon says certified the building is safe. Not too long after getting the fire put out, and then they had the night shift come on as per normal, And when the night shift got there, some workers reported that there were still areas of the warehouse that had enough smoke to cause problems, you know, like it was hard to breathe that kind of thing. Now, this is the same Amazon warehouse that voted to unionize

earlier this year. That's something that Amazon has yet to formally recognize, although the National Labor Relations Board to here in the US has sided with the Amazon workers on this one, and about fifty workers staged a walkout in protest of being told to work in an environment that they felt was inherently unsafe. Amazon has subsequently suspended those

workers with pay. Now, I think that's an interesting choice considering how other Amazon facilities are also getting close to holding votes on unionization, because I feel like this kind of press is more likely to encourage employees to organize into a union, which obviously Amazon does not want to have happened. So making a choice like this seems to

fuel the movements to organize. Anyway, Amazon is saying it's investigating the matter and that it's going to resolve the suspensions one way or another once that investigation is complete. A jury has found Uber's former chief security officer guilty of attempting to cover up a massive hacker intrusion into Uber's systems. All right, let's get some backstory on this. So back in Joseph Sullivan became the chief security officer

for Uber. He would actually leave Uber in ten he would start to work over at cloud Flare in the same sort of role. Now, a year before Sullivan came to Uber, in hackers penetrated Uber systems and they accessed databases containing personal information for approximately fifty thousand Uber users and drivers. Uber reported this to the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, and this happened all shortly before Sullivan even

joined the company. But the FTC investigated Uber's security systems and processes and essentially said, Yo, this ever happens to you, you you need to let us know stat Now, this was the environment into which Sullivan stepped as the new Cso alright, So in twenty six a second hacker attack, this one way bigger in scope, hit Uber. The hackers access systems that contained data on around fifty seven million Uber users and drivers. It included more than half a

million driver license numbers along with other information. Now, the FDC had told Uber that the company has to report these kinds of intrusions promptly, considering the massive effect they can have on millions of people. But Sullivan allegedly chose to cover the whole thing up. Oh and this hack happened less than two weeks after Sullivan had just appeared before the FTC to give an update on Uber's security systems and practices. So Sullivan had just recently reassured the

FTC that Uber strategy was up today. Then he found out that Uber was hit by this massive hacker intrusion. Then he decided to cover it up further. Uber would later pay the hackers one thousand dollars in cryptocurrency because the hackers claimed they would delete the information they stole

only if they were paid a ransom. Uber even found out the identities of a couple of those hackers and convinced them to sign non disclosure agreements about the breach, So instead of alerting authorities to these people, they're like, hey, don't talk about this ever. All right, sign this deal, you get your money, don't ever talk about it. Meanwhile, these hackers were targeting other companies using very similar approaches

to what worked with Uber. So the FTC argued that what Sullivan was effectively doing was covering for criminals who were continuing to perpetuate digital crimes while also disguising the fact that Uber had been hit by this. The whole thing went to trial, and, as I said, a jury found Soul have been guilty of a couple of different charges, namely obstruction of justice and one called misprision of felony.

I was completely unfamiliar with that phrase, but it means that he knew that a federal felony had been perpetrated, and then he took steps to conceal that felony. While he was found guilty, he has yet to be sentenced. He could potentially face up to five years in prison for the obstruction charge and three years for the misprision charge. Fun fact, though before he started working in security roles for tech companies, Sullivan was a lawyer with the Department

of Justice. Oh, how the turns have tabled. Yesterday, Intel announced it is getting closer to a process that would allow the company to scale up quantum computer production, specifically chips for quantum computers, using a very similar approach to

how it designs chips for classical computers. Now, I've talked about quantum computing before, how a sufficiently powerful quantum computer paired with the right algorithm or program could potentially solve very tricky computational problems in a fraction of the amount of time it would take a classical computer to do that same task. Now, this is not true for all

computational tasks, mind you. There's some things that a classical computer can do much more efficiently than your typical quantum computer, unless you were somehow able to build a truly massive quantum computer that could compete with a classical computer for those tasks, which would be very very hard to do. For a subset of computational problems, however, including ones that relate to our current encryption practices, a quantum computer could

