Daily Tech News 5 November 2022

• Twitter layoffs leave whole teams gutted albeit not literally but that would probably be an environmental hazard. (The Verge)
  
  Half the company has been told not to bother coming back to work on Monday. Sadly for the idiots who thought they had a legal case under the WARN act, it turns out the richest man in the world has access to lawyers. The actual terminations take effect at the start of February, but people are locked out of Twitter's offices and computer network effective immediately.
  
  Which is the only way to handle it when half your employees are mentally-impaired anarcho-communists.

  The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk's cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams, according to tweets by laid-off employees and people familiar with the matter. More company leaders, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony Haile, a senior director of product overseeing Twitter's work with news publishers, have also been laid off following Musk's firings of Twitter's senior leadership last week.

  A lot of those teams sound like they could be removed entirely without anyone noticing - and apparently the curation department was. That's the team that - among other things - edited the trending topics list whenever the peasants start getting ideas above their station.
  
  
  
• Latest kitchen toy is a slow cooker, which I am really liking so far. Since I often have to work late, the ability to put dinner on at lunchtime and then eat it whenever is really convenient. It also smells great.
  
  Doing pork medallions with baby potatoes and honey mustard sauce today.

• The Censorship and Intimidation team survived this round with only 15% cuts and is busy whistling past the Democrats' electoral graveyard and frantically cancelling the truth.
  
  

  PRO TIP: If your state cannot count every vote on election night, there’s cheating in your state. Entire nations count their votes on Election Day.
  
  If you can’t, it’s because you don’t want to. https://t.co/9DPNWAueF3

  — NevilleTheCat (@FearTheFloof) November 3, 2022

  
  
  Unfortunately for C&I there's another dozen levels of that quote tweet cascade branching out in all directions.
  
  
  
• Web3 is not the web. (CNBC)
  
  And it's probably not 3 either.
  
  This from the guy who invented it. The web, that is. Not 3. Probably.
  
  
  
• Vietnam is increasing its control over social media in the country. (Reuters)
  
  Content ruled "inconvenient" or "true but embarrassing" must be removed by the networks within 24 hours or face... Punji sticks, huh? Guess a leopard never changes its hammer and sickle.
  
  
  
• Dell Australia is facing legal action from the country's consumer protection agency over bullshit monitor prices. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you advertise a sale price in Australia, the price you show as before the discount must be the regularly advertised price. It's illegal to inflate it to make the discount look bigger... Which is what Dell allegedly did here.
  
  
  
• The executives behind the painfully obvious MoviePass scam are facing criminal charges for fraud. (The Verge)
  
  Investors claim they were totally fooled by the company's business plan of losing money on every sale but making it up in volume.
  
  
  
• HBO has cancelled Westworld. (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  This came as a shock to everyone except people who had watched recent seasons or paid any attention whatsoever to the ratings and reviews, which were utterly dire.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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