New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer.

"One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too." Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data.

In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" — in reference to the Snapchat logo — where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage."

The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.

A CNN opinion piece looks at "the moaning about manual transmission's demise," noting that "it's not just Europeans (literally) clinging on. In the U.S., there's apparently a young (also predominantly male) demographic that is embracing manual driving — championing it as retro, much like Gen Z's affinity to typewriters and vintage cameras.

"They feel there's something authentic about it: a connection between driver and vehicle that automatization cuts out." But CNN's writer argues the case against stick shifts... [Automatic vehicles] chalk up better mileage and drive faster than their stick-shift counterparts. The explanation: automatics select the right gear for the vehicle, usually the highest gear possible. The average manual driver is not always so proficient. In getting the gear right, automatics consume less fuel, save money and emit fewer emissions.

These are among the reasons why it's ever harder to buy a new manual-transmission model of any kind in many countries. In the US, less than 1% of new models have stick shifts (compared to 35% in 1980), according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It's really only sports cars, off-road truck SUVs and a handful of small pickups that still have clutches.... While all gasoline-run cars and trucks are climate killers with stick shifts being the slightly worse of two evils, combustion-engine automatics themselves are on their way out. They are tooling along the highway side-by-side with their stick-and-clutch counterparts toward the junkyard of history. Electric vehicles have gear systems, too: a single speed transmission that transmits energy from the motor to the wheels. But because only one gear exists, there is no switching of gears, neither automatically nor manually...

Road transportation accounts for 15% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World Data, as well as being a huge contributor to the air pollution that claims around nine million deaths a year from respiratory and lung diseases. Transportation noise, though less deadly, also contributes to stress and sleep disorders. Thankfully, there's a convenient way to circumvent these blights: electric vehicles...

But for those aficionados who really can't go without a clutch and gear shifter, Toyota is planning a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission for some EV models. It serves no purpose whatsoever — save to comfort bruised egos.

"After being in development since 2019, the huge NetBSD 10.0 is out today as a wonderful Easter surprise," reports Phoronix: NetBSD 10 provides WireGuard support, support for many newer Arm platforms including for Apple Silicon and newer Raspberry Pi boards, a new Intel Ethernet drive, support for Realtek 2.5GbE network adapters, SMP performance improvements, automatic swap encryption, and an enormous amount of other hardware support improvements that accumulated over the past 4+ years.

Plus there is no shortage of bug fixes and performance optimizations with NetBSD 10. Some tests of NetBSD 10.0 in development back during 2020 showed at that point it was already 12% faster than NetBSD 9.
"A lot of development went into this new release," NetBSD wrote on their blog, saying "This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did."

Among the new userspace programs is warp(6), which they describe as a "classic BSD space war game (copyright donated to the NetBSD Foundation by Larry Wall)."

This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer".

But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans." That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems...

[B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector.
CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology."

CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsen. The so-called "Lenna image," (Forsen added an extra "n" to her name in her Playboy appearance to aid pronunciation) has been used in image processing research since 1973 and has attracted criticism for making some women feel unwelcome in the field. In an email from the IEEE Computer Society sent to members on Wednesday, Technical & Conference Activities Vice President Terry Benzel wrote, "IEEE's diversity statement and supporting policies such as the IEEE Code of Ethics speak to IEEE's commitment to promoting an including and equitable culture that welcomes all. In alignment with this culture and with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image, Lena Forsen, IEEE will no longer accept submitted papers which include the 'Lena image.'"

An uncropped version of the 512×512-pixel test image originally appeared as the centerfold picture for the December 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine. Usage of the Lenna image in image processing began in June or July 1973 (PDF) when an assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuck and a graduate student at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute scanned a square portion of the centerfold image with a primitive drum scanner, omitting nudity present in the original image. They scanned it for a colleague's conference paper, and after that, others began to use the image as well. The image's use spread in other papers throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and it caught Playboy's attention, but the company decided to overlook the copyright violations. In 1997, Playboy helped track down Forsén, who appeared at the 50th Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science in Technology, signing autographs for fans. "They must be so tired of me ... looking at the same picture for all these years!" she said at the time. VP of new media at Playboy Eileen Kent told Wired, "We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon."

