The Associated Press looks at three new fatalities involving Teslas this week, saying the crashes have "increased scrutiny of the company's Autopilot driving system just months before CEO Elon Musk has planned to put fully self-driving cars on the streets." Last Sunday, a Tesla Model S sedan left a freeway in Gardena, California, at a high speed, ran a red light and struck a Honda Civic, killing two people inside, police said.... Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said it's likely that the Tesla in Sunday's California crash was operating on Autopilot, which has become confused in the past by lane lines. He speculated that the lane line was more visible for the exit ramp, so the car took the ramp because it looked like a freeway lane. He also suggested that the driver might not have been paying close attention. "No normal human being would not slow down in an exit lane," he said...

On the same day, a Tesla Model 3 hit a parked firetruck on an Indiana freeway, killing a passenger in the Tesla... In both cases, authorities have yet to determine whether Tesla's Autopilot system was being used... Many experts say they're not aware of fatal crashes involving similar driver-assist systems from General Motors, Mercedes and other automakers. GM monitors drivers with cameras and will shut down the driving system if they don't watch the road. "Tesla is nowhere close to that standard," Rajkumar said. He predicted more deaths involving Teslas if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fails to take action...

And on Dec. 7, yet another Model 3 struck a police cruiser on a Connecticut highway, though no one was hurt... [T]he driver told police that the car was operating on Autopilot, a Tesla system designed to keep a car in its lane and a safe distance from other vehicles.

"2020 may be the year where tech unionizing efforts gain some actual traction for the first time," argues GeekWire: The chances of this happening in 2020 reflect several factors in the industry and political landscape coming together in the right way for the first time ever. The "Streisand Effect" is basically where the actions you take to prevent what you most want not to happen actually makes it happen. Google has been in the news recently around unionizing activity and its response to that.... [T]he perceived heavy-handed response by Google and the response to it seem more likely to foster more pro-union activity at Google in the near future than to quell it. As Google is a huge presence in Silicon Valley and other cities such as Seattle, these actions can have ripple effects throughout the industry. Certainly, it seems more rather than less likely that there will be continued actions like this at Google in 2020. Since Google is such a leader in the industry, that could spread to other companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and beyond.

Here we turn from Google to two other tech powerhouses: Amazon and Uber. Both of these companies now have a huge presence in areas that have historically strong bastions of union activity: trucking and transportation... [T]he war around unionization and ride-sharing is happening on multiple fronts and at the state level it will be harder for Uber and Lyft to combat this.

Two other factors come into play here in the broader business and political landscape and they both mean that right now, tech companies have few friends outside of the tech industry that would be willing to come to their aid in these fights against unionization... Take all these factors and put them together and you have the makings of a true perfect storm for union activity in tech in 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a long-time columnist for the Northwest Florida Daily News: In this age dominated by screens, we have become more prone to sitting in our cars, houses and workplaces and watching the world at a safe remove. From our couches, it's easy to have an opinion about everything. From that safe perspective, we know everything and we can comment, sometimes brutally, without fear of being called out. It's an age of anonymity masquerading as connectivity.

We seem to be more global, more in contact with people who may live hundreds of miles away. We can date people we've never even met. But in reality, we are hiding behind the safety of our screens, posting only photos that frame us as we want to be seen, using screen names and judging people in the online arena that we would never criticize if they were standing on front of us. This has not brought out the best in many of us.
The columnist ultimately argues the world would be improved by more accountability -- "being held responsible for our actions and our words."

The article's headline? "Stop hiding behind the safety of our screens."

The world's five regional Internet registry have an unincorporated organization called the Number Resource Organization, and they also all have representatives on a supporting organization affiliated with ICANN called the Address Supporting Organization (ASO).

This week the ASO "submitted correspondence" to ICANN about the proposed transfer for the .org registry to Ethos Capital, reports CircleID: This is a historic step as the NRO (Number Resource Organization) representing the 5 Regional Internet address Registries normally does not engage in policy matters related to the Domain Name System. NRO has made an exception, in this case, stating, "ICANN's handling of this proposal to be an important Internet governance decision, with bearing on the community's trust in ICANN, and the legitimacy of the ICANN model."

NRO's formal request: "As a Decisional Participant in the Empowered Community and pursuant to ICANN Bylaws section 22.7, the ASO hereby submits this Inspection Request to inspect the records of ICANN, including minutes of the Board or any Board Committee, for the purpose of determining whether the ASO's may have need to use its empowered community powers in the near future relating to the potential assignment of the .org Registry Agreement.

"For this purpose, the ASO seeks to inspect any ICANN records which pertain to or provide relevant insight to the process by which ICANN will consider (and potentially approve) the assignment of the .org Registry Agreement, including the process by which input from the affected community will be obtained prior to ICANN's consideration and potential approval of the assignment."

An anonymous reader quotes Space News: The SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites scheduled for January 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida Space Coast will be first launch of 2020 and also the 45th Space Wing's inaugural launch as part of the U.S. Space Force.

The 45th Space Wing, headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, oversees the preparation and launching of U.S. government and commercial satellites from Cape Canaveral and operates the Eastern Range. It is one of five Air Force space wings that have been assigned to the U.S. Space Force effective December 20, when President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act that created the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. "I'm excited for the 45th Space Wing to be a part of the U.S. Space Force," wing commander Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess said in a statement Jan. 3.

The 45th Space Wing will continue to do what it has been doing and the transition to the Space Force will not change that, Schiess said. The details of how the U.S. Space Force will be structured and staffed will take at least 18 months to sort out... Air Force Space Command personnel have been assigned to the Space Force but still remain airmen within the U.S. Air Force...

"The effects the new Space Force will have on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Patrick Air Force Base has not been announced yet, but continuing to successfully accomplish the mission without interruption is our top priority," Schiess said.

"A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect's phone went dark," reports the Wall Street Journal: WhatsApp, Facebook Inc.'s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users -- among them the suspected terrorist -- that their phones had been hacked by an "advanced cyber actor."

An elite surveillance team was using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company, to track the suspect, according to a law-enforcement official overseeing the investigation. A judge in the Western European country had authorized investigators to deploy all means available to get into the suspect's phone, for which the team used its government's existing contract with NSO. The country's use of NSO's spyware wasn't known to Facebook... WhatsApp's Oct. 29 message to users warned journalists, activists and government officials that their phones had been compromised, Facebook said. But it also had the unintended consequence of potentially jeopardizing multiple national-security investigations in Western Europe about which Facebook hadn't been alerted -- and about which government agencies can't formally complain, given their secret nature...

NSO has faced criticism for selling its products to government agencies in the Middle East, Mexico and India, which Facebook and human-rights research group Citizen Lab, among others, allege used them to spy on dissidents, religious leaders, journalists and political opponents. Among the 1,400 WhatsApp users notified in October, more than 100 fell into these categories, Citizen Lab said. The group, which is based at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, worked with Facebook on identifying these people... Citizen Lab has issued reports for several years linking NSO's spyware to governments with a history of human-rights abuses, and said that record should put NSO out of the running for government contracts from Western agencies, said Ronald Deibert, Citizen Lab's director. "What we have been trying to do with our research is to raise alarm bells...."

On the day WhatsApp sent its alert, the official overseeing the terror investigation in Western Europe said, he was stuck in traffic on his way to work when a call came in from Israel. "Have you seen the news? We've got a problem," he said he was told. WhatsApp was notifying suspects whom his team was tracking that their phones had been hacked. "No, that can't be right. Why would they do that?" the official said he asked his contact, thinking it a joke. The most immediate concern was a suspected terrorist investigators linked to Islamic State. They had received a tip he was part of a group plotting an attack around Christmas. Once they saw the suspect's phone receive WhatsApp's alert, the phone went dark, the official said. The sleuths soon lost access to the suspect's messages, the official said, indicating he had discarded or disabled the phone. "We only had that one phone," the official said.
Though that suspect was still under traditional surveillance, "He's not the only suspect we have to follow..." the official complained to the Wall Street Journal, adding that their counterparts in other Western European countries told him more than 10 other investigations "may have been" compromised by WhatsApp's alert.

The Journal also notes that tech companies "have come under growing pressure in the U.S. and Europe to give law enforcement a back door into encrypted messages. But they are also under fire for not doing enough to protect the privacy of their users and, in some jurisdictions, they have legal obligations to disclose security breaches."

"Iranian officials are likely considering a cyber-attack against the U.S. in the wake of an airstrike that killed one of its top military officials," reports Bloomberg: In a tweet after the airstrike on Thursday, Christopher Krebs, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, repeated a warning from the summer about Iranian malicious cyber-attacks, and urged the public to brush up on Iranian tactics and to pay attention to critical systems, particularly industrial control infrastructure... John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., said Iran has largely resisted carrying out attacks in the U.S. so far. But "given the gravity of this event, we are concerned any restraint they may have demonstrated could be replaced by a resolve to strike closer to home."

