Republican congressman Denver Riggleman was once a defense contractor for America's National Security Agency. But in 2004, he paid more than $5,000 to join an amateur expedition searching for Bigfoot. Not because he believed in the mythical ape-like creature said to live in the woods, according to the Washington Post, but "to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?"

"Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of QAnon supporters and President-elect Joe Biden deniers." Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good (R) in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse... To Riggleman, the book, "Bigfoot... It's Complicated," mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the "boogaloo" movement to President Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud. Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see...

Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, "facts don't matter."

"They're all bat---- crazy. Right?" he said, not really joking. "All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what's so dangerous about politics today. That's what I've been trying to say."
Riggleman also criticized political operatives "asking for donations to help in a mythological quest of things that can't be proven," arguing this shared mythology can turn into a grift.

"I saw it with Bigfoot. I'm seeing it with QAnon. It's about money. And sometimes crazy and money live in the same space."

"Tesla's Sentry Mode is about to bring things to a whole new level by enabling Tesla owners to remotely see what their cars can see through Autopilot cameras," claims Electrek — citing a Twitter user named green "who has been revealing new Tesla features found in software updates."

"It's not certain when the live camera update would arrive, provided it's not scrapped," writes Engadget, adding "Elon Musk has been teasing a 'hot' holiday software release, but 'green' warned that it might not make that release..."

Some background from Electrek: For a while now, Tesla has been talking about better integrating its Tesla Sentry Mode feature into its mobile app. Sentry Mode is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla's vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car and it has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars. On several occasions, Sentry Mode videos went viral, and the vandals turned themselves in after online pressure. In other cases, video evidence helped police identify and find the vandals.

The feature was built on top of "TeslaCam," a previously released integrated dashcam system with similar capability as Sentry mode, but used when someone is inside the car. TeslaCam helped several Tesla owners with insurance claims by proving that they weren't at fault in some accidents captured by the integrated dashcam system. In order to activate the TeslaCam and Sentry Mode features, owners have to plug a storage device, thumb drive, or SSD inside their Tesla and activate the features in the settings...

Tesla owners can already have an extensive look at the status of their vehicles, including the doors open or close, same for windows, charge port, and more. Now they are going to be able to see around their vehicles even if no Sentry Mode event has been activated.
That's only if the update is actually released. How do Slashdot's readers feel about the possibility of this feature?

Does the world change when Tesla owners can remotely access their cars' cameras?

QAnon "was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the 'Q' posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon's spread and the originators' financial gain..." reports NBC News, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo .

"NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon 'research.'" In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of "Q," the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.

Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q's mysterious posts...

Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the "anon" genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon [real name: Coleman Rogers] and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz's blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News. "A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops," Furber said in an email... As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well... Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts. Diaz's YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter.

Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube "research" as her sole source of income. Diaz declined to comment on this story. "Because I cover Q, I got an audience," Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.

To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and "normies," who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in her blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community... Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon's eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups...

As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, and the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet's conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group. Recently, some Qanon followers have accused Diaz and Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz and Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing to a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers and Diaz may have been involved in the theory from the start.

Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers to both deny that they are Q and say they don't know who Q is.

Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) writes: According to this Tom's Hardware story, a Belgian PhD student managed to wrest full control of a Tesla Model X SUV, by way of hijacking the Bluetooth keyfob and reprogramming it, using a Raspberry Pi.

Tesla has since issued a software update to protect against that kind of attack

Since the attack is done via Bluetooth, control could be gained wirelessly from 5 meters away.
According to the article this is the third time the same student "has managed to exploit the key fob and gain access to the car. Previously he was able to clone the fob..."

Computer Weekly also got an interesting quote from a senior security consultant at the electronic design automation company Synopsys, who argues that the research "demonstrates the impacts of security requirements and security features not having proper validation."

Facebook's employees and executives "are battling over how to reduce misinformation and hate speech without hurting the company's bottom line," reports the New York Times, after employees had spotted false and misleading election-related misinformation going viral on the site.

The solution? Make temporary changes to the controversial algorithm "which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day" by highlighting "big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said."

The Wrap reports: Zuckerberg's decision came after Facebook employees, seeing President Trump claim the election was rigged against him, "proposed an emergency change" to make "authoritative news" more prominent. It's unclear how long the changes were in place for, but they appear to have ended. Facebook vice president Guy Rosen told the Times "there has never been a plan to make these permanent...."

Since making the changes a few weeks ago, some Facebook employees have pushed for the "nicer" News Feed to become permanent, the report added.
The New York Times argues the incident "illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company's aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance....

"Even as Election Day and its aftermath have passed with few incidents, some disillusioned employees have quit, saying they could no longer stomach working for a company whose products they considered harmful."

Developer Alexander Graf has successfully virtualized the Arm version of Windows on an M1 Mac, proving that the M1 chip is capable of running Microsoft's operating system. From a report: Currently, Macs with the M1 chip do not support Windows and there is no Boot Camp feature as there is on Intel Macs, but support for Windows is a feature that many users would like to see. Using the open-source QEMU virtualizer, Graf was able to virtualize the Arm version of Windows on Apple's M1 chip, with no emulation. Since the M1 chip is a custom Arm SoC, it is no longer possible to install the x86 version of Windows or x86 Windows apps using Boot Camp, as was the case with previous Intel-based Macs. However, he said in a Tweet that when virtualized on an M1 Mac, "Windows ARM64 can run x86 applications really well. It's not as fast as Rosetta 2, but close."

The long-awaited Facebook-led digital currency Libra is preparing to launch as early as January, Financial Times reported Friday, citing three people involved in the initiative, but in an even more limited format than its already downgraded vision. From a report [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]: The 27-strong Libra Association said in April that it had planned to launch digital versions of several currencies, plus a "digital composite" of all of its coins. This followed concerns from regulators over its initial plan to create one synthetic coin backed by a basket of currencies. However, the association would now initially just launch a single coin backed one-for-one by the dollar, one of the people said. The other currencies and the composite would be rolled out at a later point, the person added. Libra's exact launch date would depend on when the project receives approval to operate as a payments service from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, but could come as early as January, the three people said. Finma said it would not comment on Libra's application, which was initiated in May. First launched in June 2019, the scaling down of Libra's vision comes as it has received a sceptical reception from global regulators, who have warned that it could threaten monetary stability and become a hotbed for money laundering. While the restricted scope may appease wary regulators, critics have complained that a move to single-currency coins could hit users looking to convert currencies with additional costs, undermining its ambition to enable greater financial inclusion.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission killed a proposal to allow in-flight voice calls via mobile phones, ending its examination of an idea that evoked fears of air rage from passengers trapped beside jabbering seat mates. From a report: The idea drew "strong opposition" from pilots and flight attendants, the agency said Friday in a four-paragraph order. The FCC in 2013 proposed allowing mobile telephone conversations above 10,000 feet, adopting practices followed in Europe and elsewhere, where in-flight voice calling is more common. But the proposal led to strong and immediate pushback, with travelers, flight attendants, members of Congress and others saying they were troubled by the idea of passengers talking on phones in flight. One group raised "the potential for air rage if passengers are using their cell phone."

Amazon has embarked on an extraordinary hiring binge this year, vacuuming up an average of 1,400 new workers a day and solidifying its power as online shopping becomes more entrenched in the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The hiring has taken place at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, at its hundreds of warehouses in rural communities and suburbs, and in countries such as India and Italy. Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas. The spree has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic, which has turbocharged Amazon's business and made it a winner of the crisis. Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic.

The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees. Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America. It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago. The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.

Windows Central reports: Microsoft is working on a software solution that would allow app developers to bring their Android apps to Windows 10 with little to no code changes by packaging them as an MSIX and allowing developers to submit them to the Microsoft Store. According to sources familiar with the matter, the project is codenamed 'Latte' and I'm told it could show up as soon as next year. The company has toyed with the idea of bringing Android apps to Windows 10 before via a project codenamed Astoria that never saw the light of day. Project Latte aims to deliver a similar product, and is likely powered by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL.) Microsoft will need to provide its own Android subsystem for Android apps to actually run, however.

Microsoft has announced that WSL will soon get support for GUI Linux applications, as well as GPU acceleration which should aid the performance of apps running through WSL. It's unlikely that Project Latte will include support for Play Services, as Google doesn't allow Play Services to be installed on anything other than native Android devices and Chrome OS. This means that apps which require Play Services APIs will need to be updated to remove those dependencies before they can be submitted on Windows 10.

Nathaniel Popper, reporting for The New York Times: One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said. One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible. "Most people of color working in tech know that there's a diversity problem," said Ms. Butler, who resigned in April 2019. "But I've never experienced anything like Coinbase."

In Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs and investors often preach high-minded missions and style themselves as management gurus, Coinbase has held itself up as a model. Since the start-up was founded in 2012, Brian Armstrong, the chief executive, has assembled memos and blog posts about how he built the $8 billion company's culture with distinct hiring and training practices. That has won him acclaim among influential venture capitalists and executives. But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees. One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures. On Wednesday, before publication of this article, Emilie Choi, Coinbase's chief operating officer, wrote an email to employees to preemptively question the article's accuracy and said, "We know the story will recount episodes that will be difficult for employees to read." The company posted the email to its public blog. "As Brian shared with the ColorBlock ERG this morning, we don't care what The New York Times thinks. "

Dyson will invest an additional 2.75bn pound ($3.67 billion) on developing technologies and products over the next five years [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], as the appliances brand pushes deeper into areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and energy storage. From a report: The company founded by billionaire James Dyson and famous for its vacuum cleaners said it intended to double its portfolio of products by 2025 and enter new fields, taking it "beyond the home" for the first time. Although it did not provide any breakdown of the investments, they will be focused in Singapore, where the group controversially decided to move its headquarters last year, as well as the UK and the Philippines. The announcement comes more than a year after Dyson abandoned its ambitious plans to manufacture an electric vehicle from scratch in the Asian city-state. Sir James had hoped that the EV project would redefine his business but, after spending hundreds of millions of pounds, concluded that it was too expensive to compete against established carmakers.

The UK is moving ahead with a plan to regulate big tech, responding to competition concerns over a 'winner takes all' dynamic in digital markets. From a report: It will set up a new Digital Market Unit (DMU) to oversee a "pro-competition" regime for Internet platforms -- including those funded by online advertising, such as Facebook and Google -- the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced today. It's moving at a clip -- with the new Unit slated to begin work in April. Although the necessary law to empower the new regulator to make interventions will take longer. The government said it will consult on the Unit's form and function in early 2021 -- and legislate "as soon as parliamentary time allows." A core part of the plan is a new statutory Code of Conduct aimed at giving platform users more choice and third party businesses more power over the intermediaries that host and monetize them. The government suggests the code could require tech giants to allow users to opt out of behavioral advertising entirely -- something Facebook's platform, for example, does not currently allow. It also wants the code to support the sustainability of the news industry by "rebalancing" the relationship between publishers and platform giants, as it puts it.

A wave of damaging attacks on hospitals upended the lives of patients with cancer and other ailments. From a report: At lunchtime on Oct. 28, Colleen Cargill was in the cancer center at the University of Vermont Medical Center, preparing patients for their chemotherapy infusions. A new patient will sometimes be teary and frightened, but the nurses try to make it welcoming, offering trail mix and a warm blanket, a seat with a view of a garden. Then they work with extreme precision: checking platelet and white blood cell counts, measuring each dosage to a milligram per square foot of body area, before settling the person into a port and hooking them up to an IV. That day, though, Ms. Cargill did a double-take: When she tried to log in to her work station, it booted her out. Then it happened again. She turned to the system of pneumatic tubes used to transport lab work. What she saw there was a red caution symbol, a circle with a cross. She walked to the backup computer. It was down, too.

"I wasn't panicky," she said, "and then I noticed my cordless phone didn't work." That was, she said, the beginning of the worst 10 days of her career. Cyberattacks on America's health systems have become their own kind of pandemic over the past year as Russian cybercriminals have shut down clinical trials and treatment studies for the coronavirus vaccine and cut off hospitals' access to patient records, demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms for their return. Complicating the response, President Trump last week fired Christopher Krebs, the director of CISA, the cybersecurity agency responsible for defending critical systems, including hospitals and elections, against cyberattacks, after Mr. Krebs disputed Mr. Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud. The attacks have largely unfolded in private, as hospitals scramble to restore their systems -- or to quietly pay the ransom -- without releasing information that could compromise an F.B.I. investigation. [...] The latest wave of attacks, which hit about a dozen hospitals in the United States, was believed to have been conducted by a particularly powerful group of Russian-speaking hackers that deployed ransomware via TrickBot, a vast network of infected computers used for cyberattacks, according to security researchers who are tracking the attacks.

Britain will spend $333 million to diversify its sources of 5G wireless equipment after banning China's Huawei from supplying the next-generation technology. From a report: Huawei is set to be excluded from British 5G networks by 2027 due to security concerns, leaving phone carriers reliant on a supply duopoly of Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson. Around $67 million of the total will be spent next year to help build "a secure and resilient 5G network" according to documents published on Wednesday as part of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak's spending review. The resulting reduction in competition could hurt security and push up prices, so Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden has started a task force to increase the number of suppliers. He is set to publish more details before the end of the year.

Britain's crackdown on Huawei came in July after UK officials said US sanctions made it impossible to verify the security of Huawei's supply chain. The White House accuses Huawei of being a security risk, which the company has always denied. Since then, Nokia and Ericsson have already won major contracts from British carriers like BT Group and CK Hutchison Holdings' Three UK. The phone industry is banking that longer-term initiatives such as OpenRAN -- a project to make mobile network equipment more interoperable and encourage new suppliers -- will eventually introduce more competition.

On Friday, Amazon warehouse workers and social and environmental justice activists around the world will stage a series of coordinated protests, strikes, and actions to demand the online retailer respect workers' rights to participate in union activity, stop circumventing tax laws, and commit to higher environmental standards, according to the event's organizers. From a report: The day of action, which is being called #MakeAmazonPay, coincides with Black Friday, one of Amazon's biggest sales events of the year and the start of its peak season, when warehouse worker injuries are highest and workloads for warehouse workers and delivery drivers skyrocket. On Friday, protest actions will take place across Amazon's supply chain in Brazil, Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Poland, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Australia. As many as 3,000 workers will strike at six Amazon facilities in Germany. Garment workers in Bangladesh who manufacture clothes sold by Amazon will also protest. Trade union members and environmental groups, including the climate-focused Extinction Rebellion, will demonstrate outside Amazon's European headquarters in Luxembourg. In the Philippines, contracted Amazon Ring call center workers, who face 'subhuman' conditions according to a recent Financial Times article, will hold a virtual action. At Amazon's Seattle and Northern Virginia headquarters, community activists from social justice organizations, including Justice for Muslims Collective and La ColectiVA, will hold their own protests.

UK-based cyber-security vendor Sophos is currently notifying customers via email about a security breach the company suffered earlier this week. From a report: "On November 24, 2020, Sophos was advised of an access permission issue in a tool used to store information on customers who have contacted Sophos Support," the company said in an email sent to customers and obtained by ZDNet. Exposed information included details such as customer first and last names, email addresses, and phone numbers (if provided).

In a blog post, hCaptcha announced that its bot detector is running on about 15% of the internet, adding they they "took most of this market share directly from Google reCAPTCHA." From the post: Competing with Google and other Big Tech companies seems like a tall order: their monopolistic market power, platform effects and army of highly paid developers are generally considered too powerful to tackle for anyone but other tech giants such as Facebook or Amazon. Our story shows that it doesn't have to be that way -- you can beat Big Tech by focussing on privacy. Consider Google reCAPTCHA, which consumes enormous amounts of behavioral data to determine whether web users are legitimate humans or bots. At hCaptcha, we have deliberately taken a very different approach, using privacy-preserving machine learning techniques to identify typical bot behaviors at high accuracy, all while consuming and storing as little data as possible.

Google is an ad company, and their security products look very much like their ad products: they track user behavior on every page of a website and across the web. We designed hCaptcha to be as privacy-friendly as possible from day one. This led to a completely different approach to the problem. As it turns out, tracking users across the web and tying their web history to their identity is completely unnecessary for achieving good security. The many companies that have switched over to hCaptcha often report equal or better performance in bot detection and mitigation despite our privacy focus.

A growing number of critics have pointed out that Google's disregard for user privacy should concern customers looking to protect their websites and apps. At the same time, stopping bots from accessing publisher sites can reveal ad fraud, pitting Google's reCAPTCHA product directly against their ad business, which produces over 80% of their revenue. Every bot Google detects should be earning zero ad dollars. Google's company incentives are thus poorly aligned with the users of their security services, and this may be one explanation for the poor performance of their reCAPTCHA security offering.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The owners and operators of more than half a million diesel pickup trucks have been illegally disabling their vehicles' emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a new federal report has concluded. The practice, described in a report by the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Civil Enforcement, has echoes of the Volkswagen scandal of 2015, when the automaker was found to have illegally installed devices in millions of diesel passenger cars worldwide -- including about half a million in the United States -- designed to trick emissions control monitors. But in this case no single corporation is behind the subterfuge; it is the truck owners themselves who are installing illegal devices, which are typically manufactured by small companies. That makes it much more difficult to measure the full scale of the problem, which is believed to affect many more vehicles than the 500,000 or so estimated in the report.

The E.P.A. focused just on devices installed in heavy pickup trucks, such as the Chevrolet Silverado and the Dodge Ram 2500, about 15 percent of which appear to have defeat devices installed. But such devices -- commercially available and marketed as a way to improve vehicle performance -- almost certainly have been installed in millions of other vehicles. The report found "significant amounts of excess air pollution caused by tampering" with diesel pickup truck emissions controls. The technology is essentially an at-home version of the factory-installed "defeat devices" embedded into hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the United States byVolkswagen, which was forced to pay $14.7 billion in the U.S. to settle claims stemming from the scandal. The report said "diesel tuners" will allow the trucks to release more than 570,000 tons of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant linked to heart and lung disease and premature death, over the lifetime of the vehicles. That is more than ten times the excess nitrogen oxide emissions attributed to the factory-altered Volkswagens sold domestically. The report also found that the altered pickup trucks will emit about 5,000 excess tons of industrial soot, also known as particulate matter, which is linked to respiratory diseases and higher death rates for Covid-19 patients.

General Motors has launched a new insurance service that will leverage the data captured through its OnStar connected car service, ultimately helping drivers cash in on lower insurance rates based on safe driving habits. From a report: OnStar Insurance Services has been created to achieve a better understanding of the vehicles GM produces, in order to offer a personalized digital insurance experience for drivers. The service is currently working with its insurance carrier partners to remove biased insurance plans by focusing on factors within the customer's control, which includes individual vehicle usage and rewarding smart driving habits that benefit road safety.

OnStar Insurance Services plans to provide customers with personalized vehicle care and promote safer driving habits, along with a data-backed analysis of driving behavior. The service plans to build on the learnings of the OnStar Smart Driver feature to provide each policyholder with recommendations for smarter driving habits so customers can drive more safely and potentially earn discounts. The service will start in Arizona and initially offer OnStar Insurance to GM employees in Q4 2020, slowly expanding to additional customers, including the general public, in early 2021.