potentially cause massive disruption. It's possible that with a powerful enough quantum computer and with the right algorithm, you could decrypt pretty much anything that has ever been encrypted in a short amount of time. No more secrets. In other words, So this has pushed research facilities and academic institutions and various companies to work on developing the next generation of encryption tools that would be able to withstand this kind

of computational approach. Anyway, For a long time, all of this was largely in the realm of the theoretical because early quantum computers were pretty puny, and they were more of a demonstration of the principles of quantum computing as opposed to a practical implementation, and scaling these quantum computers is really hard to do. It's hard to build more and more powerful quantum computers. It does happen, but it's

a very big challenge. They are incredibly expensive machines to build and operate, and it's very very easy for stuff to go wrong. But Intel's announcement indicates that this theoretical reality may soon manifest as real reality, and not too

long from now. Granted, for all of this to really be a problem, you also have to develop those algorithms or you know, a series of instructions that a quantum computer would follow to carry out a task like decrypting stuff that we would otherwise think of as being practically untouchable. It's not like you build a quantum computer and it magically can decrypt things. You have to design an algorithm

that effectively leads the quantum computer to do this. But there are people who are working on those algorithms and improving them all the time. It's just that you have to marry that with a quantum computer of sufficient power to make it actually do the thing. You wanted to do. But this really does mean we're on the precipice of an enormous transformation in digital communication and encryption. And that's just one possible quantum computing application. There are lots of others,

so very exciting. Also, you know, notably a little scary because of the implications for things like encryption and the idea that with the right machine and algorithm, all stuff that previously we thought of as being private and safe and locked away isn't. So that that is concerning. But yeah, still also really exciting that this is happening and hopefully

things will turn out. Okay, all right, we're gonna take another quick break while I calm myself down, and we'll be back to conclude this news episode with a few more stories. Okay, while looking at news articles for this episode, I came across a headline titled social media use linked to developing depression regardless of personality. Now, that headline reinforces some preconceived ideas of my own, and it also mirrors my own personal experience, so it seems to reinforce my

anecdotal experience. So my first reaction to this headline was, well, of course, I'll go ahead and cover this, but I mean, of course it does. However, then I thought, hang on, I just did an episode about critical thinking. I should use some critical thinking. I should really read about how this study was performed and what it concluded. And once I did that, and I to be clear, I just read the press release. I have yet to read the full study. I haven't taken enough time to do that yet.

But even just reading the press release, I tempered my reaction significantly. Now this is not to say that I think the headline is necessarily inaccurate, but rather that I have more questions and I feel like there's some big gaps in the reasoning here. Anyway, a group of researchers from the University of Arkansas, Oregon State University, University of Alabama, a couple of others. They took a sample of one

thousand US adults between eighteen and thirty years old. Uh. Actually that sample was taken back in eighteen, so this is four year old data. That's one thing we've got to keep in mind. And they look to see how depression correlated both with social media use as well with certain personality traits, like are people who express certain types of personalities? More likely to be depressed if they use

social media. That was kind of the question. Now the press release says, quote, for each personality trait, social media use was strongly associated with the development of depression. End quote. Now that phrase has some wiggle room in it. Right, strongly associated doesn't necessarily mean there's a causal relationship there. Right, that you have an association, but it doesn't mean that

one causes the other. But in another part of the press release, it says, quote, those with high neuroticism were twice as likely to develop depression than those with low neuroticism when using more than three minutes of so show media per day. End quote. Y'all that better be a typo. Three hundred minutes of social media per day. Three hundred minutes is five hours. That is a lot of time on social media. I mean, I did a cursory search to find out how much the average person spends on

social media in a day. The number I kept seeing was one forty seven minutes. This was on sites like Statista, which some people have issues with, but I've seen it reported in a couple different places. Of course, they could all be getting their data from the same source, but still one seven minutes is less than half of three hundred minutes, right, So from what I was saying, the average person spends less than half that amount of time. So if you're spending three hundred minutes of time per

