Tag Archives: stupid amounts of money

CNN: Academic researchers blast Twitter’s data paywall as ‘outrageously expensive’

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CNN: Academic researchers blast Twitter’s data paywall as ‘outrageously expensive’. “In an open letter this week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research — a group representing dozens of researchers and civil society organizations — said free and open access to Twitter data has historically enabled systematic, large-scale research on social media’s role in public health initiatives, foreign propaganda, political discourse, and even the bots and spam that Musk has blamed for ruining Twitter. But Twitter’s new tiered access system undercuts all of that, the researchers said.”

Mashable: Twitter cuts many app developers’ API access, even those willing to pay $42,000 per month

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Mashable: Twitter cuts many app developers’ API access, even those willing to pay $42,000 per month. “When Twitter rolled out the pricing for its paid API tiers last week, many indie developers announced they would have to shut down apps they had made for the platform…. Now, the Elon Musk-owned company has seemingly cut off API access to even some of the largest Twitter-based apps – including some that wanted to pay the exorbitant new fees which start at $42,000 per month.”

Boing Boing: Having devalued Twitter’s blue checkmark, Elon sells Gold Badges

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Boing Boing: Having devalued Twitter’s blue checkmark, Elon sells Gold Badges. “No longer serving the purpose of identifying a publication or other notable source as passing whatever Twitter’s idea of verified or notable was, Elon Musk now offers a Gold Badge your company can buy for $1000/mo to prove they are a company that paid $1000.”

WIRED: Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone

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WIRED: Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone. “The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.” I believe the technical term for those prices is “goony”.

WIRED: Billionaires Are A Security Threat

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WIRED: Billionaires Are A Security Threat. “In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the ‘evil billionaire attack’ if you’d like.”

Business Insider: A 17-year-old Seattle high schooler is tracking more than 150 private jets’ emissions

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Business Insider: A 17-year-old Seattle high schooler is tracking more than 150 private jets’ emissions. “Using [Jack] Sweeney’s Ground Control Registration Database — which was developed to famously track Elon Musk’s private jet — [Akash] Shendure identifies and compiles carbon emissions from the private jets of more than 150 wealthy Americans and their families.”

The Atlantic: My Printer Is Extorting Me

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The Atlantic: My Printer Is Extorting Me. “After years of holding out, my family finally succumbed to a pandemic inkjet purchase. (Like many, we were doing a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I girded my loins for the agony of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded utterance ‘Driver not found.’ What I did not expect, however, was for my printer to shake me down like a loan shark.”

New York Times: FTX Inquiry Expands as Prosecutors Reach Out to Former Executives

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New York Times: FTX Inquiry Expands as Prosecutors Reach Out to Former Executives. “Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are speaking with lawyers for former officials at the collapsed crypto exchange FTX and scrutinizing the immediate family of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.”

GeekWire: MacKenzie Scott launches new website that details her giving process and lists recipients of $14B

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GeekWire: MacKenzie Scott launches new website that details her giving process and lists recipients of $14B. “Since her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott has given away more than $14 billion to more than 1,600 nonprofit organizations, which are all listed on the new site, along with the amount of money received. She has stayed out of the limelight during that time, only penning a handful of essays to describe her donations.”

New York Times: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Quest to Win Friends and Influence People

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New York Times: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Quest to Win Friends and Influence People. “A network of political action committees, nonprofits and consulting firms funded by FTX or its executives worked to court politicians, regulators and others in the policy orbit, with the goal of making Mr. Bankman-Fried the authoritative voice of crypto, while also shaping regulation for the industry and other causes, according to interviews, email exchanges and an encrypted group chat viewed by The New York Times.”

Vox: Crypto probably isn’t dead, but should it be?

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Vox: Crypto probably isn’t dead, but should it be?. “For those who have been paying attention to the sector, this sort of feels like waking up from a worldwide hypnosis. The metaverse thing, which is basically Zoom meetings with legless cartoons, never made sense. Neither did this idea that images of pixelated punks and weird-looking monkeys were worth millions of dollars as NFTs. Thousands of crypto tokens and coins spun up out of thin air have been revealed to be nothing more than magic beans.” If you HAVEN’T been paying attention to the sector, this is a good overview of its problems with lots of links to backstory.

The Hill: The true tragedy behind Musk’s Twitter buyout is the power of billionaires

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The Hill: The true tragedy behind Musk’s Twitter buyout is the power of billionaires. “The fact that one single person, Elon Musk, could access enough money to buy out an entire social media platform is incredible. It would take the median American worker, working full time at $55,640 a year, no fewer than 790,797 years to make the $44 billion needed to buy Twitter. This is longer than human beings have been on the planet.”

Crypto Crash Widens a Divide: ‘Those With Money Will End Up Being Fine’ (New York Times)

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New York Times: Crypto Crash Widens a Divide: ‘Those With Money Will End Up Being Fine’. “Enthusiasts promote the digital coins — which are exchanged using networks of computers that verify transactions, rather than through a centralized entity like a bank — as a means for people of all backgrounds to achieve transformational wealth outside the traditional finance system. But for all those supposedly egalitarian principles, crypto’s collapse has revealed a yawning divide: As employees of crypto companies lose their jobs and ordinary investors suffer huge losses, top executives have emerged relatively unscathed.”

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Sign up for a guided email tour of the Pandora Papers

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International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: Sign up for a guided email tour of the Pandora Papers. “The Pandora Papers also explore how this shadow economy takes a global toll beyond lost tax revenue, harming everyday people and the public interest in often unexpected ways. To help readers navigate the vast scope of this investigation, this six-part guided tour will walk you through the most explosive stories and break down key findings, email-by-email over the next two weeks, right in your inbox.”

The Verge: Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company

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The Verge: Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company. “Twitter has accepted Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company announced in a press release today. Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer earlier this month.”