Tag: Elon Musk

Elon Musk has announced that there would be a temporary cap set on the number of tweets users may read per day on Twitter after hundreds of users experienced access issues.

The chairman of the social networking site tweeted that verified accounts are only allowed to read 6,000 messages every day.

He said that new unverified accounts are only allowed to read 300 posts per day, while unverified accounts can only read 600 posts per day.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said Twitter had imposed the ‘temporary limit’ to ‘address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation’.

In a later tweet, the billionaire added: ‘Rate limits increasing soon to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.’

It comes after Twitter announced users will be required to have an account on the site to view tweets, a move he called a ‘temporary emergency measure’.

Musk has said hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data ‘extremely aggressively’, impacting user experience.

He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using the platform’s data to train their large language models.

In the UK, a peak of 5,126 people complained of problems accessing the site at 4.12pm on Saturday after reported outages started coming in at 12pm, according to the website Downdetector – which tracks online outages.

In the US, some 7,461 people complained of issues as of 4.15pm UK time, the site notes.

#Twitterdown and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with a message saying ‘Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again’.

It comes after another outage in February, when many users were not able to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.

After taking over Twitter, Mr Musk laid off some 80% of its 8,000 global staff – and admitted it resulted in the platform losing a large amount of its functionality.

He also oversaw the scrapping of legacy ‘blue ticks’, which verified a user’s identity and were replaced by a paid-for subscription called Twitter Blue.

High-profile figures and celebrities said the move leaves the platform open to imposters and disinformation.

Users who pay £9.60 a month, or £115.20 annually, receive the blue tick and can make longer tweets up to 10,000 characters.

Other select features available only to subscribers include non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures, making changes to published tweets and seeing around 50% fewer ads.

Twitter has said that the service ‘elevates quality conversations’.

Entrepreneur Mr Musk, prior to buying the platform, revealed plans to turn it into ‘X, the everything app’.

In December, just weeks after the takeover, Mr Musk tweeted: ‘I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.’

The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a poll Mr Musk created and promised to abide by.

In May, Mr Musk confirmed that advertising executive Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBCUniversal, was replacing him as Twitter’s chief executive.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to launch its own creation, which might carry nearly twice as much power than anything flown previously, just a few months after NASA exposed the world to the most powerful rocket ever flown to orbit.

At SpaceX’s facilities along the southern Texas coast, a vehicle with the name of Starship is presently perched on a launch pad. Although the company can launch at any moment between 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) and 9:30 a.m. CT (10:30 a.m. ET) on Monday, that is the time it is aiming for.

“I guess I’d like to just set expectations low,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a Twitter “Spaces” event for his subscribers Sunday evening. “If we get far enough away from launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the pad.”

He added: “There’s a good chance that it gets postponed since we’re going to be pretty careful about this launch.”

It will be SpaceX’s first attempt to launch a fully assembled Starship vehicle, building on a years-long testing campaign.

Musk has talked about Starship — making elaborate presentations about its design and purpose — for half a decade, and he frequently harps on its potential for carrying cargo and humans to Mars. Musk has even said that his sole purpose for founding SpaceX was to develop a vehicle like Starship that could establish a human settlement on Mars.

Additionally, NASA has already awarded SpaceX contracts and options worth several billions of dollars to use Starship to ferry government astronauts to the surface of the moon under the space agency’s Artemis program.

The inaugural flight test will not complete a full orbit around Earth. If successful, however, it will travel about 150 miles above Earth’s surface, well into altitudes deemed to be outer space.

Starship consists of two parts:the Super Heavy booster, a gargantuan rocket that houses 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft, which sits atop the booster during launch and is designed to break away after the booster expends its fuel to finish the mission.

The massive Super Heavy rocket booster will give the first blast of power at liftoff.

Less than three minutes after takeoff, it’s expected to expend its fuel and separate from the Starship spacecraft, leaving the booster to be discarded in the ocean. The Starship will use its own six engines, blazing for more than six minutes, to propel itself to nearly orbital speeds.

The vehicle will then complete a partial lap of the planet, reentering the Earth’s atmosphere near Hawaii. It’s expected to splash down off the coast about an hour and a half after liftoff.

SpaceX tries, fails to catch part of rocket with net

Starship’s ultimate success or failure immensely consequential. Not only is it crucial to SpaceX’s future as a company — it also underpins the United States government’s ambitions for human exploration.

