I'm back! Thanks Josh, Chris and Joel for keeping the news flowing while I spent some time away from my desk. I should do it more often.
Twitter's board has accepted Elon Musk's US$44b offer to buy all its shares and take it off the public market. It's pretty tough to look at that offer, a 38% premium over Twitter's current share price, and say no when you consider the struggles Twitter has had trying to turn a buck since its IPO. What's the plan now? Musk says he wants to "make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans". Vox explores some scenarios where Musk tries to make Twitter worth the US$44b he's on the hook for, The Atlantic ponders various worst-case scenarios and The Verge reckons employees aren't happy about their new boss.
I'm sorry to have to keep talking about him, but Elon's been pretty noisy the last few days:
The European Parliament and EU Member States have agreed on details regarding one the EU's big sticks for regulating tech companies - the Digital Services Act. The DSA aims to set a "new standard for the accountability of online platforms regarding illegal and harmful content". It's pretty detailed and hard to summarise in a single paragraph, but essentially the EU wants to see platforms make their algorithms transparent, limit the use of personal data for targeted advertising and give users a way to challenge content moderation. This page has a good introduction to the DSA if you'd like to know more.
This happened a few months ago, but the Raspberry Pi 4 can now boot off the internet (like a Mac in recovery mode) and write an OS to the microSD card. No need to download an image and write to the card on a separate computer! How nifty is that? This is even older, but the Raspberry Pi has an official PoE "hat" that'll power the unit and send data, as well as the ability to boot off an external USB drive, allowing the use of heaps faster (and more reliable) SSDs. Maybe you'd prefer to boot off the network instead via PXE? You can do that! I love this little computer.
📻 Elektrobank (Demo 3/6/96) - The Chemical Brothers
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