Category Archives: BUSINESS

Twitter saga continues after Zatko revelations; Parag ridicules false claims

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Twitter’s Indian-origin CEO Parag Agrawal has lashed out at the company’s former security chief Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko terming his claims false and riddled with inaccuracies.

Reacting to ongoing saga over bots controversy with Zatko, who was fired in January, he said, “We are reviewing the redacted claims that have been published, but what we’ve seen so far is a false narrative that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and presented without important context.”

Zatko claimed that Twitter lied about the actual number of bots on its platform and misled federal regulators about users’ data safety, substantiating Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s takeover bid and withdrawal from the move.

“There are news reports outlining claims about Twitter’s privacy, security, and data protection practices that were made by Mudge Zatko, a former Twitter executive who was terminated in January 2022 for ineffective leadership and poor performance,” Agrawal said in an internal message sent to the staff.

Zatko also alleged that the Indian government forced the micro-blogging platform to hire a “government agent” and allow him access to users’ sensitive data, a claim that was trashed by Twitter.

Agrawal said that this is frustrating and confusing to read, “given Mudge was accountable for many aspects of this work that he is now inaccurately portraying more than six months after his termination”.

“But none of this takes away from the important work you have done and continue to do to safeguard the privacy and security of our customers and their data,” he told employees.

Zatko’s disclosure before SEC

According to Zatko’s disclosure before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Twitter has “major security problems that pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy”.

Agrawal said that given the spotlight on Twitter, “we can assume that we will continue to see more headlines in the coming days — this will only make our work harder. We will pursue all paths to defend our integrity as a company and set the record straight.”

Wheat prices spike due to climate change: Study

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Rising temperatures are harmful to wheat yields. However, crop yields do not provide a holistic vision of food security. The impacts of climate change on wheat price, livelihood and agricultural market fundamentals are also important to food security but have been largely overlooked.

An international research team has now estimated the comprehensive impact of climate change and extreme climate events on global wheat supply and the demand chain in a 2 ℃ warmer world by using a novel climate-wheat-economic ensemble modelling approach.

The effect of CO2 fertilization could cancel out temperature stress on crops, with a slightly greater wheat yield under 2 ℃ warming as a result. However, increases in global yield do not necessarily result in lower consumer prices. Indeed, the modelling results suggest that global wheat price spikes would become higher and more frequent, thus placing additional economic pressure on daily livelihood.

The findings, by scientists from six countries, were published in One Earth on August 19.

“This counterintuitive result is initially driven by uneven impacts geographically. Wheat yields are projected to increase in high-latitude wheat exporting countries but show decreases in low-latitude wheat importing countries,” said lead author ZHANG Tianyi, an agrometeorologist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Co-author Karin van der Wiel, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, further explained: “This leads to higher demand for international trade and higher consumer prices in the importing countries, which would deepen the traditional trade patterns between wheat importing and exporting countries.”

Earlier researchers pointed out that trade liberalization would help mitigate climate stress via improving market mobility. The current research team revealed that such policies could indeed reduce consumers’ economic burden from wheat products. However, the impact on farmers’ income would be mixed. For example, trade liberalization policy under 2 ℃ warming could stabilize or even improve farmers’ income in wheat exporting countries but would reduce income for farmers in wheat importing countries.

“These results would potentially cause a larger income gap, creating a new economic inequality between wheat importing and exporting countries,” said WEI Taoyuan, co-author and an economic scientist at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research. ZHANG further explained more dependence on imports could lower the wheat self-sufficiency ratio, thus causing a “vicious negative cycle” for wheat importing and less-developed countries in the long term.

“This study highlights that effective measures in trade liberalization policies are necessary to protect grain food industries in importing countries, support resilience, and enhance global food security under climate change,” said Frank Selten, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and co-author of the study.