[kevcampb]

If you read the proposal, this is for providing automated defences against social engineering attacks - eg: phishing. It's incredibly benign.

That's not how it's presented on Elon's twitter post, certainly. The replies are just layers and layers of conspiracy theories.

[chrisco255]

That sounds quaint. Why was it awarded to Reuters, a British/foreign news organization that supposedly hires journalists to report unbiased information? What expertise would they have in preventing social engineering attacks?

[imadethis]

It was awarded to Thomson Reuters, the parent company. They do a lot of work in risk management and fraud detection, so they have a lot of expertise.

[jauer]

Reuters builds software for a variety of fields and maintains datasets that would be useful in identifying if, say, an email with an invoice purporting to be from a specific company aligns with the invoicing practices of that company.

It would be more accurate to compare that side of Reuters to LexisNexus, Wolters Kluwer, or perhaps Bloomberg.

[red-iron-pine]

Thomson Reuters is an American-Canadian company. Thompson was founded in Toronto and bought Reuters in 2008. Most of it's leadership is Canadian, and to some degree American or British.

This isn't "foreign", and it has a large presence in the US

They also have a long, long history of providing services to the USG, including a lot of efforts in busting illegal immigration via shared media databases.

[Jimmc414]

I'm annoyed that I have to assert this, but I wasn't even aware of Elon Musk's tweet when I posted this. I found the entire site fascinating for entirely non-political reasons. I didn't know this information was publicly available.