Twitter may be rethinking Elon Musk’s buyout offer
Elon Musk and Twitter are back in the news. If you haven’t been following the story over the past month or so, it started with Musk quietly buying up Twitter’s common stock until he was the largest single shareholder with a 9.2% stake. Twitter’s board of directors then made him an offer to join them on the board (the dark side). Well, he refused, because it turns out 9.2% of Twitter wasn’t enough. He wanted it all. On 14 April, he made Twitter’s shareholders an offer of $54.20 (~R845), around 18% higher than what shares were going for at the time – $45.85 (~R715).
Twitter was quick on the defence, adopting what investors call a “poison pill” strategy, which lets some shareholders buy more stock at a discount in an attempt to stave off the hostile takeover attempt. Now, it looks like that might’ve just been to buy some time. Or maybe Musk’s first offer of around $43 billion (R672 billion), which he called his “best and final” offer, wasn’t high enough. The Wall Street Journal reports Twitter is “taking a fresh look” at Musk’s proposal. That’s after the world’s richest man ‘announced’ via a new SEC filing that he could secure up to $46.5 billion (R727 billion) in funding for the purchase. If you don’t have your calculator handy, that’s a whole $3.5 billion (R55 billion) more. Is this the beginning of the end of Twitter as we know it? Probably not. Maybe it will hurry along that edit button though.
Scammers have started using AI-generated faces to scam people
Scam attempts are getting more intricate, which makes them harder to spot. Ben Dickson, founder of TechTalks, discovered this first-hand when he was contacted by a legitimate-looking lawyer, working for a legitimate-looking law firm, with regards to a DMCA copyright infringement he had allegedly committed.
The copyrighted image that Dickson used was in fact from Pexels, a license-free stock photo library, meaning that no attribution is required. So either this ‘lawyer’ needed to go back to law school or something fishy was up. Turns out it was the second one. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the website of the ‘legit’ law firm was only set up in February 2022, despite being involved in over 420 cases since 2009. The images of the lawyers at the firm, found in the ‘about’ section all looked legit as well, except they weren’t.
They are the product of something called a generative adversarial network (GAN). This is a deep learning model that can be taught to create images of faces of people, art or… anything else really. You can see this kind of thing in action over at This Person Does Not Exist. Keep this in mind next time someone emails you threatening legal action or if you’ve won something exorbitant, like $80 million dollars from Kenya’s National Bank.
Source: TechTalk
Teslas don’t like private jets, apparently
A shaky, vertical video emerged on Reddit late last week of a Tesla hitting into and then moving a Cirrus Vision Jet. Some unlucky Tesla owner is reported to have engaged their vehicle’s Smart Summon feature in the vicinity of the plane. It’s not like the car maliciously sought out the most expensive plane to ram. The $3.5 million (R54 million) Vision Jet just happened to be in the way. The feature enables a parked Tesla to leave its parking and navigate around a few basic obstacles before finding its owner. It is activated or deactivated from the Tesla smartphone app. Maybe a whole plane doesn’t count as a basic obstacle. Or maybe it was riding a little high for the Tesla’s sensors to pick up.
The Smart Summon function first appeared in Teslas in 2019. Shortly after it debuted, users began posting videos of confused looking cars and near-misses. CEO Elon Musk once described the Smart Summon feature as Tesla’s “most viral” feature but we don’t think that’s a good thing in this case.
Source: The Verge
A wild Google Pixel Watch appears
If you’re old enough to remember the fuss that came from an Apple engineer forgetting a then-unreleased prototype of the iPhone 4 in a bar, you might find this amusing. The same thing has apparently happened with a Google Pixel Watch in the US. Android Central received pictures from somebody claiming to have found the watch in a restaurant after it was left there. Putting scepticism aside for a moment, if the images do depict the unreleased watch a lot of rumours have been confirmed.
Current rumours suggest the watch could be announced at Google’s next I/O event, set to take place on 11 May 2022 and be released alongside the Pixel 7 towards the end of this year. We’ll have to wait to see if that’s the case or not. But at least now we know what the watch might look like.
The design of the watch and the clasp on the strap looks very Fitbit-esque, which makes sense seeing Google bought that company in 2021. The strap connectors look to be Google’s proprietary designer. Take all of this info with quite a bit of salt. Without any official info along with the watch, there’s no way of verifying a) if it’s even real and b) how far along in the testing phase it is. This design could have already changed as far as anybody knows. So sit tight. Hopefully this will all make sense in a few weeks at Google I/O 2022.
Source: Android Central