But it’s not all riding on this inaugural test flight. SpaceX has long established its willingness to embrace mishaps, mistakes and explosions in the name of refining the design of its spacecraft.

In the lead-up to the first launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, which held the title of most powerful rocket before NASA’s SLS took flight last year, Musk foresaw only a 50-50 chance of success.

“People (came) from all around the world to see what will either be a great rocket launch or the best fireworks display they’ve ever seen,” Musk told CNN at the time.

The inaugural Falcon Heavy launch was ultimately successful.

Watch yet another SpaceX prototype explode

01:26 – Source: CNN Business

Development of Starship has been based at SpaceX’s privately held spaceport about 40 minutes outside Brownsville, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Testing began years ago with brief “hop tests” of early spacecraft prototypes. The company began with brief flights that lifted a few dozen feet off the ground before evolving to high-altitude flights, most of which resulted in dramatic explosions as the company attempted to land them upright.

One suborbital flight test in May 2021, however, ended in success.

Since then, SpaceX has also been working to get its Super Heavy booster prepared for flight. The massive, 230-foot-tall (69-meter-tall) cylinder is packed with 33 of the company’s Raptor engines.

Fully stacked, Starship and Super Heavy stand about 400 feet (120 meters) tall.

SpaceX has been waiting more than a year to get FAA approval for this launch attempt.

The company, and federal regulators tasked with certifying SpaceX launches won’t pose risks to people or property in the area surrounding the launch site, have faced significant pushback from the local community, including from environmental groups.

But the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, announced Friday, April 14, that it granted the company’s request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket out of the SpaceX facilities in South Texas.

“After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement.

During a call with reporters last week, an FAA official, who declined to be named for publication, said that the agency has been overseeing SpaceX’s compliance with the mitigating actions, some of which are still in the works, even as the company prepares for launch.

The FAA official said government personnel will be on the ground to ensure SpaceX complies with its license during the test launch.

SpaceX’s contract with NASA to use Starship for the space agency’s Artemis III moon landing later this decade leaves much of Starship’s development work to SpaceX. A $2.9 billion deal, inked in April 2021, was awarded to SpaceX over several competitors. It was later expanded to include a second lunar landing mission in 2027.

NASA has been working over the past year to hash out a work flow between the space agency and SpaceX. It’s a dynamic the two organization have had to iron out in previous SpaceX-NASA projects, including an ongoing partnership that uses SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A moon mission, however, involves more powerful and complex hardware.

NASA is not, however, involved in planning the flight profile for this test flight or directing SpaceX on what to do, according to Lisa Hammond, NASA’s associate program manager of the Human Landing System at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Hammond did not share a specific checklist of tests or flights that NASA hopes to see before Starship is entrusted with a moon landing mission.

“I would not put it with a number,” she said, adding that the Artemis II mission, slated for next year, will see humans fly atop the SLS rocket after only one uncrewed test flight.

“The confidence comes in the design, the confidence comes in the safety of the vehicle for the crew,” Hammond said.

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell previously said she hopes the company will conduct more than 100 orbital test flights of Starship before putting humans on board, as the company will need to do in order to help NASA carry out its moon landing with the Artemis III mission, slated for 2025.

“I think that would be a great goal,” Shotwell said Wednesday, when asked whether that target was still feasible. “I don’t think we will do 100 flights of Starship next year, but maybe (in) 2025 we will do 100 flights.”

NASA’s current timeline targets 2025 for the first lunar landing mission, which will see astronauts transfer from their Orion capsule, which will launch atop a NASA Space Launch System rocket, and into a Starship spacecraft already in lunar orbit. It will be the Starship vehicle that ferries the crew down to the lunar surface.

It’s not clear, however, if 2025 is feasible. NASA’s inspector general has already suggested it is not. Delays, according to comments from the inspector general in March 2022, could revolve around Starship.

Many of the over 50 classified documents that appeared on social media networks days after the Pentagon declared it was looking into the leak, are still accessible on Twitter.

Before making their way to more popular websites like Twitter and other platforms like Telegram, images of the hacked documents first appeared on a social media site called Discord weeks ago and went mostly unreported.

