West News Wire: Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, is suing after portions of the source code used to power the service were posted online.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media site, is trying to find out who posted the material on Github, a site that Microsoft owns for exchanging software development code.
It follows Mr. Musk’s admission in an internal message that Twitter is reportedly only worth $44 billion, or about half of what he paid for it in an October 2017 agreement.
After firing more than half of the company’s personnel, the billionaire was outlining the new stock compensation package he is providing to the less than 2,000 people who are still working there.
These stock grants valued the business at roughly $20bn.
In its court filing, Twitter has asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to produce “all identifying information” associated with the user named ‘FreeSpeechEnthusiast’.
Court documents say “various excerpts” of Twitter’s source code, which is used to run the company online, were posted.
Github said it took down the code on Friday at Twitter’s request.
Source code is the fundamental component of a computer program that is created by a programmer, outlining functions, descriptions, methods other operational statements.
It is designed to be human-readable and formatted in a way that developers and other users can understand.
Exposing Twitter’s internal workings may make the service more vulnerable to hacking attempts.
The social network is asking GitHub for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, emails, social media profiles, and IP addresses of the parties involved in the leak.
The company has also launched an internal investigation into the leak, according to the New York Times.
The username chosen by the leaker appears designed to poke fun at Mr. Musk, who insisted his $44bn takeover last year was about restoring free speech to the platform.
Earlier this month, the billionaire tweeted that he wanted to make part of the source code the part relating to recommended tweets public.
He said: “Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st.
