Elon Musk wants to end his deal to buy Twitter, reports CNBC citing a letter sent by a lawyer on his behalf. From the report: In the letter, disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Skadden Arps attorney Mike Ringler charged that "Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations." Ringler claimed that Twitter did not provide Musk with relevant business information he requested, as Ringler said the contract would require. Musk has previously said he wanted to assess Twitter's claims that about 5% of its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) are spam accounts.

"Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information," Ringler claimed. "Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk's requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information." Ringler also charged in the letter that Twitter breached the merger agreement because it allegedly contains "materially inaccurate representations." This accusation is based on Musk's own preliminary review of spam accounts on Twitter's platform. Twitter has said it's not possible to calculate spam accounts from solely public information and that a team of experts conducts a review to reach the 5% figure.

"While this analysis remains ongoing, all indications suggest that several of Twitter's public disclosures regarding its mDAUs are either false or materially misleading," Ringer alleged. He also claimed Twitter breached its obligations under the agreement to get Musk's consent before changing its ordinary course of business, pointing to recent layoffs at the company. Twitter shares were down about 5% after hours on Friday. The $44 billion deal was first announced by Twitter on April 25th but was placed "on hold" two weeks later after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users, a figure that Musk says the company was not able to prove.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted at the time. However, in a follow-up tweet, he added that he was "still committed to [the] acquisition."

Yesterday, Twitter executives told reporters in a briefing that the social network removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day. This raises the question... how many new real accounts does it get each day?

UPDATE: Twitter says it's going to sue Musk for trying to back out of the deal. "The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement," tweeted Twitter's chairman, Bret Taylor, less than an hour after Musk's legal team said he wanted out of the deal in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery."

Twitter removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day, executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday, providing new insight into efforts to reduce harmful automated bots as billionaire Elon Musk has demanded more details from the social media company. Reuters reports: The briefing comes after Musk threatened to halt a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter unless the company showed proof that spam and bot accounts were fewer than 5% of users who see advertising on the social media service. Musk previously tweeted that one of his biggest priorities after acquiring Twitter is to "defeat the spam bots or die trying."

On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013. Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said. The company said it does not believe a calculation of such accounts could be performed externally because it would require private information, but declined to comment on the type of data it would provide to Musk.

Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up in spam folders, according to a filing obtained by Axios. From a report: Google has come under fire that its algorithms unfairly target conservative content across its services, and that its Gmail service filters more Republican fundraising and campaign emails to spam. Republican leadership introduced a bill this month that would require platforms to share how their filtering techniques work and make it illegal to put campaign emails into spam unless a user asks. Google's pilot program, per the June 21 filing, would be for "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC." It would make campaign emails from such groups exempt from spam detection as long as they don't violate Gmail's policies around phishing, malware or illegal content. Instead, when users would receive an email from a campaign for the first time, they would get a âoeprominentâ notification asking if they want to keep receiving them, and would still have the ability to opt out of subsequent emails.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday he is investigating Twitter over its reporting of how many accounts on the platform are from bots and fake users, saying the company may be misrepresenting the number to inflate its value and raise its revenue. The Texas Tribune reports: Twitter has claimed in its financial regulatory filings that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts. But Paxton on Monday alleged that spam accounts could make up as much as 20% of users or more. "Bot accounts can not only reduce the quality of users' experience on the platform but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming Texas consumers and businesses," Paxton said.

False reporting of fake users could be considered "false, misleading, or deceptive" under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, he said. Paxton sent Twitter a civil investigative demand, requiring the social media company to turn over documents related to how it calculates and manages its user data.

Google has halted businesses from using RCS for promotion in India, the company's biggest market by users, following reports of rampant spam by some firms in a setback for the standard that the company is hoping to help become the future of SMS messaging. From a report: Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption. Google, Samsung and a number of other firms including telecom operators have rolled out support for RCS to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in recent years. Google said last month that RCS messaging in the Messages app for Android had amassed over 500 million monthly active users. The problem, however, is that scores of businesses in India including top banks and other lending firms have been abusing the feature to send unsolicited promotional materials to any individual's phone number they can find in the country.

