Elon Musk finally owns Twitter, but is the social media giant circling the drain or about to become something entirely new? Should Medibank pay the ransom to keep customers‘ sensitive medical data safe? I was on this week’s Vertical Hold: Behind The Tech News and this is an updated version.
“Australian technology news podcast Vertical Hold dives into the big stories of the week. Joined by Australia’s leading tech journalists every Friday, co-hosts @adam_turner and @alexkidman channel-surf through the headlines in search of the big picture,” they write.
“A week is a long time in politics, they say, and it turns out it’s a long time when you’re the new owner of Twitter, having spent $44 billion dollars to own it. Elon Musk has been on an absolute tear this week, but what will his changes mean for Twitter? Will anyone pay $8/month for a verified tick, and what are they worth if anyone can just do that anyway?
“Meanwhile the breaches are coming thick and fast as we dive into the details (such as they are) behind the Medibank data breach, and Sony reveals its PSVR2 pricing!”
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Episode Links
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[27 October 2022] Chief financial officer Mark Rogers said the company hadn’t taken out cyber insurance because it was too expensive.
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[2 November 2022] Ben Walker worked in cybersecurity in the private health insurance industry for six years, and says hackers will now "see Australia as a soft target".
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[7 October 2022] It’s now obvious to everyone that businesses routinely retain too much personal information, and that the true cost of a data breach is far higher than expected. We all see how criminals exploit stolen data, what makes data valuable to them, and what motivates criminal hacking. But the systemic problem no one is talking about is the way we use identifying information to begin with. If we don’t fix that properly, then the next big breach will be just as devastating.
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[2 August 2021] We should be able to “tap-and-prove” any important facts and figures about ourselves — as easily as we tap and pay with a smartphone at any one of hundreds of millions of terminals globally.
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[4 November 2022] "Those type of provocations are not helping to calm the waters."
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It’s hard to understate how tech billionaires are actively intervening to make the world a worse place. Elon Musk is reshaping Twitter with the help of David Sacks, who is part of an effort by Peter Thiel to push US politics to the right. I dig into it all with @SilvermanJacob!
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[3 November 2022] The billionaire and his advisers have discussed adding paid direct messages, fees to watch videos and other features to the service.
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[1 November 2022] Twitter’s new owner faces a difficult regulatory landscape around the world.
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It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.
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Evelyn and Alex talk about, what else, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. He says he’s freed the bird, but there’s a whole bunch of restraints he clearly hasn’t thought about. He’s got some not-so-fun meetings and phone calls coming up.
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