Iranian cyber-attacks have included U.S. universities and companies, operators of industrial control systems and banks. Iranian hackers tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign, and they have launched attacks against current and former U.S. government officials and journalists. The U.S., meanwhile, has employed cyberweapons to attack Iran's nuclear capabilities and computer systems used to plot attacks against oil tankers, according to the New York Times....

James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said Iranian retaliation may include the use of force, but the government is also likely asking hackers for a list of options. "Cyber-attacks may be tempting if they can find the right American target," Lewis said. "The Iranians are pretty capable and our defenses are uneven, so they could successfully attack poorly defensed targets in the U.S. There are thousands, but they would want something dramatic."
Mother Jones shares another perspective: There's little reason to think that Iran could pull off a truly spectacular attack, such as disabling major electric grids or other big utilities, said Robert M. Lee, an expert in industrial control systems security and the CEO of Dragos. "People should not be worried about large scale attacks and impacts that they can largely think about in movies and books like an electric grid going down." Instead, Iran might choose targets that are less prominent and less secure.

"The average citizen should not be concerned," he said, "but security teams at [U.S.] companies should be on a heightened sense of awareness."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames. But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely.

Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tire. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression. "The pressure involved is similar to what you'd get in a coffee machine," she says. The university paired her with materials scientist, Luke Sperrin, to try to find commercial applications for the innovation -- and H2Go Power was born. The company partnered with Canadian hydrogen fuel cell maker Ballard to create a drone which used their reactor to safely store hydrogen for flight. The aluminum reactor weighs less than a bag of sugar and features a small gas cylinder with an intricate network of 3D-printed aluminum tubes inside.

"The hydrogen remains stable and solid in these structures until 'coolant' is pumped through the tubes, warming them and releasing hydrogen gas to the drone's fuel cell," reports the BBC. "Hydrogen (H2) is pumped into one side of the fuel cell through a catalyst which frees electrons, creating electricity. Oxygen (O) is then pumped into the other side of the fuel cell and combines with the left over, positively-charged hydrogen atoms (H+). The only final waste product is water vapor (H2O)."

Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Verge reports: In a short statement posted on its website, Imagination said that it had entered into a multiyear license agreement with Apple, under which the Cupertino, California-based firm will have access to "a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees." Apple announced its split from Imagination back in April 2017 when it said that it would start designing its own graphics chips, and it would stop licensing the company's technology within two years. After the split was announced, Imagination expressed skepticism that Apple could design its own chips "without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property, and confidential information."

New submitter jasonbuechler writes: Related to the Xiaomi post the other day, Google has entirely disabled Google Assistant/Home integration with Xiaomi devices pending further testing. Google issued the following statement:

Hi everyone,

Late night on January 1st, we were made aware of an issue where a Reddit user posted that their Nest Hub was able to access other people's Xiaomi camera feeds. We've been working with Xiaomi and we're comfortable that the issue was limited to their camera technology platform. While we worked on this issue with Xiaomi, we made the decision to disable all Xiaomi integrations on our devices. We understand this had a significant impact on users of Xiaomi devices but the security and privacy of our users is our priority and we felt this was the appropriate action.

We're re-enabling Xiaomi device integrations for everything but camera streaming after necessary testing has been completed. We will not reinstate camera functionality for Xiaomi devices until we are confident that the issue has been fully resolved. We'll keep you updated with information as more becomes available to share. UPDATE: Speaking to Engadget, Xiaomi says that the issue occurred due to a cache update, which made the stills pop up if a user had that camera and that display under poor network conditions. According to the company, only 1,044 users had this setup with a "few" experiencing the poor network connection that would make it appear, and they have fixed the issue on their end. The full statement is available on Engadget's report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [T]he U.S. has traditionally paid for the upkeep of its roads via direct taxation of gasoline and diesel fuel, which means that as our fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, that revenue will drop in relation to the total number of vehicle miles traveled each year. As a result, some states are starting to grapple with the problem of how to get drivers to pay for the roads they use in cars that use less or even no gas per mile. At the start of this year, Utah has begun a pilot Road Usage Charge program, coupled to an increase in registration fees for alternative fuel vehicles. Assuming a state gas tax of 30c/gallon and 15,542 miles/year driven, Utah says it collects $777 a year from a 6mpg heavy truck, $311 from a pickup getting 15mpg, $187 from a 25mpg sedan, $93 from a 50mpg hybrid, and nothing from anyone driving a battery EV.

