Want to know where Elon’s jet is at all times?
19-year-old Jack Sweeney found his 15 minutes of internet fame with one of the many Twitter bots he’s created. The former child has written a Twitter bot (@ElonJet) that uses publicly available flight info to track the private jets of those he’s deemed worthy. Of the high-profile tech individuals including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Kimbal and Elon Musk, the latter didn’t particularly like being tracked. “Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” Musk wrote in a Twitter dm to Sweeney. Not wanting to oblige and have nothing to show, Sweeney responded with “Yes I can but it’ll cost you a Model 3 only joking unless?” You have to shoot your shot, we guess.
In the exchange that followed, Musk offered him $5,000 for Sweeney to take the bot down and help keep Musk safe. Sweeney’s counteroffer of $50,000 was left on ‘read’ by Musk who said he’d think about it but hasn’t responded since. But that’s okay, according to Sweeney. The bot manager said he’s already benefitted from the work he’s done on the project with the experience he’s gained and a part-time job as an app developer. So, the precedent is set, if you’re got a cool tech idea, implicate someone famous and they might pay you or make you famous as well.
Source: Engadget
Spotify issues lukewarm response to COVID-19 misinformation backlash
The online audio streaming giant has responded (kinda) to the mounting controversy over some of the creators on its platform reportedly spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Its response will be to add content advisory warnings to anything that covers the pandemic. CEO Daniel Ek published a blog post yesterday in which he announces that Spotify has published its “long-standing Platform Rules”. This is the first time these rules have been made public.
In the rules post – which you can find here – a section states to avoid “Content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health.” This follows from the controversy that started from Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in which Rogan claimed that healthy young people don’t need the vaccine. This led to some notable artists giving Spotify the ultimatum between them or Joe Rogan. Of course, Spotify sided with the host of the most listened to podcast on the planet.
Source: TechRadar
Microsoft successfully defends against largest-ever DDoS attack
After last year and what seemed like the ransomware Ragnarok, Microsoft bags a Win against internet attackers. The tech company’s Azure DDoS protection team published new data from November last year that shows it successfully defended against several high-volume Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A few of them even broke some records. As the name suggests, a DDoS attack uses hundreds if not thousands of sources usually computers and devices under the attackers’ control to flood the target network with junk data with the goal of overwhelming the network and crashing it.
By today’s standards, this is the equivalent of giving a bunch of regular dudes stones and telling them to try and demolish a big house. Not very sophisticated. Eventually, they might manage to do it but it’s going to take a very long time. The dudes would all get bored or run out of stones before then. In this case, though, it was more like a few trillion dudes all trying at the same time. An attack on some unlucky Azure customers in Asia peaked at 3.47Tbps of data throughput from 10,000 sources in over 10 countries. The largest attack of its kind probably ever. That’s over 3 million times more throughput than your internet connection at home. Thanks, Microsoft, we guess.
Source: Ars Technica
Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi announce EV roadmap
Not to be outdone by any of the other car manufacturers switching to EV production, Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi have announced their common Alliance 2030 roadmap. It’s complete with new EVs, factories and massive amounts of money. The roadmap indicates the group will invest €23 billion over the next five years, release 35 new vehicles and build more factories, presumably. There weren’t many concrete facts given, it’s only a roadmap after all. But it did mention a new Mitsubishi ASX, a new Nissan Micra and a Renault R5. Presumably all-electric and likely to replace their current petrol or diesel counterparts.
At the rate things are going, EVs will be dominant on the road before too long. SA has seen some EVs on our road already and there have even been talks of testing electric taxis.
Source: Nissan Press Release