Over the past few weeks, Google Messages users in India have been reporting more and more ads showing up through RCS messaging. 9to5Google reports: While many brands -- even in the US and other countries -- have used messaging apps and SMS texts to advertise new products to former customers, these ads going on in India are not necessarily the result of a user's buying activity. Business messaging on RCS, as Google's Jibe website points out, is supposed to be used for things such as sending copies of your travel tickets or sending links for buying additional products based on a past purchase based on a user's request. [...] That is very much not what is happening in India right now.

Brought to our attention by Ishan Argwal on Twitter, RCS ads in Google Messages appear to be coming from "Verified Business" accounts. Google first announced that functionality back in 2020, for the purposes of allowing customers to talk to businesses. Advertising was surely part of the functionality, but it's clearly being abused in India. Android Police says these ads have been going out for almost a year now, citing examples of ads sent by Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bajaj Finserv, Buddy Loan, and PolicyBazaar. From what we can tell from user reports, it appears the frequency of these ads has been picking up over the past few months especially.

These ads are not harmless, either, with many of the examples we've seen being for personal loans, a category that tends to be full of predatory practices. One user reports that they were sent one of these ads on a phone that didn't even have an active SIM card in it. Currently, it seems as though this practice is primarily happening in the Indian market, at least in this quantity. What can be done about these ads in Google Messages? The solutions are all not quite ideal, unfortunately. You can report these businesses and block them from sending future messages [...]. Alternatively, you can turn off RCS features entirely within the Google Messages app.

Twitter's potential new owner just made this announcement to his 93.1 million followers. "Very important to fix your Twitter feed," the annoncement began: 1. Tap home button.
2. Tap stars on upper right of screen.
3. Select "Latest tweets".

You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don't realize.

Easy to switch back & forth to see the difference.
Currently it's been pinned to the top of Elon Musk's Twitter feed. And minutes later, he added this reply to his own tweet. "This message brought to you by the Illuminaughty."

Hours later Musk posted some clarification. "I'm not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it's trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening.

"Not to mention potential bugs in the code. Open source is the way to go to solve both trust and efficacy."

Musk's motivation isn't clear — but just minutes earlier he'd tweeted a reply to own tweet from Friday that had suggested Twitter users check a sample of 100 Twitter accounts for the percentage of fake/spam/duplicate accounts. "I picked 100 as the sample size number," Musk had added as a reply Friday, "because that is what Twitter uses to calculate less than 5% fake/spam/duplicate." Musk's follow-up tweet today?

"Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened."

The tweets follow three more from the last 24 hours which all apparently comment wryly on Musk's planned acquisition of Twitter. "Whoever thought owning the libs would be cheap never tried to acquire a social media company!" Musk tweeted earlier this afternoon. "At least, that's what the lib hivemind thinks haha."

And an earlier tweet appeared to allude to his recently-expressed interest in the number of fake/spam accounts on Twitter. Friday night, Elon Musk tweeted:

"The bots are angry at being counted."

The Washington Post reports on the "My Friends My Data" coalition, a group of start-up founders "working to push tech giants to adopt a new industry-wide standard that would allow users to transfer their followings from one app to another, thereby creating more competition between platforms." "Large social media companies are intentionally holding our personal contact information hostage," said Daniel Liss, founder and CEO of Dispo, a photography-based social network. "This limits consumer choice, stymies competition and inhibits free speech. We are committed to giving our community members control of their friend data...."

MFMD's founding members include a who's who of buzzy social apps like Dispo, Itsme, Clash App, Muze, Spam app and Collage, which together have received more than $100 million in venture funding and amassed tens of millions of downloads. The group has issued letters to Meta, TikTok, Snap, Twitter and other large social platforms calling on them to join their crusade. As the start-ups have found, competing with tech giants like Meta or YouTube is difficult when the top talent on the Internet is essentially locked in to specific platforms because of their inability to take followers elsewhere.

Many creators are already on board with MFMD's initiative. Some learned lessons about ownership the hard way after the fall of Vine. Many top Vine stars were overleveraged, investing all their energy in building out their following on the short-form video platform. When the app shuttered in 2016 those who hadn't used Vine to springboard to other apps like YouTube were left without access to the massive fandoms they had built....

[Liss] said that in addition to putting public pressure on the tech giants he hopes the MFMD can be a political force as well. "I'm very comfortable engaging in the political process on behalf of what we think is right," Liss said. "Not just for our companies but also for the next generation of consumer start-ups."
Eugene Park, a gaming Twitch streamer in Los Angeles with 300,000 followers, likes the idea of making followers transferrable to other services, telling the Post it "would be taking power from the tech companies and putting it in the hands of creators who really make up these giant platforms."

