While some thought Twitter would fall apart over the weekend, given the engineering constraints it’s now under, it made it to Sunday. And it’s even got one of its most divisive users back. On Friday night, Musk tweeted a poll asking people to vote on whether Twitter should reinstate former President Donald *****’s account. ***** recently announced he will run for the country’s highest office again in 2024.
The option to reinstate the former president won with 51.8 percent of the 15,085,458 votes. While the poll was ongoing, Musk said it was getting one million votes per hour, and also said “bot and troll armies” were responsible for some of the activity.
Reinstating *****’s account was one of Musk’s early promises for the platform, which some thought was a joke. It was not. Earlier in the week, Twitter reinstated the accounts of three other controversial users, including comedian Kathy Griffin, conservative satire site Babylon Bee and conservative author (and former YouTube personality) Jordan Peterson.
– Mat Smith
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Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison on fraud charges
The Theranos founder is due to surrender in April.
Holmes, the former CEO and founder of Theranos, has been sentenced to just over 11 years in prison for defrauding the investors of her blood-testing startup. The sentence comes almost a year after Holmes was found guilty on four counts of fraud. She will also be ordered to pay restitution, though Judge Ed Davila said that amount will be determined at a separate hearing. Judge Davila said restitution would be based on $121 million in losses to 10 investors, according to The New York Times.
Holmes delivered a brief statement at her sentencing hearing: “I regret my failings with every cell of my body,” she said, according to Law360’s Dorothy Atkins. The tale of Theranos (and of Holmes) has been made into a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried, while Apple is still reportedly working on a movie.
Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035
Even if Russia isn’t on board.
Government representatives at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris, France, voted nearly unanimously to retire the practice of occasionally adding one second to official clocks. Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to even out discrepancies between atomic time and observed solar time, the leap second has been the bane of tech companies for decades. It’s taken Reddit offline and messed up Cloudflare services in recent years. Dignitaries from the US, Canada and France called for the leap-second practice to end before 2035. Russia voted against the proposal. GLONASS, its global positioning system, incorporates the leap second. This decision may force Russia to launch new satellites.
Waymo’s fully driverless rides are coming to San Francisco
It still needs to secure a deployment permit.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has granted Waymo a Driverless Pilot permit, which allows it to pick up passengers in a test vehicle without a driver behind the wheel. It’s only the second participant in the CPUC’s Driverless Permit program, with Cruise being the first.
By securing the permit, Waymo now has the authority to offer driverless rides throughout San Francisco, portions of Daly City and parts of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. Its vehicles are allowed to go as fast as 65 miles per hour and can operate 24/7, but the company can’t charge for the rides just yet – it needs another permit for that.
All the ‘fun’ grown-up gifts we would like to receive
LEGO sets, jerky and, oh baby, smart water leak detectors.
Working on Engadget’s holiday gift guides, we often can’t help but think about the things we’d like to receive as gifts – unusual stuff beyond headphones, laptops and games consoles. While scrambling to find gifts for the people we love, here are a few things we’d love to get this holiday season. Me? I’d appreciate some new noise-canceling headphones, please.