Shipments of personal computers and mobile phones are expected to fall for the second straight year in 2023, with phone shipments slumping to a decade low, IT research firm Gartner said on Tuesday. From a report: Mobile phone shipments are projected to fall 4% to 1.34 billion units in 2023, down from 1.40 billion units in 2022, Gartner said. They totaled 1.43 billion in 2021. That was close to the 2009 shipments level when Blackberry and Nokia phones were the market leaders as Apple tried to dent their dominance.

The mobile phone market peaked in 2015 when shipments touched 1.9 billion units. The pandemic led to a fundamental change where people working from home didn't feel the need to change phones frequently, Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said in an interview.

The World Wide Web Consortium: The World Wide Web Consortium began the year 2023 by forming a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves our member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization also preserves the core process and mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web, by developing open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community.

Our Director, Tim Berners-Lee, noted: "Today, I am proud of the profound impact W3C has had, its many achievements accomplished with our Members and the public, and I look forward to the continued empowering enhancements W3C enables as it launches its own public-interest non-profit organization, building on 28 years of experience." Our vision for the future is a web that is truly a force for good. A World Wide Web that is truly international and more inclusive, more respectful of its users. A web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate. A web that works for everyone, because of everyone.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are back. From a report: The Instagram co-founders, who departed Facebook in 2018 amid tensions with their parent company, have formed a new venture to explore ideas for next-generation social apps. Their first product is Artifact, a personalized news feed that uses machine learning to understand your interests and will soon let you discuss those articles with friends. Artifact -- the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence -- is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok's For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

GitHub said unknown intruders gained unauthorized access to some of its code repositories and stole code-signing certificates for two of its desktop applications: Desktop and Atom. From a report: Code-signing certificates place a cryptographic stamp on code to verify it was developed by the listed organization, which in this case is GitHub. If decrypted, the certificates could allow an attacker to sign unofficial versions of the apps that had been maliciously tampered with and pass them off as legitimate updates from GitHub. Current versions of Desktop and Atom are unaffected by the credential theft.

"A set of encrypted code signing certificates were exfiltrated; however, the certificates were password-protected and we have no evidence of malicious use," the company wrote in an advisory. "As a preventative measure, we will revoke the exposed certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications." The revocations, which will be effective on Thursday, will cause certain versions of the apps to stop working.

Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? From a report: Efforts to find independent reviews of Amazon-exclusive products rarely turn up high-quality content; many sites just summarize Amazon reviews in an effort to collect search traffic from Google and eventually affiliate commissions from Amazon itself. You read a little feedback to quell your doubts or ease your mind, then eventually, or quickly, you pluck a spatula out of the cascade. There's a good chance, however, that it won't actually be sold by Amazon but rather by a third-party seller that has spent months or years and many thousands of dollars hustling for search placement on the platform -- its "store," to use Amazon's term, is where you will have technically bought this spatula. There's an even better chance you won't notice this before you order it. In any case, it'll be at your door in a couple of days.

The system worked. But what system? In your short journey, you interacted with a few. There was the '90s-retro e-commerce interface, which conceals a marketplace of literally millions of sellers, each scrapping for relevance, using Amazon as a sales channel for their own semi-independent businesses. It subjected you to the multibillion-dollar advertising network planted between Amazon users and the things they browse and buy. It was shipped to you through a sprawling, submerged logistics empire with nearly a million employees and contractors in the United States alone. You were guided almost entirely by an idiosyncratic and unreliable reputation system, initially designed to review books, that has used years of feedback from hundreds of millions of customers to help construct an alternative universe of sometimes large but often fleeting brands that have little identity or relevance outside of the platform. You found what you were looking for, sort of, through a process that didn't feel much like shopping at all.

This is all normal in that Amazon is so dominant that it sets norms. But its essential weirdness -- its drift from anything resembling shopping or informed consumption -- is becoming harder for Amazon's one-click magic trick to hide. Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don't have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal. But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon's customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and "low-quality" items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it's slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe -- hear me out -- everything is going according to plan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A bug in a new centralized system that Meta created for users to manage their logins for Facebook and Instagram could have allowed malicious hackers to switch off an account's two-factor protections just by knowing their phone number. Gtm Manoz, a security researcher from Nepal, realized that Meta did not set up a limit of attempts when a user entered the two-factor code used to log into their accounts on the new Meta Accounts Center, which helps users link all their Meta accounts, such as Facebook and Instagram.

