Flying taxis moved a step closer to becoming a fixture buzzing across urban skyscapes, as a closely watched effort was unveiled in Los Angeles and startups in the U.K. and Brazil made commercial breakthroughs. From a report: Vertical Aerospace Group, based in Bristol, England, won conditional orders for as many as 1,000 electric aircraft that could total $4 billion from buyers including American Airlines Group and Virgin Atlantic Airways, it said late Thursday. Meanwhile, Brazil's Embraer SA said it's in talks to merge its unit developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft into a public company, sending the stock surging.

And in California, startup Archer Aviation showcased its future eVTOL after nabbing a $20 million investment from United Airlines Holdings. The carrier plans to buy as many as 200 of the aircraft, dubbed Maker. While none are certified for commercial use, approvals for electric flying taxis could come as early as 2024, according to Europe's top aviation regulator. Airlines are placing orders because they see the potential to develop a new business tied to local transport, as their main activity shuttling people on longer trips comes under pressure over carbon emissions and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Volkswagen says more than 3.3 million customers had their information exposed after one of its vendors left a cache of customer data unsecured on the internet. From a report: The car maker said in a letter that the vendor, used by Volkswagen, its subsidiary Audi, and authorized dealers in the U.S. and Canada, left the customer data spanning 2014 to 2019 unprotected over a two-year window between August 2019 and May 2021. The data, which Volkswagen said was gathered for sales and marketing, contained personal information about customers and prospective buyers, including their name, postal and email addresses, and phone number. But more than 90,000 customers across the U.S. and Canada also had more sensitive data exposed, including information relating to loan eligibility. The letter said most of the sensitive data was driver's license numbers, but that a "small" number of records also included a customer's date of birth and Social Security numbers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday morning, Waymo announced that it is working with trucking company JB Hunt to autonomously haul cargo loads in Texas. Class 8 JB Hunt trucks equipped with the autonomous driving software and hardware system called Waymo Driver will operate on I-45 in Texas, taking cargo between Houston and Fort Worth. However, the trucks will still carry humans -- a trained truck driver and Waymo technicians -- to supervise and take over if necessary.

"This will be one of the first opportunities for JB Hunt to receive data and feedback on customer freight moved with a Class 8 tractor operating at this level of autonomy. While we believe there will be a need for highly skilled, professional drivers for many years to come, it is important for JB Hunt as an industry leader to be involved early in the development of advanced autonomous technologies and driving systems to ensure that their implementation will improve efficiency while enhancing safety," said Craig Harper, chief sustainability officer at JB Hunt. "We're thrilled to collaborate with JB Hunt as we advance and commercialize the Waymo Driver," said Charlie Jatt, head of commercialization for trucking at Waymo. "Our teams share an innovative and safety-first mindset as well as a deep appreciation for the potential benefits of autonomous driving technology in trucking. It's companies and relationships like these that will make this technology a commercial reality in the coming years."

Apple has hired Ulrich Kranz, a former senior executive at BMW AG's electric car division, to help lead its own vehicle efforts. Bloomberg reports: The technology giant hired Kranz in recent weeks, about a month after he stepped down as chief executive officer of Canoo, a developer of self-driving electric vehicles. Before co-founding Canoo, Kranz was senior vice president of the group that developed the i3 and i8 cars at BMW, where he worked for 30 years.

Kranz is one of Apple's most significant automotive hires, a clear sign that the iPhone maker is determined to build a self-driving electric car to rival Tesla and other carmakers. Kranz will report to Doug Field, who led development of Tesla's mass-market Model 3 and now runs Apple's car project, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. [...] Following successful stints at BMW's Mini division and teams working on sports cars and SUVs, Kranz was asked to run Project I, a battery-powered vehicle skunkworks started in 2008. It yielded the all-electric i3 compact and the plug-in hybrid i8 sports car. The former was panned by design critics, and production was very limited on the latter. Kranz left BMW in 2016 and soon became chief technology officer at Faraday Future, an electric vehicle startup based in Los Angeles. He stayed only three months, before co-founding Canoo. Both firms have struggled with their technology and ability to produce vehicles, while Canoo reportedly discussed selling itself to Apple and other companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The future of driving may cost you $8.50 per hour if Volkswagen follows through on its boardroom musings. The German automaker is considering charging an hourly fee for access to autonomous driving features once those features are ready. The company is also exploring a range of subscription features for its electric vehicles, including "range or performance" increases that can be purchased on an hourly or daily basis, said Thomas Ulbrich, a Volkswagen board member, to the German newspaper Die Welt. Ulbrich said the first subscription features will appear in the second quarter of 2022 in vehicles based on Volkswagen's MEB platform, which underpins the company's new ID.3 compact car and ID.4 crossover.

