Here's an interesting statistic spotted by Fortune. "Eight out of the 10 largest private employers in the U.S. are tracking productivity metrics for their employees, according to an examination from The New York Times."

"Some of this software measures active time, watches for keyboard pauses, and even silently counts keystrokes." J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, The Times reported, seeing everything from how long it takes to write an email to keyboard activity. There are repercussions if workers aren't meeting expectations: a prodding note, a skipped bonus, or a work-from-home day taken away, to name a few. For employers surrendering in the fight to return to the office, such surveillance is a way to maintain a sense of control. As Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitor systems, told The Times, "If we're going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we're not going to give up on managing productivity....

But tracking these remote workers' every move doesn't seem to be telling employers much. "We're in this era of measurement but we don't know what we should be measuring," Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told the Times.
From the New York Times' article. (Alternate URLs here, here, and here.) In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others.... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their "inactivity" time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'.... Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring. Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday.

They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control — and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as "demoralizing," "humiliating" and "toxic." Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself....

But many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable — and perhaps inevitable. Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight. Derelict workers can be rooted out. Industrious ones can be rewarded. "It's a way to really just focus on the results," rather than impressions, said Marisa Goldenberg, [who] said she used the tools in moderation...

[I]n-person workplaces have embraced the tools as well. Tommy Weir, whose company, Enaible, provides group productivity scores to Fortune 500 companies, aims to eventually use individual scores to calibrate pay.

A local news report called it "a futuristic dream, now a reality in Las Vegas: self-driving vehicles moving customers up and down the Las Vegas strip." Lyft's ride-hailing service now lets customers book Motional's all-electric (and autonomous driving) IONIQ 5.

Not everyone's sold. "Love technology — love it, promote it — but we don't need to replace every human," said one person interviewed on the street. But "the digital wave continues to sweep Las Vegas," the newscast points out, with the car company's director of commercial fleet operations insisting it will ultimately make transportation more affordable, sustainable, and reliable. "We look at this as an opportunity to really show that robotaxis are the best way for people to get around," he says, noting Vegas drivers have to contend with lots of night-time driving, bright lights, unusually wide lanes and big intersections.

The city once adopted the slogan "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," and some passengers might appreciate the extra privacy of a truly driverless vehicle. Passengers "for the time being, will be accompanied by two safety drivers in the event of an error," according to news reports, but that's expected to change soon: "Motional and Lyft have a clear path to widespread commercialization of Level 4 autonomous vehicles," said Karl Iagnemma, Motional's president and CEO. "We've led the industry in commercial operations for years, and today's launch signals we're on track to deliver a fully driverless service next year...."

Upon arrival, riders who order the IONIQ 5 can unlock the doors to the vehicle using the Lyft mobile app. Once inside the vehicle, customers can start the ride or contact customer support by using the new in-car Lyft AV app [on a touchscreen for passengers]. By making these new features available now, despite the presence of the two safety drivers, Lyft hopes to solicit customer feedback and refine the new tools before the service goes fully driverless in 2023.

Lyft and Motional have been piloting autonomous rides in other vehicles in Las Vegas since 2018, with more than 100,000 autonomous rides provided thus far, over 95% of which have received five-star ratings, according to the companies. Feedback gathered on the new IONIQ 5 autonomous vehicle over the coming months will help to inform Lyft's launch of fully driverless e-hail trips in Las Vegas sometime next year.

After that, the company plans to expand the driverless, e-hail service to various other markets throughout the country.

"Dodge has given its electric Charger Daytona SRT Concept a set of fake exhausts and one of the loudest artificial V8 noises we've ever heard," writes Harry Waring via CarThrottle. From the report: The car features some interestingly named components that make it stand out from the rest of the EV crowd, such as the "Rupt" simulated multispeed transmission and a "Fratzonic" chambered 'exhaust' which emits a 125 dB "Dark Matter" noise (yes, we're serious). According to Dodge, the battery-powered machine is supposedly as loud as a Hellcat with its supercharged Hemi V8. The unusual names continue with the 800V "Banshee" propulsion system, which delivers power to the car's 21-inch wheels. We're yet to hear about official performance figures, but stopping power will be provided by six-piston brake callipers. The 'Fratzog' logo sits on the car's front and rear ends, previously used on vehicles produced by Dodge between 1962 and 1976, now representing the brand's electrified future. You can watch (and hear) it in action here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [Swedish car publication Vi Bilagare] tested 11 new cars alongside a 2005 Volvo C70, timing how long it took to perform a list of tasks in each car. These included turning on the seat heater, increasing the cabin temperature, turning on the defroster, adjusting the radio, resetting the trip computer, turning off the screen, and dimming the instruments. The old Volvo was the clear winner. "The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h [1,004 feet at 68 mph]," VB found. Most of the other cars required twice as long, or more, to complete the same tasks. VB says that "one important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started." VB lays the blame for the shift from buttons to screens with designers who "want a 'clean' interior with minimal switchgear."

