Ramesh Nathan was convicted of wire fraud and money laundering for scamming local investors, including veterans, with false claims about a fake space tech company and using their money for personal expenses.

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Ramesh Kris Nathan, 43, on Thursday of six counts of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering after he defrauded investors with promises of futuristic space technology. According to Bay Area News Group, Nathan claimed his company, Relativity Research Fund, was developing spacecraft, propulsion systems, and robotics, boasting of worldwide offices, massive profits, and an upcoming Nasdaq listing. In reality, the company had no employees, operations, or revenue.

Between 2016 and 2017, Nathan took about $50,000 from investors — many of them military veterans — using false promotional materials, a fake company website, and an intermediary to lure victims. Instead of funding tech innovation, Nathan spent the money on personal expenses and overseas transfers to his mother and ex-girlfriend. Nathan was arrested in 2019 while trying to leave the US.

Prosecutors and the FBI said Nathan betrayed the trust of investors with "fantastic tales" and "science fiction.” He now faces up to 20 years in prison for each fraud charge and 10 years for each laundering charge, with sentencing set for June 13.

Image: Ken Lund/Flickr

• Famed 1980s cop Bob Geary, who carried a ventriloquist dummy, has died. Geary and his sidekick played the classic “good cop/bad cop” routine to help diffuse tense situations. [Chronicle]
• Recent Salesforce layoffs will impact 153 San Francisco employees. The company will be laying off over 1,000 workers by April 25th, as it continues to hire new salespeople to sell its AI products. [Chronicle]
• Bike lanes along San Mateo’s Humboldt Street are scheduled for immediate removal after a unanimous vote during a recent San Mateo City Council meeting. The bike lanes were installed two years ago in response to serious crashes in the area and were funded through a $1.5 million federal safety project. [SF Gate]
• Oakland’s budget crisis could lead to a cut in funding to police oversight agencies. The agencies were created in 2016 in response to scandals involving officer misconduct and lack of accountability. [Oaklandside]
• A fifteen-year-old boy was arrested for yesterday’s shooting in Redwood City [CBS News]
• The two men who were killed in the Sonoma County floodwaters have been identified. [KRON4]
• The evacuation order for low-lying areas along the Russian River has been downgraded to a warning. [CBS News]

National:

• Google has removed the pledge from its website at some point during the last week that proclaims that the company will not use AI for weapons or surveillance. Google responded in a blog post, “we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.” [CNN]
• Last weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the dams of California’s Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, which are located near the Sierra Nevada and help store water for the farmland of the eastern San Joaquin Valley, releasing more than 2.2 billion gallons over three days. POTUS claimed that if the releases had happened earlier, the Los Angeles fires could have been prevented, despite the fact that the two waterways do not connect to the aqueduct that serves Southern California. [SF Gate]
• Mark Pocan, a U.S. Democratic Representative from Wisconsin, has announced his plan to introduce a new bill with the apt title, “Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy.” “After more than $20 billion in federal contracts, there’s no way Musk can be objective in what he’s doing. Protecting the taxpayers has to be our number one priority,” says Pocan. [TechCrunch]

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Lyft, the ridesharing giant, is suing San Francisco's city government, accusing it of overcharging the company $100 million in taxes from 2019 to 2023.

The lawsuit, first filed Friday in California state court, alleges that San Francisco engaged in tax methodology that is “distortive and will grossly overstate Lyft’s gross receipts."

Specifically, the company's lawyers claim that the city taxed the total fare amount paid by passengers as revenue, rather than the percentage fee of each fare that Lyft gets paid by drivers.

Lyft's lawyers are seeking a refund of the overpaid taxes with interest and additional punitive compensation if they win. The lawsuit represents a broader legal debate over whether or not rideshare companies such as Lyft and Uber have repeatedly misclassified their drivers as independent contractors.

A spokesperson for the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office told the Chronicle today that their team "will review the complaint and respond accordingly."

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

A controversial proposed ban on in-house cafeterias at San Francisco tech companies is returning in a revised (and much less onerous) version before the Board of Supervisors this week. The latest version is not an outright ban on cafeterias, but it will restrict how significantly local companies can alter or expand their existing food options, and it will require conditional-use approval for any new cafeterias to be built.