The executive said that Volkswagen will also offer video games in cars, similar to Tesla's arcade. "In the charging breaks, even if they only last 15 minutes, we want to offer customers something," Ulbrich said. He said the automaker wouldn't be developing the games themselves, and it's not clear whether they'll come preinstalled or be available for purchase through an app store. Volkswagen's real moneymaker might be autonomous driving, though. "In autonomous driving, we can imagine that we switch it on by the hour. We assume a price of around seven euros ($8.50) per hour. So if you don't want to drive yourself for three hours, you can do it for 21 euros," said Klaus Zellmer, chief sales officer of the Volkswagen brand. In a swipe at Tesla, he said that by charging hourly fees, VW would make autonomous driving more accessible than "a car with a five-digit surcharge." That's not to say Volkswagen isn't hoping to make serious money off the subscriptions. In total, Zellmer said he anticipates the subscriptions will eventually make the company hundreds of millions of euros in additional revenue.

The White House announced this week that it will establish a task force to address supply chain challenges in key sectors where "a mismatch between supply and demand has been evident." From a report: The task force will focus on "homebuilding and construction, semiconductors, transportation, and agriculture and food" and will be led by the secretaries of commerce, agriculture and transportation, the White House said. As the U.S. has reopened its economy, changes in demand have caused the disruptions, the White House said.

"While these short-term supply chain disruptions are temporary, the president has directed his administration to closely monitor these developments and take actions to minimize the impacts on workers, consumers, and businesses in order to bolster a strong economic recovery," it said. The actions come as the White House released the findings of a 100-day review of critical U.S. supply chain issues in a 250-page report Tuesday. The report includes recommendations that the White House said "will not only strengthen the four prioritized supply chains, but will rebuild the U.S. industrial base and restart our innovation engine."

At WWDC today, Apple announced an update to its Wallet app that will let you add information from an ID card in certain supported U.S. states. One of the first partners to support the digital identities will be the U.S. Transportation Security Administration. AppleInsider reports: All of the information in Wallet will be stored in a secure and encrypted fashion. Like an actual ID, it will include a person's legal name, date of birth, photo, and Real ID status. In addition to the support for IDs, Apple is also expanding the types of keys that users can add to Wallet. That includes keys to a smart home lock, keys to hotel rooms, and work badges that can be scanned to gain entry to a workplace. For example, Hyatt is rolling out its support for digital keys in Wallet to more than 1,000 properties later in 2021. The company says your license or state ID will be encrypted and stored in the iPhone's secure enclave. It's also working on adding features for unlocking cars from various manufacturers using their ultra-wideband chip (UWB) found in the new iPhones and Apple Watches.

18-inch tall robots on four wheels zipping across city sidewalks "stopped people in their tracks as they whipped out their camera phones," reports the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery landscape...

In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot servers grows around the country. And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and several others, in the next couple of weeks... "Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing the space with the delivery bots," said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...

Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in 30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at Berkeley, where at least one of its robots burst into flames. But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000 deliveries...

"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."

A video shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer having to tip human food-delivery workers.

Plans for an artificial island to house 35,000 people and protect the port of Copenhagen from rising sea levels have been approved by Danish MPs. The BBC reports: The giant island, named Lynetteholm, would be connected to the mainland via a ring road, tunnels and a metro line. The approval by Denmark's parliament paves the way for the 1 sq mile (2.6 sq km) project to begin later this year. But it faces opposition from environmentalists who have concerns over the impact of its construction.

Plans for Lynetteholm include a dam system around its perimeter, with the aim of protecting the harbour from rising sea levels and storm surges. If construction goes ahead as planned, the majority of the foundations for the island off Denmark's capital should be in place by 2035, with an aim to fully complete the project by 2070. Some of the environmental concerns include the transportation of materials by road, which will involve large numbers of vehicles to move the 80 million tons of soil required to create the peninsula alone. "There are also concerns among environmentalists about the movement of sediment at sea and the possible impact on ecosystems and water quality," the report adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A scammer who convinced some of the world's biggest tech businesses to send him replacement kit has been sentenced to seven years and eight months in the U.S. prison system. Justin David May, 31, used stolen hardware serial numbers, a plethora of fake websites and online identities, social engineering tactics, and a network of associates, to scam Cisco out of nearly $3.5m in hardware in just 12 months. Microsoft lost 137 Surface laptops (retail cost $364,761) to the crew, with Lenovo US also losing 137 replacement hard drives worth $143,000 and APC (formerly American Power Conversion) getting scammed out of a few uninterruptible power supplies. May pled guilty to 42 counts of mail fraud, 10 counts of money laundering, three counts of interstate transportation of goods obtained by fraud, and two counts of tax evasion.

