72 karma · joined February 11, 2020
I've read the comments here and quite surprisingly there are a lot of folks saying that the value of this hack isn't worth more than roughly one year's salary at Twitter (as an intern). I appreciate the pragmatism, but unlikely.
Anyone with this kind of exploit could have sold it, moved to Russia, and received immunity from extradition. Secondly, people should be scrutinizing any moron willing to give away thousands of dollars to billionaires for a promise of a 2x return. Especially in these times.
So, reason can only allow us to arrive at a most likely cause. That this was indeed an inside job. It was not about money. It was not a security flaw. But rather, it was simply a group of employees that were unhappy with Twitter allowing the federal government to investigate bad actors on the platform behind closed doors.
And here is why: https://www.scribd.com/document/467148777/DHS-Social-Media-L...
I think what the site says is basically true, but also I think it's vaguely disingenuous.
This stuff takes a lot of time and they've been preparing for the change since 2015. This is entirely not simple.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/irs_2019_integrated_moderniz...
See page 29 for details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel
There is also a scientific precedence that refutes these findings, which is called the McGurk effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_perception#Music-langua...
These researchers may not be to blame for this, but they really should have been honest in their conclusion.
People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
I can't blame progress for killing culture, but I'm glad that back then, something like serving up an MP3 library in an AOL chatroom was a deeply awesome experience.
Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.