The image, which features Forsen's face and bare shoulder as she wears a hat with a purple feather, was reportedly ideal for testing image processing systems in the early years of digital image technology due to its high contrast and varied detail. It is also a sexually suggestive photo of an attractive woman, and its use by men in the computer field has garnered criticism over the decades, especially from female scientists and engineers who felt that the image (especially related to its association with the Playboy brand) objectified women and created an academic climate where they did not feel entirely welcome. Due to some of this criticism, which dates back to at least 1996, the journal Nature banned the use of the Lena image in paper submissions in 2018.

Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia's government to explore the development of a series of homegrown consoles to compete with PlayStation and Xbox. Game Rant reports: Russia has taken issue with Western games and developers in recent years, leading the country to threaten the banning of certain titles like Apex Legends and The Last of Us Part 2. This is due to what the Russian government perceives as pro-LGBTQ messaging, which it openly opposes. In February, Russia's Organization for Developing the Video Game Industry (RVI) laid out a long-term plan that ended with the creation of a fully capable gaming console in 2026-2027. It seems that the Russian government may be attempting to follow through with this plan.

Following a meeting on the economic development of Kaliningrad, Putin requested government officials to research the requirements for domestic production of stationary and portable gaming consoles. The Russian president also ordered the planning of an appropriate operating system and cloud system for the consoles. The deadline for these plans is set for June 15, 2024, and Russia's prime minister was designated as the official overseeing these tasks. A Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that the orders intend to develop Russia's homegrown gaming industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Biden administration on Friday announced a regulation designed to turbocharge sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, from school buses to cement mixers, as part of its multifront attack on global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the new rule could mean that 25 percent of new long-haul trucks, the heaviest on the road, and 40 percent of medium-size trucks, like box trucks and landscaping vehicles, could be nonpolluting by 2032. Today, fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold in the United States fit that bill. The regulation would apply to more than 100 types of vehicles including tractor-trailers, ambulances, R.V.s, garbage trucks and moving vans.

The rule does not mandate the sales of electric trucks or any other type of zero or low-emission truck. Rather, it increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from trucks across a manufacturer's product line over time, starting in model year 2027. It would be up to the manufacturer to decide how to comply. Options could include using technologies like hybrids or hydrogen fuel cells or sharply increasing the fuel efficiency of the conventional trucks. The truck regulation follows another rule made final last week that is designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032, up from just 7.6 percent last year.

Together, the car and truck rules are intended to slash carbon dioxide pollution from transportation, the nation's largest source of the fossil fuel emissions that are driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden's strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation's emissions in half by the end of this decade.

Google is preparing to introduce a significant change to its ChromeOS platform by decoupling the Chrome browser from the operating system, AndroidCentral writes. The project, known as "Lacros" (Linux And Chrome OS), aims to solve several issues, including the inability to receive browser updates after a Chromebook reaches its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date. This change will allow users to install updates for the browser separately, potentially extending the lifespan of their devices and reducing e-waste. Additionally, Lacros will bring a consistent user experience across all platforms, including features like profile switching without the need to log out of accounts.

Google has yet to announce the exact release date of the change, however, the report adds.

LinkedIn is testing support for short-form videos to help it compete with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other social media platforms. "[W]e are testing new ways to help members more easily discover timely, relevant videos to watch on LinkedIn," Suzi Owens, a company spokesperson, tells Axios in an email. From the report: A new "Video" option will appear next to the "Home" button at the bottom of the app's navigation bar, per a demo of the feature shared online by Austin Null, strategy director at creative agency McKinney. After tapping it, viewers are led to a feed of short-form videos similar to Instagram Reels and TikTok.

Victoria Song reports via The Verge: When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago next week, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools' Day, portending some kind of prank. But soon, invites to Gmail's very real beta started going out -- and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.

Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?

U.S. users have just a few more days to make the transition from Google Podcasts as the company moves forward with the process of discontinuing the service globally. From a report: Google is currently sending in-app notifications to users in the U.S. that starting April 2nd they will no longer be able to use Google Podcasts and is recommending to export subscriptions to YouTube Music. The Google Podcasts streaming service launched six years ago. It's app has more than 500 million downloads on Google Play and apart from offering a large selection of podcasts it also allows subscribing to favorite channels, downloading and playing on various devices. The service integrates with Google's ecosystem, providing users with personalized recommendations based on interests, listening history, and preferences.

Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: About half of the processors packaged in Russia are defective. This has prompted Baikal Electronics, a Russian processor developer, to expand the number of packaging partners in the country, according to a report in Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily newspaper published in Moscow (hat tip to Cnews). In addition to GS Group based in Kaliningrad, the company will now use Milandr and Mikron, which are based in Zelenograd, a town near Moscow. What remains unclear is which foundry initially produces the chips for Baikal. [...]

There are no contract chipmakers in Russia that can process wafers on 28nm-class fabrication technologies, so Baikal is likely using a Chinese foundry to make its processors. Since 2021, the company has been experimenting with localizing chip packaging at GS Group in Kaliningrad. But transitioning to local packaging has not been smooth. The process is intricate and costly, leading to a high rate of defects. According to industry insiders, more than half of the chip batches end up being defective due to issues with equipment calibration and the lack of skilled personnel. It turns out that GS Group cannot fulfill the demands of Baikal, which has now tapped Milandr and Mikron to assist with chip packaging. Apparently, it hasn't helped much. "More than half of the chip batches turn out to be defective," a source familiar with the matter told Vedomosti. "The reasons lie in both the equipment of the enterprises, which needs to be properly configured, and the insufficient competencies of the people involved in chip packaging."

"Russia can package a small number of processors, but when it comes to a series, a lot of defects appear," explained one of the newspaper's sources. "Manufacturers cannot maintain a consistently high level across all products."

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, now on the board of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, believes that while AI has the potential to revolutionize the economy, its impact will take time to materialize. However, Summers maintains that AI could be the biggest economic development since the Industrial Revolution, eventually replacing most forms of human labor, particularly cognitive tasks. He said: "If one takes a view over the next generation, this could be the biggest thing that has happened in economic history since the Industrial Revolution,"he added. "This offers the prospect of not replacing some forms of human labor, but almost all forms of human labor."

From building homes to making medical diagnoses, Summers predicted that AI will eventually be able to do nearly every human job, particularly white collar workers' "cognitive labor."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamingOnLinux: After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions. I've covered the issues with the Snap Store a few times now like on March 19th when ten scam crypto apps appeared, got taken down and then reappeared under a different publisher. Also earlier back in February there was an issue where a user actually lost their wallet as a result of a fake app. Multiple fake apps were also put up back in October last year as well, so it was a repeating issue that really needed dealing with properly.

So to try and do something about it, Canonical's Holly Hall has posted on their Discourse forum about how "The Store team and other engineering teams within Canonical have been continuously monitoring new snaps that are being registered, to detect potentially malicious actors" and that they will now do manual reviews whenever people try to register "a new snap name." On top of that soon they will also be releasing a new policy regarding "crypto-wallet and other sensitive snaps" with "guidelines for how to publish such a snap." Currently all of this is not supposed to be long-term, as it's an evolving situation.

Lyle Smith reports via StorageReview.com: Proxmox has introduced a new import wizard for Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), aiming to simplify the migration process for importing VMware ESXi VMs. This new feature comes at an important time in the industry, as it aims to ease the transition for these organizations looking to move away from VMware's vSphere due to high renewal costs.

The new import wizard is integrated into Proxmox VE's existing storage plugin system, allowing for direct integration into the platform's API and web-based user interface. It offers users the ability to import VMware ESXi VMs in their entirety, translating most of the original VM's configuration settings to Proxmox VE's configuration model (all while minimizing downtime). Currently, the import wizard is in a technical preview state, having been added during the Proxmox VE 8.2 development cycle. Although it is still under active development, early reports suggest the wizard is stable and holds considerable promise for future enhancements, including the planned addition of support for other import sources like OVF/OVA files. [...]

This tool represents Proxmox's commitment to providing accessible, open-source virtualization solutions. By leveraging the official ESXi API and implementing a user space filesystem with optimized read-ahead caching in Rust (a safe, fast, and modern programming language ideal for system-level tasks), Proxmox aims to ensure that this new feature can be integrated smoothly into its broader ecosystem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship," said plaintiffs in filings (PDF) made public on Saturday. "It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011-2019, Netflix's then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook's board and personally directed the companies' relationship"

The filings detail Hastings' uncomfortably close relationship with Meta's upper management, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. During these years, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privileged analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals. This gave Facebook greater dominance in its all-important ad division, plaintiffs allege, so the company was fine to retreat from Netflix's streaming territory by shuttering Watch. In 2017, Facebook Watch began signing deals to populate its streaming service with original TV Shows from movie stars such as Bill Murray. A year later, the service attempted to license the popular '90s TV show Dawson's Creek. Facebook Watch had meaningful reach on the home screen of the social media platform, and an impressive budget as well. Facebook and Netflix appeared ready to butt heads in the streaming world, and the Netflix cofounder found himself in the middle as a Facebook board member. [...]

Netflix was a large advertiser to Facebook, and plaintiffs allege Zuckerberg shuttered its promising Watch platform for the sake of the greater advertising business. Zuckerberg personally emailed the head of Facebook Watch in May of 2018, Fidji Simo, to tell her their budget was being slashed by $750 million, just two years after Watch's launch, according to court filings. The sudden pivot meant Facebook was now dismantling the streaming business it had spent the last two years growing. During this time period, Netflix increased its ad spend on Facebook to roughly $150 million a year and allegedly entered into agreements for increased data analytics. By early 2019, the ad spend increased to roughly $200 million a year. Hastings left Facebook's board later in 2019.
UPDATE: Meta (Again) Denies Netflix Read Facebook Users' Private Messenger Messages.

An anonymous reader writes: What if you could update the device while it's still in the box? That's the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they're still in their boxes. The new system is called "Presto." French site iGeneration has the first picture of what this setup looks like. It starts with a clearly Apple-designed silver rack that holds iPhones and has a few lights on the front. The site (through translation) calls the device a "toaster," and yes, it looks like a toaster oven or food heating rack.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has been writing about whispers of this project for months, saying in one article that the device can "wirelessly turn on the iPhone, update its software and then power it back down -- all without the phone's packaging ever being opened." In another article, he wrote that the device uses "MagSafe and other wireless technologies." The iGeneration report also mentions that the device uses NFC, and there are "templates" that help with positioning the various-sized iPhone boxes so the NFC and wireless charging will work. With that wireless charging, downloading, and installing, all while being isolated in a cardboard box, Apple's "toaster" probably gets pretty hot.

Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the AI race. From a report: In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China's rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to a blacklist of imports. Now, as the tech and economic cold war between the United States and China accelerates, Silicon Valley's leaders are capitalizing on the strife with a lobbying push for their interests in another promising field of technology: artificial intelligence.

On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp, the head of the defense contractor Palantir, and Roelof Botha, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will come to Washington for a daylong conference and private dinner focused on drumming up more hawkishness toward China's progress in A.I. Dozens of lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, will also attend the event, the Hill & Valley Forum, which will include fireside chats and keynote discussions with members of a new House A.I. task force.

Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States. The event highlights an unusual area of agreement between Washington and Silicon Valley, which have long clashed on topics like data privacy, children's online protections and even China.

An anonymous reader shares a report: New York City announced a new permitting system for companies interested in testing autonomous vehicles on its roads, including a requirement that a human safety driver sit behind the steering wheel at all times. As cities like San Francisco continue to grapple with the problems posed by fully driverless for-hire vehicles, New York City is trying to get ahead of the problem by outlining what it calls "a rigorous permitting program" that it claims will ensure applicants are "ready to test their technology in the country's most challenging urban environment safely and proficiently."

"This technology is coming whether we like it or not," Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to The Verge, "so we're going to make sure that we get it right." The requirements would exclude companies without previous autonomous vehicle testing experience in other cities. Applicants would need to submit information from previous tests, including details on any crashes that occurred and how often safety drivers have to take control of the vehicle (also known in California as "disengagements"). And in what is sure to be the most controversial provision, fully driverless vehicles won't be permitted to test on the city's public roads; only vehicles with safety drivers will be allowed.