The initial ban, sponsored by Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Aaron Peskin, was met with significant backlash when it was first introduced last summer. The New York Times headline at the time read, "San Francisco Officials to Tech Workers: Buy Your Lunch," and Safai and Peskin explained that the goal was penetrate the walled-off corporate cultures that are occupying prime office real estate but dis-incentivizing workers from ever going outside and patronizing local businesses.

"These tech companies have decided to leave their suburban campuses because their employees want to be in the city, and yet the irony is, they come to the city and are creating isolated, walled-off campuses," Peskin told the Times. "This [ordinance] is not against these folks, it’s for them. It’s to integrate them into the community."

But tech workers who enjoy their free lunches and other meals pointed out that a) it's an important perk that saves them money, letting them afford to live in a city that is only barely affordable to some of them; and b) it feels like a misguided effort on the part of a city that has far bigger fish to fry with things like homelessness, trying to dictate where workers can and can not eat. Companies also talked about the loss of jobs that would come with closing down these cafeterias, which employ thousands of people in the city.

The San Francisco Planning Department also expressed some displeasure, and this revised ordinance made its way through Planning earlier this year. Under the new law, as the SF Business Times reports, new tech firms or those looking to add cafeterias would need to seek conditional-use authorization to do so. And factored into their approval would be street activation — whether the cafeteria occupied ground-floor space accessible by the pubic — as well as how many jobs they create.

Diego Sanchez, a legislative analyst for the city's planning department, tells the paper that the revised law will let new companies moving in "mold" their cafeteria plans to better suit city policy.

The new ordinance will not, however, do much to change the behavior of the workers at places like Uber, Twitter, Thumbtack, and Square, who tend not to patronize the restaurants in the mid-Market area as much as those restaurants would like. Michael Cohen, the managing partner of The Market in the same building as Twitter and Thumbtack, told the Times that the issue wasn't just workers grabbing free lunches, they were actually "shopping" in these cafeterias as well, grabbing fruit, snacks, and meals to take home for later.

And Cohen added that he'd rather see the city doing more about the vagrancy and crime on the street, which isn't helping his business any and it costing him too much in private security.

We are raising a generation of constantly distracted chatbots and an experiment by one beleaguered teacher illustrates this in a most upsetting fashion.

A teacher in an unnamed locale teaching children of an unknown age asked all the kids in her fourth-period class to turn up the notifications on their phones and to tell her what app or source each one came from as they came in. The piece of paper she documented this one is a truly staggering illustration of what American teens and tweens are dealing with in contemporary life, and it's a wonder they're coping as well as they apparently are — i.e. they're not all in straight-jackets muttering gibberish 24-7.

New York Times reporter Katie Rosman screencapped the image from her Facebook feed, and she does not yet know any details or data points. For instance: How many kids does this represent, how long is a class period, and what grade are they in? One can assume, because Instagram and Snapchat require users to be over 13, that this is either junior high or high school.

But the story's already gone viral, prompting Android co-founder Rich Miner to tweet in response, "I worry about the smart-phone centric interrupt driven world I helped created and how it is going to impact people who grew up thinking this is just how things are."

And all this texting and calling isn't all the kids' fault!! One teacher replied to Rosman's tweet saying, "Parents have face timed their kids in the middle of my class. And you'd be surprised how many don't see that as an issue. As a high school teacher, this is insanely accurate."

Also, this guy below made a bar graph out of the hash marks, and you can see that Instagram is the most popular app, losing out in total notifications only to text messages.

Related: Op-Ed: Facebook Wouldn't Be As Big Of A Problem For The News If People Actually Clicked And Read Stories [SFist]

The only enduring legacy of the stupid Google Glass fad of 2013-14 is the image of fanboy Robert Scoble wearing the contraption in the shower. While the Glass device has mercifully been more or less shelved, Scoble has continued to thrive as a high-profile “tech evangelist,” “entrepreneur-in-residence,” and in other vague, non-defined roles that don’t make sense outside the tech industry but certainly carry enormous power and influence within it. And like so many tech industry leaders, Scoble has been dogged by whispers of workplace sexual harassment. A May 2017 SFist report into sexual harassment at virtual reality startup UploadVR discovered that Scoble worked there at the time, though none of the allegations were directed at him. They are now, though, as TechCrunch found four women accusing Scoble of harassment despite his 2015 pledge that he would sober up and lay off the groping.

The accusations blew up Friday after USA Today published an article detailing the claims of two of Scoble’s alleged victims, a Silicon Valley-specific piece written in the wake of the #MeToo campaign. The accusers went on the record, journalist Quinn Norton in a Medium post and ProDay founder Sarah Kunst in the USA Today writeup, both detailing incidents prior to 2015. In response, Scoble told the paper that “I did some things that are really, really hurtful to the women and I feel ashamed by that," and "I have taken many steps to try to get better because I knew some of this was potentially going to come out."

But TechCrunch caught a comment in Norton’s Medium post, and confirmed the above account with NASA analysts Sarah Seitz. TechCrunch’s Sarah Buhr also notes that “Another woman who chose to remain anonymous told TechCrunch that Scoble made a pass at her, telling her how much he wanted to make out with her after getting high at a tech conference earlier this year.” Buhr adds that “She said that Scoble later apologized for his behavior and lavished her with praise; he also connected her with people she needed to help further her career, which she said effectively silenced her.”

In comments posted to Facebook just shortly after the TechCrunch piece was published, Scoble said (in addition to what is visible above), “I have committed to making amends where appropriate and to living a life of transparency, integrity, and honesty. I’m deeply sorry to the people I’ve caused pain to. I know I have behaved in ways that were inappropriate. I apologize for that. The question is not if it happened or if anyone got hurt (they did) but how can I do better? I know that apologies are not enough and that they don’t erase the wrongs of the past or the present. The only thing I can do to really make a difference now is to prove, through my future behavior, and my willingness to listen, learn and change, that I want to become part of the solution going forward.”

On top of the two accusers mentioned above, TechCrunch also reports that “Two additional women have told TechCrunch that Scoble was still making inappropriate advances after he’d publicly stated he was going sober, but neither wanted to go on record for fear of the repercussions.”

The Susan Fowler-Uber harassment scandal has awoken a sleeping giant of tech industry harassment victims coming forward, but the problem clearly goes beyond the surly bonds of Silicon Valley and the Harvey Weinstein. A CBS 5 report also posted Friday notes the problem is also rampant at the Sacramento state house. More than 140 women in California state politics have signed an open letter declaring, “Men have groped and touched us without our consent, made inappropriate comments about our bodies and abilities. Insults and sexual innuendo frequently disguised as jokes have undermined our professional positions and capabilities.”

Lobbyist Pamela Lopez details her encounter with a California lawmaker in pretty graphic fashion. “He rushed up behind me, rushed me into the restroom, locked the door behind him, exposed himself, began to masturbate all in a matter of seconds,” she told CBS 5.

Related:Twitter Says Rose McGowan Suspended Over Tweeted Phone Number, Lifts Ban

It’s been a bumpy ride for the tech-loving private shuttle service Chariot, which arrived three years ago to make “transportation better only for some people” in the words of Muni Diaries. Chariot has since paid shills to evangelize at bus shelters and caught hell for blocking Muni stops, but they got acquired by Ford Motors which surely fulfilled their founders’ endgame. But that hasn’t fulfilled the SFMTA’s desire to see these private buses better regulated, to which end the transit authority passed a few new rules Tuesday governing the emerging new jitney transit scene, according to the Examiner.

While these fresh regulations do “require private transit to provide wheelchair accessible vehicles and to submit operating data to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency” per the Ex, they completely punt on the two biggest problems Chariot poses: the regular complaints about blocking crosswalks and Muni stops, and the problematic duplication of Muni lines that rather intentionally cannibalizes public transit ridership and slows down buses to even more sluggish speeds.

The SFMTA didn’t pass a proposal to ban Chariot routes that match Muni routes by 75 percent or more. They’re likely to revisit that ban, though surprisingly would consider grandfathering in current Chariot routes.

And as the Examiner points out, the regulation of Chariot may have the unintended consequence of bolstering business for the new Lyft Shuttle service. “Doug Bloch, political director of Teamsters Joint Council 7, which represents locals across the state, advised that Lyft’s bus service competes directly with Chariot, but is not regulated by the SFMTA — and that strict regulations for Chariot may benefit Lyft,” Rodriguez writes.

Lyft Shuttle is similarly an app-based commute-hours transport service introduced in June which the Chronicle described as “essentially reinventing the concept of a bus” and Salon hailed as “pretty much a glorified city bus — with fewer poor people.”

The problems with those old-timey, legacy jitneys give us insight on why regulation of modern-day private transit is so important. Mission Local wrote a 2014 historical retrospective on the jitneys in which one-time driver Michele Di Pilla said, “The dealer would give us vans with 12 seats, and we arranged to have 20 seats.”

“We took out the van seats and put [in] bus seats that we bought from junkyards,” the jitney driver admitted.

Related: Private Shuttle Chariot's Latest Route Whisks NEMA Royalty To Caltrain For Free

A series of cock-ups has rideshare Uber arse-deep in trouble on the other side of the pond. In the wake of a Guardian report on sexual assaults committed by Uber drivers, the regulatory transportation authority Transport for London (TfL) has rejected Uber’s license to operate in London according to TechCrunch. (Uber has previously received such a license, but it expires September 30). Using adorably British terminology, TfL declared that Uber “is not fit and proper to hold a private hire operator licence.”

“TfL’s regulation of London’s taxi and private hire trades is designed to ensure passenger safety,” the regulatory body said in a statement. “TfL considers that Uber's approach and conduct demonstrate a lack of corporate responsibility in relation to a number of issues which have potential public safety and security implications.”

Business Insider reports that Uber was not aware of the decision “until one minute before the regulator tweeted its statement out publicly.”

In this particular rejection for a license renewal, Uber was dinged on the rigorousness of their background checks and their approach to reporting criminal offenses among drivers and those applying to be drivers. UK authorities also suspect Uber has been using their shady Greyball scheme in England to evade regulators.

This is not a death blow to Uber’s operation in London. The Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998 gives Uber 21 days to appeal the decision, and they’re still allowed to operate during the appeal. But unsurprisingly, the company is circulating an online petition that creates the impression that Uber is all about the “drivers’ livelihoods.”

London mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted his support of the Uber ban, noting that “any operator of private hire services in London needs to play by the rules.”

According to CNet, “Uber's rivals in London celebrated the news with discounted fares for customers.”

Related: Kalanick Reportedly Cries As He Passes Torch To New Uber CEO

We're so excited to help turn the @WeWorkSF community into an urban campus with Spin bikes. Details: https://t.co/SxGCS1Dn5g pic.twitter.com/JqcEUs1BKJ

— Spin San Francisco (@Spin_SF) August 31, 2017

Spin, a stationless bike rental startup, might be catching some heat from the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Agency soon as someone snapped a photo of the app-unlockable bikes parked where they shouldn't be, complete with a missing wheel because hey, it's still a bike parked in the city and all. Such is the tax for riding a bicycle in San Francisco.

According to Hoodline's report on Spin and their wayward bikes, the startup has a "partial" agreement with the SFMTA and co-working space WeWork, allowing them to provisionally operate in the city. The stipulations of that agreement require Spin to only allow their bikes to be parked on WeWork property grounds. Thus far, there are only about 50 Spin bikes in operation around the city (49 if you knock off the one with the missing wheel in the photo above), all of which need to be parked in one of WeWork's 10 San Francisco locations.

If they fail to comply with this rule, the company could be hit with some serious fines. Hoodline also shared the above photo with SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose, who commented, "The two bikes on the left—side-by-side cluttering a very busy sidewalk between a sign pole and outdoor seating—represent the type of situation we seek to avoid by requiring the operator to comply with conditions of our permit."

Previously, Bluegogo, a Chinese company who attempted to do what Spin is doing, pulled all their bikes from San Francisco when city residents complained about seeing them abandoned in their neighborhoods. Spin's trouble here seems minor, comparatively, as they aren't exactly dealing with bikes turning up all over the place.

Thing is, even city-approved rental bicycle companies that use docks are having issues of their own. Earlier this year, Ford's GoBike program was met with much controversy as local neighborhoods all around San Francisco and Oakland rejected the placement of the docks in their areas. According to the SF Examiner, the problem, many said, was that neither Ford nor Motivate, the managing company behind the bikes, communicated very well that such installations were being made. Truth be told, the stations felt a bit like they popped up overnight, and so, too, did reports of abandoned GoBikes found in trees or in Lake Merritt.

Spin feels a little bit like the same deal here, as again, it's a company that's started pretty small, only to have bikes suddenly turn up in public where they're a bit in the way. To their credit, they're trying to work with the city to make sure they're sticking to regulations, and save for this relatively minor incident, they seem to be doing pretty well in that regard.

Related: Chinese Bike-Share Outfit Warned Not To Drop Thousands Of Bikes On SF Streets Without Permits

Ex-Googlers can do more than just found a Bodega startup that the internet loves to hate. Some ex-Googlers might force the search giant to cough up back pay and a hefty slice of its profits to thousands of female employees at the company who may have been underpaid or underpromoted. Three women who left Google/Alphabet because they claim they were “segregrated” into lower-paying career tracks have filed a lawsuit against Google that intends to become a class action, according to the Associated Press. The suit sets to prove that Google pays and promotes women less than their male counterparts, according to the plaintiffs, former senior manager Holly Pease, sales executive Kelli Wasuri, and software engineer Kelly Ellis, who has tweeted on the matter.

The suit comes against the backdrop of U.S. Department of Labor lawsuit against Google for “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” and of course the comically sexist saga of fired brogrammer James Damore, who continues to make himself look less intelligent by the day. (Honestly, the replies to this tweet are true comedy magnificence).

Accusing Google of “assigning and keeping female employees in lower compensation levels than male employees with similar skills, experience, and duties,” the suit could force Google/Alphabet to pay out big bucks to those more than 21,000 current and former female employees. Wired notes that should the suit turn class action (which it has not yet), the pool of potential plaintiffs would expand to “all women who have worked at Google since 2013.”

The Guardian acquired a copy of the lawsuit, which accuses Google of “assigning and keeping female employees in lower compensation levels than male employees with similar skills, experience, and duties.” James Finberg, the attorney who filed the suit, claims he’s been contacted by more than 90 women who currently or formerly worked at Google.

ABC 7 has the full text of Google’s statement responding to the matter. “We work really hard to create a great workplace for everyone, and to give everyone the chance to thrive here,” the statement insists. “In relation to this particular lawsuit, we'll review it in detail, but we disagree with the central allegations. Job levels and promotions are determined by rigorous hiring and promotion committees and must pass multiple levels of review, including checks to make sure there is no gender bias in these decisions.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times acquired a spreadsheet of Google salaries and bonuses that shows a pretty clear pattern of women being paid less at every salary level in the company.

But class actions like this have, so far, not been easy to establish, let alone win. A lawsuit brought by recently deceased Walmart employee Betty Dukes that alleged gender bias in wages and promotions across the company and sought to establish a class of 1.6 million female employees was shot down by the Supreme Court in 2011, with the justices unanimously deciding that the class was too large and diverse in its circumstances to be certified.

Attorney Anita Hill recently penned an op-ed, however, encouraging women in Silicon Valley to take a cue from women on Wall Street in the 1990s, specifically the "Boom Boom Room" case of 1996 in which 2,000 women ended up joining a class action and winning a $150 million settlement from Smith Barney over the sexist culture there. "It’s time women in tech consider taking advantage of the law to disrupt the industry once and for all," Hill wrote.

Related: 60% Of Women In Tech Are Sexually Harassed (And More Numbers To Make You Throw Up)

The bulls**t is hitting the fan down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, on the heels of Monday’s Daily Beast report that the Kremlin has been organizing right-wing rallies remotely on the social media platform and a Reuters disclosure that both a Senate Intelligence Committee and Facebook internal employees are up in arms over the extent to which Facebook hosts misinformation and shares little data about how bad the problem is. All of these bombshells work under the assumption that the fake news problem, while very real, can ultimately be fixed with some combination of militance and fact-checking.