day on social media, you are well outside the norm. Also, we should point out that according to these sites they are saying a hundred forty seven minutes is average. That's an increase of two minutes over one. So in other words, this keeping in mind that the data we're looking at in this study is four years old, presumably the average amount of time spent on social media back in eighteen

was significantly lower than a hundred forty seven minutes. So three hundreds is a crazy outlier, is what I'm saying. And I'm also saying, if you're spending twice as much time as the average person on social media, maybe there's another factor at play that's contributing both to your depression and the amount of time you're spending online. Also, I should point out, one people, that's a very very small sample size. It's hard to draw broad conclusions on such

a small sample. Now, none of this is to say that the research is inherently bad or that the researchers all came to faulty conclusions. It's just that, based on the press release, I can't really see any kind of causal link between social media use in depression. This isn't to say there's not a link. There might be. I just don't see it being pointed out in this this study. Based on the press release. In fact, I could argue, well, what if the causal link goes the other way. What

if it's not using social media leads to depression. What if having depression leads to an overreliance on social media. That kind of gets back to that idea of the strong association, right, That could be a causal link that goes in a different direction. It could just be a correlation. So I don't feel like you can draw any firm conclusions about this. Even though the press release goes on to say that people should be cutting back on the

amount of time they spend on social media. I also think that I just don't think this study supports that argument, at least not not with any real evidence. It just seems to confirm feelings we have about it. I do think that it shows that we need a better designed, larger scale study to really look at to this also to acknowledge the fact that these kind of studies are

inherently difficult to do. It is so hard to control for various variables that can affect things like depression that are outside the scope of the study, and because of that, it is very difficult to draw any sort of firm conclusion. So the whole reason I said this was again to once again reinforce the idea of critical thinking is important, especially when you encounter things that reaffirm your your previously

held biases. Because it happened to me this morning, and then I took a moment and started asking questions again. Maybe it's all absolutely perfectly accurate. There's just some gaps there in the reasoning, but you can't say for sure one way or the other, which is why I go on ti rates like this, all right, Moving on. Earlier this week, the UK government announced plans to build a prototype fusion reactor on the side of a decommissioned coal mine and to have it up and running by twenty

forty now. The specific approach the UK is taking is the spherical TACAMAC for energy production or STEP. A tacamac is a machine that can generate incredibly powerful magnetic fields

meant to contain plasmas UH. This is in a doughnut shape called it trus and the purpose of a tocamac is to essentially force superheated atoms which are moving like crazy otherwise, but forcing these these really fast moving atoms to come into very close contact with one another so that they fuse into a heavier atom and release UH an enormous amount of energy in the process. So fusion, if we can get it to work, would absolutely transform

our approach to energy. Fusion does not have the same dangers and drawbacks as nuclear fission does, and researchers have creative fusion reactions in labs. But the question is whether we can figure out a way to make a sustainable approach where you're able to, you know, do this more than just in an instant and be able to continue to have fusion reactions so that you can continue to provide energy in the form of electricity, or also if we can figure out a way to get more energy

out than what we put into it. Right, if it costs you more energy to start and maintain the set of fusion reactions, then you get out of those fusion reactions. Then you're operating at a net loss, and it makes no sense to do it. You know. It means that you're wasting more energy than you're getting out of it. And you could just bypass that whole process and use the energy you were going to use to start and

maintain the reactions to provide electricity to folks. So if we do figure it all out, that would be great. It would be transformational. Twenty forties seems like an incredibly ambitious and aggressive deadline to me. Um, maybe it's accurate, But because I haven't done research on fusion in a little while, maybe the advancements we've made make that less unlikely than I feel as it is. But I'm gonna

need to do more research at the moment. I would be shocked if a working prototype fusion reactor we're up and running by twenty UM. I think it's more likely to go well over scheduled and probably way over budget, which is estimated to be in the like ten billion pounds range. Remember we're talking about the UK here, so pounds rather than dollars. But maybe, um, if it works, that would be amazing. I would love to see it happen.