In the meantime, the article points out, TikTok users "have taken to referring to other apps like Instagram and YouTube using 'algospeak' pseudonyms, because they say even uttering the name of a competitor can downrank your content."

Third Position shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter is "temporarily on hold" after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users. The Tesla CEO, who offered to buy twitter for $44 billion, tweeted a link to a May 2nd Reuters report on Twitter's filing, saying he wants to see the company's calculations.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted. However, in a follow-up tweet, he added that he's "still committed to [the] acquisition," suggesting that it'll proceed after Twitter provides satisfactory information on its numbers. Slashdot reader Excelcia shared a similar report from the BBC, which cited analysts speculating "he could be seeking to renegotiate the price or even walk away from the takeover."

"One analyst, as quoted in the story, suggests that 'Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market,'" writes Excelcia. "Shares have dropped another 10% since the announcement."

"Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal," Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday to his 89 million followers, "so no one can spy on or hack your messages."

And on Monday, Musk also announced hopes to "authenticate all humans."

But now Security Week is wondering if Musk's acquisition of Twitter will ultimately mean not just better security at Twitter but also innovation for the entire cybersecurity industry: Twitter has struggled with consistent security leadership, hiring and firing multiple CISOs even as nation-state adversaries target Twitter's massive user base with computer-generated disinformation campaigns...."Even if you don't like the guy, you have to root for Twitter to beat the bots," said one prominent CISO interviewed by SecurityWeek on Tuesday. "I think we will all benefit from any security features they [Twitter] can create."

Jamie Moles, a senior technical manager at ExtraHop, said the bot-elimination mission could have spinoff benefits for the entire industry. "While this seems like a Sisyphean task, if he's successful, the methods used by Twitter to eliminate bots from the platform may generate new techniques that improve the detection and identification of spam emails, spam posts, and other malicious intrusion attempts," Moles said. If Musk and his team can train AI to be more effective in combating this, it may well be a boon to security practitioners everywhere," Moles added.

"Identity is one area I expect to see movement. In addition to just detecting bots and spam better, I think we will see Twitter do a better job around verifying humans. There are a lot of things to fix there," said one CISO who requested anonymity because his company does security-related business with Twitter. Industry watchers also expect to see the company improve the multi-factor authentication (MFA) adoption numbers among its massive user base....

If Twitter can build a reliably secure platform with a new approach to distinguishing between human and bot traffic and fresh flavors of MFA and encryption, this could be a big win for the entire industry and users around the world.
Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the story

Twitter today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Press release: Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

"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," said Mr. Musk. "I also want 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. Twitter has tremendous potential -- I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." Earlier on Monday, Musk tweeted: "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they've never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night. From a report: Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn't have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user's address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped. "I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago," one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. "It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on." The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks. Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That's not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The average American received roughly 42 spam texts just in the month of March, according to new data from RoboKiller, an app that blocks spam calls and texts. Spammers like using text messages because of their high open rates -- and are now even mimicking targets' own phone numbers to get them to click malicious links, the New York Times reported. "Just like with robocalls, it's extremely easy to deploy [spam texts] in enormous volume and hide your identity," Will Maxson, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices, told Axios. "There's a large number of actors all over the world trying to squeeze spam into the network from almost an infinite number of entry points all the time."

It's not just texts. Every form of spam is on the rise. There were more spam calls last month than in any of the previous six months, per YouMail's Robocall Index. Spam emails rose by 30% from 2020 to 2021, according to a January report from the Washington Post. There was an unprecedented increase in social media scams last year, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Many scams were related to bogus cryptocurrency investments.

Experts attribute the sharp increase in spam to the pandemic. People's increased reliance on digital communications turned them into ready targets. The Federal Communications Commission saw a nearly 146% increase in the number of complaints about unwanted text messages in 2020. Americans reported losing $131 million to fraud schemes initiated by text in 2021, a jump over 50% from the year before, according to data from the FTC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Early in March, a bunch of Facebook users got a mysterious, spam-like email titled "Your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect" and telling them that they were required to turn on the Facebook Protect feature (which they could do by hitting a link in the email) by a certain date, or they would be locked out of their account. The program, according to Facebook, is a "security program for groups of people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials." It's meant to do things like ensure those accounts are monitored for hacking threats and that they are protected by two-factor authentication (2FA).

