Techlife News #581

Twitter suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk’s private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform’s new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles. Then, hours later, Musk brought back the jet-tracking account after imposing new conditions on all of Twitter’s users — no more sharing of anyone’s current location. But shortly afterward, the account was suspended again. That came after Musk tweeted that a “crazy stalker” attacked a car in Los Angeles carrying his young son. He also threatened legal action against Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the @elonjet flight-tracking account, and “organizations who supported harm to my family.” It’s not clear what legal action Musk could take against Sweeney for an account that automatically…

Shares of Tesla are sliding before the market open on Thursday after news broke that CEO Elon Musk sold another $3.58 billion worth of the electric vehicle maker’s stock this week. The stock slipped to $153 in premarket trading and is nearing two-year lows. Musk, the new owner of Twitter, sold the shares from Monday through Wednesday, according to a filing posted Wednesday night by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It wasn’t clear where the proceeds were being spent. Musk has sold nearly $23 billion worth of Tesla stock since April, with much of the money likely going to help fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Early last month he sold nearly $4 billion worth of Tesla shares, according to regulatory filings. The sale comes as shares of the electric vehicle and…

A hacker who reportedly posed as the CEO of a financial institution claims to have obtained access to the more than 80,000-member database of InfraGard, an FBI-run outreach program that shares sensitive information on national security and cybersecurity threats with public officials and private sector actors who run U.S. critical infrastructure. The hacker posted samples they said were from the database to an online forum popular with cybercriminals last weekend and said they were asking $50,000 for the entire database. The hacker obtained access to InfraGard’s online portal by posing as the CEO of a financial institution, they told independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, who broke the story. They called the vetting process surprisingly lax. The FBI declined to comment. Krebs reported that the agency told him it was aware of a potential…

The government charged eight men of earning more than $100 million in illicit stock market profits by manipulating their novice-investor followers on social media. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission said that from early 2020 to around April of this year the men, who had combined following of over 1.5 million on Twitter, ran a “pump-and-dump” scheme. Seven of the social-media influencers promoted themselves as successful traders on Twitter and in Discord chat rooms and encouraged their followers to buy certain stocks, the SEC said. When prices or volumes of the promoted stocks would rise, the influencers “regularly sold their shares without ever having disclosed their plans to dump the securities while they were promoting them,” the agency said. “The defendants used social media to amass a large following of…

The company that assembles Apple Inc.’s iPhones has announced it is easing COVID-19 restrictions at its largest factory in China that led thousands of workers to quit and drastically slowed production. Foxconn Technology Group said in a statement on one of its official WeChat social media accounts that it would end the so-called “closed loop” system at the facility in Zhengzhou, central China, that required workers to stay in their workplaces and dormitories to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections. The move announced this week came about a week after China began easing harsh COVID-19 curbs despite signs the number of infections is rising. Following a spate of protests across the country last month many “zero-COVID” restrictions were lifted. That means people no longer need to take frequent COVID-19 tests to travel on…

A report by environmental group Oceana has found that plastic waste from Amazon packages went up by 18% last year, but Amazon says it has reduced its use of single-use plastic across its network. According to the Oceana’s estimates, released Thursday, Amazon’s plastic waste jumped from 599 million pounds in 2020 to 709 million pounds last year — an amount that can circle the planet more than 800 times in the form of air pillows, the group said. For years, the advocacy organization has been pushing the company to release more data around its plastic footprint and commit to reducing any harmful environmental impacts that might stem from it. That idea was put up for a vote two times at Amazon’s annual shareholders meetings during the past two years. The last vote,…