An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The former personal assistant of a young tech entrepreneur found decapitated and dismembered in his Manhattan apartment was arrested early on Friday and was expected to be charged in the killing, according to three officials briefed on the matter. The entrepreneur, Fahim Saleh, 33, was discovered dead on Tuesday afternoon by his sister inside his $2.25 million condo in a luxury building on the Lower East Side, the police said. She had gone to check in on him after not hearing from him for about a day.

Mr. Saleh's head and limbs had been removed, and parts of his body had been placed in large plastic bags designed for construction debris. An electric saw was still plugged in nearby. The former assistant, Tyrese Devon Haspil, 21, had worked for Mr. Saleh since he was 16. Mr. Haspil was expected to be charged in a criminal complaint with second-degree murder and other crimes. Detectives believe that the motive for the killing stemmed from Mr. Saleh having discovered that Mr. Haspil had stolen roughly $90,000 from him, two of the officials said. Mr. Saleh fired Mr. Haspil, but did not report the theft and even offered to set up what amounted to a repayment plan so he could return the money, the officials said. One of the officials said Mr. Saleh had paid Mr. Haspil so well that he had been able to pay off the debts of several family members. "After the murder, the killer used a credit card to pay for a car to a Home Depot, on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, and to buy cleaning supplies, the fourth official said. He returned to Mr. Saleh's apartment the next day to dismember the body and clean up the crime scene," the report adds.

"On the day of the murder, detectives believe that the killer -- dressed in a black three-piece suit, wearing a black mask and latex gloves, and carrying a duffel bag -- followed Mr. Saleh off an elevator that opened up in his apartment, law enforcement officials said. As the two men left the elevator, the killer used a Taser to immobilize Mr. Saleh and then stabbed him to death."

Twitch has intervened to stop the US Army using fake prize giveaways on its esports channel to redirect viewers to army recruitment pages. From a report: The practice was brought to light by a report from The Nation on the use of esports as a recruitment tool by the American military. The US Army, Navy, and Air Force all field esports teams comprised of active and reserve personnel who stream on Twitch and chat with young viewers about life, video games, and the opportunities afforded by military service. "Esports is just an avenue to start a conversation," Major-General Frank Muth, head of the army's recruiting command, told ThinkTech Hawaii recently. "We go out there and we have a shared passion for esports ... and it naturally devolves into a conversation, 'What do you do?', 'I'm in the army.'"

This outreach included automated links dropped into the army's stream chat that told viewers they could win an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller in a "giveaway." But when anyone clicked the link, says The Nation, they were directed to "a recruiting form with no additional mention of a contest, odds, total number of winners, or when a drawing will occur." Viewers, streamers, and game developers reacted with anger to the news, saying that any other channel would face repercussions for such behavior. Twitch itself has now apparently forced the army to stop these giveaways, according to a report from Kotaku.

During a series of Cisco online all-hands meetings on race in early June, some workers posted comments in message channels that other staff and company management said were demeaning to Black people, exposing racial divisions at the Silicon Valley tech giant and leading to the dismissal of a number of people. From a report: During the first videoconference on June 1, following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins spoke with Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, who is Black, and Bryan Stevenson, a Black lawyer and author who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, in front of 30,000 employees. The conversations about race continued in subsequent online global staff meetings. "Black lives don't matter. All lives matter," one worker wrote in the comments during one of the virtual all-hands meetings, according to screen shots obtained by Bloomberg. Another said the phrase Black Lives Matter "reinforces racism" because it singles out one ethnic group. "People who complain about racism probably have been a racist somewhere else to people from another race or part of systematic oppression in their own community!" a third worker wrote in the chat section visible for all those online. Cisco, the world's largest networking company, said it fired "a handful" of workers for inappropriate conduct because it "will not tolerate" racism.

The breach revealed Twitter's engineering prowess and management practices as subpar. Hedge fund Elliott Management can't be happy about its investment. From a report: Even if Twitter's user growth is relatively unaffected, shareholders shouldn't overlook what the latest in a long series of security incidents says about the how the company works and why its stock has been such a disappointment: Twitter's engineering prowess and management practices are simply second-rate. On Wednesday, numerous Twitter accounts from business leaders, celebrities to major companies -- including Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Apple -- were hacked and posted cryptocurrency scam messages, promising to double the amount of any funds sent to a specific Bitcoin address. Twitter later admitted to the unprecedented nature of the breach, saying it believes it fell victim to a "coordinated social engineering attack," where hackers were able to take control of its internal systems. CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, "Tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible this happened."

Certainly, hedge fund Elliott Management must not be pleased with the turn of events. The activist hedge fund and Twitter stakeholder reached an agreement with the company earlier this year to restructure the company's board, standing down on an initial goal of replacing management including Dorsey. The lackluster security is more ammunition for Twitter's critics who have long questioned the company's efficacy in using its engineering resources. Even as Chinese super-apps such as WeChat have expanded upon core messaging services to build vast consumer internet empires, and Facebook has transformed its platforms into advertising money machines, the basic nature of Twitter's offering hasn't changed much over the past decade. That, even as the company spends an incredible amount in research and development annually -- including nearly $700 million last year alone. Where does all the money go?

U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at Hollywood companies, including Walt Disney on Thursday as well as large technology firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft over company actions with China. From a report: "Corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate with the (Chinese Communist party)," Barr said. He added that Hollywood has routinely caved into pressure and censored their films "to appease the Chinese Communist Party. I suspect Walt Disney would be disheartened to see how the company he founded deals with the foreign dictatorships of our day," Barr said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.

Barr chided U.S. companies for being too willing to take steps to ensure access to the large Chinese market. "The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report," Barr said. "America's big tech companies have also allowed themselves to become pawns of Chinese influence." Barr suggested that Apple iPhones "wouldn't be sold (in China) if they were impervious to penetration by Chinese authorities." He suggested American tech companies were imposing a "double standard."

While doctors and politicians still struggle to convince Americans to take the barest of precautions against Covid-19 by wearing a mask, the Department of Homeland Security has an opposite concern, according to an "intelligence note" found among the BlueLeaks trove of law enforcement documents: Masks are breaking police facial recognition. From a report: The rapid global spread and persistent threat of the coronavirus has presented an obvious roadblock to facial recognition's similar global expansion. Suddenly everyone is covering their faces. Even in ideal conditions, facial recognition technologies often struggle with accuracy and have a particularly dismal track record when it comes to identifying faces that aren't white or male. Some municipalities, startled by the civil liberties implications of inaccurate and opaque software in the hands of unaccountable and overly aggressive police, have begun banning facial recognition software outright. But the global pandemic may have inadvertently provided a privacy fix of its own -- or for police, a brand new crisis. A Homeland Security intelligence note dated May 22 expresses this law enforcement anxiety, as public health wisdom clashes with the prerogatives of local and federal police who increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools.

The bulletin, drafted by the DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counterterrorism Mission Center in conjunction with a variety of other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "examines the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems -- such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms -- to monitor public spaces during the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency and in the months after the pandemic subsides." The Minnesota Fusion Center, a post-9/11 intelligence agency that is part of a controversial national network, distributed the notice on May 26, as protests were forming over the killing of George Floyd. In the weeks that followed, the center actively monitored the protests and pushed the narrative that law enforcement was under attack. Email logs included in the BlueLeaks archive show that the note was also sent to city and state government officials and private security officers in Colorado and, inexplicably, to a hospital and a community college.

British Airway has announced that it will immediately retire its Boeing 747 fleet following the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The airline was forced to store all of its 28 747-400s due to reduced demand in the midst of the respiratory disease pandemic. Airline Geeks reports: In a letter sent out to all BA employees, the airline believes that the 747s are unsustainable for the new aviation industry post-pandemic and will look to accelerate the retirement of the twin-deckers. Most of the airline's 747s were scheduled to be phased out progressively by early 2024. The interiors of its 747s had recently been refurbished as part of a billion-pound upgrade program to help extend the lifespan of the fleet. Yet, the ongoing aviation crisis forced the flag carrier to retire its twin-deckers immediately.

"With much regret, we are proposing, subject to consultation, the immediate retirement of our Queen of the Skies, the 747-400. We know there is speculation on social media and aviation websites, so we wanted to make our position clear," the airline told its staff in a letter seen by AirlineGeeks. This will mark a milestone for the airline as the era of jumbo will end when the affectionately-nicknamed 'Queen of the Skies' ceasing operations for British Airways after a 51-year long association. The airline had tremendous success with the Boeing 747 since it entered service, operating its 747s as the flagship aircraft of its long-haul fleet.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that the "Privacy Shield" data transfer agreement, which had allowed tech companies to transfer EU user data to the US, failed to adequately protect Europeans' data from US surveillance and security laws and was therefore invalid. What this means is companies like Facebook "could be prevented from sending data back to the US," reports The Guardian. From the report: The ruling of the court of justice of the European Union (CJEU) does not immediately end such transfers, but requires data protection authorities (DPAs) in individual member states to vet the sending of any new data to make sure people's personal information remains protected according to the EU's data protection laws (GDPR). The complaint, which goes back to October 2014, was lodged by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems. He argued, following the Snowden revelations, that the privacy of European citizens could not be guaranteed if their data was sent to the US, given the evidence of widespread eavesdropping by the country's National Security Agency (NSA), and the fact that the US legal system only protected the rights of US citizens. Schrems' initial complaint led to the overturning of the EU/US "safe harbor," which had governed data transfer between the two countries, and the creation of a new treaty, the EU/US "privacy shield." This latest ruling has overturned that policy too. [...]

The ruling is not a total halt on data transfers between the EU and US, said Lisa Peets, a partner at Covington, which represented the UK's software industry in the case. The court upheld the use of "standard contractual clauses" (SCCs) to transfer personal data between Europe and US, allowing companies to seek specific consent from users for data to be exported. "Data flows between Europe and the United States are an integral part of the European economy and of the day-to-day lives of millions of European consumers, and the SCCs are the backbone for many of those data transfers," Peets said. "As for the privacy shield, the European commission will be highly focused on finding a resolution and will be actively working work with the US government to identify a path forward."

Brian Krebs has written a blog post with clues about who may have been behind yesterday's Twitter hack, which had some of the world's most recognizable public figures tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report (though we strongly recommend you read the full analysis here): There are strong indications that this attack was perpetrated by individuals who've traditionally specialized in hijacking social media accounts via "SIM swapping," an increasingly rampant form of crime that involves bribing, hacking or coercing employees at mobile phone and social media companies into providing access to a target's account. In the days leading up to Wednesday's attack on Twitter, there were signs that some actors in the SIM swapping community were selling the ability to change an email address tied to any Twitter account. In a post on OGusers -- a forum dedicated to account hijacking -- a user named "Chaewon" advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece. "This is NOT a method, you will be given a full refund if for any reason you aren't given the email/@, however if it is revered/suspended I will not be held accountable," Chaewon wrote in their sales thread, which was titled "Pulling email for any Twitter/Taking Requests."

Hours before any of the Twitter accounts for cryptocurrency platforms or public figures began blasting out bitcoin scams on Wednesday, the attackers appear to have focused their attention on hijacking a handful of OG accounts, including "@6." That Twitter account was formerly owned by Adrian Lamo -- the now-deceased "homeless hacker" perhaps best known for breaking into the New York Times's network and for reporting Chelsea Manning's theft of classified documents. @6 is now controlled by Lamo's longtime friend, a security researcher and phone phreaker who asked to be identified in this story only by his Twitter nickname, "Lucky225."[...] But around the same time @6 was hijacked, another OG account -- @B -- was swiped. Someone then began tweeting out pictures of Twitter's internal tools panel showing the @B account. Another Twitter account -- @shinji -- also was tweeting out screenshots of Twitter's internal tools. Minutes before Twitter terminated the @shinji account, it was seen publishing a tweet saying "follow @6," referring to the account hijacked from Lucky225.

Cached copies of @Shinji's tweets prior to Wednesday's attack on Twitter are available here and here from the Internet Archive. Those caches show Shinji claims ownership of two OG accounts on Instagram -- "j0e" and "dead." KrebsOnSecurity heard from a source who works in security at one of the largest U.S.-based mobile carriers, who said the "j0e" and "dead" Instagram accounts are tied to a notorious SIM swapper who goes by the nickname "PlugWalkJoe." Investigators have been tracking PlugWalkJoe because he is thought to have been involved in multiple SIM swapping attacks over the years that preceded high-dollar bitcoin heists. Now look at the profile image in the other Archive.org index of the @shinji Twitter account (pictured below). It is the same image as the one included in the @Shinji screenshot above from Wednesday in which Joseph/@Shinji was tweeting out pictures of Twitter's internal tools.

This individual, the source said, was a key participant in a group of SIM swappers that adopted the nickname "ChucklingSquad," and was thought to be behind the hijacking of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's Twitter account last year. The mobile industry security source told KrebsOnSecurity that PlugWalkJoe in real life is a 21-year-old from Liverpool, U.K. named Joseph James Connor. The source said PlugWalkJoe is in Spain where he was attending a university until earlier this year. He added that PlugWalkJoe has been unable to return home on account of travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [...] If PlugWalkJoe was in fact pivotal to this Twitter compromise, it's perhaps fitting that he was identified in part via social engineering.

Verizon has turned to Google Cloud's Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations. The Register reports: The Contact Center AI technology will, we're told, use natural-language recognition to transcribe on-the-fly customers as they talk down the line. This speech-to-text output will be fed into Dialogflow, a platform that parses the text and generates responses in real-time. Similarly, written conversations with online support chatbots will be processed in real-time by Google's AI. The overall aim is to allow subscribers to rant, er, complain away using natural language at the computer system, from their keyboards or over the phone, and the artificial intelligence should be able to work out what customers want, and help them out, without them having to navigate a menu or bark simple commands.

And presumably the aim is to sort out simple stuff quickly without a human operator having to come on the line and deal with it. Subscribers with trickier problems should also, we hope, be directed to a human being without having to negotiate their way through a menu or a script of irrelevant procedures. The software agents can also suggest relevant online documentation, such as information on how to view or pay a bill, based on a subscriber's request. Amusingly, if you get through to a human, or demand to speak to a person, the staffer will probably just tell you what the AI wanted to say anyway: the software will, behind the scenes, provide prompts to the call-center workers.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google gives its online video service YouTube the advantage when choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web. From the report: Take a clip of basketball star Zion Williamson that the National Basketball Association posted online in January, when he made his highly anticipated pro debut. The clip was popular on Facebook Inc., drawing more than one million views and nearly 900 comments as of March. A nearly identical YouTube version of the clip with the same title was seen about 182,000 times and garnered fewer than 400 comments. But when The Wall Street Journal's automated bots searched Google for the clip's title, the YouTube version featured much more prominently than the Facebook version.

The Journal conducted Google searches for a selection of other videos and channels that are available on YouTube as well as on competitors' platforms. The YouTube versions were significantly more prominent in the results in the vast majority of cases. This isn't by accident. Engineers at Google have made changes that effectively preference YouTube over other video sources, according to people familiar with the matter. Google executives in recent years made decisions to prioritize YouTube on the first page of search results, in part to drive traffic to YouTube rather than to competitors, and also to give YouTube more leverage in business deals with content providers seeking traffic for their videos, one of those people said. A Google spokeswoman, Lara Levin, said there is no preference given to YouTube or any other video provider in Google search. "Our systems use a number of signals from the web to understand what results people find most relevant and helpful for a given query," Ms. Levin said. She declined to comment on the specific examples cited in the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany has banned Tesla from repeating what a court says are misleading advertising statements relating to the capabilities of the firm's driver assistance systems and to autonomous driving, a Munich judge ruled on Tuesday. Tesla can appeal the ruling. The case was brought by Germany's Wettbewerbszentrale, an industry sponsored body tasked with policing anti-competitive practices. The Munich court agreed with the industry body's assessment and banned Tesla Germany from including "full potential for autonomous driving" and "Autopilot inclusive" in its German advertising materials. It said such claims amounted to misleading business practices, adding that the average buyer might be given the impression that the car could drive without human intervention and might suggest such a system was now legal on German roads.

IBM's Global Technology Services has posted a job ad calling for candidates with a "minimum 12+ years' experience in Kubernetes administration and management." From a report: Which is a little odd because the first GitHub commit for the project was made on June 7, 2014. And the feature freeze for version 1.0 was announced on May 22, 2015. Sharp-minded Reg readers will have recognised that -- absent time travel -- it is therefore not possible for anyone to have 12 years' experience with Kubernetes. The ad is sadly silent on just how IBM expects candidates will have found the time to accumulate a dozen years' experience in a six-year-old project.

Microsoft is adding support for custom email addressing to Office 365 email services, a feature it hopes to complete in Q3 2020. From a report: Custom email addresses are an optional feature that some email providers can support. The feature is described in the RFC 5233 internet standard. Officially known as subaddressing, this standard allows users to extend their email address using "tags" or the plus (+) character, hence its two alternative names of tagged addressing or plus addressing. For example, a user with the email address of username@domain.com can use the plus addressing feature to extend their email address to username+tag@domain.com. If the user's email address supports subaddressing, all emails sent to the username+tag@domain.com email will land in the user's username@domain.com inbox.

Britain announced on Tuesday that it would ban equipment from the Chinese technology giant Huawei from the country's high-speed wireless network, a victory for the Trump administration and a reversal of an earlier decision that underscores how technology has taken center stage in the deepening divide between Western powers and China. From a report: In January Britain said that Huawei equipment could be used in its new 5G network on a limited basis. But since then Prime Minister Boris Johnson has faced growing political pressure domestically to take a harder line against Beijing, and in May the United States imposed new restrictions to disrupt Huawei's access to important components. Britain's about-face signals a new willingness among Western countries to confront China, a determination that has grown firmer since Beijing last month adopted a sweeping new law to tighten its grip on Hong Kong, the semiautonomous city that was a British colony until 1997. On Tuesday, Robert O'Brien, President Trump's national security adviser, was in Paris for meetings about China with counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Huawei's critics say its close ties to the Chinese government mean Beijing could use the equipment for espionage or to disrupt telecommunications -- a point the company strongly disputes.

Arguing that Huawei created too much risk for such a critical, multibillion-dollar project, the government said Tuesday that it would bar the purchase of new Huawei equipment for 5G networks after December, and that existing gear already installed would need to be removed from the networks by 2027. "As facts have changed, so has our approach," Oliver Dowden, the government minister in charge of telecommunications, told the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon. "This has not been an easy decision, but it is the right one for the U.K.'s telecoms networks, for our national security and our economy, both now and indeed in the long run." The dispute over Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, represents an early front in a new tech Cold War, with ramifications for internet freedom and surveillance, as well as emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics.

Google is in advanced talks to buy a $4 billion stake in Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's technology venture, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, seeking to join rival Facebook in chasing growth in a promising internet and e-commerce market. From the report: The Mountain View, California-based company has been discussing the investment in Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Ambani's Reliance Industries, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. An announcement could come as soon as the next few weeks, according to the people. Jio is at the center of the Indian tycoon's ambition to transform his energy conglomerate into a homegrown technology behemoth akin to China's Alibaba Group Holding. The venture has turned into a magnet for Silicon Valley investors, attracting almost $16 billion from Facebook to KKR in the past three months. Should the talks with Google result in a deal, that would further burnish Jio's credentials in its push to upend online retail, content streaming, digital payments, education and health care in a market of more than a billion people. Google said on Monday that it plans to invest $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: With select bucket seats from the 911 and 718 as well as various classic car parts -- including clutch release levers for the 959 -- already being produced using 3D printing, Porsche is more familiar with the technology than most. Now, the automaker is taking things even further, 3D printing entire pistons for its most powerful 991-gen 911, the GT2 RS. Although it doesn't sound like these 3D-printed pistons will actually be found in many production Porsches anytime soon, they represent a bit more than just an engineering flex. There are some very real mechanical benefits here. For starters, they weigh 10 percent less than their forged equivalents and feature an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that's apparently unable to be reproduced using traditional manufacturing methods. The decrease in weight and temperature results in an extra 30 horsepower on top of the GT2 RS's already mighty 700.

Produced in partnership with German auto part maker Mahle and industrial machine manufacturer Trumpf, the pistons are made out of a high-purity metal powder developed in-house by the former using the laser metal fusion process, essentially a laser beam that heats and melts the metal powder into the desired shape. The end result is then validated using measurement technology from Zeiss, the German optics company best known for camera lenses.

Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer and roboticist who hosted the popular science show MythBusters and Netflix's White Rabbit Project, has died suddenly following a brain aneurysm. He was 49. From The Hollywood Reporter: An electrical engineer and roboticist by training, he joined Discovery's MythBusters in its third season, replacing Scottie Chapman and was with the show until 2014 when he left with with co-hosts Kari Byron and Tory Belleci. The trio would reunite in 2016 for Netflix's White Rabbit Project which lasted for one season. On MythBusters, Imahara used his technical expertise to design and build robots for the show and also operated the computers and electronics needed to test myths.

Born in Los Angeles, Imahara studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California (though he briefly had doubts and wanted to become a screenwriter) before combining the two passions and landing a post-graduation gig at Lucasfilm-associated THX labs. In his nine years at Lucasfilm, he worked for the company's THX and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) divisions. In his years at ILM he became chief model maker specializing in animatronics and worked on George Lucas' Star Wars prequels, as well as The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Galaxy Quest, XXX: State of the Union, Van Helsing, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. [...] Imahara also starred in several episodes of the fan-made web series Star Trek Continues. He played Hikaru Sulu, a lieutenant, helmsman and third officer on the USS Enterprise, in the show that was an unofficial continuation of Star Trek: The Original Series. "We are heartbroken to hear this sad news about Grant. He was an important part of our Discovery family and a really wonderful man. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family," a representative for Discovery said in a statement on Monday.

California has opened its own antitrust probe into Google, leaving just one state that has yet to do so. "In September, attorneys general from 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia announced an antitrust investigation into Google focused on the company's dominance of the advertising technology market," reports Politico. "Over the past 10 months, that investigation -- led by Texas -- has expanded into other aspects of the company's business, including its conduct in the search market." From the report: California -- which houses Google's headquarters in Mountain View -- was the most notable holdout in the multi-state group, and Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra has repeatedly declined to answer questions about why the state wasn't a participant. The California antitrust probe is a separate investigation from the multi-state effort, two of the individuals said. All of the individuals spoke on condition of anonymity to talk openly about a confidential probe. Alabama is now the only state that is not investigating the company. It was not immediately clear what aspect of Google's business California is targeting.

Google has previously been in California's crosshairs over antitrust concerns. In the early 2010s, California was among five states that investigated Google alongside the Federal Trade Commission over allegations the tech giant biased its search results to favor its own products. The FTC opted against filing an antitrust suit and closed its probe in January 2013. California and the other states, which included Texas, New York, Oklahoma and Ohio, later closed their probes in 2014. California has its own antitrust laws, the Cartwright Act and the Unfair Competition Act, that are sometimes interpreted more broadly than the U.S. federal antitrust law. Unlike federal antitrust law, California's laws do allow government enforcers to seek restitution or civil penalties for violations.

Self-driving startup Voyage built a physical "Telessist Pod" with software that allows a remote operator to give instructions to a self-driving car. A reader shares a report from Ars Technica "For all of this to work safely, it had to basically be a car without wheels," Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron told me in a Thursday phone interview. "It had to have a real steering wheel, real pedals, real automotive-grade connectors, and real automotive-grade ECUs." Voyage's engineers built a "car without wheels" because they wanted to mirror the experience of driving a real car as closely as possible. "If you try to do it with a gaming steering wheel, you don't get the force feedback" you get with a real car, Cameron said. "It's impossible to drive reliably like that. It's so unsafe."

Remote Voyage drivers sit in a metal cage the size of a golf cart. There's a steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal where you'd expect them in a real car. A wraparound array of computer monitors shows the car's surroundings. An encrypted wireless data connection keeps the components in the Telessist pod synchronized with their counterparts in the real car. Voyage says the network latency is under 100 milliseconds -- short enough that the driver won't notice a significant lag. In case something goes wrong, the company bonded together five separate cellular connections, each with its own SIM card on a different wireless carrier, to achieve maximum redundancy and hence reliability," reports Ars. "If one of the five networks fails, software automatically switches over to the other four."

There's a system called Remote Drive Assist that will take over if the car loses its wireless connection. Voyage even added an emergency braking system, which consists of a small, self-contained lidar unit in front of Voyage's cars. "If it detects an imminent collision, it has the power to activate the brakes and bring the vehicle to a stop," adds Ars. "This means that, even if the human driver -- or Voyage's main self-driving system, for that matter -- makes a mistake, the car is unlikely to run into anything."