With a victim's phone number, an attacker would go to the centralized accounts center, enter the phone number of the victim, link that number to their own Facebook account, and then brute force the two-factor SMS code. This was the key step, because there was no upper limit to the amount of attempts someone could make. Once the attacker got the code right, the victim's phone number became linked to the attacker's Facebook account. A successful attack would still result in Meta sending a message to the victim, saying their two-factor was disabled as their phone number got linked to someone else's account.

Manoz found the bug in the Meta Accounts Center last year, and reported it to the company in mid-September. Meta fixed the bug a few days later, and paid Manoz $27,200 for reporting the bug. Meta spokesperson Gabby Curtis told TechCrunch that at the time of the bug the login system was still at the stage of a small public test. Curtis also said that Meta's investigation after the bug was reported found that there was no evidence of exploitation in the wild, and that Meta saw no spike in usage of that particular feature, which would signal the fact that no one was abusing it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It was only a matter of time before the wave of artificial intelligence-generated voice startups became a play thing of internet trolls. On Monday, ElevenLabs, founded by ex-Google and Palantir staffers, said it had found an "increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases" during its recently launched beta. ElevenLabs didn't point to any particular instances of abuse, but Motherboard found 4chan members appear to have used the product to generate voices that sound like Joe Rogan, Ben Sharpio, and Emma Watson to spew racist and other sorts of material. ElevenLabs said it is exploring more safeguards around its technology.

The clips uploaded to 4chan on Sunday are focused on celebrities. But given the high quality of the generated voices, and the apparent ease at which people created them, they highlight the looming risk of deepfake audio clips. In much the same way deepfake video started as a method for people to create non-consensual pornography of specific people before branching onto other use cases, the trajectory of deepfake audio is only just beginning. [...] The clips run the gamut from harmless, to violent, to transphobic, to homophobic, to racist. One 4chan post that included a wide spread of the clips also contained a link to the beta from ElevenLabs, suggesting ElevenLabs' software may have been used to create the voices.

On its website ElevenLabs offers both "speech synthesis" and "voice cloning." For the latter, ElevenLabs says it can generate a clone of someone's voice from a clean sample recording, over one minute in length. Users can quickly sign up to the service and start generating voices. ElevenLabs also offers "professional cloning," which it says can reproduce any accent. Target use cases include voicing newsletters, books, and videos, the company's website adds. [...] On Monday, shortly after the clips circulated on 4chan, ElevenLabs wrote on Twitter that "Crazy weekend -- thank you to everyone for trying out our Beta platform. While we see our tech being overwhelmingly applied to positive use, we also see an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases." ElevenLabs added that while it can trace back any generated audio to a specific user, it was exploring more safeguards. These include requiring payment information or "full ID identification" in order to perform voice cloning, or manually verifying every voice cloning request.

Frontier, an internet service provider (ISP) that services 25 US states, has just launched 5 Gig fiber internet service across its entire network. The Verge reports: Frontier launched 2 Gig fiber internet service less than a year ago, and the 5 Gig plan is currently available in all of Frontier's fiber-connected markets, with no phased rollouts. Compared to the cable-bound internet that most of us are familiar with, Frontier's 5 Gig internet is reported to have upload speeds that are up to 125 times faster and up to five times faster downloads, all delivered with less latency. The new 5 Gig network is one of the fastest internet options currently available in the US, with other fiber-enabled ISPs like Verizon Fios and Google Fiber still capped at around 2Gbps.

Right now, the only other 5 Gig network currently available in the US is through AT&T, which offers 2 Gig and 5 Gig plans. Google Fiber is also slated to add 5-gig and 8-gig plans to its lineup sometime this year, despite its numerous setbacks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public. [...] While it's not clear whether there are security or structural implications of Yandex's source code revelation, the leak of 1,922 ranking factors in Yandex's search algorithm is certainly making waves. SEO consultant Martin MacDonald described the hack on Twitter as "probably the most interesting thing to have happened in SEO in years" (as noted by Search Engine Land). In a thread detailing some of the more notable factors, researcher Alex Buraks suggests that "there is a lot of useful information for Google SEO as well."

