Tech News

ArsTechnia: A history of Japan's car industry.

Hit the link. Check out the image gallery of cars.

Extreme Tech: Best cars of the 2019 Chicago auto show.

Hit the links in the link for more images.

Technocracy: Self-driving cars are INCREASING urban congestion.

Self-driving cars will likely jam up downtown streets by cruising at slow speeds rather than parking, according to a new analysis published in the journal Transport Policy. Using game theory and simulated traffic models, report author Adam Millard-Ball found that the vehicles will be incentivized to circle streets rather than pay for parking.

According to Millard-Ball’s model, even as few as 2,000 self-driving cars in downtown San Francisco could slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour.

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Tech Dirt: Italy tells EU to drop Articles 11 and 13 in copyright reform.

Italy... has now made a pretty clear statement that if the country is going to support the latest directive, it needs to protect the users of the web, and the only way to do that is to remove Articles 11 and 13.

Good for Italy!
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ZD Net: Will Robot love fulfill emotional needs?

I wonder...how close are we to the era of when our robots will need shrinks?

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Beta News: Spotify to ban ad-blockers.

Under the heading "the following is not permitted for any reason whatsoever" Spotify lists, among other things:

   - circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service[.]

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TechSpot: Senate investigations into government workers use of VPNs.

Recent months have been filled with news of international cybersecurity concerns and foreign meddling, and now two US Senators are going after a new target – virtual private networks (VPNs) used by governmental employees.

Who are the two senators? Marco Rubio (Republican) and Ron Wyden (Democrat).

10,000 to one odds that, three weeks ago, there might have been two - at most - two senators, who know what a VPN is.  This is similar to when John McCain was convinced the 2016 presidential election was hacked, and he pretended to know about hacking, yet didn't know what an exit node is. Sputnik News:

When questioned by a Sputnik reporter following the hearing about the debunking of the Joint Annual Report by security experts, including the finding that 43 percent of the IP addresses attributed to ‘Russian hackers’ were generic web-browser Tor exit nodes, the Senator responded by saying that he had “no idea” what she was talking about.

Lawmakers getting involved in Tech. Again. You have better odds in uniting the properties of water and electricity.
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Tech News World: Wireless carriers really selling our data.

AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have sold access to subscribers' real-time location data to aggregators, which in turn have sold it to about 250 bounty hunters and related businesses, Motherboard reported Wednesday.

In some cases, the data allowed users to track individuals to their specific locations inside a building.

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Gizmodo: Washington state's snow-induced mayhem.

Yeah, and hey, Washington, your snows keep coming our way, hitting the central Midwest. So...stop it!
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Computer World: Apple is disabling Safari's "do not track" feature.

The list of online entities who do not respect DNT requests includes all the usual privacy-eroding suspects, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Medium, Pinterest, and Reddit do honor these requests, which rather suggests you can find alternative ways to make a business.