Category: Tech news

Waymo has become the second company to apply for the newly-available permit to deploy autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on some California roads, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It would be putting its cars — well, minivans — on streets around Mountain View, where it already has an abundance of data.

The company already has driverless driverless cars in play over in Phoenix, as it showed in a few promotional videos last month. So this isn’t the first public demonstration of its confidence.

California only just made it possible to grant permits allowing autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on April 2; one other company has applied for it in addition to Waymo, but it’s unclear which. The new permit type also allows for vehicles lacking any kind of traditional manual controls, but for now the company is sticking with its modified Chrysler Pacificas. Hey, they’re practical.

The recent fatal collision of an Uber self-driving car with a pedestrian, plus another fatality in a Tesla operating in semi-autonomous mode, make this something of an awkward time to introduce vehicles to the road minus safety drivers. Of course, it must be said that both of those cars had people behind the wheel at the time of their crashes.

Assuming the permit is granted, Waymo’s vehicles will be limited to the Mountain View area, which makes sense — the company has been operating there essentially since its genesis as a research project within Google. So there should be no shortage of detail in the data, and the local authorities will be familiar with the people necessary for handling any issues like accidents, permit problems, and so on.

No details yet on what exactly the cars will be doing, or whether you’ll be able to ride in one. Be patient.

In a rare mea culpa for the mercurial billionaire, Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that the company has been too reliant on robots for production.

“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk wrote, responding to a Wall Street Journal reporter’s tweet. “Humans are underrated.” He also talked about this with CBS News’ Gayle King, adding “we had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts….And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.”

Tesla has faced mounting public pressure amid a production slowdown for its Model 3, its lower-priced car. The company recently revealed that it missed its target to produce 2,500 cars a week, disappointing investors.

The uncertainty has resulted in a volatile stock. A month ago shares were trading at $340 and then slid to $252. Things have started to recover now that Musk says the company will be profitable and cash flow positive in the third quarter.

This was also revealed in a tweet that Musk wrote to The Economist on Friday.

There’s “no need to raise money,” he added. Shares closed Friday at $300.34.

The company has a market cap of $50.7 billion. By comparison, Ford Motors has a market cap of $45 billion.

Facebook employees watched the hearings closely, and were pleased by what they saw.

Android Auto — Google’s system for powering your car’s dash display from your phone, and the company’s answer to Apple’s CarPlay — is going wireless. You can leave your phone in your bag, and it’ll still be able to push your apps and content to your in-dash screen.

Alas, there’s a catch: To get it all working wirelessly at this point, you’ll need to have some pretty specific gear.

You’ll need the right phone (Pixel or Pixel XL, Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL, Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P) and the right head unit — and for now, that means one of just a handful of units announced by JVC/Kenwood earlier this year.

The list of compatible devices will grow in time (Google says to expect more “this year”) — but if you want wireless right this second, the options are quite limited.

On this episode, we discuss Facebook’s future relationship with its users, and with the governments who seek to regulate it.

Yahoo Japan has gotten its hands on 40 percent of a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange set to launch this fall.

The investment, made in BitARG Exchange through a Yahoo Japan subsidiary gives the company a minority stake with BitARG parent company CMD Laboratories still maintaining 60 percent ownership of the exchange. A source told CNBC the deal went for about 2-3 billion yen or around $18-28 million.

In a translated announcement, BitARG said the exchange would benefit from the “service operation and security expertise of the Yahoo Japan Group, which will make it easier for customers to prepare for the start of the exchange service… and to improve the operation after the commencement.”

Last month, Nikkei Asian Review reported the deal was in progress, further noting that Yahoo Japan planned to use BitARG’s technology to launch its own cryptocurrency exchange in 2019.

Emboldened by silent colleagues and apologist supporters, music artists and executives continue to misbehave with impunity.

The comedian’s new show ‘Problem Areas’ takes a serious look at the problems plaguing law enforcement.

Stephen Tourlentes has spent more than two decades photographing the bright glow of prisons on the periphery of society.

With ‘Automata,’ Taro created a game that wasn’t just thorny and ambitious, but humanistic.

Plus: Aistream’s cozy new trailer, Luminar starts cranking out lidars, and more.

Pepper is part of the first wave of intelligent machines that promise to not only make our lives easier, but to bring a strange new form of interaction into being.

Backpage .com, for years the primary online platform for the sex trade, has pleaded guilty as a company to charges of sex trafficking in Texas, the state’s attorney general announced today. Its CEO, Carl Ferrer, pleaded guilty to money laundering, for which he may be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison.

The site was seized last week and a 93-count indictment issued days later.

Ferrer was arrested back in 2016, and will be sentenced “once he’s fulfilled the terms of his plea agreement.”

