Technology
Mayor of St. Louis among those targeted by racist mass texts
How BLACK ENTERPRISES as we’ve previously reported, the racist mass message was received by countless black people across the country, and among that number is the mayor of st. Louis.
According to , St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and her son were there among those who received the texts whose origins the FBI is currently trying to find out.
According to the St. Mayor’s Office Louis, Jones’ son, received the text on November 7, and the mayor received an identical email on November 9.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office released an announcement on Jones’ behalf shortly after receiving the news.
“I’m furious that anyone would think it’s okay to send messages like this to children or anyone else. I happened to be with my son when he got it, and I had seen it before, so I was ready to talk to him and tell him it was a cruel hoax. It is completely unacceptable that anyone should have to struggle with being defined as property or less than any other human being, especially in a society where black and brown people have always been treated like second-class citizens if we have been treated like citizens.” the statement reads.
The statement continued: “The undeniable fact that this news is spreading is a reminder that we still have loads of work to do to get rid of this sort of ugliness in our country. I fear it should only worsen because our nation will once more have a person at the highest of our government who time and time again belittles other people because of their race, gender or disability. “
According to the Associated Press, the messages were sent anonymously to recipients in several statesincluding New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Tennessee.
The FBI is coordinating its investigation with the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, in addition to with federal and state law enforcement agencies.
Several officials, including FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, have indicated that text messaging constitutes a troubling use of technology.
According to the AP, in an interview, Brown stated, “This is an intimidating and threatening use of technology,” which likely violates several laws.
Phone service provider Text Now, which provides its users with phone lines that use existing infrastructure from various carriers to send and receive text messages and phone calls, said in an announcement that its service was used to send text messages.
“As part of our investigation into these messages, we have learned that they were sent via multiple carriers across the United States and we are working with partners and law enforcement to investigate this attack,” the Canadian company said.
According to Cori Faklaris, assistant professor of software and data on the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the perpetrators likely purchased the information somewhere online for a low price.
“It’s the primary way most Americans communicate today,” Faklaris said. “So people who want to advertise or promote services go where the people are. Unfortunately, scammers and haters are also following suit.”
Faklaris continued: “All of this means that it may be easier than most people realize to truly accurately guess the race or ethnicity of the person associated with that phone number.” Faklaris also added that because of increased scam activity through the pandemic, that “it should be relatively easy for authorities to track down this particular attack.”
Technology
Donald Trump announces that Elon Musk will be co-head of the Department of Government Effectiveness
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that Elon Musk will co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym stands for DOGE, Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency. The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink and the owner of
Specifically, DOGE will “provide non-governmental advice and guidance,” implying that it will not be an official government agency requiring legislative approvals and funding. DOGE would moderately work with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget, based on the report press release.
The Trump campaign noted that DOGE’s work would be accomplished no later than July 4, 2026.
Musk has mentioned the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency over the past few months while campaigning for Trump across the country. However, it was unclear what shape DOGE would actually take or whether Trump would actually accept Musk’s offer.
At an October rally in New York, Musk promised to discover “cuts of at least $2 trillion” in federal agencies if Trump wins. It isn’t yet known whether Musk and Ramaswamy will keep this promise. Musk never explained which agencies or police would receive these cuts.
Trump and Musk have grown closer in recent months, and their relationship has only accelerated since they chatted together at X Spaces in August. During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, Musk donated greater than $100 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, called America PAC, while also holding pro-Trump rallies in key swing states. Trump promised Musk the position of head of DOGE during a September speech at the Economic Club of New York.
Technology
After the election, Bluesky is witnessing an exodus of dissatisfied X users
X, formerly Twitter, is now not “digital city market– once promised that it might be so. In the wake of the US presidential election results, a wave of users dissatisfied with the app’s latest direction are moving to a rival app, Bluesky.
Decentralized social media platform Bluesky continues to grow with over 9 million users from September to 14.6+ million as of Tuesday, with the last spike occurring over the weekend as US users fled X.
The exodus briefly placed Bluesky as the No. 2 iPhone app in the U.S. App Store on Monday, down from No. 27 the day after the election. Today it has dropped barely to third place, behind Threads Meta and ChatGPT.
It is also value being attentive to the rate of registration of recent users. Yesterday, many sockets reported that Bluesky added over 700,000 users in the last week, bringing its total to 14.5 million. A day later, the number is over 14.6 million, meaning around 100,000 users join each day.