Yandex, the fourth-ranked search engine by volume, purportedly employs several ex-Google employees. Yandex tracks many of Google's ranking factors, identifiable in its code, and competes heavily with Google. Google's Russian division recently filed for bankruptcy after losing its bank accounts and payment services. Buraks notes that the first factor in Yandex's list of ranking factors is "PAGE_RANK," which is seemingly tied to the foundational algorithm created by Google's co-founders.

As detailed by Buraks (in two threads), Yandex's engine favors pages that: - Aren't too old
- Have a lot of organic traffic (unique visitors) and less search-driven traffic
- Have fewer numbers and slashes in their URL
- Have optimized code rather than "hard pessimization," with a "PR=0"
- Are hosted on reliable servers
- Happen to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
- Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a domain
- Have keywords in their URL (up to three)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Jack Wallen: PikaOS is very similar to that of Nobara Linux, which opts for a Fedora base. But what are these two Linux distributions? Simply put, they are Linux for gamers. [...] So, what does PikaOS do that so many other distributions do not? The most obvious thing is that it makes it considerably easier to install the tools needed to play games. Upon first logging in, you're greeted with a Welcome app. In the First Steps tab, you have quick access to tools for updating the system, installing patented codecs and libraries, installing propriety Nvidia drivers, installing apps from the Software Manager, and installing WebApps.

Next comes the Recommended Additions, where you can install the likes of: PikaOS Game Utilities is a meta package that installs Steam, Lutris, GOverlay, MangoHud, Wine, Winetricks, vkBasalt, and other gaming-centric tools; Microsoft TrueType fonts for better Windows font emulation; Blender for creating 3D images; OBS Studio for streaming; Kdenlive for non-linear video editing; Krita for painting; and LibreOffice for productivity. In the Optional Steps tab, you can add AMD proprietary drivers, ROCm drivers, Xone drivers, and Proton GE (for Steam and Wine compatibility). Finally, the Look And Feel tab allows you to customize themes, layouts, and extensions. The layouts section is pretty nifty, as it allows you to configure the GNOME desktop to look and feel like a more traditional desktop, a MacOS-like desktop, a Windows 11 layout, a throwback GNOME 2 desktop, and even a Ubuntu Unity-like desktop.

As far as pre-installed software goes, it's pretty bare bones (until you start adding titles from the Recommended Additions tab in the Welcome App). You'll find Firefox (web browser), Geary (email), Pidgin (messaging), Weather, Calculator, Cheese (web camera software), Rhythmbox, Contacts, a few utilities, and basic games. However, installing new apps is quite simple via the Software Manager app. Of course, the focus of PikaOS is games. When you install the PikaOS Game Utilities, you'll get Steam installed, which makes it easy to play an endless array of games on the Linux desktop. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you launch the PikaOS Game Utilities installation, it opens a terminal window to run the installation. Give this plenty of time to complete and, in the end, you can launch Steam, log in to your Steam account, and start playing. Just remember, the first time you launch the Steam app, it will take a moment to update and configure. But once it's up and running... let the games begin.

Dutch health technology company Philips will scrap another 6,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to restore its profitability and improve the safety of its products following a recall of respiratory devices that knocked off 70% of its market value. From a report: Half of the job cuts will be made this year, the company said on Monday, adding that the other half will be realised by 2025. The new reorganisation brings the total amount of job cuts announced by new Chief Executive Roy Jakobs in recent months to 10,000, or around 13% of Philips' current workforce.

The European Union is weighing a proposal to make technology companies that use the most bandwidth, like Netflix and Alphabet, to help pay for the next generation of internet infrastructure, according to a draft document seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The suggestions are part of a "fair-share" vision from the EU's executive arm that could require large tech businesses, which provide streaming videos and other data-heavy services, to help pay for the traffic they generate.

The draft document, which is part of a consultation with the industry, suggested firms might contribute to a fund to offset the cost of building 5G mobile networks and fiber infrastructure, as well as the creation of a mandatory system of direct payments from tech giants to telecom operators. The commission also asked companies whether there should be a threshold that would qualify a company to be a "large traffic generator," the document showed. That could be similar to the European governing body's rules designating some tech companies "gatekeepers" and "very large online platforms" in its recent competition and online content rules.

Satellite navigation systems for lunar settlements will require local atomic clocks. Scientists are working out what time they will keep. From a report: It's not obvious what form a universal lunar time would take. Clocks on Earth and the Moon naturally tick at different speeds, because of the differing gravitational fields of the two bodies. Official lunar time could be based on a clock system designed to synchronize with UTC, or it could be independent of Earth time. Representatives of space agencies and academic organizations worldwide met in November 2022 to start drafting recommendations on how to define lunar time at the European Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Decisions must be made soon, says Patrizia Tavella, who leads the time department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France. If an official lunar time is not established, space agencies and private companies will come up with their own solutions, she says. "This is why we want to raise an alert now, saying let's work together to take a common decision." The most pressing need for lunar time comes from plans to create a dedicated global satellite navigation system (GNSS) for the Moon, similar to how GPS and other satellite navigation networks enable precise location tracking on Earth.

Space agencies plan to install this lunar GNSS from around 2030. ESA approved a lunar satellite navigation project called Moonlight at its ministerial council meeting on 22 and 23 November 2022 in Paris, and NASA established a similar project, called Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems, last January. Until now, Moon missions have pinpointed their locations using radio signals sent to large antennas on Earth at scheduled times. But with dozens of missions planned, "there's just not enough resources to cover everybody," says Joel Parker, an engineer who works on lunar navigation at the Goddard Center.

Arrival, an electric vehicle startup based in the UK, said it was laying off 50 percent of its employees in a bid to reduce costs. The company also named a new CEO, Igor Torgov, who previously served as executive vice president of digital at the company. From a report: Arrival, which announced last year that it was winding down its UK operations in favor of refocusing its business in the US, became a publicly traded company in March 2021 after merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Founded in 2015, Arrival was developing electric delivery vans for UPS as a customer, as well as ridehailing cars for Uber and public buses. It also has backing from Hyundai and Kia. Arrival's layoffs will bring the company down to a workforce of 800 employees. The company claims that it expects to halve its ongoing cost of operating the business to approximately $30 million per quarter when accounting for reductions in real estate and other third-party costs. Arrival says it currently has $205 million in cash on hand.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kanter has been one of Google's main legal foes for nearly 15 years. Last week, as the nation's top antitrust cop, he delivered a threat to break up the internet company. Mr. Kanter, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for antitrust, filed a lawsuit alleging that Google is an illegal monopolist in the market for brokering ads on the internet. Some of the complaints trace back to early 2000s, when Mr. Kanter started questioning Google's role in the digital economy on behalf of his then-legal clients, including Microsoft.

The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of Alphabet, has said includes untrue allegations and misstatements about its business, embraces charges the government once wrote off as far-fetched. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission, which also polices threats to competition, said Google wouldn't be able to smother rivals in the digital-advertising world and declined to block its purchase of DoubleClick, an ad broker that the Justice Department now says Google should be forced to sell. The DOJ's lawsuit alleges that threats the FTC dismissed actually came to pass. The company built a moat around its business matching web publishers' supply of ad space with advertisers' demand, according to the DOJ's lawsuit. When new companies tried to compete or customers sought better deals, Google responded by blocking rivals from its platform or buying them outright and forcing them to work only with its products, the lawsuit alleges.

Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google, Amazon.com, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Apple as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws. "Today there is nobody in the world who knows more about that business and the antitrust issues surrounding it than Jonathan," said Charles "Rick" Rule, who worked with Mr. Kanter in private practice. "He has been confronting Google for 15 years." Mr. Kanter has spent most of his legal career in private practice, sometimes defending corporate clients from government investigations, but also representing companies in pressing law enforcers to go after rivals that have grown dominant. He began looking into Google during the 2000s decade on behalf of Microsoft, which the DOJ in 1998 alleged was an illegal monopolist in the personal-computer market in a lawsuit settled in 2001.

