Dear reader,
there is already a discussion in our Netzwelt department: Should we delete our accounts if Elon Musk is now taking over Twitter?
If only so that our direct messages – which are all unencrypted – cannot become bedtime reading for the richest man in the world?
Or simply because the platform is expected to become even more unbearable once fully exposed to Musk's whims?
In any case, no one close to me believes that Twitter will improve after the takeover.
At least it will be different.
Musk himself recently tweeted: "The purchase of Twitter accelerates the creation of X, the everything app." By possibly three to five years, he added, but he could also be wrong.
My colleague Alexander Demling writes: "The letter has a special meaning for Musk: X.com was the company that gave rise to PayPal and laid the foundation for his great fortune.
Musk holds his shareholdings in Tesla or the space company SpaceX in the X Holdings.
His child with the musician Grimes is called X Æ A-12.«
But in the context of the Everything app, X could just be a placeholder.
More exciting than the name is the question of what all this is actually supposed to contain.
Musk once mentioned WeChat in a meeting with Twitter's employees.
In China, this is practically an everything app that combines social media, chats and payments, among other things, and is ubiquitous.
There's nothing quite like it in the West, and Musk has indicated he wants to change that.
A central platform for the entire digital life, controlled by a politically naïve, almost childishly stubborn online troll, for whom life on Mars sometimes seems to be more important than life on Earth -
what could possibly go wrong
?
Even if Musk were a completely different person, I think it unlikely that Twitter would be a suitable cornerstone for X.
There are days when, after looking at the app, I would say: building X with Twitter would be an attempt to make hell fun.
Or maybe I just lack the necessary imagination and experience to build a tech empire.
That's why Musk is a billionaire and I'm not yet.
Our current Netzwelt reading tips for SPIEGEL.de
"The dogs are loose"
(seven minutes of reading)
The North Atlantic Fella Organization is a loose, international coalition of people who take action against Russian propaganda on Twitter.
Almost every means is right for them, as Carl Winterhagen describes.
»An almost perfect crime« (twelve minutes of reading)
A detailed SPIEGEL report on ransomware, a threat to companies, authorities and other institutions that just won't get any smaller.
We spoke to victims of blackmail and to the security authorities to find out why.
»You feel completely transformed« (five minute read)
For Matthew Ball, the Metaverse becomes the »three-dimensional version of the Internet that we experience in real time«.
His analyzes are extremely popular in Silicon Valley.
Our correspondent Alexander Demling interviewed Ball.
External links: Three tips from other media
"Hacking Google: Operation Aurora" (YouTube video, English, 18 minutes)
A bit too polished, but still well done and entertaining: Googlers explain how the company was hacked by China in 2009.
"Encryption is a 'bad problem': EU states want to exploit security gaps" (three minutes of reading)
European domestic politicians and prosecutors do not want to close weak points, but want to keep them open in order to exploit them in investigations, reports Stefan Krempl from "heise online".
This does not go well with the promises of the traffic light coalition.
»Bavarian authorities crack cell phones of tolerated people« (ten minutes of reading)
The Bavarian State Office for Asylum and Repatriations analyzes the cell phones of refugees who cannot be deported because their identity or nationality is unclear or because they cannot produce travel documents.
To do this, the authority uses Israeli software that is otherwise used by criminal prosecutors, as Netzpolitik.org reports.
I wish you an undystopic rest of the week,
Patrick Beuth
