Elon Musk is known mostly for being an unaccountable liar, so his personal brand of chaos now blanketing the unfortunate staff at Twitter was easily predictable.

Nothing the man says can be believed, which is what historians in the past described as the “permanent improvisation” symptom of dictators doomed to fail.

As just one obvious example on Oct 28 at 8:18PM Elon Musk tweeted this:

No major content decisions or account reinstatement will happen before [content moderation council] convenes

And then three hours later he flip-flops and contradicts by unilaterally announcing a major content decision and account reinstatement plan.

Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail

As another painfully obvious example of flip-flopping, Oct 28 at 11:16PM the CEO announces comedy can’t be touched.

Comedy is now legal on Twitter.

And then on Nov 6 at 11:53PM he angrily shuts down well known comedians with permanent bans for being unauthorized/unappreciated by him personally.

Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended.

He went on to add that there would be no warning to comedians having their speech censored.

Kathy Griffin, an obviously well-known comedian, was being personally and specifically targeted by the CEO’s back-breaking flip-flops.

…by 5 p.m. Hollywood time, Griffin was back on the platform speaking from the grave of her deceased mother’s account, @maggiegriffin. Griffin’s mom Maggie died in 2020, aged 99, but her daughter maintains the account. A one-word tweet read: “#FreeKathy”. By this morning at 7:30, Griffin’s dead mother was more loquacious: “Elon, this is Maggie contacting you from the spirit world to tell u… you’re a douchebag. This is not parody. This is the actual ghost of Kathy Griffin’s boxed wine loving mother saying I’m gonna get tipsy & throw my bingo cards at you.! NOT A PARODY. To the moon, a**hole.” Star Wars’ Mark Hamill retweeted “#FreeKathy” with a thumbs up.

Haha, to the moon, a**hole. She should have said Uranus.

In case it’s unclear what’s going on at this point, Tesla was a brand that said it was about safety yet we all know (ancient history now) that its CEO lied and lied and lied year after year in a mess of unsafe contradictions.

The company plummeted to the bottom of safety and quality rankings, dumping one of the worst engineered cars on the road.

Now the same CEO is saying Twitter will be about freedom and… we should expect it to plummet into being the least free platform of any.

Twitter’s product was content moderation. It’s what they offered as value.

This tragedy of permanent improvisation undermines the value of moderation completely, making it unsafe at any tweet.

Not unlike how Tesla is unsafe at any speed.

He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started censoring comedians (inconsistently). Of all the people in the world to target for censorship, going after comedians is the worst possible move — extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.

He said he would buy Twitter to bring forward his vision of absolute free speech, then he started trying to charge for speech (before reversing). Joking his critics must pay him a tax to speak is not only NOT funny, again it’s the extreme opposite of protecting free speech. Fail.

He said he would improve integrity of the profiles on Twitter and then he removed almost all the teams who worked on it, and introduced instead a basic monthly charge for a “checkmark” with no integrity that directly undermined site-wide trust. Fail

He said he would bring profitability by focusing on productivity, then fired about half the company in such a rushed and incoherent way (as if American Psycho was an instruction guide) that thousands of managers spent copious time scrambling to find a way to days later attempt rehire the same people just fired or cover for them without knowing even where or how… FAIL.

The sheer money desperation driving all this cruel flip-flopping in chaos crisis — I mean the result of “spending” $44 billion that he doesn’t even have and then claiming he is desperate for money and everyone else will pay — is just more proof that Tesla’s “vision” is all just unintelligent seat-of-pants fraud and should be banned from roads.

Severe lack of engineering quality as well as high rates of crashes are symptomatic of this endemically bad leadership. We may as well expect Twitter to try and attempt an even worse impact on the world as the fraud of Tesla unravels.

The elephant in the room is thus whether Musk can continue to lead a company while already showing a penchant for unforced errors that directly cause widespread harms. Such a question is like asking whether the GOP or their man Putin can win another election. It depends on who is in position to hold the man accountable, really measure integrity on a basic humanitarian scale, let alone correct any of the wrongs being done by him.

