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Twitter is officially beginning to roll out support for  encrypted direct messages (DMs)  on the platform, more than five months after its chief executive Elon Musk  confirmed  plans for the feature in November 2022. The "Phase 1" of the initiative will appear as separate conversations alongside existing direct messages on users' inboxes. Encrypted chats carry a lock icon badge to visually differentiate them. That said, the opt-in feature is currently limited to verified users or affiliates to a verified organization. It's also essential both the sender and recipient are on the latest versions of the Twitter apps across Android, iOS, and desktop web. Another criteria to send and receive encrypted messages is that the recipient must follow the sender, has sent a message to the sender in the past, or has accepted a direct message request from the sender at some point. While Twitter did not disclose the exact method it uses to secure the conversations, the company ...

Twitter on Wednesday said that its investigation found "no evidence" that users' data sold online was obtained by exploiting any security vulnerabilities in its systems. "Based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems," the company  said  in a statement. "The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources." The disclosure comes in the wake of  multiple   reports  that Twitter data belonging to millions of users – 5.4 million in November 2022, 400 million in December 2022, and 200 million last week – have been made available for sale on online criminal forums. The social media giant further said the breach "could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident," adding no passwords were exposed. The two datasets published in...

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk confirmed plans for end-to-end encryption ( E2EE ) for direct messages on the platform. The  feature  is part of Musk's vision for Twitter 2.0, which is expected to be what's called an "everything app." Other functionalities include longform tweets and payments, according to a slide deck shared by Musk over the weekend. The company's plans for encrypted messages first came to light in mid-November 2022, when mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong  spotted  source code changes in Twitter's Android app referencing conversation keys for E2EE chats. It's worth noting that various other messaging platforms, such as Signal, Threema, WhatsApp, iMessage, Wire, Tox, and Keybase, already support encryption for messages. Google, which previously turned on E2EE for  one-to-one chats  in its RCS-based Messages app for Android, is currently piloting the same option for group chats. Facebook, likewise, began  enabling E2EE  o...

Twitter, which is in the process of being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has agreed to pay $150 million to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to settle allegations that it abused non-public information collected for security purposes to serve targeted ads. In addition to the monetary penalty for "misrepresenting its privacy and security practices," the company has been banned from profiting from the deceptively collected data and ordered to notify all affected users. "Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads," FTC Chair Lina M. Khan  said  in a statement. "This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter's primary source of revenue." According to a  complaint  filed by the U.S. Justice Department, Twitter in May 2013 began enforcing a requirement for users to provide either a phone number or email ad...

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter's new owner, on Thursday called on adding support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the platform's direct messages ( DM ) feature. "Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages," Musk  said  in a tweet. The statement comes days after the microblogging service  announced  it officially entered into an agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, with the transaction valued at approximately US$ 44 billion, or US$ 54.20 per share in cash.  The deal, which is expected to be closed over the next six months, will see it becoming a privately held company. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making t...

Big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, are in the race of bringing Internet connectivity to unconnected parts of the world through wireless devices , flying drones , high-altitude balloons, and laser beams . But, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has big plans for bringing low-cost Internet service worldwide, and it all starts in space. Private rocket launch service SpaceX has asked the U.S. government for permission to launch 4,425 satellites in orbit to beam high-speed Internet down to the world, according to a newly filed application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That's a hell of a lot of satellites; in fact, the figure surpasses the total number of satellites in the Earth's orbit. Here's what the company's 102-page technical document reads: "The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, governmental and professional users world...