The fact that these documents sat undetected for so long and in some cases continue to circulate online underscores the limited authority the US government has to force social media companies to remove content, even classified materials that threaten national security. It also highlights the subjective enforcement of those companies’ policies that determine what content does and doesn’t belong on their sites.

“This all underscores that the notion that platforms are neutral is absolutely bogus,” said Justin Sherman, founder and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a DC-based research and advisory firm. “Doing nothing is still a decision, and platforms have to make judgment calls about what they want to allow on their platforms.”

In Twitter’s case, the classified material appears to have fallen through a policy loophole. The posting of classified US military documents would likely not be a violation of Twitter’s hacked materials policy, a former Twitter employee told CNN, “because there isn’t credible evidence establishing the likelihood of a technical hack or intrusion as the source of the materials.”

Twitter’s content moderation policy allows for the platform to label tweets that share potentially doctored materials, but the team responsible for producing such labels has been gutted under Elon Musk, the former employee told CNN, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation by Musk.

“The fact that Twitter is unresponsive to questions about this at a time when Musk says he’s interested in public trust does not inspire a lot of confidence,” Eddie Perez, a former Twitter executive focused on product safety, told CNN.

Twitter’s personnel issues have only exacerbated its inability to respond to the classified information incident, Sherman said.

“Twitter has been a content moderation dumpster fire since Elon Musk took over and fired or pushed out or caused people to quit in large numbers,” he said, “and there is basically nobody left paying attention to many of these issues.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. Musk broached the issue in a tweet last week, saying sarcastically: “Yeah, you can totally delete things from the Internet – that works perfectly and doesn’t draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide at all.”

Without additional information from outside sources such as government or intelligence officials, tech companies will struggle to proactively respond to classified material, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook official who helped lead the company’s global election efforts until 2021.

“There’s the hack part, the leak part, and the classified part,” Harbath said. “There’s all those different components. No company alone is going to be able to determine every single one of those without help.”

Like Twitter, Discord does not appear to have a specific policy against posting classified information. It has roughly two dozen other policies in its community guidelines, including bans on “illegal behavior,” conduct that infringes on others’ “intellectual property or other rights,” and spreading false or misleading information.

On Discord, content resides on community-managed chatrooms known as “servers.” The basic structure of the platform can make it easier for illegal content to linger in niche corners compared to more centralized platforms.

That structure also arguably made it easier for the sensitive classified documents to slip under the radar for weeks.

In 2022, the shooter who killed 10 people in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store posted racist screeds and memes to a private Discord server before embarking on his rampage, but Discord did not learn of or remove the content until after the killing spree and once the shooter began sharing links to the private server to his followers.

The classified documents’ murky origins weren’t just an issue for the platforms.

“Most [Discord] users distributed the files because they thought they were fake at first,” one Discord user who followed the initial flurry of postings of classified documents told CNN. “By the time they were confirmed as legitimate, they were already all over Twitter and other platforms,” said the user, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

A Discord spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company is “cooperating with law enforcement” in response to the “to the apparent breach of classified material.”

“When we are made aware of content that violates our policies, our Safety team investigates and takes the appropriate action, including banning users, shutting down servers, and engaging with law enforcement,” the Discord spokesperson said.

Discord has grown more popular in recent years and now claims 150 million active users, many of them avid video gamers.

Austin Berglas, a former senior FBI official, said the FBI is likely looking to obtain information on which Discord users were administering the chat rooms where the documents appeared and the users that posted the documents.

It is unclear whether the US government warned social media platforms to be on alert for posts containing the specific classified information, and it is uncertain how the government could have done so without divulging the fact of the compromise or the contents of the documents to a wide range of otherwise unauthorized individuals.

“In a scenario where you identify and expect a platform to remove leaked classified documents, you’re asking that company to do classified document verification,” said Sherman. “That is not something your average moderator, especially for these companies that farm out their content moderation to people in low-resource countries that they underpay, are going to be able to do.”

Beyond the difficulty of verifying whether the content is authentic, there is also the issue of whether posts have intrinsic public interest value. In the past, some platforms have used that defense to justify hosting content that otherwise might violate their policies, including social media posts by Donald Trump.

The challenges involving US-based social media companies such as Twitter and Discord become even thornier when the platform is based outside of the United States, experts said.

“Good luck getting any of this removed from Telegram,” said Sherman, referring to a social media platform with operations outside of the US.