In the largest scam against Cisco, run from April 2016, according to court documents [PDF] filed in eastern district court of Pennsylvania, May and the team set up domains and email addresses to mimic cisco.com user IDs and harvested serial numbers of legit machinery. They then used these to trick Cisco into sending out replacement kit, such as a Cisco Catalyst 3850-48P-E Switch worth around $21,000 at the time, and a couple of Cisco ASR 9001 routers priced at over $100,000 for the pair. The same scam worked well for Microsoft and Lenovo too, it seems. The court docs note that May was skilled at picking imaginary faults that weren't remotely repairable, such as basic software issues, but which were more obvious as serious flaws needing a replacement unit. In addition the crew digitally altered images of their supposed kit and serial numbers to fool support staff. Once the hardware was received, usually via UPS or FedEx, the companies never got the faulty kit back because it never existed. Meanwhile the packages were picked up, sold on eBay and other second-hand sites, and the cash pocketed, or in the case of Microsoft, some of the hardware shipped to Singapore for resale.

The airline, which plans to buy planes from Boom Supersonic [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], a start-up, could become the first to offer ultrafast commercial flights since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. From a report: The era of supersonic commercial flights came to an end when the Concorde completed its last trip between New York and London in 2003, but the allure of ultrafast air travel never quite died out. President Biden mused about supersonic flights when discussing his infrastructure plan in April. And on Thursday, United Airlines said it was ordering 15 jets that can travel faster than the speed of sound from Boom Supersonic, a start-up in Denver. The airline said it had an option to increase its order by up to 35 planes.

Boom, which has raised $270 million from venture capital firms and other investors, said it planned to introduce aircraft in 2025 and start flight tests in 2026. It expects the plane, which it calls the Overture, to carry passengers before the end of the decade. But the start-up's plans have already slipped at least once, and it will have to overcome many obstacles, including securing approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and regulators in other countries. Even established manufacturers have stumbled when introducing new or redesigned planes. Boeing's 737 Max was grounded for nearly two years after two crashes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Amazon will no longer test most job applicants for marijuana use in the latest sign of America's changing relationship with pot. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., also says it now backs legalizing marijuana nationwide. "In the past, like many employers, we've disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use," the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. "However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we've changed course."

With the shift in policy, the only job candidates Amazon will screen for marijuana are those applying for positions regulated by the Department of Transportation -- a category that includes delivery truck drivers and operators of heavy machinery. The company says it will handle marijuana the same way it deals with alcohol -- and it will still test for all drugs and alcohol after any accidents or other incidents. Amazon is also acting on the political level, throwing its weight behind the push to legalize marijuana in the U.S. and expunge criminal records for nonviolent marijuana-related convictions.

The company says its public policy team "will be actively supporting" the MORE Act -- the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act -- a move that adds momentum to legislation that was reintroduced in Congress on Friday. The MORE Act would remove marijuana from the list of drugs in the federal Controlled Substances Act, making its status similar to alcohol and tobacco. It would also tax cannabis products, directing some of that money toward investments in communities that have been harmed by marijuana's criminalization. "We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law," Amazon said in a statement about its support for legal marijuana.

Apple has lost multiple top managers of its self-driving car team in recent months, a sign of attrition at the division involved in what could become an important future product. From a report: The iPhone maker has hundreds of engineers working on underlying self-driving car technology as well as groups of employees working on an actual vehicle, Bloomberg News has reported. Running the division is Doug Field, a former top vehicle engineer for Tesla, along with a management team of fewer than a dozen executives. At least three members of that Apple car management team have departed this year.
In recent days, Dave Scott, who led teams working on robotics related to the car, left to become the chief executive officer at Hyperfine, a health care company developing next-generation MRI systems. Before Scott's departure, Jaime Waydo, who led autonomous car safety and regulation teams, departed to become the chief technology officer at Cavnue, a startup focused on the safety of autonomous cars on public roads. In February, Benjamin Lyon, who helped create Apple's original car team several years ago and was key in the future project's development, left to become the chief engineer at Astra, a company developing technology for sending satellites to space.

Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."

That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.

This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.

So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...

Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.

Despite $11.2 billion worth of orders, and partners like Boeing, General Electric and Berkshire Hathaway, Aerion says it still couldn't raise enough money to head into production "in the current financial environment," according to a Flying magazine shared by schwit1: The Aerion SST — the most promising effort in years to represent the next step in supersonic travel since the demise of the Anglo-French Concorde — has reached the end of the line after the company said it had run short of cash. The Reno, Nevada-based aircraft builder said Friday it is closing its doors for good according to a story in Florida Today...

In March 2021, NetJets offered Aerion a vote of confidence by ordering 20 of the SSTs as well as agreeing to become the exclusive fractional business jet operator for the new aircraft. Each AS2 was priced at $120 million in today's dollars.