So in 2020, Utah is increasing vehicle registration fees. In 2019, registering a BEV in Utah would cost $60; in 2020 that will be $90, increasing to $120 in 2021. PHEV fees were $26 in 2019, increasing to $39 this year and $52 in 2021, and not-plug-in hybrid fees have gone from $10 to $15, increasing to $20 next year. An extra $30 a year -- or even $60 a year -- is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, particularly considering how much cheaper an EV is to run. But Utahns with EVs have an alternative. Instead of paying that flat fee, they can enroll in the pilot program that involves fitting a telematics device to the car. The device tracks the actual number of miles driven on Utah's roads. These are billed at a rate of 1.5c/mile, but only until the total equals whatever that year's registration fee for the vehicle would have been; participating in the pilot means you could pay less than you would otherwise, but Utah's Department of Transportation says that participants would not ever be charged more than that year's registration fee. The data will be collected by a contractor called Emovis, which operates toll roads around the U.S. As for Oregon -- another state working to solve this problem, the state is increasing its state gas tax by 2c/gallon, and like Utah, it's also increasing vehicle registration fees. "Now, fees for registering your car in Oregon will depend on how many miles per gallon your car gets; a two-year registration for something that gets below 19mpg will cost $122, rising to $132 for a vehicle between 20â"39mpg, then $152 for a vehicle that gets 40mpg or better, and $306 for a BEV," reports Ars Technica.

Thankfully, if you own a 40+mpg vehicle or a BEV, you can cut that two-year fee to $86 by enrolling in OReGO. However, you will need to fit your qualifying car with a telematics device to track the actual miles traveled on the state's roads. "Those are billed at 1.8c/mile -- Oregon evidently decided its roads are worth a little more than those in Utah -- but you can then get credited for any fuel tax you pay in the state," the report adds.

A U.S. judge has awarded $12.8 million to 22 unnamed women, ruling that they were tricked into appearing in widely distributed online porn videos. The BBC reports: Some of the models duped by the owners and operators of the GirlsDoPorn website had become suicidal, he said. They were told the videos were for a private collector or overseas DVDs, according to the 181-page judgement. The women -- aged 18-23 when they shot the videos -- were also assured the videos would never appear online. But they were uploaded to GirlsDoPorn's subscription-based amateur porn website, and clips were shared on some of the world's most popular free-to-view adult websites.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright ordered GirlsDoPorn chief executive Michael Pratt, 36, videographer Matthew Wolfe, 37, and porn actor Ruben Garcia, 31, to take the videos down from GirlsDoPorn and take steps to get them removed from other sites too. GirlsDoPorn markets itself on the premise that the women in the videos are not professional porn stars.

SpankiMonki shares a report from CNBC: Tesla said it delivered 92,550 Model 3 cars and 19,450 Model S and X vehicles during the fourth quarter. The company was expected to deliver 87,900 Model 3, 9,800 Model S and 9,300 Model X vehicles, according to an average of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Investors were also watching production numbers. In the second and third quarters of 2019, Tesla delivered more cars than it produced. The production versus deliveries gap widened in the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, Tesla manufactured 96,155 vehicles and delivered 97,000 vehicles. In the fourth quarter, it manufactured 104,891 vehicles and delivered 112,000. The electric-car maker said it has produced just under 1,000 cars that are ready for sale at its new factory in Shanghai. Tesla started delivering vehicles to Chinese customers late last month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems. Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

The first version of Apple's lawsuit accused Corellium of copyright infringement. A new version filed on December 27 alleges both copyright infringement and "unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201," a statute that's part of the DMCA. Apple argued that Corellium gives users the ability to jailbreak iOS for either benign or malicious purposes. In response to the new allegations, Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton said "Apple's latest filing against Corellium should give all security researchers, app developers, and jailbreakers reason to be concerned."

Corellium is "deeply disappointed by Apple's persistent demonization of jailbreaking," with Gorton writing that "developers and researchers rely on jailbreaks to test the security of both their own apps and third-party apps." Apple's filing, according to Corellium, essentially "assert[s] that anyone who provides a tool that allows other people to jailbreak, and anyone who assists in creating such a tool, is violating the DMCA." Apple, Gorton wrote, "is using this case as a trial balloon in a new angle to crack down on jailbreaking" and "is seeking to set a precedent to eliminate public jailbreaks."

Many users have taken to the Lutris Forums to report that EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V. "Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned," writes one user. "As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating..." Another user said the "same problem" happened to them, and they "got banned on tuesday for cheating."

While some users await a response from EA, others have received an email confirming the action that was taken on their account. "... After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account," the email states.

We've seen this happen on multiple occasions with Blizzard, but they eventually fixed the problem the first time. In a comment on Hacker News, user jchw writes: "Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge..."