Baidu is planning to roll out an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT potentially China's most prominent entry in a race touched off by the tech phenomenon. From a report: China's largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn't been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI's popular platform.

Baidu has spent billions of dollars researching AI in a years-long effort to transition from online marketing to deeper technology. Its Ernie system -- a large-scale machine-learning model that's been trained on data over several years -- will be the foundation of its upcoming ChatGPT-like tool, the person said. ChatGPT, OpenAI's artificial intelligence tool, has lit up the internet since its public debut in November, amassing more than a million users within days and touching off a debate about the role of AI in schools, offices and homes. Companies including Microsoft are investing billions to try and develop real-world applications, while others are capitalizing on the hype to raise funds. Buzzfeed's shares more than doubled this month after it announced plans to incorporate ChatGPT in its content.

When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees "got the news in their inbox," writes Gawker's founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times: That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.... It's not just tech and media. Companies in a range of industries claim this is the only efficient way to do a lot of layoffs. Informing workers personally is too complicated, they say — and too risky, as people might use their access to internal systems to perform acts of sabotage. (These layoff emails are often sent to employees' personal email; by the time they check it, they've been locked out of all their employer's own platforms.)

As someone who's managed people in newsrooms and digital start-ups and has hired and fired people in various capacities for the last 21 years, I think this approach is not just cruel but unnecessary. It's reasonable to terminate access to company systems, but delivering the news with no personal human contact serves only one purpose: letting managers off the hook. It ensures they will not have to face the shock and devastation that people feel when they lose their livelihoods. It also ensures the managers won't have to weather any direct criticism about the poor leadership that brought everyone to that point.... Future hiring prospects will be reading all about it on Twitter or Glassdoor. In a tight labor market, a company's cruelty can leave a lasting stain on its reputation....

The expectation that an employee give at least two weeks notice and help with transition is rooted in a sense that workers owe their employers something more than just their labor: stability, continuity, maybe even gratitude for the compensation they've earned. But when it's the company that chooses to end the relationship, there is often no such requirement. The same people whose labor helped build the company get suddenly recoded as potential criminals who might steal anything that's not nailed down....

Approval of unions is already at 71 percent. Dehumanizing workers like this is accelerating the trend. Once unthinkable, unionization at large tech companies now seems all but inevitable. Treating employees as if they're disposable units who can simply be unsubscribed to ultimately endangers a company's own interests. It seems mistreated workers know their value, even if employers — as they are increasingly prone to demonstrate — do not.

Fortune reports on what happened next: As questions piled up over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the entire company in a meeting on Monday to answer questions, and announced then that top executives would take a pay cut this year as part of the company's cost reduction measures, Business Insider reported. Pichai said that all roles above the senior vice president level will witness "very significant reduction in their annual bonus," adding that for senior roles the compensation was linked to company performance. It was not immediately clear how big Pichai's own pay cut would be.
Reuters also points out that Pichai "received a massive hike in salary a few weeks before Google announced layoffs." But Fortune makes an interesting comparison: Pichai's move to cut the pay for senior executives comes only weeks after Apple's Tim Cook announced his compensation would be 40% lower amid shareholder pressure. The iPhone maker had a strong 2022 and remains one of the few tech behemoths that hasn't announced layoffs yet.
Last year Apple's share price still dropped 27%, reports Forbes, and "According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is expected next month to report its first quarterly sales decline in over three years."

Yet Apple seems to have avoided layoffs — which Forbes argues is because Apple didn't hire aggressively during the pandemic. Compared to the other Big Tech companies, Apple scaled its workforce at a relatively slow pace and has generally followed the same hiring rate since 2016. While there was a hiring surge in Silicon Valley during the pandemic, Apple added less than 7,000 jobs in 2020....

The tech companies undergoing layoffs right now hired fervently during their pandemic — and even before. Alphabet has consecutively expanded its workforce at least 10% annually since 2013, according to CNBC....

Since 2012, Meta has expanded its workforce by thousands each year. In 2020, Zuckerberg increased headcount by 30% — 13,000 workers. The following year, the social media platform added another 13,000 employees to its payroll. Those two years marked the biggest growth in the company's history.

Amazon has initiated its plan to separate more than 18,000 white-collar professionals from its payroll. In 2021, the online retailer hired an estimated 500,000 employees, according to GeekWire, becoming the second-largest employer in the United States after Walmart. A year later, the company expanded its workforce by 310,000.
Entrepeneur supplies some context about those layoffs at Google: Reports indicate qualifying staff who were let go will receive their full notification period salary plus a severance package beginning at 16 weeks' pay and two additional weeks for every year of employment. Also part of the package: bonuses, vacation time, and health care coverage for up to six months will be paid for, along with job placement and immigration support.
Entrepreneur also notes reports that Google's latest round of layoffs "affected 27 massage therapists across Los Angeles and Irvine."

"San Francisco is trying to slow the expansion of robotaxis," reports NBC News, "after repeated incidents in which cars without drivers stopped and idled in the middle of the street for no obvious reason, delaying bus riders and disrupting the work of firefighters." The city's transportation officials sent letters this week to California regulators asking them to halt or scale back the expansion plans of two companies, Cruise and Waymo, which are competing head-to-head to be the first to offer 24-hour robotaxi service in the country's best-known tech hub.

The outcome will determine how quickly San Francisco and possibly other cities forge ahead with driverless technology that could remake the world's cities and potentially save some of the 40,000 people killed each year in American traffic crashes.... Neither vehicles from Cruise or Waymo have killed anyone on the streets of San Francisco, but the companies need to overcome their sometimes comical errors, including one episode last year in which a Cruise car with nobody in it slowly tried to flee from a police officer.

In one recent instance documented on social media and noted by city officials, five disabled Cruise vehicles in San Francisco's Mission District blocked a street so completely that a city bus with 45 riders couldn't get through and was delayed for at least 13 minutes. Cruise's autonomous cars have also interfered with active firefighting, and firefighters once shattered a car's window to prevent it from driving over their firehoses, the city said....

"A series of limited deployments with incremental expansions — rather than unlimited authorizations — offer the best path toward public confidence in driving automation and industry success in San Francisco and beyond," three city officials wrote Thursday in a letter to the utilities commission, the state agency that decides if a company gets a robotaxi license. A second letter expressed concerns about Waymo....

Cruise has argued that its service is safer than the status quo.
A Cruise spokesperson also provided letters of support "written by local San Francisco merchants associations, disability advocates and community groups." And U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Quartz last year that "it would be hard to do worse than human drivers when it comes to what we could get to theoretically with the right kind of safe autonomous driving."

But in 2021 CBS reported that dozens and dozens of Waymo's robo-taxis kept mistakenly driving down the same dead-end street. And in 2018 a self-driving Uber test vehicle struck and killed a woman in Arizona.

More stories from the Verge: In July, a group of driverless Cruise vehicles blocked traffic for hours after the cars inexplicably stopped working, and a similar incident occurred in September. Meanwhile, a driverless Waymo vehicle created a traffic jam in San Francisco after it stopped in the middle of an intersection earlier this month. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Cruise last December over concerns about the vehicles blocking traffic and causing rear-end collisions with hard braking... [San Francisco] city officials also express concern over the way driverless vehicles deal with emergency vehicles. Last April, officials say an autonomous Cruise vehicle stopped in a travel lane and "created an obstruction for a San Francisco Fire Department vehicle on its way to a 3 alarm fire...."

Other incidents involve Cruise calling 911 about "unresponsive" passengers on three separate occasions, only for emergency services to arrive and find that the rider just fell asleep.... Officials say companies should be required to collect more data about the performance of the vehicles, including how often and how long their driverless vehicles block traffic.

An anonymous reader shares this report from OMG! Ubuntu: Developers have just uncorked a brand new release of Wine, the open source compatibility layer that allows Windows apps to run on Linux.

A substantial update, Wine 8.0 is fermented from a year's worth of active development (roughly 8,600 changes in total). From that, a wealth of improvements are provided across every part of the Wine experience, from app compatibility, through to performance, and a nicer looking UI....

Notable highlights in Wine 8.0 include the completion of PE conversion, meaning all modules can be built in PE format. Wine devs say this work is an important milestone towards supporting "copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM", and more.