Beautiful new see-through frog puts whole heart on display Treehugger
Judge Smacks NYPD For Its ‘Gotcha’ Tactics In Forfeiture Public Records Lawsuit Techdirt Nice to see the good guys win one once in a while.
MIT Technology Review – Google Now Tracks Your Credit Card Purchases and Connects Them to Its Online Profile of You: “Google’s new ability to match people’s offline credit card purchases to their online lives is a stunning display of surveillance capitalism in action. The capability, which Google unveiled [the week of May 22, 2017], allows the company to connect the dots between the ads that it shows its users and what they end up actually buying
Read the PDF – Internet Trends, Mary Meeker, May 31, 2017 [355 pages]
“Here are a few initial takeaways via TechCrunch:
- Smartphone sales and Internet penetration growth are both slowing
- It’s not really a “shift to mobile” as much as “the addition of mobile”, since desktop usage hasn’t declined much while mobile usage has skyrocketed to over three hours per day per person in the US
- There’s still more time spent on mobile than ad spend, indicating forthcoming windfalls for mobile ad platforms
- Google and Facebook control 85% of online ad growth
- Internet ad spend will surpass TV spend within six months
- Streaming music led by Spotify surpassed physical music sales, giving recorded music its first revenue growth in 16 years
- eSports are exploding, with viewing time up 40% year over year, and an equal number of millennials strongly preferring eSports vs traditional sports
- Email spam with malicious attachments is exploding as cloud usage increases, so be careful what you click
- Tech companies drive wealth creation in China, where people pay for livestreaming, and bike sharing usage is skyrocketing
- Falling data costs are driving increasing Internet adoption in India, but smartphone prices remain too high
- 60% of the most-highly valued tech companies in America were founded by first or second generation Americans while 50% of the top private startups were founded by first-gen immigrants…”
“What’s the Social Security Number Removal Initiative (SSNRI)? TheMedicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015, requires us to remove Social Security Numbers (SSNs) from all Medicare cards by April 2019. A new Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI) will replace the SSN-based Health Insurance Claim Number (HICN) on the new Medicare cards for Medicare transactions like billing, eligibility status, and claim status. You can find more details in our 11/1/16 SSNRI Open Door Forum slides.
We currently use an SSN-based HICN to identify people with Medicare and administer the program. We’ve used the HICN with our business partners:
- The Social Security Administration (SSA)
- The United States Railroad Retirement Board (RRB)
- State Medicaid Agencies
- Health care providers
- Health plans