Twitter allegedly loses one million users in just a week, impersonations without clear markings are now a bannable offence on Twitter, and a lawyer alleges that Microsoft violated open-source licenses.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Tuesday, November 8, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Twitter’s user base saw a significant reduction after the tectonic shifts in the way the platform operates. Just one week since Elon Musk took over the social platform, the platform has allegedly lost over one million followers, according to the MIT Technology Review. The number was derived by a firm called Bot Sentinel, which monitors the platform for user activities. The firm believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and almost 500,000 accounts were suspended in just a week. That’s more than double the usual number. Bot Sentinel attributed the exodus to people being unhappy with the changes made under Musk’s management.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Speaking of Twitter’s tectonic changes, Elon Musk just announced that users who impersonate others without marking them as parodies will be permanently suspended. This appears to run counter to his own “free speech” rhetoric that he championed. In another tweet, Musk elaborated that there will be no warning since it’s now rolling out widespread verification. This change, like some before it, appears to be made without any prior notice.
Source: The Verge
A consortium of semiconductor companies wants to greenify its production. The consortium, called the Semiconductor Climate Consortium, consists of more than 60 companies in the electronic supply chain. Big names in the group include Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others. The group was just formed last week and is now in the process of electing a governing council. It will begin by focusing on developing best practices, emission goals, and decarbonization strategies.
Source: IEEE
A lawyer has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI for infringing upon the rights of programmers. According to Matthew Butterick, GitHub’s Copilot feature violates the terms of open-source licenses. Copilot is an AI-based programming aid that generates code in real-time using the OpenAI Codex in Visual Studio, Microsoft’s development environment. The feature is trained using data pulled from public repositories. The controversy is that despite extensive use of open-source code and generating new code based upon it, there’s no attribution given to the original developers. The lawsuit demanded $9,000,000,000 in damages.
Source: Bleeping Computers
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