The Texas AG’s office does not elaborate beyond the charges mentioned in the press release, except to say that Ferrer’s cooperation could lead to new ones. Considering the site was an international and popular platform for all kinds of sex-related commerce — allegedly including child trafficking — it seems likely there’s far more yet to come, including pleas for similar crimes in different jurisdictions.

The execution of this strike against Backpage, the culmination of an 18-month investigation (beginning around the arrest of Ferrer), is coincident but not directly related to the passage and signing of FOSTA. The bill, just this week signed into law, effectively removes the “safe harbor” enjoyed by internet companies protecting them from having liability for the actions of their users. Under FOSTA, a company like Craigslist would be responsible if, for example, a prostitute listed their services on the site.

Unsurprisingly Craigslist and other sites have removed listings or services that may put them at risk under FOSTA, prompting criticism from the more legitimate sides of the sex industry that relied on them.

It was hard to avoid seeing the video posted last week showing local news stations reciting a “must-run” script about fake news from their parent company, Sinclair broadcasting, in eerie synchrony. It creeped out a dozen Senators so much that they asked the FCC to look into it — and Chairman Ajit Pai has responded, saying that’s not going to happen.

The Senators’ letter, which you can read here, expresses concern that Sinclair is clearly using its power over local news stations to advance a political agenda at a national level:

Sinclair may have violated the FCC’s longstanding policy against broadcast licensees deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information…Multiple news outlets report that Sinclair has been forcing local news anchors to read Sinclair-mandated scripts warning of the dangers of “one-sided news stories plaguing our country,” over the protests from local news teams.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is responsible for ensuring that broadcast licensees use the public airwaves to serve the public interest. We call on the FCC to investigate whether Sinclair’s production of distorted news reports fails the public interest test.

There’s a clear irony in what amounts to fake news warning viewers of itself, but the concerns of these Senators are more straightforward. Note that they don’t simply dislike the message; the message is only mentioned by the by. The real issue is that if Sinclair is systematically distorting the news that appears on its stations, that should be investigated as a potential violation of its FCC-issued broadcast license.

And as icing on the cake, they bring up the fact that Sinclair ought to be under extra scrutiny since it is in the middle of a merger that would give it unprecedented reach in broadcast, and the FCC is also accused by many of favoring Sinclair in particular with some of its deregulatory policies.

Chairman Pai responded today with a letter essentially answering a straw man version of the problems presented above:

In light of my commitment to protecting the First Amendment and freedom of the press, I must respectfully decline.

I have repeatedly made clear that the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.

I understand that you disliked or disagreed with the content of particular broadcasts, but I can hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast station because of disagreement with its news coverage or promotion of that coverage.

Pai completely mischaracterizes the issues brought up by the Senators, and responds as if they had asked him to shut down a local news station because of a report they “disliked or disagreed with.”

In no way does the Senators’ letter reference “a particular newscast” or the “content of particular broadcasts.” The problem is specifically described throughout as the parent company, Sinclair, blatantly forcing its local news broadcasters to air politically slanted segments word for word, some against their will.

Funnily enough, what he pretends the Senators are asking him is what Trump actually did propose — that the FCC revoke the license of “NBC and the Networks” because of “all the Fake News coming out of” them. It took Pai a week to make his inability to do so clear that time, though Commissioner Rosenworcel did so within an hour.

As of this writing, there’s a single, solitary review for Button Tooter. It’s three stars and three sentences, and it’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. “They clearly ran out of ideas!” the reviewer writes. “It’s kind of fun! How about a game where you can make music. [sic]” Is Amazon’s creation of a fart app a true indication of creativity bankruptcy?

Or is it the sign of a company that’s finally discovered the killer app for its new hardware platform. It’s true that, in the past, fart apps have become a bit of a shorthand for useless mobile software. And for a brief, but glorious moment several years back, fart apps topped the various mobile charts, only to pass like, well, to quote the Oscar-nominated film, “a fart in the wind.”

But Buttons have always been a curiosity among the Echo family, some employee’s side project that somehow made it into production. Amazon’s formed a couple of partnerships with game makers, but the company has clearly spent much more time focusing on the rest of its smart home devices.

I never had any desire to have an Echo Button in my life — and the Button Tooter arrived. Now all I can think about is how much I want a remote button that can make my Echo Spot fart. And $20 seems like a small price to pay for the five or so minutes of pure childlike joy it will bring to my life. When’s the last time you could say that about a gadget.

Because we may have gotten old in the blink of an eye, and technology may have made us callous and uncaring husks of our former selves. The world may be full of hate, and this precise moment in time may feel as though we’re closer to the brink of global destruction by our hands.

But there’s one truth I know, that has always and will always hold in the face of an ever-changing world: farts are funny. So go forth and press, friends.