The Actuator - January 15th

In Austin this week for our annual meeting of Head Geeks. The first order of business is to decide what to call our group. I prefer a "gigabyte of Geeks," but I continue to be outvoted. Your suggestions are welcome.

As always, here's a bunch of links from the internet I hope you find interesting. Enjoy!

Facebook again refuses to ban political ads, even false ones

Zuckerberg continues to show the world he only cares about ad revenue, for without that revenue stream his company would collapse.

Scooter Startup Lime Exits 12 Cities and Lays Off Workers in Profit Push

Are you saying renting scooters your customers then abandon across cities *is not* a profitable business model? That's crazy!

Russian journals retract more than 800 papers after ‘bombshell’ investigation

I wish we could do the same thing with blog posts, old and new.

Alleged head of $3.5M crypto mining scam bought stake in nightclub

A cryptocurrency scam? Say it isn't so! Who knew this was even possible?

Ring confirms it fired four employees for watching customer videos

Ah, but only after an external complaint, and *after* their actions were known internally. In other words, these four would still have jobs if not for the external probe.

Tesla driver arrested for flossing at 84 mph on autopilot

Don't judge, we've all been there, stuck in our car and in need of flossing our teeth.

It's helpful for a restaurant to publish their menu outside for everyone to see.

IEBYE5932.JPG

  • In regards to the Ring Camera employees who viewed more customer video than allowed, it's got to be assumed people will abuse privilege and access.  Therefore extra steps and authorization have to be required to do so.

    In the health industry, we may have the ability to view patient's personal health information (PHI), but we're trained NOT to view more than is require by our jobs.  In fact, each time an employee views PHI an alert is sent that tracks down who accessed what and determines if it was necessary.  Those viewings of PHI leave very bright tracks in the snow.  You could think of the step taken to access additional information like taking the little hammer hanging by the fire alarm pull and using it to break the glass, while pulling the alarm equates to accessing the PHI.

    We're serious about protecting private information.

    Why isn't Ring Camera?

  • It's nice to see some of the bad things about bitcoins coming back to bite those that abuse the ignorance of others.

  • That "bomb shell" story about Russian plagiarism was eye opening.  Thanks for sharing it.  I reminds me strongly of other technical journal publications associated with projects outside of Russia--the problem appears to be more universal than the focus on Russian issues implies.

  • I'm not surprised Lime is closing operations in multiple cities, but I AM surprised they were as widely diversified to so many cities.

    I wonder what makes the difference for them in profitability.  Is it just that some cities have responsible adults who return things to the places they belong, and other cities have less mature scooter operators?

Thwack - Symbolize TM, R, and C