Journalists are busying themselves to tell Apple users the sky is falling, given the quiet hint from Apple about exploitation of CVE-2022-42827…

An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.

Actively exploited?

That’s a giant flashing red light buried by Apple halfway down their security advisory page.

Meanwhile a far more interesting and crazy detail nobody is taking about is that MacOS Ventura security lists forty, that’s four zero, vulnerabilities fixed in a text editor (Vim).

CVE-2022-0261 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0318 (9.8 Critical)

CVE-2022-0319 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-0351 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0359 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0361 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0368 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0392 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0554 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0572 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0629 (6.1 Medium)

CVE-2022-0685 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-0696 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-0714 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-0729 (6.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-0943 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1381 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1420 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-1725 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-1616 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1619 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1620 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1621 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1629 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1674 (5.5 Medium)

CVE-2022-1733 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1735 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1769 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1927 (9.8 Critical)

CVE-2022-1942 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1968 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1851 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1897 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1898 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-1720 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-2000 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-2042 (9.8 Critical)

CVE-2022-2124 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-2125 (7.8 High)

CVE-2022-2126 (7.8 High)

Whoa. That’s a… giant flashing red dumpster fire buried halfway down the page.

And I don’t understand Apple’s list. It seems random at best. Why not sequential by ID or severity?

Or to say it another way, here are critical ones listed together:

• CVE-2022-0318 (9.8 Critical): Reported Jan 18, 2022. Heap-based Buffer Overflow in vim/vim prior to 8.2. Found by @zfeixq.
• CVE-2022-1927 (9.8 Critical): Reported May 22, 2022. Buffer Over-read in GitHub repository vim/vim prior to 8.2. Found by TDHX ICS Security @jieyongma
• CVE-2022-2042 (9.8 Critical): Reported Jun 6, 2022. Use After Free in GitHub repository vim/vim prior to 8.2. Found by Muhammad Aldo Firmansyah @thecrott

January, then May then June… critical vulns fixed by Apple months later in October.

The scatter shot mess is detailed by Bram Moolenar who has been posting continuously on a bounty site for months while discussing fixes.

Use After Free in function did_set_string_option fix in vim / vim Sep 28

Stack-based Buffer Overflow in function win_redr_ruler fix in vim / vim Sep 27

Use After Free in function process_next_cpt_value fix in vim / vim Sep 24

Stack-based Buffer Overflow in function ex_finally fix in vim / vim Sep 24

Access violation near NULL on destination operand eval.c:2603:37 in segmentation fault fix in vim / vim Sep 22

Use After Free in function movemark fix in vim / vim Sep 21

Use After Free in function getcmdline_int fix in vim / vim Sep 17

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function utfc_ptr2len fix in vim / vim Sep 16

Null Dereference in vim_regcomp() fix in vim / vim Sep 7

Use After Free in function do_tag fix in vim / vim Sep 5

Use After Free in function do_cmdline fix in vim / vim Sep 2

Use After Free in Function qf_buf_add_line( ) fix in vim / vim Aug 29

Use After Free in function get_next_valid_entry fix in vim / vim Aug 27

Use After Free in function qf_fill_buffer fix in vim / vim Aug 24

NULL Pointer Dereference in function do_mouse fix in vim / vim Aug 24

Use After Free in function vim_vsnprintf_typval fix in vim / vim Aug 22

NULL Pointer Dereference in function sug_filltree fix in vim / vim Aug 21

Use After Free in function find_var_also_in_script fix in vim / vim Aug 18

NULL Pointer Dereference in function generate_loadvar fix in vim / vim Aug 17

use after free in function generate_PCALL fix in vim / vim Aug 16

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function latin_ptr2len fix in vim / vim Aug 16

Buffer Over-read in function utf_head_off fix in vim / vim Aug 16

Use After Free in function string_quote fix in vim / vim Aug 14

Out-of-bounds read in function check_vim9_unlet in vim/vim fix in vim / vim Aug 14