Bluesky downloads in the U.S. are up 933% year-to-date, while X downloads are up 48%, in line with app analytics firm Appfigures. Appfigures also noted that Bluesky downloads on November 10 increased by 624% in comparison with November 1.
what’s more, According to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says engagement at Bluesky is typically higher than at X – and that is not a recent trend. While X still has that number because many users abandon but don’t delete their X accounts, Bluesky tends to have the next percentage of “posters” — those that are actively engaging quite than lurking, Graber says.
“We have… a higher percentage of posters than most social media sites that operate according to the 90-9-1 pattern: lurkers-commenters-posters. We didn’t go below ~30% of posters,” she noted in Bluesky post on Tuesday. For newbies, she recommends posting on relevant channels, commenting on others’ posts, finding friends (those you follow who in turn follow you) and using hashtags to extend engagement together with your own content.
The shift in user adoption follows changes lon Musk has made since purchasing the company formerly referred to as Twitter in the fall of 2022. The Telsa and SpaceX executive originally promised to show his $44 billion acquisition right into a free speech platform where everyone’s voice could be heard. Instead, Musk used the app to promote right-wing views, campaign for TrumpAND stop at the next rate than before Data from X’s own transparency report.
While Musk can have once believed that Twitter favored the left, he has not turned the app right into a neutral platform. In fact, research found that Musk’s right-wing political posts appeared in X users’ feeds, even when users didn’t follow him or engage along with his content.
With his 204 million followersthe platform gives Musk incredible reach to advertise his own political opinions and support Trump.
Of course, some fear that Bluesky itself will develop into a partisan platform if it is flooded by liberals leaving X. However, the nature of the way this platform is built doesn’t allow it to be guided by the political opinions of its owner. In addition to the standard blocking and reporting features, Bluesky allows users to create their very own algorithms and custom channels, and subscribe to their very own moderation services to personalize the app to their liking. If the Bluesky app and moderation decisions don’t fit your needs, people will give you the option to run the social software on their very own servers, little just like Mastodon, an open source X competitor (although Bluesky uses a distinct protocol, AT protocolas an alternative of Mastodon and Threads’ ActivePub.)
Interest in Bluesky has been growing for a while, and never only because of its infrastructure and architecture. Bluesky has benefited from other increases before, corresponding to when X was banned in Brazil and when Threads handled moderation issues, for instance. However, this latest increase indicates that increasingly more left-leaning users are deciding to stop using X. Without the combative, back-and-forth political chat that Twitter is famous for, its future as a “global marketplace” becomes increasingly uncertain.
Technology
Conduktor tries to protect “bad data” from company applications
The 12 months was 2020 and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were extremely frustrated with Apache Kafka. The real-time data stream tool simply couldn’t sustain with the engineering needs of the three — especially through the pandemic, when corporations were rushing to use cloud services.
“Many companies have had difficulty scaling their data operations,” Orban told TechCrunch. “And they have struggled to realize the full potential of their data, leaving vast amounts unused or sent to silos.”
After some thought, Orban, Derosiaux and Maarek got here to the conclusion that Kafka, although burdensome, was not an entire failure. This could work, they thought, if it could possibly be improved with some instrumentation.
So they decided to construct the instrumentation.
The trio named the tool Conductorand through the years, it has evolved right into a full-fledged streaming data management platform – one which can capture and filter data according to company policy before it reaches its destination.
Conductor essentially acts as an information gatekeeper, Orban (the startup’s CEO) said, stopping end-applications from being contaminated with “bad data” – corrupted, warped or otherwise incomplete. For example, this could possibly be data for real-time analytics or predictive maintenance.
“Customers are struggling with data explosion, data underutilization and technical hurdles to scaling data in real time,” Orban said. “We are currently working with some of the largest companies in the world because they are the ones feeling these challenges the most.”
Companies can monitor their data streams using Conduktor or share them with third parties through Conduktor Share, which allows organizations to share specific streams externally for data licensing.
The tool runs on a company’s infrastructure and may implement data masking and access controls to be certain that a company’s data practices comply with regulations equivalent to GDPR.
This month, Conduktor closed a $30 million Series B financing round led by RTP Global, with participation from Ansa, M12 (Microsoft’s enterprise fund) and Accel.
Conduktor has competition on this market (as does Immerok), however the startup is growing at a rapid pace, tripling its annual recurring revenue last 12 months. The startup counts DraftKings and Lufthansa as customers and expects to double its 60-person team by 2026.
“As streaming is inevitable in digital innovation, the need for an enterprise data management platform continues to grow,” Orban said, citing a Fortune Business Insights report that estimates the streaming market will grow to $185 billion by 2032.
The fresh money, which is able to bring the New York company’s total capital to $52 million, will go toward overall expansion and product development, Orban said.
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