New submitter grunby shares a report from Gothamist: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 -- and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date." NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters -- the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix. The report notes that parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is still working if you want to use credit cards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: "We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool," explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a Stanford news release. But this wasn't designed like a traditional particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider or one at collaborator SLAC's National Accelerator Laboratory. Instead of engineering it from the bottom up, they fed their requirements to an "inverse design algorithm" that produced the kind of energy pattern they needed from the infrared radiation emitters they wanted to use. That's partly because infrared radiation has a much shorter wavelength than something like microwaves, meaning the mechanisms themselves can be made much smaller -- perhaps too small to adequately design the ordinary way. The algorithm's solution to the team's requirements led to an unusual structure that looks more like a Rorschach test than a particle accelerator. But these blobs and channels are precisely contoured to guide infrared laser light pulse in such a way that they push electrons along the center up to a significant proportion of the speed of light.

The resulting "accelerator on a chip" is only a few dozen microns across, making it comfortably smaller than a human hair and more than possible to stack a few on the head of a pin. A couple thousand of them, really. And it will take a couple thousand to get the electrons up to the energy levels needed to be useful -- but don't worry, that's all part of the plan. The chips are fully integrated but can be put in a series easily to create longer assemblies that produce larger powers. These won't be rivaling macro-size accelerators like SLAC's or the Large Hadron Collider, but they could be much more useful for research and clinical applications where planet-destroying power levels aren't required. For instance, a chip-sized electron accelerator might be able to direct radiation into a tumor surgically rather than through the skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Google has begun sunsetting its print-replica magazine service. From a report: Paid Google Magazine users have reportedly begun receiving emails announcing that the service is shutting down. The email said that users won't be able to purchase new issues or renew magazine subscriptions via Google News, Android Police reported on Friday. The last subscription payment will be refunded within 30 days, the email said. The email said users will still be able to access previously-purchased issues in the Following or Favorites tab, depending on the app.

Helsinki, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Singapore, and other metros have been experimenting with on-demand buses -- and not seeing a lot of success. From a report: Since September, commuters using Shanghai's Number 9 bus route have had a new way of catching a ride. Rather than stand at a designated stop, they open a smartphone app and book a ride to wherever they're going. The service, provided by Alibaba, takes those reservations into account and calculates where the bus should go, using the company's artificial intelligence to customize the route. The idea is to boost ridership -- and curb traffic --by making public transit more convenient. Shanghai is just the latest city to give this sort of scheme a try. From Helsinki, Finland, to Sydney, cities around the world have spent the past few years trying to implement AI-fueled, on-demand bus services. Few have succeeded. Earlier this year, Singapore decided against renewing a pilot for on-demand buses. In Germany, microtransit company CleverShuttle -- which bills itself as more of a ride-pooling service than a bus -- pulled out of three of the eight cities it was operating in, citing economic and bureaucratic hurdles.

In a pilot project with shared rides company Via, bringing underserved residents to public transit nodes, Los Angeles Metro is spending $14.50 per trip -- twice what it spends on a regular bus trip. On-demand buses have been a thing for decades. Public transit agencies often call them demand-responsive buses, and deploy them to serve users who lack easy access to standard routes because they live especially far away, or may have special needs. Because they reach relatively few people, they're expensive to operate. They're inefficient too, often making riders wait undetermined amounts of time for a ride. So cities must strike a balance between making public transit accessible to the largest number of residents, and meeting their budget goals.

An Arkansas-based telemarketing firm sent home more than 300 employees and told them to find new jobs after IT recovery efforts didn't go according to plan following a ransomware incident that took place at the start of October 2019. From a report: Employees of Sherwood-based telemarketing firm The Heritage Company were notified of the decision just days before Christmas, via a letter sent by the company's CEO. Speaking with local media, employees said they had no idea the company had even suffered a ransomware attack, and the layoffs were unexpected, catching many off guard. "Unfortunately, approximately two months ago our Heritage servers were attacked by malicious software that basically 'held us hostage for ransom' and we were forced to pay the crooks to get the 'key' just to get our systems back up and running," wrote Sandra Franecke, the company's CEO, in the letter sent to employees. She goes on to say that data recovery efforts, initially estimated at one week, have not gone according to plan and the company had failed to recover full service by Christmas. Franecke said the company lost "hundreds of thousands of dollars" because of the incident and have been forced to "restructure different areas in the company." As a result of the botched ransomware recovery process, the company's leadership decided to suspend all services, leaving more than 300 employees without jobs.