Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s $43B Purchase Offer
Reuters is reporting this morning that Twitter’s board may announce its acceptance of Elon Musk’s offer to purchase Twitter for $54.20 per share.
The news agency cites “people familiar with the matter” in its coverage and notes that these sources said the deal could always collapse at the last minute.
The New York Times reports that Twitter’s board met with Musk Sunday and that discussions continued into the early hours this morning.
Musk acquired a 9.1% stake in Twitter on April 4, making him the company’s largest shareholder.
Twitter announced that Musk would be joining its board; however, Tesla’s CEO announced on April 9 via Twitter that he had declined that offer.
Had he accepted the board seat, Musk’s stake in Twitter would have been limited to no more than 14.9% for the duration of his service, plus 90 days.
Can Musk Actually Afford To Buy Twitter?
In short, yes.
But it will take some creative financing.
Updated April 25, 2022, 4:15pm ET
Twitter confirmed in a press release distributed this afternoon that it has agreed to the acquisition.
Elon Musk will wholly own the entity acquiring Twitter for $54.20 per share to be paid in cash.
The purchase price presents a 38% premium on the share price as of April 1, 2022, the last day prior to Musk’s purchase of 9.1% of Twitter’s stock, the release notes.
The transaction is expected to close in 2022 and was unanimously approved by Twitter’s board of directors.
Source: Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s $43B Purchase Offer
Beware of fake DMCA link requests by AI-generated lawyers
Have you recently received a DMCA copyright infringement notice through email from a personal claiming to be a lawyer? Well, that email might be a scam and the lawyer who emailed you might not be a real person, but rather an AI generated persona for a lawyer at a fake law firm. That is what The Next Web uncovered in a recent report about such a DMCA request.
What is a DMCA request. A DMCA request is when someone requests the removal of content or a web page due to copyright violations. DMCA stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it is used to have hosting companies, Google and web site owners remove content that infringes on copyright.
What is the scam. In this case, the fake machine generated lawyer is emailing sites claiming DMCA copyright infringement and instead of having the site remove the content, they are asking for a link instead. The email says first starts off threatening, as most legal notices sound, but it ends saying “our client is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet. However, proper image credit is due for the past or ongoing usage.” The proper image credit should be done with “a link to” the site “within 7 days.” “Otherwise, we are required to take legal action,” the email continues.
In short, the scam is to threaten copyright legal action for a link to a site.
Here is a copy of the email:
Fake lawyers. It gets even more creepy, as this reporter dug into this issue, they investigated who Arthur Davidson Legal Services was. The law firms site looked legit but the domain name was only registered this year but the site claims the firm has been around for many years. He then dug into the profile of Nicole Palmer and learned that she never existed, that she was made up by AI, by a generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that can be trained to create faces, art, or anything else. This is her photo, notice how the earrings and other aspects don’t exactly line up:
It is just pretty wild how far scammers will go to manipulate the Google search rankings.
Source: Beware of fake DMCA link requests by AI-generated lawyers
Brands plan to invest more in search in the next 12 months
With more people working from home, the lines between work and personal time are more blurred than ever. As such, a new report by Forrester, done on behalf of Microsoft, says there is a new persona that brands and marketers need to be aware of: the “workday consumer.”
What is a workday consumer? They are online more often than before the pandemic. They switch between work and personal to-do lists throughout the day. And they use work devices, tools and software for personal purposes.
Key search stats.
- 75%: The number of respondents who said search has become more important to their brand’s online advertising strategies.
- 70%: The amount of budget going to digital channels within the next 12 months, including search, social, online video and display advertising. (Before the pandemic, 58% of paid media went to digital).
- 60%: The percentage of companies planning to increase advertising budget for search, online video and display advertising in the next 12 months.
- 16%: The percentage of brand respondents who said their brand plans to increase its paid search advertising budget by more than 10% over the next 12 months.
- 88%: The percentage of respondents who said their brand plans to advertise on three or more search engines over the next 12 months. Currently, 92% of brand respondents said their company advertises on two or more search engines.
Key recommendation for search marketers. Workday consumers research products and services in between work tasks. So if you want to attract, convert and retain these people, make sure your messaging, content and ads go beyond simple demographics and past behavior.
Source: Brands plan to invest more in search in the next 12 months
WordPress 6.0 Features Numerous Accessibility Improvements
WordPress recently announced that version 6.0, due out in May 24, 2022, will feature a significant amount of accessibility improvements that will make using WordPress easier for users and bring it closer to WCAG 2.0 AA compliance.
WordPress Accessibility
WordPress maintains inclusiveness and accessibility as a core goal “as much as possible” for all WordPress releases.
In order to achieve this goal WordPress has an internal team that is focused on accessibility.
Accessibility Improvements in WordPress 6.0
WordPress offered a sneak preview of the numerous improvements coming to WordPress 6.0, currently scheduled for May 24, 2022.
Alt Text
An improvement to the alt text used on the featured image is to use the post title as the alt text for it when the featured image is linked to the post.
Improvements to Tabbing
WordPress noted an addition that allows tabbing into a block placeholder.
Screen Reader Related Improvements
A number of the improvements are related to making it easier for publishers who use screen readers to navigate through the blocks and get things done.
- Announce search results in the Block Manager.
- Ensure that blocks with a placeholder setup have their description read by VoiceOver, giving context for the block itself and the resulting controls.
- Improve successful draft save notification for screen readers by making it more descriptive.
- Add button text labels to site editor.
- Avoid duplicate labels for “Save Draft” and “Save as pending” buttons to reduce confusion
Aria-Related Accessibility Fixes to WordPress 6.0
This is an improvement that one of the WordPress contributors called a small change that resulted in an important improvement. This is about adding a role=”img” tag but without adding an aria-label to SVGs. So what they did was to remove the role attribute, which fixed the issue.
Improvements to the Navigation Block
The improvements to the navigation block are going to be welcomed by many
For example, several of the fixes make it easier for those using screen readers to understand situations where there are multiple navigation menu blocks, like a high level site navigation menu and a second level menu for categories, as well as improving the user interface feedback for screen readers when creating a new menu.
There are additional improvements to various other blocks, including the addition of an aria label to the search button.
Improvements to WordPress List View
The List View is a user interface for navigating through sections of content.
The list view interface is available through an icon at the top of the page in the WordPress toolbar.
Activating the icon through the toggle button reveals the drop down menu that stays open while in use.
Improvements to Handling Media
WordPress is also introducing improvements to how media is handled.
Additional Accessibility Improvements
WordPress 6.0 also improves screen reader and keyboard functionality in the Quick/Bulk editing, fixes issues with the login and registration buttons to add autocomplete values but in a way that doesn’t represent a security issue since the values are stored in the browser (more here).
Lastly there were miscellaneous accessibility improvements to official WordPress themes:
- “Twenty Nineteen: Override flex order in comment form.
- Twenty Twenty: Transform search into a dialog role and fix the handling of aria-expanded to synchronize mobile and desktop buttons.
- Twenty Twenty-One: Reverse logic for prefers-reduced-motion media query.
- Use the pointer cursor when hovering over the theme details button for consistency with the theme card.”
WordPress 6.0 Accessibility
The WordPress accessibility team put a lot of effort into making WordPress 6.0 accessible and inclusive, in accordance with their stated goal of making WordPress WCAG 2.0 AA compliant as possible.
Source: WordPress 6.0 Features Numerous Accessibility Improvements
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