Even with touchscreens, though, we can see in the spread of scores VB gave to different all-touch cars that design matters. You'll find almost no buttons in a Tesla Model 3, and we called out the lack of buttons in the Subaru Outback in our review, but both performed quite well in VB's tests. And VW's use of capacitive touch (versus physical) for the controls on the center stack appears to be exactly the wrong decision in terms of usability, with the ID.3 right at the bottom of the pack in VB's scores. I'm not surprised that the BMW iX scored well; although it has a touchscreen, you're not obligated to use it. BMW's rotary iDrive controller falls naturally to hand, and there are permanent controls arrayed around it under a sliver of wood that both looks and feels interesting. It's an early implementation of what the company calls shy tech, and it's a design trend I am very much looking forward to seeing evolve in the future.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday upheld the FCC's decision to reallocate part of the 5.9 GHz band for unlicensed use -- rather than the dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) it was originally allocated for. "This is part of the spectrum that in 1999 was set aside exclusively for the auto industry to use for DSCR to improve auto safety," notes Fierce Wireless. "At that time, the full amount set aside was 75 megahertz." From the report: After about 20 years, nothing ever really came of DSRC, and in 2020, the FCC divvied up the 75 megahertz, making 45 megahertz available for unlicensed use with the remaining 30 megahertz designated for auto safety. Specifically, the auto safety spectrum was reallocated for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, a more modern tech than DSRC. The Intelligent Transportation Society of America and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials didn't like the FCC's decision and appealed, arguing that it violated the Transportation Equity Act. They also said the FCC unlawfully revoked or modified FCC licenses. But Circuit Court Judge Justin Walker said it did not violate the act and said the court disagreed with the transportation officials' arguments "on all fronts."

Alphabet's "urban innovation" arm Sidewalk Labs planned to build a model "smart city" along a 12-acre patch of Toronto waterfront known as Quayside.

But they abandoned the project in 2020, points out MIT's Technology Review, "at the tail end of years of public controversy over its $900 million vision for a data-rich city within the city."

Sidewalk's big idea was flashy new tech. This unassuming section of Toronto was going to become a hub for an optimized urban experience featuring robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, autonomous garbage collection, and an extensive digital layer to monitor everything from street crossings to park bench usage. Had it succeeded, Quayside could have been a proof of concept, establishing a new development model for cities everywhere. It could have demonstrated that the sensor-Âladen smart city model embraced in China and the Persian Gulf has a place in more democratic societies. Instead, Sidewalk Labs' two-and-a-half-year struggle to build a neighborhood "from the internet up" failed to make the case for why anyone might want to live in it....

The project's tech-first approach antagonized many; its seeming lack of seriousness about the privacy concerns of Torontonians was likely the main cause of its demise. There is far less tolerance in Canada than in the U.S. for private-sector control of public streets and transportation, or for companies' collecting data on the routine activities of people living their lives. "In the U.S. it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," says Alex Ryan, a senior vice president of partnership solutions for the MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto nonprofit founded by a consortium of public and private funders and billed as North America's largest urban innovation hub. "In Canada it's peace, order, and good government. Canadians don't expect the private sector to come in and save us from government, because we have high trust in government."

With its very top-down approach, Sidewalk failed to comprehend Toronto's civic culture. Almost every person I spoke with about the project used the word "hubris" or "arrogance" to describe the company's attitude. Some people used both.
In February Toronto announced new plans for the area, the article points out, with "800 affordable apartments, a two-acre forest, a rooftop farm, a new arts venue focused on indigenous culture, and a pledge to be zero-carbon.... Indeed, the philosophical shift signaled by the new plan, with its emphasis on wind and rain and birds and bees rather than data and more data, seems like a pragmatic response to the demands of the present moment and the near future."