Unfortunately, the email that Facebook sent from the address security@facebookmail.com resembled a rather common form of spam, and so it's probable that many people ignored it. It actually wasn't spam. In fact, it was real. The first deadline to hit for many people was Thursday, March 17th. And now, they are locked out of their Facebook accounts -- and are having trouble with the process that Facebook has provided to get them back in. Those who did not activate Facebook Protect before their deadline are apparently getting a message explaining why they can't get into their accounts and offering to help them turn it on. However, it's not always working.

Internet security analysts have spotted a spike in backdoor infections on WordPress websites hosted on GoDaddy's Managed WordPress service, all featuring an identical backdoor payload. The case affects internet service resellers such as MediaTemple, tsoHost, 123Reg, Domain Factory, Heart Internet, and Host Europe Managed WordPress. BleepingComputer reports: The discovery comes from Wordfence, whose team first observed the malicious activity on March 11, 2022, with 298 websites infected by the backdoor within 24 hours, 281 of which were hosted on GoDaddy. The backdoor infecting all sites is a 2015 Google search SEO-poisoning tool implanted on the wp-config.php to fetch spam link templates from the C2 that are used to inject malicious pages into search results. The campaign uses predominately pharmaceutical spam templates, served to visitors of the compromised websites instead of the actual content.

The goal of these templates is likely to entice the victims to make purchases of fake products, losing money and payment details to the threat actors. Additionally, the actors can harm a website's reputation by altering its content and making the breach evident, but this doesn't seem to be the actors' aim at this time. The intrusion vector hasn't been determined, so while this looks suspiciously close to a supply chain attack, it hasn't been confirmed. [...] In any case, if your website is hosted on GoDaddy's Managed WordPress platform, make sure to scan your wp-config.php file to locate potential backdoor injections. Wordfence also reminds admins that while removing the backdoor should be the first step, removing spam search engine results should also be a priority.

"With so many coming together on the side of Ukraine (even those who traditionally stay neutral in international affairs), asking ICANN to take action against Russia seems like it could be a reasonable proposition under the circumstances," writes new Slashdot submitter unimind. "As a bonus, the likely decrease in spam would be a welcome reprieve..." The Register reports: In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week, Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, on Monday asked the head of DNS overlord ICANN to disable country code top-level domains associated with Russia. In an email [PDF], Fedorov asked Goran Marby, CEO of ICANN, to impose sanctions on Russia, arguing that the Putin regime has used internet infrastructure to propagandize its war effort. Specifically, he has asked for the revocation of domains ".ru", ".", ".su", and others used by the Russian Federation, shutting down DNS root servers serving the Russian Federation, and contributing to the revocation of associated TLS/SSL certificates for those domains.

"All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation," Fedorov's email says. "Leaders, governments and organizations all over the world are in favor of introducing sanctions towards the Russian Federation since they aim at putting the aggression towards Ukraine and other countries to an end. I ask you kindly to seriously consider such measures and implement them as quickly as possible. Help to save the lives of people in our country." Doing so would block about five million domains from the global internet, and would significantly affect Russia's ability to communicate online. In response to Prykhodko, Erich Schweighofer, a professor at the University of Vienna and ICANN community participant, wrote: "We know and we are aware of the very difficult and dangerous situation. [The] EU will support you. However, removing Russia from the internet does not help supporting the civil society in this country for a democratic change. ICANN is a neutral platform, not taking a position in this conflict but allowing States to act accordingly, e.g. blocking all traffic from a particular state."

Antony Van Couvering, CEO of Top Level Domain Holdings, expressed support for the idea: "Neutrality as a response to murder is not neutral. What is the use of 'civil society' organizations if they won't even speak up in support [to] protect civil society, much less do anything about it? Even politicians have woken up. Even the German government has woken up. Even the Swiss government has woken up! Meanwhile some people at ICANN are content to repeat empty phrases about not getting involved because it doesn't help civil society in their country. So much for 'one world, one internet.'"

The report adds that domain registrar Namecheap has "advised customers in Russia to take their business elsewhere, citing war crimes." However, Namecheap's CEO, Richard Kirkendall, later clarified that they haven't blocked the domains. Instead, they're just "asking people to move."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In 2021, Reddit's users created nearly 5.8 billion posts, comments, private messages and chats across the platform, with 297,161,752 later being removed by moderators (around 175.8k), removed by site admins (108.6K), and the authors themselves (12.6K). Content can be removed for a variety of reasons. 'Content manipulation' is the largest category and encompasses spam, community interference (so-call 'brigading'), vote manipulation, and similar issues. For the purpose of this report, however, we'll home in on the copyright issues faced by Reddit during the last year and how the site responded to them.

In common with the vast majority of large companies based in the US, Reddit has to follow the requirements of the DMCA which means that when it receives a valid copyright notice, it must comply by taking the identified content down. On the other hand, when submitters send notices that are incomplete or invalid in some other way, Reddit does not. "In 2021, Reddit received 177,450 copyright notices reporting 920,672 pieces of content. This represents an increase of 104% from 2020. We removed 665,898 pieces of content in response to these takedown notices," the company reveals in the latest edition of its transparency report.

Under the DMCA, Reddit is also required to take "appropriate action" against so-called "repeat infringers", which in the company's case can involve the termination of not only user accounts but also entire subreddit communities, especially ones where "excessive amounts" of infringing content keep getting posted. "In 2021, Reddit permanently suspended 2,813 users and banned 2,625 subreddits for excessive copyright infringement," the company writes. These figures represent a substantial increase over those published for 2020. In that year, Reddit banned just 303 users and terminated 514 subreddits. Although overall copyright complaints are up 104% on the previous year, the site's termination policy doesn't appear to have changed significantly. "With around 297 million pieces of content removed by Reddit in 2021, the 665,898 pieces removed on copyright grounds represent a small fraction of the overall problem," concludes the report. "However, with user accounts and entire communities on the line, consequences can be great when errant users repeatedly and intentionally overstep the line."

A new claim that Microsoft and Google are gaming the online advertising market to the detriment of smaller rivals threatens to set up a new antitrust clash in Europe, according to previously unseen data. Politico: The two U.S. giants appear to be flooding smaller search engine partners with spam ads and keeping some of the most valuable ads for themselves, according to data reviewed by POLITICO, in a move that draws parallels with the infamous $2.7 billion Google Shopping case. While EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager's 2015 offensive against Google's abuses in the search market got the backing of the EU General Court in November, there are some who say that blind spots in the case have allowed for certain violations to continue -- illustrated by Swedish price-comparison site PriceRunner's decision earlier this month to sue Google for $2.4 billion in damages. And now, according to the same data, both Google and its closest rival in the search engine space, Microsoft, are siphoning off so-called spam ads to smaller search engines that use their search results, as well as limiting the quantity of higher-value ads that appear on these partner search engines.

Reuters reports that a popular NFT trading platform "has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a 'fundamental problem' in the fast-growing digital assets market...." The U.S.-based Cent executed one of the first known million-dollar NFT sales when it sold the former Twitter CEO's [first] tweet as an NFT last March. But as of February 6, it has stopped allowing buying and selling, CEO and co-founder Cameron Hejazi told Reuters.... Hejazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs, people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.

He said these issues were "rampant", with users "minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets".

"It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole... Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up...." Hejazi said his company was keen on protecting content-creators, and may introduce centralised controls as a short-term measure in order to re-open the marketplace, before exploring decentralised solutions.
Engadget reports that Cent "continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that's about it."

See also: More Than 80% of NFTs Created For Free On OpenSea Are Fraud Or Spam, Company Says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it's a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it would limit how many times a user could create (or "mint") an NFT for free on the platform using its tools to 50. So-called "lazy minting" on the site lets users skip paying a blockchain gas fee when they create an NFT on OpenSea (with the buyer eventually paying the fee at the time of sale), so it's a popular option especially for people who don't have deep pockets to jumpstart their digital art empire.

This decision set off a firestorm, with some projects complaining that this was an out-of-the-blue roadblock for them as they still needed to mint NFTs but suddenly couldn't. Shortly after, OpenSea reversed course and announced that it would remove the limit, as well as provided some reasoning for the limit in the first place: The free minting tool is being used almost exclusively for the purposes of fraud or spam. "Every decision we make, we make with our creators in mind. We originally built our shared storefront contract to make it easy for creators to onboard into the space," OpenSea said in a tweet thread. "However, we've recently seen misuse of this feature increase exponentially. Over 80% of the items created with this tool were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam."