He had probably been enthroned on the GitHub site, which hosts project code online, for several months. A portion of Twitter’s source code was accessible online until the bluebird social network submitted a request to Google to have it removed. To do this, Twitter has relied on a US law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), which is used to enforce digital copyrights.
Secret code
The post contained “proprietary source code from Twitter’s platform and internal tools,” according to the request, posted online by GitHub. The source code of a digital platform is often a well-guarded trade secret, to avoid giving a competitive advantage to competitors or revealing insider secrets. However, a few days earlier, Twitter had announced that it would be partially disclosed, only regarding the code used to recommend tweets.
The profile responsible, a certain “Free Speech Enthusiast” (or literally “Free Speech Enthusiast”) refers to a statement by Twitter boss himself, Elon Musk, who declared himself a “free speech absolutist”. freedom of expression” in the past. Since the account was created in January, the leak could go back several months, without Twitter noticing it.
The disgruntled employee hypothesis
According to the New York Times who leaked the information, Twitter suspects that an employee who was fired last year may be behind the leak. That does not exactly facilitate the search, since the social network laid off more than 75% of its employees, going from 7,500 to 2,000 employees in a few months.
Twitter, therefore, would have submitted an application to the California courts to try to identify the person responsible, and obtain from GitHub the list of Internet users who may have downloaded this sensitive data. The platform reportedly requested the names of the users involved, their addresses, phone numbers, emails, social media profiles and IP addresses, according to information from Bloomberg.
The social network seems weaker than ever, since Elon Musk recently assessed its value at 20 billion dollars; a vertiginous fall compared to the 44,000 million against which the businessman had bought it, just five months ago.
Source: BFM TV
