Twitter Working on End-to-End Encryption for Direct Messages

[ipaqrat]

I never trusted Twitter and the Twittering Twits to report even the time of day. "Fake Time!" Now, the clown show is amusingly worse, wagon now hitched to the lunatic fringe. And NOW there's consideration of trusting them with encryption? Seriously?!?

You want privacy, simply shut your pie hole. Still feel compelled to tell people secrets? Pull on your Rorschach suit, meet IRL, in the woods, whisper it directly in their ear. Then kill them. Uh-oh, that sounded harsh, better add "LOL"

 

[pretend.doctor]

Why is this a priority all of a sudden? You'd think that driving revenue would come first, then these nice to haves

 

[nt5672]

Regardless of whatever the hell is happening with the takeover, end to end encryption is a good thing.

That depends, who has the encryption keys?

If it is twitter, then it really is not end to end, because Twitter can read anything it wants. That is just end to end except twitter, the government, and any one else that can convince twitter's corporate idiots to give them the info.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

For all the insanity that’s been going on in the media, I really feel like Twitter will get better over the coming months / years.

The insanity isn't going on in the media. The insanity is within Twitter. The media is just reporting on it.

 

[btrach144]

I'm surprised Elon still has engineers there that want to work for him, his feuds with Twitter engineers regarding development he apparently doesn't understand, and the subsequent firings can't be good for employee morale.

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Speaking of, all Twitter employees have until 5:00PM eastern today to click a link to agree to “long hours of work at high intensity”, or get laid off with 3 months of severance.

Elon Musk demands Twitter staffers commit to 'long hours' or leave

The companywide ultimatum was sent around midnight San Francisco time. Musk has already fired key Twitter executives and laid off half of Twitter’s full-time employees.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[btrach144]

Speaking of, all Twitter employees have until 5:00PM eastern today to click a link to agree to “long hours of work at high intensity”, or get laid off with 3 months of severance.

Elon Musk demands Twitter staffers commit to 'long hours' or leave

The companywide ultimatum was sent around midnight San Francisco time. Musk has already fired key Twitter executives and laid off half of Twitter’s full-time employees.

www.nbcnews.com

Unreal. We’re headed into a 6 week holiday period in the US where Twitter’s HQ is at and he’s announcing this a week before the start of the holidays.

That freaking insane. He’s crazy.

Twitter engineers would be better using the holiday period to look for new jobs.

 

[tgwaste]

I'm surprised Elon still has engineers there that want to work for him, his feuds with Twitter engineers regarding development he apparently doesn't understand, and the subsequent firings can't be good for employee morale.

And yet... there they are. Working for him. That should tell you something. That he understands exactly what hes doing and you dont understand a thing.

 

[crawfish963]

Hmm. Who did really choose the outlet?

If Mr. Free Speech alleges facts in public, I would fully expect he'd welcome public disagreement, as well. Musk certainly isn't shy about sharing his unsolicited opinion and has publicly stated that cancelling people for voicing their opinion is wrong.

My job has rules about such things. If I don’t follow them I know what to expect.

 

[seek3r]

Given that basically everyone significantly competent with encryption has almost certainly left or will be leaving why would I trust an implementation from Twitter on this? Musk has obliterated the capability of the company to deliver a trustable solution…

 

[seek3r]

And yet... there they are. Working for him. That should tell you something. That he understands exactly what hes doing and you dont understand a thing.

We recruited 4 Twitter engineers this week, they’re fleeing in droves, and the newest announcement is going to push most of the rest to leave. The only folks left will be a few weird Musk cultists, a few folks who have internalized the sunk cost fallacy and are desperately trying to protect things they spent a huge amount of effort building, the people who cant find other jobs (the people that you really dont want to keep), and those who literally cant leave, at least not easily (like folks on H1Bs)

The company’s engineering and also just general talent has been obliterated

 

[dk001]

Well if your boss was to behave in the same manner as Elon Musk, taking over a company and immediately firing all the top directors and then getting employees access to Twitter computers and accounts disabled without telling them first they are part of the 50% that will be fired then hell yes the boss should be taken down publicly. Musk is proving he is a boss that likes to dish it out but cannot take it when it is fired back at him because when it is, he fires them.

If a boss cannot handle criticism then do not go dishing it out.

I know my past bosses, if I had made a public comment like that, would have canned my ass.

 

[ScottishDuck]

Twitter is improving already, obviously he has a learning curve but it doesn't look like he's slowing down on its development. Gutting the dead weight was just the first of many steps.

Excellent satire.

 

[Sciomar]

Speaking of, all Twitter employees have until 5:00PM eastern today to click a link to agree to “long hours of work at high intensity”, or get laid off with 3 months of severance.

Elon Musk demands Twitter staffers commit to 'long hours' or leave

The companywide ultimatum was sent around midnight San Francisco time. Musk has already fired key Twitter executives and laid off half of Twitter’s full-time employees.

www.nbcnews.com

Long hours is not exactly a numerical expression, long according to whom? If it's any relation to the videos some employees have been posting about their typical day, it looks like anything over 4 hours will be "long". I'm still hoping he guts the entire thing only for use in Tesla/Starlink/Neuralink, but until then he's driving a more demanding environment for development. Too bad those delicate flowers are having such a hard time keeping up, welcome to the working world.

 

[xbjllb]

How cool! All the Soviet fake conservative bots on there can talk over espionage and collude without being detected.

Go Elon! Work it for Daddy!

 

[seek3r]

That depends, who has the encryption keys?

If it is twitter, then it really is not end to end, because Twitter can read anything it wants. That is just end to end except twitter, the government, and any one else that can convince twitter's corporate idiots to give them the info.

It doesnt really matter actually, Twitter would control the endpoint. It's how other E2E services comply with law enforcement for ex, the endpoint app can forward data to be read without having to MitM the encrypted stream. tldr Twitter doesnt need to hold the keys, they can get the data after it gets decrypted on the client.

 

[laptech]

Speaking of, all Twitter employees have until 5:00PM eastern today to click a link to agree to “long hours of work at high intensity”, or get laid off with 3 months of severance.

Elon Musk demands Twitter staffers commit to 'long hours' or leave

The companywide ultimatum was sent around midnight San Francisco time. Musk has already fired key Twitter executives and laid off half of Twitter’s full-time employees.

www.nbcnews.com

So basically Musk is blackmailing the remaining Twitter staff, agree to my demands of long hours of work or get fired. I would hope what's left of the Twitter staff all refuse to sign the agreement because it is more than what Musk deserves for the way he has handled taking over the company. He does not give a damn about the staff as has already been proven by it being his way or the highway.

E2E will not work because there will be no Twitter programmers left to write the code for it to work.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

Long hours is not exactly a numerical expression, long according to whom? If it's any relation to the videos some employees have been posting about their typical day, it looks like anything over 4 hours will be "long". I'm still hoping he guts the entire thing only for use in Tesla/Starlink/Neuralink, but until then he's driving a more demanding environment for development. Too bad those delicate flowers are having such a hard time keeping up, welcome to the working world.

Yes, Elon Musk is putting his faith in lazy, "delicate flowers" to drag him out of his self-inflicted Twitter hellhole and wouldn't just replace them with productive, hard working ones without batting an eye if it was necessary?

How did you come up with that?

He clearly needs them to stay and is literally demanding they work beyond 40 hours per week or leave with 3 months severance.

This is about cutting down staff even further and getting those remaining to work at least 40 hours per week or more while not earning more.

Might help Twitter, might not.

But that's the story.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

Elon replying with a winky face could also be an indication that he had no idea that feature was being worked on and just discovered it by reading her tweet. Or that he's got dust in his eye. Literally no telling with that guy.

It's obviously all a result of him being so terribly busy creating totally real, working hyper-loop vacuum trains, Neuralink brain-machines, and getting us all to Mars by 2030.

We'd probably be at the end of the galaxy by now if his gf could simply enable parental controls on his phone and limit his Twitter usage to 12 hours per day.

 

[seek3r]

Long hours is not exactly a numerical expression, long according to whom? If it's any relation to the videos some employees have been posting about their typical day, it looks like anything over 4 hours will be "long". I'm still hoping he guts the entire thing only for use in Tesla/Starlink/Neuralink, but until then he's driving a more demanding environment for development. Too bad those delicate flowers are having such a hard time keeping up, welcome to the working world.

The core measure of getting work done as an engineer is meeting your deadlines, not how many hours spent hunched over your desk. If someone only works 4 hours/day but delivers everything they’re supposed to that shouldnt be a problem.

Additionally, fun fact: an old boss, one who loves musk ironically, used to consistently make the point that an employee can usually be expected to get 4-5 hours of focused work done in an 8 hour day. It’s a fairly standard business expectation. Expecting more than that actually ends up being counter productive and can overload people and stifle problem solving. So basically you should be balancing your day between 4-5 hours of focused work and leaving the rest of the time for smaller tasks, meetings, and breaks.

And taking breaks is important, I know I’m a lot more productive overall if I take breaks throughout the day. The dog helps there, I *have* to get up and walk her, no matter how glued to my keyboard I’ve been

Oh, and last I’ll note that if you work somewhere that’s requiring massive amounts of extra time working the problem isnt the employee, the problem is short staffing (like, say, firing half the company and losing at least a quarter more in quits)

Tldr you’re wrong about how to get the best out of talented people

 

[svish]

End to end encryption will be good. So many changes!!