The article calls it "a conspicuous disavowal not only of the 2017 proposal but of the smart city concept itself."

General Motors' Super Cruise advanced driver assistance network will soon double in size to 400,000 miles across the U.S. and Canada by the end of the year. Engadget reports: The Super Cruise system -- and its successor, Ultra Cruise -- relies on a mix of high-fidelity LiDAR maps, GPS, and onboard visual and radar sensors to know where the vehicle is on the road. So far, those maps, which dictate where features like Hands-Free Driving can operate, have only included major, divided highways like interstates with the big median barriers. Smaller, undivided public highways -- aka State Routes -- were not included, in part because of the added ADAS challenges presented by oncoming traffic, until now.

"This expansion will enable Super Cruise to work on some additional divided highways, but the big news is this the bulk of the expansion will allow Super Cruise to operate on non-divided highways," David Craig, GM's Chief of Maps, said during Tuesday's call. "These non-divided highways are typically the state and federal highways... that connect the smaller cities and townships across the US and Canada." These will include Route 66, the Pacific Coast Highway (aka CA Route 1), the Overseas Highway (aka US Route 1) and the Trans-Canada Highway. "if you look at I-35 which is the interstate that runs North and South up the middle of the United States, and look to the West, you will see that the Super Cruise coverage currently is just the major interstates, which is fairly sparse," Craig continued. "But in the expansion, you can see that it's just a spiderweb of roads covering the entire area. All the little townships are going to be connected now." The company said that every new Super Cruise-enabled GM vehicle will be equipped with the full 400,000-mile capabilities, as will 2021 and 2022 GM vehicles outfitted with the VIP (Vehicle Intelligence Platform) architecture. Vehicles with Super Cruise but without VIP will receive a smaller update.

Using monthly vehicle registration data, Axios is tracking the transition to electric vehicles in the United States. What they found is that a handful of states are driving nearly all the country's electric car adoption. From the report: California -- no surprise -- leads the U.S. in electric vehicle ownership, accounting for 39% of all EVs registered nationwide. Look more closely at the numbers, however, and it turns out EVs represent less than 2% of all vehicles on the road in the Golden State. [...] 4.6% of the new vehicles registered in the U.S. this past May were electric, according to the [S&P Global Mobility's] most recent data. That's more than double EVs' share of monthly registrations in May 2021 (1.9%). EVs still account for only about 0.6% of all registered vehicles in the U.S. Take California's EVs away, and it's just 0.4%.

As of April 1, Florida has the second-highest share of the country's EVs, at 6.7%. Then comes Texas (5.4%), Washington (4.4%), and New York (3.6%). Yet, EVs account for only 1% or less of all vehicles within each of these states. Besides California, the states or areas with the highest share of EVs within their own borders: Hawaii (1.3%), and the District of Columbia (1.2%). "Tesla's brand loyalty more than doubled in the month of May and was higher than any brand in the industry, including Toyota and Ford," S&P Global Mobility analyst Tom Libby tells Axios, noting that the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 are growing in popularity.

"We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's coming," says Libby.

Solid state drives use far less power than hard disc drives. But a new study unexpectedly reveals that their lifetime carbon footprint is much higher than their hard disc cousins, raising difficult questions for the computer industry. From a report: The benefits of SSDs over HDDs are legion. They are smaller, mechanically simpler, faster to read and write data than their hard disc cousins. They are also more energy efficient. So with many computer manufacturers and datacenter operators looking to reduce their carbon footprints, it's easy to imagine that all this makes the choice of memory easy. But all is not as it seems, say Swamit Tannu at University of Wisconsin in Madison and Prashant Nair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. SSDs have a dirty secret. Tannu and Nair have measured the carbon footprint per gigabyte of these devices across their entire lifetimes and, unexpectedly, it turns out that SSDs are significantly dirtier. "Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower," say the researchers.