That may not be the case. According to a new analysis highlighted by Politico, tagging fake news on the platform as “disputed” makes negligible difference on whether people believe the baloney. And in the case of supporters of take-a-wild-guess-who, the disputed tag on fake news makes them more likely to believe the story.

The full peer-reviewed analysis from Yale University called Assessing the Effect of “Disputed” Warnings and Source Salience on Perceptions of Fake News Accuracy reports in its abstract that “With respect to disputed warnings, we find that tagging articles as disputed did significantly reduce their perceived accuracy relative to a control without tags, but only modestly (d=.20, 3.7 percentage point decrease in headlines judged as accurate). Furthermore, we find a backfire effect — particularly among Trump supporters and those under 26 years of age — whereby untagged fake news stories are seen as more accurate than in the control.”

This is the America we live in, people.

Mindful of keeping investors happy and vested stock options valuable, Facebook is bravely applying another fig leaf to their ad ecosystem that Russian trolls have so shrewdly exploited. TechCrunch reports that Facebook is taking steps to ban the monetization of ads featuring violence, pornography, drugs and hate speech on their nascent platforms for Branded Content, Instant Articles, and their new video hub called Facebook Watch.

A cynic could argue that Facebook is is merely trying to promote the existence of Branded Content, Instant Articles, and their new video hub called Facebook Watch. But these new assurances really are of critical importance to the ad-tech industry, because Facebook’s ad platform, while dominant, remains plagued by wildly inaccurate ad metrics and pushing brands’ ads to hate sites like Breitbart.

(Hilariously, the above-linked New York Times report about brands’ ads inadvertently appearing on Breitbart found that New York Times ads were inadvertently appearing on Breitbart.)

This all gives you a sense of how Facebook — unknowingly — made a deal with the devil to achieve their wildly successful $500 billion valuation and are now frantically trying to renegotiate the terms. These developments come against the backdrop of CEO Mark Zuckerberg showing aspirations beyond managing the platform he founded. But shady advertisers and online trolls, at least for time being, can "fake it 'til they make it" using Facebook better than Zuckerberg can.

Related: YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, And GoDaddy Take Stands To Shut Down White Supremacist Site Daily Stormer

Wunderkind electric car brand Tesla probably thought they were doing something nice this weekend when they boosted the battery power capacity for their drivers escaping the perilous path of Hurricane Irma. Owners of Tesla Model S and Model X cars who’d bought the “cheaper” versions with battery limits of 60-70 kilowatts hours (kWh) got an unexpected bonus when the carmaker remotely boosted their batteries to 75kWh, if they were in Irma-affected areas. According to car enthusiast blog Elektrek, the bonus boost bought about 30-40 miles of extra driving range for those trying to elude the storm.

But just like that one time Apple put the U2 album on your iPhone without asking, Tesla’s act of corporate charity has sparked suspicions about which other aspects of automobile ownership Tesla may be inclined to just up and change on its customers. And it confronts Tesla owners with an awkward truth about the precious vehicles for which they waited on years-long waiting lists — if someone a thousand miles away can just flip a switch and change the performance features of your car, then you don’t really own that car.

“You’re bringing a consumer electronics mentality to a durable-goods product,” Oppenheimer Bank managing director Colin Rusch told the New York Times. “Adding incremental functionality is an ongoing process for Tesla. We’ll see them continue to participate in that over-the-air market.”

“Over-the-air” means changes to the product you supposedly own are rolled out digitally or wirelessly. Maybe the manufacturer notifies you, and maybe they don’t. And in the case of Tesla, the buyer was made fully aware that they were getting weaker battery life in exchange for a price tag of roughly $6,000 less. The buyer can upgrade to a full-powered battery at any time.

But this assumes a transaction in which the manufacturer is completely up front about costs, benefits, and drawbacks. I’ve lived through enough iOS updates to know that it doesn’t always work that way.

In fact, it doesn’t always work that way with Tesla and their glorified “computers on wheels”, either. Last month, Tesla removed automatic emergency braking in some of their models, which had been billed as a standard feature. Owners, naturally, had no say in this. They simply lost something they’d paid for, and Tesla also has a history of promising software updates but delivering them behind schedule.

