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Pakistan has banned popular short video app TikTok in the nation, citing circulation of videos that it deemed "immoral and indecent." From a report: The move comes months after the South Asian country raised serious concerns about the nature of some videos on ByteDance's app and the impact they posed on society. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the country's telecommunication authority, said in a statement Friday evening that despite the warnings and months-long time, TikTok "failed to comply with the instructions, therefore, directions were issued for blocking of TikTok application in the country." The authority had received a "number of complaints from different segments of the society" over the videos, it said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The early days of the internet were full of predictions about access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation. More recently, views on the internet's impact have soured, as states use it to spy on dissidents and influence foreign elections. Opinions on this topic are abundant, but hard data are scarce. No one knows whether the Arab spring could have occurred without the internet, or whether Russia's online efforts to boost President Donald Trump's campaign had any effect. Nonetheless, scholars can sometimes find natural experiments to substitute for such counter-factual scenarios. A recently revised study by the economists Sergei Guriev, Nikita Melnikov and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, which is now undergoing peer review, uses the growth of mobile broadband to reveal a link between internet access and scepticism of government. Most of the 4.1bn people now online got connected after 2010. To measure how new users' views changed as a result, the authors combined two datasets. First, for each year in 2007-18, they estimated the share of people in each of 2,232 regions (such as states or provinces), spread across 116 countries, that could access at least 3G-level mobile internet. Then they used surveys by Gallup, a pollster, to measure how faith in government, courts and elections changed during this period in each area. In general, people's confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3G. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities. A similar pattern emerged at the ballot box. Among 102 elections in 33 European countries, incumbent parties' vote-share fell by an average of 4.7 percentage points once 3G arrived. The biggest beneficiaries were parties classified as populist -- though this may simply have been because they happened to be in opposition when voters turned against parties in power, rather than because of their ideology.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For months, Apple's corporate network was at risk of hacks that could have stolen sensitive data from potentially millions of its customers and executed malicious code on their phones and computers, a security researcher said on Thursday. Sam Curry, a 20-year-old researcher who specializes in website security, said that, in total, he and his team found 55 vulnerabilities. He rated 11 of them critical because they allowed him to take control of core Apple infrastructure and from there steal private emails, iCloud data, and other private information. Apple promptly fixed the vulnerabilities after Curry reported them over a three-month span, often within hours of his initial advisory. The company has so far processed about half of the vulnerabilities and committed to paying $288,500 for them. Once Apple processes the remainder, Curry said, the total payout might surpass $500,000. "If the issues were used by an attacker, Apple would've faced massive information disclosure and integrity loss," Curry said in an online chat a few hours after posting a 9,200-word writeup titled We Hacked Apple for 3 Months: Here's What We Found. "For instance, attackers would have access to the internal tools used for managing user information and additionally be able to change the systems around to work as the hackers intend." An Apple representative issued a statement that said: "At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats. As soon as the researchers alerted us to the issues they detail in their report, we immediately fixed the vulnerabilities and took steps to prevent future issues of this kind. Based on our logs, the researchers were the first to discover the vulnerabilities so we feel confident no user data was misused. We value our collaboration with security researchers to help keep our users safe and have credited the team for their assistance and will reward them from the Apple Security Bounty program."

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As Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google are being targeted by the House Judiciary Committee for abusing American antitrust law, one major company has managed to escape the glare: Microsoft. That's because they are now "the adult in the room in some ways on this issue," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), a Democratic member of the House Antitrust subcommittee, which has been diving into Big Tech's practices for the last 16 months. Yahoo Finance reports: Jayapal's Seattle district includes Amazon's headquarters and the company's practices, specifically how it uses data from third-party sellers, has been one of her major focuses. It's Congress's job to make sure "a company like Amazon can't just put a small business that produces diapers out of business by taking all of that market information that nobody else has access to, and using it to subsidize losses and push small companies out," Jayapal told Yahoo Finance. She has also had a less-than-cordial relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. During a Yahoo Finance interview this summer, Jayapal said she had never before met the billionaire. They did talk virtually in July when she grilled him during the hearings, but she said this week that communication since then has been sparse. "I've had an open door policy to speaking with Mr. Bezos and have invited him many times," she said. Though she has met with Amazon senior managers. "The lesson here is self-regulation doesn't work," said Jayapal. She points to Microsoft as an example that Amazon should follow, of successfully working with the government. In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his company's ways. The company had to "change its culture, change its lines of business," Jayapal said. The process of government involvement led to Microsoft creating a "platform for other small companies to thrive," she said. Jayapal also pointed to the Microsoft example as to why breaking up a company isn't always the best option. "Perhaps in retrospect, Amazon, after we've regulated them, after we've put through some of the recommendations that are in the report, we'll look back and say, "You know what? It's a good thing that that happened," she said.

