Month: March 2018

Police in Tempe, Arizona, have released dash cam footage showing the final seconds before an Uber self-driving vehicle crashed into 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg. She died at the hospital shortly afterward.

The accident occurred after dark on Sunday evening. Herzberg was walking with a bicycle across a poorly-lit roadway. About 1.4 seconds elapses between the time when Herzberg starts to become visible (initially, only her feet are faintly illuminated) and the video's final frame.

While Herzberg is visible for less than two seconds in the camera footage, she might have become visible earlier to a human driver, since human eyes are better at picking out details in low-light situations. Also, the Uber vehicle was presumably equipped with lidar and radar—sensors that work just as well in the dark as they do in broad daylight.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | baona )

The US Senate today passed a bill that weakens legal protections given to websites that host third-party content, saying the measure will help stop promotion of prostitution and sex trafficking on the Internet. But the legislation won't actually help victims of sex trafficking, and will erode online free speech, critics say.

The Senate passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) in a 97-2 vote. Only Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) voted against the bill, which is also known as the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). It already passed the House of Representatives, and is expected to be signed by President Donald Trump.

The bill changes Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides website operators with broad immunity for hosting third-party content. The bill declares that Section 230 "was never intended to provide legal protection to websites that unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution and websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims."

Enlarge / CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook's 2016 "F8" conference. (credit: Facebook)

After days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the controversy over the 2014 leak of private Facebook user data to a firm that went on to do political consulting work for the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.

Cambridge Analytica got the data by paying a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to create a Facebook personality quiz that harvested data not only about its own users but also about users' friends. Kogan amassed data from around 50 million users and turned it over to Cambridge.

Zuckerberg says that when Facebook learned about this transfer in 2015, it got Kogan and Cambridge to certify that they had deleted the data. But media reports this weekend suggested that Cambridge had lied and retained the data throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in Idaho in 2015. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla shareholders have approved a massive new pay package for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, helping to ensure that he will continue running the company for another decade.

The package is performance based. If Tesla's stock value reaches $100 billion, Musk will receive an award equal to one percent of the company's shares, worth $1 billion. Musk gets another one percent for each $50 billion increase in the share price. If the stock rises to $650 billion—and Tesla meets other profit and revenue targets—Musk will get a series of stock awards totaling $45 billion.

Tesla's stock is currently worth around $53 billion, so even hitting the first target of $100 billion within the next 10 years won't be easy. If he doesn't reach this target, he'll get no compensation for serving as Tesla's CEO over the next decade.