"Traveling in a space plane is a lot like traveling in a regular plane, except for the middle part," quips Bloomberg Business Week: After reaching cruising altitude, the pilot hits the rocket boosters and blasts the aircraft to the edge of space at more than 9,000 mph, or about 12 times the speed of sound. The plane travels at that speed for about 15 minutes, then glides against the atmosphere to slow itself down, cruising back to Earth to land at a conventional airport.

Venus Aerospace Corp., a startup pursuing a hypersonic space plane, is aiming to use this technique to ferry people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in about an hour.

The company was started by two former Virgin Orbit LLC employees: Sarah "Sassie" Duggleby, a code-writing launch engineer, and her husband, Andrew, who managed launch, payload, and propulsion operations... Venus now has 15 employees, most veterans of the space industry, and has received investment from venture capital firms including Prime Movers and Draper Associates. "Every few decades humans attempt this," says Andrew Duggleby, in a tacit acknowledgment of the idea's repeated failure. "This time it will work...."

Still, flights aren't imminent. The shape of the aircraft is a work in progress, and the company will begin testing three scale models this summer. The Dugglebys, who've secured a small research grant from the U.S. Air Force and are pursuing additional funding from the Department of Defense, expect the project to take a decade or more.

The New York Times reports that for years, Uber and other ride-hailing companies "offered the promise of entrepreneurship to drivers" to drivers eager to set their own schedules. "But some drivers never received the control and independence they had expected." They struggled with the costs of vehicle maintenance, loans and insurance, and they questioned whether Uber and Lyft paid a fair wage. Legislative efforts to grant them employment benefits were thwarted.

Now, dissatisfied drivers and labor advocates are forming worker-owned cooperatives in an attempt to take back some of the money — and power — in the gig economy.

The Drivers Cooperative, which opened for business in New York this week, is the most recent attempt. The group, founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver, began issuing ownership shares to drivers in early May and will start offering rides through its app on Sunday. The cooperative has recruited around 2,500 drivers so far and intends to take a smaller commission than Uber or Lyft and charge riders a lower fare.

It is an ambitious plan to challenge the ride-hailing giants, and it faces the same hurdles that tend to block other emerging players in the industry: Few have the technical prowess, the venture capital dollars or the supply of readily available drivers to subvert an established company like Uber. Still, drivers who joined the effort said even a small cooperative could make a big difference in their work, allowing them to earn more money and have a say in the way the company was run. The Drivers Cooperative said it planned to pay 10 percent above the wage minimums set by the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, and return profits to drivers in the form of dividends.
One of the labor organizers who founded the Drivers Cooperative tells the Times that "I've never seen this hunger for change that exists with drivers."

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June. Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels -- a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.

The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it's not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half. One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It's a tight fit. There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked.

The Department of Homeland Security is moving to regulate cybersecurity in the pipeline industry for the first time in an effort to prevent a repeat of a major computer attack that crippled nearly half the East Coast's fuel supply this month -- an incident that highlighted the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to online attacks. From a report: The Transportation Security Administration, a DHS unit, will issue a security directive this week requiring pipeline companies to report cyber incidents to federal authorities, senior DHS officials said. It will follow up in coming weeks with a more robust set of mandatory rules for how pipeline companies must safeguard their systems against cyberattacks and the steps they should take if they are hacked, the officials said. The agency has offered only voluntary guidelines in the past. The ransomware attack that led Colonial Pipeline to shutter its pipeline for 11 days this month prompted gasoline shortages and panic buying in the southeastern United States, including in the nation's capital. Had it gone on much longer, it could have affected airlines, mass transit and chemical refineries that rely on diesel fuel.

German lawmakers greenlit a bill that would allow for some autonomous vehicles to hit public roads as early as next year. Deutsche Welle reports: The bill, passed by Bundestag lawmakers in a late-night session on Thursday, changes traffic regulations to allow for autonomous vehicles to be put into regular use across Germany. The bill specifically concerns vehicles with fully autonomous systems that fall under the "Level 4" classification -- where a computer is in complete control of the car and no human driver is needed to control or monitor it. Once approved, it would be the world's first legal framework for integrating autonomous vehicles in regular traffic. According to the Transportation Ministry, the bill was written to be as flexible as possible, with the new regulations not requiring a human driver to be on standby.

Starting in 2022, the German government says the bill would allow for driverless shuttle busses to be put into use, as well as autonomous public transportation busses that would drive on set routes. Autonomous vehicles would also be permitted to transport goods, and "dual-mode vehicles" could be used for automated valet parking. Self-driving cars for the general public would also be permitted in regular traffic, although experts estimate it will take years before the vehicles become established in the market, public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported.