This year, Google has a lot to prove — and at least one product to unfold.
We’re expecting a barrage of news, from Pixel devices to AI announcements. If you want up to the second updates, you can follow along with our live blog. Our team is seated at the Shoreline Amphitheatre and reporting on... a duck with lips.
According to Elon Musk, at least, who has a habit of declaring Twitter policies that he does not follow through on.
This one could have big repercussions, though, and Musk didn’t provide clarity on what qualifies as being inactive. Does that mean no logins? No tweets? What happens to now-inactive icons like @Horse_Ebooks?
It’s probably a good time to fire off a tweet on your burner, just in case.
but not enough to aggressively fight back. Rest of World reports that government requests for Twitter to censor posts or provide data more than doubled under Musk, and Musk’s team has been doing little to combat them.
In the year before Musk’s acquisition, the [requests that Twitter complies with in full] had hovered around 50 percent, in line with the compliance rate reported in the company’s final transparency report. After Musk’s takeover, the number jumps to 83 percent (808 requests out of a total of 971).
On an earnings call today, Daniel EK called Epic’s single win — which will let app developers tell users about non-Apple payment options — “very important.” But mostly, he said the US still needs a law to be passed to open up mobile devices from the control of Apple and Google.
Here’s Ek on why he sees this as a big issue:
“When I started as a 14 year-old entrepreneur, the internet was this democratic place that anyone, anywhere in the world could have an impact, and right now we’re in a place where billions of consumers are using the internet primarily through smartphones and ... there’s literally two companies now that control all of that on the internet and they can unilaterally change the rules.”
The US government’s criminal case against the former product leader of OpenSea, Nate Chastain, kicks off this week. Chastain is accused of buying up NFTs that he knew would be featured on OpenSea’s homepage, then selling them shortly thereafter as their value spiked.
The question isn’t so much whether Chastain did this, it’s whether doing this is illegal. As a former SEC enforcement lawyer told Reuters, “Is it insider trading of anything?”
Yesterday, as grandmasters Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi faced off in game eight for the chess world’s top title, someone on Reddit noticed that the exact position on their board had recently been reached by an online account.
Now, the entire chess world seems convinced that they’ve found Liren’s secret online prep account, revealing his planned attacks and defenses to Nepomniachtchi ahead of their remaining games. “This is a huge, huge blow in terms of the overall match strategy,” grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura said in a video yesterday.
–a scientist discussing parrots and video calling apps. Highly recommended reading in The New York Times.
Messina said goodbye to the platform on Saturday after his verification check was removed:
My choice isn’t about the badge; it’s about everything that lead up to the badge and how it has been handled. Whatever Twitter was before deserved more dignity and consideration than it’s received in the last six months.
His account has now been set to private.
Messina’s suggestion, back in 2007, to use the # symbol to organize groups became a defining feature for Twitter. The platform’s new owner, however, isn’t much of a fan.
