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A Google self-driving car. (credit: Google)

A Michigan senator has introduced a bill that would make it legal for driverless autonomous vehicles to roam the streets of his state. Tomorrow, a committee on economic development will hold a hearing to discuss the bill, which has support from both Democrats and Republicans in Michigan’s senate.

The bill would keep a lot of the autonomous research and development that’s going on in Michigan in the state, and it could bring in other companies seeking to test out their driverless cars without human operators at the steering wheel.

"I want to make sure we plant the flag here and we maintain the lead in terms of automotive research and development,” Mike Kowall, the Republican state senator who introduced the measure, told CNN Money.

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On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal said a “person familiar with the matter” confirmed that Google would be moving into the ride-sharing market currently dominated by Uber and, to a lesser extent, Lyft. The source said that since May, Google has been testing a feature that lets Google employees and employees of other nearby firms in the Bay Area organize carpools through Waze, a mapping and traffic app purchased by Google in 2013.

The report noted that this new service would be different from Uber and Lyft in that it would only try to connect people who are already going in the same direction, offering rates low enough to discourage drivers from operating like taxis. The service will only be available in San Francisco at the beginning.

According to the WSJ, Waze’s drivers in the closed pilot test only make 54 cents a mile, although Google doesn’t take a cut as Uber and Lyft do.

Sophisticated hackers use the command line with their pinkies raised and wear cashmere balaclavas.

The profile of attacks on two US state voter registration systems this summer presented in an FBI "Flash" memo suggests that the states were hit by a fairly typical sort of intrusion. But an Arizona official said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had attributed an attack that succeeded only in capturing a single user's login credentials to Russian hackers and rated the threat from the attack as an "eight on a scale of ten" in severity. An Illinois state official characterized the more successful attack on that state's system as "highly sophisticated" based on information from the FBI.

Arizona Secretary of State Office Communications Director Matt Roberts told the Post's Ellen Nakashima that the FBI had alerted Arizona officials in June of an attack by Russians, though the FBI did not state whether they were state-sponsored or criminal hackers. The attack did not gain access to any state or county voter registration system, but the username and password of a single election official was stolen. Roberts did not respond to requests from Ars for clarification on the timeline and other details of the attack.

Based on the details provided by Roberts to the Post, it's not clear if the Arizona incident was one of the two referred to in the FBI "Flash" published this month. The FBI has not responded to questions about the memorandum on the attacks first published publicly by Yahoo News' Michael Isikoff, but a SQL injection attack wouldn't seem to be the likely culprit for stealing a single username and password. It's more likely that the Gila County election official whose credentials were stolen was the victim of a phishing attack or malware.

(credit: Neon Tommy)

In 2013, Yahoo announced that it would begin scanning its users' e-mail for targeted advertising purposes—just as Google does. As is par for the course, class-action lawsuits were filed. The Silicon Valley media giant, according to one of the lawsuits, was violating the "personal liberties" of non-Yahoo Mail users. That's because non-Yahoo Mail users, who have sent mail to Yahoo mail users, were having their e-mail scanned without their permission.

"Plaintiff and the Class are among the multitude of U.S. residents who have sent electronic communications or emails to a Yahoo Mail user or users, and whose personal liberties have been, and continue to be, intruded upon when these private communications are read or, in the alternative, eavesdropped upon by Yahoo," the lawsuit read. (PDF) The suit said that Yahoo's new scanning policies adopted under Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer violated federal and state privacy laws, and that Yahoo's e-mail scanning regime "seriously threatens the free exercise of personal liberties, and is of the type of behavior that the U.S. Congress and the California Legislature has declared should not be tolerated in a free and civilized society."

The suit, which was one of six that were co-mingled as a single class action, demanded that a judge halt the scanning and award each victim "$5,000 or three times actual damages" in addition to "reasonable attorneys' fees and costs."

Kim Dotcom. (credit: Kim Dotcom)

The battle between the US and Kim Dotcom over whether he should face criminal copyright charges is coming to a screen near you.

No, the movie rights haven't been sold (yet). The Internet mogul who ran the once-dominant cyberlocker site Megaupload has won the right to livestream his next court battle online.

Dotcom was arrested and charged in 2012, but the battle over whether he can be extradited from his home in New Zealand has dragged on. In December, a New Zealand judge finally said that Dotcom should be sent to the Eastern District of Virginia to face federal charges that he facilitated copyright infringement by promoting piracy on his website.