Roundup – US Treasury thwarts attack; Musk’s workforce slash continues

Musk to cut Twitter workforce by 25%

Members of Musk’s inner circle have been in discussions with Twitter’s remaining senior executives to conduct plans to lay off 25% of the social media giant’s workforce. Celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro, who has represented Musk for a few years, leads the talks. A document filed on Monday revealed Twitter’s board has already been dismissed. Redundancies are expected to be made across all departments, specifically targeting sales, product, engineering, legal and trust and safety which may impact more than 7,000 staff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/31/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs/

Google shakes hands with SB Energy on solar supply deal

Google has announced it will buy 75% of the renewable power from SB Energy Global’s Texas facilities. The move comes as the tech giant aims to deliver on its pledge to operate data centres on carbon-free energy by 2030. Reports suggest that companies are quickly shifting towards clean energy in a bid to meet environmental and sustainability goals. SB Energy’s Orion 1, 2 and 3 and Eiffel solar projects, which total nearly 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of capacity, are expected to be ready to supply power by mid-2024. According to Google, it will use the energy from SB Energy to power its data centres in Texas.

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2022-11-01/google-signs-solar-power-supply-deal-with-softbank-backed-sb-energy

US Treasury thwarts DDoS attack by Russian hacker group, says official

The US Treasury has said that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were traced to Killnet, the pro-Russian hacker group that claimed responsibility for disrupting the websites of several US states and airports in October. The incident took place last month and caused “little to no disruption”, according to Treasury reports. Todd Conklin, cybersecurity counsellor to deputy Treasury secretary Wally Adeyemo, described the attack as “pretty low-level DDoS activity targeting Treasury’s critical infrastructure nodes.” In line with new procedures adopted under the Biden administration, he said the Treasury shared internet protocol (IP) addresses used in the attack quickly.

https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2022/11/01/us-treasury-thwarted-attack-by-russian-hacker-group-last-month-says-official/36894

India open to self-regulation of social media content

The Indian government has said it continues to favour a self-regulatory body for social media content disputes. Reports suggest that decisions about social media content regulation in India have always caused controversy. On Friday, the government said that it would set up an appeals panel to support users who object to moderation decisions of big tech firms such as Meta and Twitter.

However, India’s minister of state for IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, told Reuters that New Delhi could still consider industry self-regulation as government-led reviews were “not something that we want to spend a lot of time doing”. Yet he added that the body would need some government representation.

https://atolltimes.mv/post/world/907