Tannu and Nair come to their conclusion by adding up the amount of carbon emitted throughout the estimated 10-year lifespans of these devices. This includes the carbon emitted during manufacture, during operation, for transportation and for disposal. The carbon emitted during operation is straightforward to calculate. To read and write data, HDDs consume 4.2 Watts versus 1.3W for SSDs. The researchers calculate that a 1 terabyte HDD emits the equivalent of 159 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a 10-year operating lifespan. By comparison, a 1 terabyte SSD emits just 49.2 kg over 10 years. But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That's because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly. All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture.

Tannu and Nair calculate that manufacturing a 1 terabyte SSD emits the equivalent of 320 kg of carbon dioxide. By comparison, a similar HDD emits just 40 kg. So the lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD. So HDDs are much cleaner. That's a counterintuitive result with important implications. At the very least, it suggests that computer manufacturers and cloud data storage operators should reconsider the way they use SSDs and HDDs. For example, almost 40 per cent of the carbon footprint of a desktop computer comes from its SSD, compared to just 4 per cent from the CPU and 11 per cent from the GPU.

Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, appears to have vanished without a trace from several of its U.S. markets. From a report: In some cases, the departure has been abrupt, leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails and lots of questions. Bolt has stopped operating in at least five U.S. cities, including Portland, Oregon, Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski in Vermont and Richmond, California, according to city officials. City representatives also said they were unable to reach anyone at Bolt, including its CEO Ignacio Tzoumas. TechCrunch has made multiple attempts to reach Bolt and those who have backed the company. Emails to Bolt's communications department, several employees and investors went unanswered. Even the customer service line doesn't appear to be staffed. The PR agency that was representing Bolt in March of this year told TechCrunch it is no longer working with the company. Bolt halted its service in Portland on July 1. The company's failure to provide the city with updated insurance and pay some outstanding fees, Portland subsequently suspended Bolt's permit to operate there, according to a city spokesperson.

The F-35 stealth-combat aircraft is the "crown jewel" of America's Air Force fight fleet, according to the defense news site Task & Purpose.

But Friday they were all grounded — "sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time as the service inspects most of its F-35 fighter jet ejection seats for faulty launch cartridges, service officials said..." The news marks the latest difficult headline for the beleaguered fighter, which U.S. military officials have placed at the forefront of their airpower strategy despite a long list of maintenance issues. Air Combat Command, the Air Force command which oversees the bulk of the service's fighter fleet, made the decision to ground its F-35s on Friday after other units of the Air Force and Navy grounded many of their aircraft due to concerns over faulty parts which could prevent the pilot ejection seat from launching out of the cockpit in an emergency. Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley said that the command started a 90-day inspection period of all cartridges on its F-35 ejection seats on July 19.

"Out of an abundance of caution, ACC units will execute a stand-down on July 29 to expedite the inspection process," Worley said. "Based on data gathered from those inspections, ACC will make a determination to resume operations."

Worley later added that the stand-down "will continue through the weekend, and a determination to safely resume normal operations is expected to be made early next week, pending analysis of the inspection data."

Many jet aircraft in the U.S. military are equipped with ejection seats made by the company Martin-Baker, which notified the Navy about potential defects earlier this month, according to Breaking Defense, which first reported the F-35 grounding story on Friday. The problem part is the cartridge actuated device, an explosive cartridge that helps launch the ejection seat out of an aircraft. Martin-Baker identified certain production lots of cartridge actuated devices as being defective and in need of replacement, the Air Force told Breaking Defense.

"While the aircraft are flyable, I don't think too many pilots would be willing to fly knowing they may not be able [to] eject," Michael Cisek, a senior associate at the aviation consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, told Breaking Defense....

America's allies may also be affected by the issue. On Wednesday, Breaking Defense reported that the Navy had informed foreign military sales customers about the issue and was working with them to resolve it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The US Senate is going to move forward with a sweeping new bill after Senator Joe Manchin finally accepted to include investments to curb climate change. The new bill is going to include the long-awaited electric vehicle tax credit reform that is going to give back access to the tax credit to Tesla GM vehicles, along with other changes. Last year, the US House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion "Build Back Better" legislation, but it has been stuck in the divided Senate ever since. The bill is interesting to the EV community because it includes a long-needed reform to the federal tax credit for electric vehicles. Even though it is technically a small part of the overall bill, it is a point of contention.