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Comcast has achieved a 10Gbps "technical milestone" that can deliver gigabit-plus download and upload speeds over existing cable wires, not fiber. ZDNet reports: Comcast has achieved a 10Gbps technical milestone by delivering 1.25Gbps upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) hardware. This is being done with DOCSIS 4. With this cutting-edge cable internet technology, you can expect to see up to 10Gbps speeds downstream and up to 6Gbps upstream capacity over a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network. In its first real-world test, to a home in Jacksonville, Fla., technicians achieved its Gigabit plus speed using upon Comcast's Distributed Access Architecture (DAA). This is an edge-based computing model. This architecture has a suite of software-powered networking technologies, including digital fiber optics, "Remote PHY" digital nodes, and a cloud-based, virtualized cable modem termination system platform (vCMTS). The result? Comcast's team consistently measured speeds of 1.25Gbps upload and 1.2Gbps download over the connection. According to a study by Dr. Raul Katz of Telecom Advisory Services, 10Gbps internet will generate at least $330 billion in total economic output and create more than 676,000 new jobs over the next seven years. It will do by enabling not just 8K video streams for everyone living in your home, but by enabling 5G access points, virtual reality applications, and telehealth. It's not just hardware that's making this possible. Comcast is a major open-source developer and user. As Comcast notes, "The trial was made possible not by a single technological innovation, but rather by a series of interrelated technologies that Comcast continues to test and deploy in its network, all powered by a DAA ecosystem. These include our increasingly virtualized, cloud-based network model." Comcast is working on the "10G" initiative along with NCTA, CableLabs, and SCTE, and other telecom and cable operators from around the world. In addition, Comcast and Charter Communications have worked closely to align on their approaches to 10Gbps and are driving technology standards and architectures to benefit everyone.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: EU capitals have been put under pressure to agree to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030 compared with 1990, after the European parliament voted in favor of an "ambitious" climate law that would also oblige each member state to be carbon neutral by 2050. The vote, which sets the chamber's position as it goes into negotiations with the 27 member states and the European commission, won the backing of 392 MEPs, with 161 voting against and 142 abstaining. Speaking to the Guardian, Pascal Canfin, the chair of the chamber's environment committee, who proposed the 2030 target, said he was convinced the position would drive member countries to raise their sights when their representatives sit together in the EU setting known as the council. The parliament's vote was a rejection of a 55% emissions reduction target for 2030 proposed by the commission, the EU's executive body led by Ursula von der Leyen. "Having the parliament supporting 60% helps the progressive countries in the council to drive ambition upwards," Canfin said. Following the vote, Finland's environment minister, Krista Mikkonen, said she would propose that her government update its national position in line with that of the EU parliament.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel wants to build his startup Redwood Materials into the world's top battery recycling company and one of the largest battery materials companies, he said at a technology conference Wednesday. Straubel aims to leverage two partnerships, one with Panasonic, the Japanese battery manufacturer that is teamed with Tesla at the Nevada gigafactory, and one announced weeks ago with e-commerce giant Amazon. With production of electric vehicles and batteries about to explode, Straubel says his ultimate goal is to "make a material impact on sustainability, at an industrial scale." Established in early 2017, Redwood this year will recycle more than 1 gigawatt-hours' worth of battery scrap materials from the gigafactory -- enough to power more than 10,000 Tesla cars. That is a fraction of the half-million vehicles Tesla expects to build this year. At the company's Battery Day in late September, Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was looking at recycling batteries to supplement the supply of raw materials from mining as Tesla escalates vehicle production. [...] Straubel's broader plan is to dramatically reduce mining of raw materials such as nickel, copper and cobalt over several decades by building out a circular or "closed loop" supply chain that recycles and recirculates materials retrieved from end-of-life vehicle and grid storage batteries and from cells scrapped during manufacturing.