 

[Sciomar]

The core measure of getting work done as an engineer is meeting your deadlines, not how many hours spent hunched over your desk. If someone only works 4 hours/day but delivers everything they’re supposed to that shouldnt be a problem.

Tldr you’re wrong about how to get the best out of talented people

Being military, we’re mission driven. If you’re the one person capable of performing a role and there are others’ lives depending on you being there and doing it, you stay until it is done. Sometimes the work gets done early and you cut out, I get that. I know my experiences are not the norm here, but 20 hour shifts are a thing on deployments. I look at situations through different eyes because of those experiences. His message reads that these people have not been meeting product deadlines and reading some of the back and forth there is evidence to this (go to Twitter for you ‘sources’ people). He’s set up a forcing function, either do what you were brought on to do or be removed as dead weight. If I have an incapable soldier who cannot perform as is necessary, I cut them loose and bring in someone who can. There’s no more time to piddle around. Twitter has been bloated and mismanaged far too long.

 

[laptech]

Being military, we’re mission driven. If you’re the one person capable of performing a role and there are others’ lives depending on you being there and doing it, you stay until it is done. Sometimes the work gets done early and you cut out, I get that. I know my experiences are not the norm here, but 20 hour shifts are a thing on deployments. I look at situations through different eyes because of those experiences. His message reads that these people have not been meeting product deadlines and reading some of the back and forth there is evidence to this (go to Twitter for you ‘sources’ people). He’s set up a forcing function, either do what you were brought on to do or be removed as dead weight. If I have an incapable soldier who cannot perform as is necessary, I cut them loose and bring in someone who can. There’s no more time to piddle around. Twitter has been bloated and mismanaged far too long.

Rules in the military are different to rules in non-military. There are laws that define a person's working hours and again there are laws regarding the expectation of working past those hours. Such laws were put in place to prevent bosses from exploiting employee's, something Musk clearly knows nothing about or he does and he just does not give a damn. In Europe there is something called the 'Working Time Directive' which defines how many hours a week a person can work and if a boss requires or needs their workers to do more (overtime) then they can request that the employee 'opts out' of the Working Time Directive BUT an employer cannot sack or treat the employee unfairly if they not wish to opt out.

I have no idea if the US has a similar working directive because if it does then Musk is in serious trouble threatening his employees with the sack if they do not sign up to working long hours. If Musk himself wants to work all the hours under the sun and night then he is more than welcome to but he cannot force the same onto his employee's. If he continues with this attitude of 'bull in a China shop' he will find there will be no company left for him to run because core staff will have left leaving gapping holes that cannot easily be filled which will cause Twitter to run ineffectively and buggy which will cause advertiers to leave in their droves because they do not want to be associated which such a tainted company and with less and less advertisers means Twitter will be persistantly running up huge debts every month which cannot be sustained. We could be witnessing the end of Twitter if Musk carries on behaving the way he is.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

The US has few labor rules compared to UK/EU. Most states are at-will, meaning the boss can look at you and say, “I don’t like your shoes, you’re fired.” And the best you can get is unemployment, which is capped at a comically low amount.

 

[GeneralChang]

Being military, we’re mission driven. If you’re the one person capable of performing a role and there are others’ lives depending on you being there and doing it, you stay until it is done. Sometimes the work gets done early and you cut out, I get that. I know my experiences are not the norm here, but 20 hour shifts are a thing on deployments. I look at situations through different eyes because of those experiences. His message reads that these people have not been meeting product deadlines and reading some of the back and forth there is evidence to this (go to Twitter for you ‘sources’ people). He’s set up a forcing function, either do what you were brought on to do or be removed as dead weight. If I have an incapable soldier who cannot perform as is necessary, I cut them loose and bring in someone who can. There’s no more time to piddle around. Twitter has been bloated and mismanaged far too long.

I think the issue with your comparison here is that I doubt Elon has expressed clear expectations regarding what exactly the engineers are supposed to be producing and what the deadline for that effort is. The chain of command for most of these engineers was broken in fundamental ways when large portions of their teams and leadership were unceremoniously fired last week. Most of them probably have no idea what the mission even is, let alone what their part is supposed to be in it. Admittedly we haven't been privy to all of Elon's communication internal to Twitter, but if it's anything like his communication internal to, say, Tesla, then it's probably pretty awful.

It would be like if you, in the military, were being given conflicting orders from day to day by your CO, who loudly demands your respect and publicly demeans you for not doing stuff you were never told to do by a deadline you were never given. Do you respect that CO? You make affectations toward that, for sure, because you're legally obligated to respect the chain of command regardless of who's sitting in it. But in the civi world, that's usually where the hired talent starts job hunting.