An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Self-driving cars, long touted by developers as a way to eliminate road deaths, could likely only prevent a third of all U.S. road crashes, according to a study released on Thursday. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a research group financed by U.S. insurers, found the remaining crashes were caused by mistakes that self-driving systems are not equipped to handle any better than human drivers.

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, a consortium of self-driving companies and researchers, said in a statement on Thursday the study wrongly assumed that automated cars could only prevent crashes caused by perception errors and incapacitation. Some 72% of crashes were avoidable, based on the study's calculations, if accidents caused by speeding and violation of traffic laws were included, the consortium said...

[N]ot all human mistakes can be eliminated by camera, radar and other sensor-based technology, according to the IIHS analysis of more than 5,000 representative police-reported crashes nationwide. Most crashes were due to more complex errors, such as making wrong assumptions about other road users' actions, driving too fast or too slow for road conditions, or making incorrect evasive maneuvers. Many crashes resulted from multiple mistakes. "Our goal was to show that if you don't deal with those issues, self-driving cars won't deliver massive safety benefits," said Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research and a coauthor of the study.

Three months after losing a deal with Take-Two, Star Theory Games was out of business. From a report: One Friday evening last December, employees of game designer Star Theory Games each received the same unusual recruitment message over LinkedIn. It struck them as bizarre for two reasons. One, it came from an executive producer at the publishing company funding their next video game. Two, it said the game -- in the works for the previous two years -- was being pulled from their studio. "This was an incredibly difficult decision for us to make, but it became necessary when we felt business circumstances might compromise the development, execution and integrity of the game," Michael Cook, an executive producer at Private Division, a publishing label within Take-Two Interactive Software, wrote in the message, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. "To that end, we encourage you to apply for a position with us."

It was strange and disconcerting news to Star Theory's employees. Normally, an announcement like this would be delivered in a companywide meeting or an email from Star Theory's leadership team. The contract with Take-Two was the studio's only source of revenue at the time. Without it, the independent studio was in serious trouble. The LinkedIn message went on to say Take-Two was setting up a new studio to keep working on the same game Star Theory had been developing, a sequel to the cult classic Kerbal Space Program. Take-Two was looking to hire all of Star Theory's development staff to make that happen. "We are offering a compensation package that includes a cash sign-on bonus, an excellent salary, bonus eligibility and other benefits," Cook wrote. When employees returned to the office on Monday, Star Theory founders Bob Berry and Jonathan Mavor convened an all-hands meeting. The two men had been in discussions about selling their company to Take-Two but were dissatisfied with the terms, they explained.

The game's cancellation was a shock, but the founders assured staff that Star Theory still had money in the bank and could try to sign other deals, according to five people who attended the meeting and asked not to be identified, citing the risk of litigation. Berry and Mavor encouraged employees to stick together and stay at the company. The next few weeks were chaos, employees said. Take-Two hired more than a third of Star Theory's staff, including the studio head and creative director. By March, as the coronavirus pandemic choked the global economy, any hope of saving the business appeared to be lost, and Star Theory closed its doors.

President Donald Trump threatened to regulate or shutter social media companies -- a warning apparently aimed at Twitter after it began fact-checking his tweets. From a report: In a pair of tweets issued Wednesday morning from his iPhone, Trump said that social media sites are trying to silence conservative voices, and need to change course or face action. There is no evidence that Trump has the ability to shut down social media networks, which are run by publicly traded companies and used by billions of people all over the world.

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen," he said Wednesday. In a second tweet, he added: "Just like we can't let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country." He didn't cite any platforms by name, but it was plainly a response after Twitter added a fact-check label to earlier Trump tweets that made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting. It's the first time Twitter has taken action on Trump's posts for being misleading.

Mike Masnick, writing at TechDirt: Last year, when Spotify purchased a bunch of podcast companies, we worried that it foretold the end of the open world of podcasting. You can get a Spotify account for free, but unlike most podcast apps, you can't get any podcast you want via Spotify. Spotify has to agree to host it, and as a podcast you have to "apply" (indeed, Techdirt's own podcast was initially rejected by Spotify, though has since been let in). That's a "closed, but free" setup. Most podcasts are both open and free -- published as open MP3 files, using an open RSS feed that any regular podcast app can grab.

Spotify, so far, hadn't done much to close off the podcasts that it had purchased, but perhaps that's changing. Earlier this week it was announced that one of (if not) the most popular podcasts in the world, Joe Rogan's, would now be moving exclusively to Spotify. News reports have said that Spotify paid over $100 million to get Rogan's podcast on board, while some have put the number closer to $200 million. While it's totally understandable why Rogan would take that deal (who wouldn't?), it does remain a sad day for the concept of an open internet. When we lock up content into silos, we all lose out. The entire concept of podcasts came from the open nature of the internet -- combining MP3s and RSS to make it all work seamlessly and enabling anyone to just start broadcasting. The entire ecosystem came out of that, and putting it into silos and locking it up so that only one platform can control it is unfortunate.

I'm sure it will get many people to move to Spotify's podcasting platform, though, and that means those that do offer open podcasting apps (most others) will suffer, because most people aren't going to want to use two different podcast apps. Even if the initial economics make sense, it still should be seen as a sad day for the open internet that enabled podcasting to exist in the first place.

theodp writes: Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson had an odd way of showing his appreciation for the unemployed computer programmer who pointed out a vulnerability in Arkansas's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance website, framing the programmer's actions as illegal.

The Arkansas Times' Lindsey Millar explains: "Beginning on Saturday at a news conference and continuing Monday, Hutchinson has framed the applicant who sounded the alarm as acting illegally. He announced Monday that the FBI was investigating the matter. He said he understood personal information had been 'exploited.' 'We don't believe that the data was manipulated,' Hutchinson said. 'In other words, where someone would go in and change a bank account number, which is what criminals would do. When you say 'exploited,' I believe that is a technical term of art that includes visual seeing of someone else's data. That is a concern to us and that is what constitutes a breach.' Asked about his rationale for framing the programmer's actions as illegal, the governor said, 'When you go in and manipulate a system in order to gain an access that you're not allowed to have permission to access, that is a violation of the security that we want to have in place in these systems, and it would be a violation of the law as well, I would think (video).'"

Hutchinson is a member of Governors for CS (and a founding co-chair), who "share best practices for computer science and advocate for federal policies to expand computer science instruction" in partnership with tech-backed Code.org. Andrew Morris, a cybersecurity expert with more than a decade of experience and the founder of GreyNoise Intelligence in Washington, D.C., said the governor's framing of the programmer as acting illegally was "the wrongest way" to handle the situation.

"They're shooting the messenger," he said. "There are so many reasons why that is bad. It creates a culture where they're punishing people for doing the right thing and trying to report the vulnerabilities and get them fixed. This person didn't have to say anything."

Andrew Pulver writes via The Guardian: Film-maker Lilly Wachowski has responded to Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump after the pair bantered on social media using a phrase from the Wachowskis' hit 1999 film, The Matrix. After Musk tweeted "Take the red pill" -- referring to a key scene in The Matrix, which subsequently gave rise to the phrase "redpilling" as an alt-right, misogynist meme, along with a red rose emoji normally associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, the party to which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib belong -- Trump replied: "Taken!"

Wachowski then pithily responded, "Fuck both of you," before following up with a tweet supporting the Brave Space Alliance, which describes itself as "the first Black and trans led LGBTQIA center located on the South Side of Chicago." Musk, the South African-born entrepreneur who is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, posted his original tweet with no other comment, but it is thought to refer to his clash with authorities in California over his plans to reopen the Tesla factory in Fremont, in which he was supported by Donald Trump.

paulbsch shares a report from Electrek: A source familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla has chosen Austin, Texas for its next factory and it's going to happen quickly. According to a reliable source familiar with the matter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is set on bringing the next Tesla Gigafactory, or now Terafactory, to Austin, Texas, or at least close to the city. The people familiar with the project said that Musk has tasked the engineering team working at Gigafactory Nevada to start the process for the new factory, which is expected to make the Tesla Cybertruck electric pickup truck and the Model Y. Tesla's CEO also reportedly wants to move extremely fast.

We are told that the decision for the site is not set in stone since Tesla was apparently given a few options in the greater Austin area, but Musk is said to want to start construction extremely soon and aims to have Model Y vehicles coming out of the plant by the end of the year. It would be an even more aggressive timeline than Gigafactory Shanghai. However, we are told that Tesla would aim to only have a general assembly line ready on that timeline and it would keep building the factory around the first phase in order to increase production capacity of different parts next year. By late next year, the new Texas factory would be producing Tesla's new Cybertruck electric pickup.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The state of Ohio won't deny unemployment benefits to people who refuse to work during the COVID-19 pandemic after people targeted the website it was using to track these workers, according to officials at the state's Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS). The state previously set up a "fraud" website encouraging employers to report those who refused to go back on the job, angering workers and labor rights advocates. State officials say they are now reconsidering the policy after Motherboard reported that a hacker created a script to flood the "COVID-19 Fraud" website with junk data, with the goal of making it impossible to process these claims.

"No benefits are being denied right now as a result of a person's decision not to return to work while we continue to evaluate the policy," ODJFS Director Kimberly Hall told Cleveland.com. "Because Ohio is still examining its policies in this area, no adjudications concerning a refusal to return to work have been initiated," Bret Crow, a spokesperson for the department, told Motherboard in an email. "While the hacker's script has since stopped working after changes to Ohio's website, another hacker has taken up the project and plans to release an updated version," adds Motherboard.

"Confirmed coronavirus cases world-wide Friday exceeded 2.7 million, with more than 190,000 dead," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing data from Johns Hopkins University.

While America has just 4.3% of the world's population, "The U.S. accounted for nearly a third of the cases, exceeding 869,000, and more than a quarter of the deaths, at 49,963." [Note: This comparison might be skewed by the number of countries underreporting their cases or deaths.]

The Miami Herald reports: The coronavirus has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States, just four days after passing 40,000 U.S. deaths on Sunday, Johns Hopkins University reports. The total as of early Friday afternoon was more than 50,370, up about 400 deaths since Thursday night, the data shows...

More than 25,000 people have died in Italy, and more than 22,000 in Spain... Most of the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York City: 16,388, the university says.
Two weeks ago America had just 20% of the world's confirmed fatalities.