There’s a lot of chatter about France’s new repairability index, a story about a surgeon’s Zoom call in the middle of surgery turns heads, and the comments of SolarWinds’ CEO
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday, March 1, and I’m your host Alex Coop.
====
Reddit is buzzing about by France’s recent decision to force certain electronic manufacturers to tell consumers how repairable their products are. Early last month, manufacturers selling things like smartphones and laptops in France must give their products a score, or “repairability index.” This index is based on a range of criteria like how easy it is to take the product apart and the availability of spare parts, and technical documents. France won’t be enforcing the use of the index with fines until next year, but some companies have already begun releasing scores for their products.
====
When you gotta Zoom, you gotta Zoom. The Sacramento Bee is reporting that medical authorities in California will investigate a plastic surgeon who appeared in a videoconference for a traffic violation trial while operating on a patient. The surgeon was dressed in surgical scrubs, and in the background, you can hear the beeps of the medical machinery with the patient just out of view. According to the Guardian, The Medical Board of California says it will look into the incident, saying it “expects physicians to follow the standard of care when treating their patients.”
====
And lastly, the information security pros are taking to Twitter to voice their frustrations over the recent comments made by former SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson. During a joint hearing Friday, Thompson told reps from the House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees that the “‘solarwinds123” password, which protected one of the company’s servers, was tied to a mistake that an intern made. “They violated our password policies,” he said, noting the intern had posted the password on their own private GitHub account. While that’s a good example of bad password management, experts were rightfully furious that Thompson blamed an intern for what’s actually pretty flimsy company policy around IT security. CNN reported that the password had been accessible online since at least June 2018. But sure, blame it on the intern – seriously?
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your mailbox every day. I’m Alex Coop, thanks for listening!