I just I feel I got a bad feeling about this, but I do need to do more research to see what progress we've made in fusion, because maybe is a

reasonable estimate. I would love to see it happen. The Great Firewall Report, which is an organization that analyzes china censorship approach to the Internet, has stated that the country's government has made some updates to the technology uses to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing anything that the government doesn't approve of, which includes the whole laundry list of different things, including stuff that criticizes the Chinese government, and the report

states that beginning on October three, the Chinese systems were starting to block quote t LS based censorship circumvention servers end quote TLS. By the way, it stands for a transport layer security. It's a cryptographic protocol. It's used all over the place. You've used it all the time without even knowing about it, and it's essentially used to encrypt data in an effort to provide security and privacy and

authentication for communications. So these servers were relying on a protocol to essentially provide cover so that a user in China would be able to access information that the government would otherwise censor. But now China has found a way to essentially fingerprint these TLS based servers and to block access to them, and that sounds nasty for all sorts of reasons. To me, it's not exactly surprising given China's

historical approach to information and communication. However, there are other tools like naive proxy that's still work right now, but the TLS based circumvention tools are being targeted pretty effectively. And finally, one story that's been unfolding in the gaming world revolves around the team based shooter game Overwatched two, which has had no shortage of controversies surrounding it and the company behind it, Activision Blizzard, is kind of a

ground zero for controversy in general. One controversy is that Overwatch two is, of course it's equel to Overwatch, and that upon the release of Overwatch two, Blizzard to shut down the original game, so players can't play Overwatch anymore.

They're forced to play Overwatched two. And another issue is that until recently, Blizzard was going to require all Overwatch two players to I had an active phone number that would be associated with their battle dot net account, and the thinking behind this was to create kind of a multi factor authentication system to establish not just player identity, but to be able to single out cheaters and abusive players.

Right Like, if you have someone who's cheating in a game, or they're hurling slurs around and they're just being trolling, you can flag them. And now Blizzard could not just banned that account, but ban any account associated with that phone number. So that way the player would not just be able to go out, create a new account and go right back to abusing the system and the players in it. They would be completely banned as long as they were relying on that phone number. If they switched

phone numbers, then it was a different story. But obviously that's a harder thing to do. But Blizzard has since walked this back a little bit. Now, anyone who was playing Overwatch the connected battle Net accounts since June nine will not have to submit a phone number to connect to their battle Net account. This change will start to

roll out beginning tomorrow, October seven. However, accounts that were not connected to battle neet and then have to be in order to play Overwatch two, and all new accounts with Overwatch two will have to submit a phone number

in order to play. However, this phone number system will not accept certain types of phone numbers, like those belonging to a voice over Internet Protocol line or void line, or phones that use prepaid SIM cards, which means that gamers who rely on those kinds of phones will effectively get locked out of playing over Watch two if they aren't in that little window of time where they get

an exclusion from this policy. So this disproportionately effects lower income gamers who might be reliant upon prepaid SIM cards because they can't afford your typical phone contract. So because they don't have the type of phone that is interoperable with Blizzard system, they can't play over Watch two. And this creates an accessibility issue. So it seems to me that Blizzard was trying to solve one problem that is

online abuse and cheating, and inadvertently created an accessibility problem. Also, we haven't seen yet whether Blizzards issues, whether blizzards approach will actually affect abuse and cheating, if it will actually work right, So we don't know if their solution works to solve the problem it was meant to solve, but we do know it has created a totally different problem. Fun times, all right, that's it for the news for Thursday, October six, two thousand twenty two. I hope you all

are well. If you want to suggest topics for me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, there are a couple of different ways of doing it. One is to download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download, it's free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. You can click on the little microphone icon and leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. And by the way, shout out to Tom Valdez for sending me some really great messages. Really appreciate it. Tom,

thanks so much. You could be like Tom, click on that little icon, leave a message. I've got a couple of of shows that I'm going to be doing in the near future that came from those suggestions. If you don't want to do that, the other way to reach out is on Twitter, at least as long as Twitter is still a working entity. Who knows when that might change, but it's working now, so you can leave me a message, and my my handle there is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y.

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