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function compile_lock_unlock in vim/vim fix in vim / vim Aug 14

Undefined behavior in diff_write_buffer() fix in vim / vim Jul 30

Out-of-bounds Read in function utf_ptr2char fix in vim / vim Jul 29

heap-buffer-overflow occurs in function eval_string ./vim/src/typval.c:2226 fix in vim / vim Jul 29

Heap-based buffer overflow in function vim_iswordp_buf fix in vim / vim Jul 28

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function ins_compl_infercase_gettext() fix in vim / vim Jul 23

Heap Use After Free in function skipwhite fix in vim / vim Jul 7

Heap-based buffer overflow in function ins_compl_add fix in vim / vim Jul 7

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function ins_compl_add fix in vim / vim Jul 7

Stack-based Buffer Overflow in function spell_dump_compl fix in vim / vim Jul 4

Heap Use After Free in function ex_diffgetput fix in vim / vim Jul 2

Out-of-bound write in function parse_command_modifiers fix in vim / vim Jul 2

Out-of-bound read data in function suggest_trie_walk() abusing array byts fix in vim / vim Jul 1

Out-of-bounds Read in function ins_bytes fix in vim / vim Jul 1

Integer Overflow in function del_typebuf fix in vim / vim Jul 1

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function utfc_ptr2len fix in vim / vim Jul 1

Heap-based buffer overflow in function inc fix in vim / vim Jun 30

Out-of-bound read in function msg_outtrans_special fix in vim / vim Jun 29

Null pointer dereference in function skipwhite fix in vim / vim Jun 27

Out-of-bound write in function ml_append_int fix in vim / vim Jun 26

Null pointer dereference in function diff_check fix in vim / vim Jun 26

Heap-based buffer overflow in function ins_bs fix in vim / vim Jun 26

Out-of-bound read in function msg_outtrans_attr fix in vim / vim Jun 25

Out-of-bounds Read in function get_lisp_indent fix in vim / vim Jun 22

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function utf_ptr2char fix in vim / vim Jun 22

Buffer Over-read in function put_on_cmdline fix in vim / vim Jun 22

Memory leaks in function vim_strsave fix in vim / vim Jun 21

Out-of-bounds write in function vim_regsub_both fix in vim / vim Jun 18

Out-of-bounds Read in function suggest_trie_walk fix in vim / vim Jun 18

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function get_lisp_indent fix in vim / vim Jun 18

Buffer Over-read in function current_quote fix in vim / vim Jun 18

use after free in skipwhite fix in vim / vim Jun 9

Out-of-bounds write in function append_command fix in vim / vim Jun 6

Use After Free in function utf_ptr2char fix in vim / vim
Jun 1

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function vim_regsub_both fix in vim / vim May 30

Buffer Over-read in function utf_ptr2char fix in vim / vim May 28

Use After Free in function find_pattern_in_path fix in vim / vim May 26

Out-of-bounds write in function vim_regsub_both fix in vim / vim May 26

Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function utf_head_off fix in vim / vim May 25

Out-of-bounds read in function gchar_cursor fix in vim / vim May 24

heap-use-after-free in function find_pattern_in_path fix in vim / vim May 18

And the list goes on and on… which begs the question of whether a “bounty” system is over-inflating results for enrichment instead of efficiencies.

Take for example, these two entries listed as separate and distinct each with their own bounties.

• Heap-based buffer overflow in function ins_compl_add fix in vim / vim Jul 7
• Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function ins_compl_add fix in vim / vim Jul 7

The description of the first is “CVE-2022-2343:Heap-based buffer overflow in function ins_compl_add at insexpand.c:751” and the second is “CVE-2022-2344: Heap-based Buffer Overflow in function ins_compl_add at insexpand.c:751”

What’s the diff?

Why not one have one CVE? Why not have a single bounty? Maybe it’s a mistake.