As former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration head David Friedman told NPR, “I do worry that some companies are being a little too cavalier when it comes to trying to apply the Silicon Valley software model to two tons of glass, metal and plastic that can cruise down the road at 70 miles an hour.”

Related: Now Elon Musk Says To Compete With Computers, People Must Merge With Them

It's tough out there for a Jewish CEO whose online empire has become a potent messaging and organizing tool for neo-Nazis and anti-semites. While the spread of online hate is not unique to just Facebook — YouTube, Twitter, and GoDaddy are wrestling with similar issues — the outbreak of Nazi groups on Facebook is promoting a new batch of Charlottesville-inspired hate rallies here in the Bay Area and nationwide. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded Wednesday with a preachy post declaring, “With the potential for more rallies, we're watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm.” But that post is accompanied by a Business Insider piece reporting that Facebook had its own internal hate speech problem, with a now-shuttered anonymous company message board that, according to The Verge, “sometimes deteriorated into racist and sexist statements.”

Was Zuckerberg's feel-good pronouncement a PR move in response to the revelation about the message board? The savvy CEO may have been tipped off that the Business Insider article was coming, but it went up almost a full day after Zuck's post.

The above image is a protest poster that appeared on the Menlo Park campus after Facebook shut down a Slack-like internal company message board called FB Anon. The internal chat group was intended as a forum for employees to “freely share concerns and opinions about the workplace” without using their real names. Oh, Facebook employees didn’t have to use real names?

The discussion in that forum reportedly got ugly during the Black Lives Matter unrest of early 2016, the same period when Facebook was in hot water because employees were crossing out the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ on a company whiteboard. The November election of Donald Trump apparently emboldened the rage within that forum, particularly posts expressing the sentiment that women can’t code.

Facebook shut down the internal messaging group in December 2016, and news of its existence is just surfacing now. Facebook’s ‘head of people’ (yes, that is the actual job title) Lori Goler told Business Insider, “The FB Anon internal Facebook group violated our Terms of Service, which require people who use Facebook (including our employees) to use an authentic identity on our platform. Last year we disabled any anonymous internal groups or pages within Facebook, and reminded our people of the places at our company where they can have discussions about issues that matter to them, openly or confidentially as appropriate.”

This may or may not have led to Zuckerberg’s personal hate speech proclamation. The post is mostly typically bland Zuckspeak that details no concrete action, but does get somewhat personal.

“As a Jew, it's something I've wondered much of my life. It's a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong — as if this is somehow not obvious,” he wrote. “There's too much polarization in our culture, and we can do something about that. There's not enough balance, nuance, and depth in our public discourse, and I believe we can do something about that.”

You will notice absolutely no new policy articulated in Zuckerberg’s post, just the inference of some kind of crackdown. But given past Facebook crackdowns, I would not have a Wow reaction if most of the content removed over this was just breastfeeding pictures and exposed nipple shots.

Related: Conservative Street Artist Sabo Has Facebook Page Taken Down, Blames Anti-Zuckerberg Posters

Here we see James Damore, who had himself a sad little two-person protest at Google’s Mountain View headquarters Thursday afternoon. (Mr. “Fired for Truth,” of course, fudged the truth on his resume.) But yesterday was a whirlwind day in the Damore uproar, as the story of his viral anti-diversity screed that got him fired has gone from butthurt manbaby curiosity into a disturbing online bullying campaign of harassment against Google employees. Google had planned an all-company ‘town hall’ meeting yesterday to soothe concerns over the matter, but there was no soothing. Recode reports that CEO Sundar Pichai canceled the meeting as employees were being harassed and doxxed.

Googlers (Alphabetters?) were able to submit their town hall questions in advance via an internal system called Dory, but when staff’s names and questions started leaking to right-wing hate sites, Pichai called the meeting off less than an hour before it was supposed to begin. Wired obtained Pichai’s cancellation email, which is seen above. “TL;DR Sorry for the late notice but we are going to cancel today’s Town Hall,” the CEO wrote. “Our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally. Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Ironically, Pichai then addressed a young girls’ coding event Thursday evening, speaking to a crowd of teen and tween ladies who were finalists in an app-building competition. The Verge has the full text of Pichai’s remarks, which appear to be only about five minutes in length, but are symbolically quite significant given the timing. “To the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur, and who dream of creating amazing things: I want you to know that there's a place for you in this industry, there's a place for you at Google,” Pichai told the girls. “Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You belong here and we need you.”