The main goal of the reform, and the one most people agree on, is the need to eliminate the tax credit cap after automakers hit 200,000 EVs sold, since it is putting automakers that were early in pushing electric vehicles at a disadvantage. It also happens that those automakers are American automakers, like Tesla and GM, while many foreign automakers still have access to the credit. Joe Manchin, a Democrat and senior United States senator from West Virginia, has been holding his vote, which is the deciding vote since the Democrats need every single one of their votes in the Senate to pass anything. The senator, who comes from a very conservative state, has proven to be difficult to deal when it comes to initiatives that deal with climate change, but in a reversal today, he announced that he accepted a new version of the bill, now called "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022." Here are some of the key changes to the EV federal tax credit in the new bill (as confirmed by Electrek):

- Federal tax credit for EVs maintained at $7,500
- Eliminates tax credit cap after automakers hit 200,000 EVs sold, making GM and Tesla once again eligible
- The language in the bill indicates that the tax credit would be implemented at the point of sale instead of on taxes.
- In order to get the full credit, the electric vehicle needs to be assembled in North America, the majority of battery components need to come from North America, and contain a certain percentage of minerals from countries with free trade agreements with the US
- A new federal tax credit of $4,000 for used EVs
- Zero-emission vans, SUVs, and trucks with MSRPs up to $80,000 qualify
- Electric sedans priced up to $55,000 MSRP qualify
- The full EV tax credit will be available to individuals reporting adjusted gross incomes of $150,000 or less, $300,000 for joint filers

JetBlue Airways on Thursday announced it would purchase Spirit Airlines, a combination that would create America's fifth-largest airline. From a report: The announcement comes a day after Spirit pulled the plug on a deal to merge with Frontier. JetBlue had been pursuing a hostile bid for Spirit even while Spirit sought shareholder approval for a lower-priced deal with Frontier. Spirit had continually expressed concern whether regulators would approve a deal with JetBlue. But shareholders had balked at accepting Frontier's less-valuable cash-and-stock offer when they had JetBlue's all-cash offer on the table. JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said the deal will be fruitful for investors and passengers. "We are excited to deliver this compelling combination that turbocharges our strategic growth, enabling JetBlue to bring our unique blend of low fares and exceptional service to more customers, on more routes," he said in a statement. The companies said the deal is worth $3.8 billion.

Spotify has stopped manufacturing Car Thing, a dashboard accessory designed to make it easier to control the streaming service on your phone from a car. From a report: The change was quietly announced as part of the company's latest earnings release, which notes the decision cost the company $32 million. "Reported Gross Margin was negatively impacted by our decision to stop manufacturing Car Thing," the release reads. "Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units," a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. "Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Energy Department on Monday announced it intends to loan a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution $2.5 billion to help finance construction of new lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facilities. The conditional commitment for the loan to Ultium Cells LLC for facilities in Ohio, Tennessee, and Michigan is expected to close in the coming months and comes from the government's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program, which has not funded a new loan since 2010. The plan, first reported by Reuters, would mark the Energy Department's first loan exclusively for a battery cell manufacturing project under the vehicle program.

The program previously provided low-cost government loans to Tesla, Ford and Nissan, which included some cell manufacturing. "We have to have vehicle manufacturing capacity but also battery manufacturing capacity," Jigar Shah, who directs the Energy Department loan program office, told Reuters in an interview. "This project provides one of the newest additions to battery manufacturing scale in this country." [...] Shah said the department has received more than $18 billion in loan requests from the auto program and expects at least another $5 billion in requests that are being actively prepared. "I do think there will more loans issued," Shah said, declining to offer a precise timeline. The program currently has $17.7 billion in lending authority available. Shah said "for motivated borrowers, they can close these loans rather quickly." Reuters notes that GM and LG are investing more than $7 billion via the venture. Production at its Ohio battery plant is expected to begin in August. Production is set to begin at its Tennessee plant in late 2023 and in Michigan in 2024.

Even Motor City is running short of cars these days. Rental counters at the Detroit airport have run out of vehicles recently. Dealerships all over town are reporting scarce inventory. And buyers are facing months-long delays and soaring prices before they can get their hands on a new truck or SUV. From a report: The root problem is the same across the country -- a global deficit of computer chips that has forced automakers to slash output, causing shortages of new and used vehicles. But the predicament feels particularly offensive here, Detroiters say. "This is an auto manufacturing city. It shouldn't be short of cars," said Benyam Tesfasion, a cabdriver who has been busy shuttling travelers from the airport to pick up rental cars at locations 10 or 20 miles away. Another feature of his daily travels, he says, is driving past giant parking lots where automakers are stockpiling newly manufactured cars that are still awaiting a few final chips.

Detroit's experience shows how thoroughly the nearly two-year-old semiconductor shortage has upended manufacturing -- and foisted change on one of America's most beloved consumer markets. "It may be the biggest disruption we've seen since the 1970s and the fuel crisis," said Matt Anderson, a transportation historian at the Henry Ford museum complex in Dearborn, referring to the tumultuous period that forced car companies to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. The chip shortage "is the kind of thing that my successors I'm sure will be studying about in future years," he added.

It says a lot about the state of the auto industry and where it's going that software problems have cost the CEO of a carmaker his job. From a report: Volkswagen ousted Herbert Diess as chief executive officer after severe software-development delays set back the scheduled launch of new Porsches, Audis and Bentleys. This was untenable considering buggy software postponed the debut of VW's initial rollout of ID models, and customers are still having to drop off their cars at the dealer for updates the company has struggled to make over the air.

Sure, Diess also didn't do enough to make allies and became increasingly isolated due to his hard-nosed leadership style. In his push to transform the company into an electric-vehicle leader, he repeatedly clashed with labor leaders by warning VW was losing out to Tesla and needed to cut thousands of jobs. But failures at the carmaker's software unit Cariad ultimately eroded Diess's support from the powerful Porsche and Piech family that calls the shots. Back in December, VW overhauled its management board, stripping Diess of some responsibilities while tasking him to turn around Cariad. While there's been a lot of re-arranging since then, Diess didn't manage to make the issues go away.

A joint investigation by Nikkei and a Tokyo analytics company found that Apple has jumped into automobile-related technologies, as shown by the company's recent patent applications. From a report: Apple has filed patents in self-driving and other vehicle software as well as in hardware related to riding comfort, such as seats and suspension. The U.S. tech and services company is also targeting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the "Internet of Things," moves seen as a major push by Apple to build its own platform and join a growing industry shift from just cars to overall mobility.

Nikkei and Intellectual Property Landscape found that as of June 1, Apple applied for and published 248 automobile-related patents after 2000. It typically takes about 18 months after filing a patent for it to be published. While most of Apple's applications in 2021 have yet to be published, eight were. This number is bound to increase throughout the year. Of Apple's 27 applications made in 2020, five were published at the same time in 2021. The number of patents published in 2021 is almost certain to exceed this, according to Intellectual Property Landscape.

"Uber has officially accepted responsibility for hiding a 2016 data breach that exposed the data of 57 million passengers and drivers..." reports Engadget.

Reuters explains this acknowledgement "was part of a settlement with U.S. prosecutors to avoid criminal charges." In entering a non-prosecution agreement, Uber admitted that its personnel failed to report the November 2016 hacking to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission [for nearly one year], even though the agency had been investigating the ride-sharing company's data security... U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds in San Francisco said the decision not to criminally charge Uber reflected new management's prompt investigation and disclosures, and Uber's 2018 agreement with the FTC to maintain a comprehensive privacy program for 20 years.

The San Francisco-based company is also cooperating with the prosecution of a former security chief, Joseph Sullivan, over his alleged role in concealing the hacking.
Here's what the Department of Justice is now alleging against that security chief (as summarized by Reuters last month: "he arranged to pay money to two hackers in exchange for their silence, while trying to conceal the hacking from passengers, drivers and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission."

That's led to three separate wire fraud charges against the former security chief, as well as two charges for obstruction of justice. The defendant was originally indicted in September 2020, and is believed to be the first corporate information security officer criminally charged with concealing a hacking. Prosecutors said Sullivan arranged to pay the hackers $100,000 in bitcoin, and have them sign nondisclosure agreements that falsely stated they had not stolen data.

Uber had a bounty program designed to reward security researchers who report flaws, not to cover up data thefts.... In September 2018, the San Francisco-based company paid $148 million to settle claims by all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. that it was too slow to reveal the hacking.

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.