Feeling uplifted? Let me completely demolish that sentiment with the news that trolls are organizing a March on Google next Saturday, a supposedly nationwide effort at all Google offices to stand up for the rights of men to openly criticize their female colleagues’ biological inadequacy. “Today, the March on Google was announced by Jack Posobiec and a coaltion [sic] of free speech activists around the United States,” the site says, clearly not having consulted spellcheck. “Organizers are reaching out to James Damore to invite him to speak as well as planning a ‘Google Meme Contest’.”

The March On Google website is quite a piece of work (check out their kick-ass home page!) and the comments, as you can imagine, reflect a mindset that assumes the Constitution guarantees white men the right to high-paying tech jobs. The spelling and punctuation in the comments are predictably awful, but the threats seem disturbingly real. “That ‘Report Your Coworkers’ meme is weapons-grade,” writes one commenter, sounding eager to harass. “Make that viral, and put posterboard-sized versions of it in the hands of marchers.”

And sure, we have had plenty of fun at Google’s expense on this site, but they’re in a pretty tricky and scary situation here. Their own tools are being used against them, as Damore is now doing interviews with alt-right YouTube stars — perhaps indicating that he's enjoying his new fame at the expense of his critical thinking abilities. And they’re taking fire from both side on the gender equity front, being sued by the U.S. Department of Labor who allege that the company does not pay women equally compared to their male counterparts. But that concern might seem secondary right now, as this particular men’s rights brouhaha may soon spawn threats, violence, and workplace harassment on a whole other level.

Related: Anita Hill Says Women Should Sue If They Want Silicon Valley To Get Less Sexist

Hell hath no fury like tech bros being told that their self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning technologies are overhyped and nowhere near ready for market. But with that in mind, SFist will hereby enrage the Tesla fanboy, chatbot fetishist, and robot-prepared quinoa loving communities with a peer-reviewed study from the Cornell University Library showing that our new robot-car overlords can be easily fooled or misdirected with so much as stickers, electrical tape, or spray paint being applied to road signs.

Here we see some simple stop-sign defacings that researchers found could easily and reliably dupe self-driving cars into speeding up instead of stopping. “Researchers say that the first image on the left, the one with the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ words fooled a self-driving car's machine learning system into misclassifying the classic ‘Stop’ sign as a ‘Speed Limit 45’ sign in 100 percent of cases,” according to the InfoSec blog Bleeping Computer.

Sure, a blog called Bleeping Computer is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. But the full peer-reviewed analysis Robust Physical-World Attacks in Machine Learning Models is available online with its rigorous methods detailed, using sentences like “Deep neural network-based classifiers are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that can fool them into misclassifying their input through the addition of small-magnitude perturbations.”

It’s time for some game theory plain English. While the ‘love/hate’ defaced Stop sign proved 100 percent effective at fooling autonomous vehicles, other methods also repeatedly duped the robot cars. Graffiti and printed overlays like the ones seen above were able to confuse the robots. That blotchy Stop sign at left was read as a Speed Limit 45 sign in 67 percent of the test cases. That altered Right Turn sign was registered as a Stop sign in 100 percent of the test cases.

The study does note that there are some exceedingly simple fixes to these problems. Road signs could just be made with anti-adhesive or anti-graffiti materials (though this would require a significant infrastructure investment). The larger issue here is that the Uber, Waymo, and other autonomous vehicle pioneers may well be looking past public safety concerns in their desire to see splashy headlines, happy investors, and a return on their vested stock shares. Yes, self-driving cars will inevitably be a reality. But we might want to hit the brakes on their rollout until we fully comprehend their vulnerability to havoc easily wreaked by kids with laser pointers, billboard liberation pranksters or — worst of all — homegrown ISIS operatives.

Related: Security Robot Knocks Toddler To The Ground Then Runs Him Over