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AmiMoJo shares a report from NPR: A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016. The ruling could lead to the identification of the person behind the Twitter name @whyspertech. Through that account, the user allegedly provided forged FBI materials to Fox News. The documents falsely linked Rich's killing to the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic Party emails in the lead-up to the 2016 election. While Twitter fought to keep the user's identity secret, U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu in Oakland, Calif., ordered on Tuesday that the tech company must turn over the information to attorneys representing Rich's family in a defamation suit by Oct. 20. It is the latest twist in a years-long saga over a conspiracy theory that rocked Washington, caused a grieving family a great deal of pain and set off multiple legal battles. "In a now-retracted story, Fox News falsely claimed that Rich's computer was connected to the leak of Democratic Party emails provided to WikiLeaks, and that Rich's slaying was related to the purported leak," the report adds. "The theory was even debunked in special counsel Robert Mueller's report." "The Washington Times later reported in 2018 that Rich's brother, Aaron Rich, helped steal the emails in exchange for money from WikiLeaks and that he knew his brother would be killed and did nothing to stop it. None of those allegations are true. That story has also been retracted."

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Brian Krebs writes via KrebsOnSecurity.com: There's an old adage in information security: "Every company gets penetration tested, whether or not they pay someone for the pleasure." Many organizations that do hire professionals to test their network security posture unfortunately tend to focus on fixing vulnerabilities hackers could use to break in. But judging from the proliferation of help-wanted ads for offensive pentesters in the cybercrime underground, today's attackers have exactly zero trouble gaining that initial intrusion: The real challenge seems to be hiring enough people to help everyone profit from the access already gained. One of the most common ways such access is monetized these days is through ransomware, which holds a victim's data and/or computers hostage unless and until an extortion payment is made. But in most cases, there is a yawning gap of days, weeks or months between the initial intrusion and the deployment of ransomware within a victim organization. That's because it usually takes time and a good deal of effort for intruders to get from a single infected PC to seizing control over enough resources within the victim organization where it makes sense to launch the ransomware. This includes pivoting from or converting a single compromised Microsoft Windows user account to an administrator account with greater privileges on the target network; the ability to sidestep and/or disable any security software; and gaining the access needed to disrupt or corrupt any data backup systems the victim firm may have. Each day, millions of malware-laced emails are blasted out containing booby-trapped attachments. If the attachment is opened, the malicious document proceeds to quietly download additional malware and hacking tools to the victim machine. From there, the infected system will report home to a malware control server operated by the spammers who sent the missive. At that point, control over the victim machine may be transferred or sold multiple times between different cybercriminals who specialize in exploiting such access. These folks are very often contractors who work with established ransomware groups, and who are paid a set percentage of any eventual ransom payments made by a victim company.

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The federal government on Thursday appealed a judge's ruling that prevented the Trump administration from imposing a ban on TikTok, the viral video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The New York Times reports: In a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Justice Department argued that a preliminary injunction issued last month by Judge Carl Nichols in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia should be lifted. A Justice Department spokeswoman said it had no further comment beyond the appeal. TikTok declined to comment. It was not immediately clear when the court might act on the government's appeal. The government's decision to appeal the injunction, which delayed TikTok from being banned in U.S. app stores, further escalates the battle between the White House and ByteDance. The move is part of a Cold War between the United States and the Chinese government. The Chinese government has for years prevented its citizens from using international apps like Facebook, Twitter and other communications services. Since President Trump took office, he has repeatedly moved to stop Chinese companies from investing in and acquiring American companies. Citing national security concerns, the administration has also sought to stop American citizens from using Chinese-owned apps and has worked to banish Chinese technology and hardware from American telecommunications networks.

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IBM announced this morning that the company would be spinning off some of its lower-margin lines of business into a new company and focusing on higher-margin cloud services. Ars Technica reports: During an investor call, CEO Arvind Krishna acknowledged that the move was a "significant shift" in how IBM will work, but he positioned it as the latest in a decades-long series of strategic divestments. "We divested networking back in the '90s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years ago because all of them didn't necessarily play into the integrated value proposition," he said. Krishna became CEO in April 2020, replacing former CEO Ginni Rometty (who is now IBM's executive chairman), but the spin-off is the capstone of a multi-year effort to apply some kind of focus to the company's sprawling business model. The new spin-off doesn't have a formal name yet and is referred to as "NewCo" in IBM's marketing and investor relations material. Under the spin-off plan, the press release claims IBM "will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform, which represents a $1 trillion market opportunity," while NewCo "will immediately be the world's leading managed infrastructure services provider." (This is because NewCo will start life owning the entirety of IBM Global Technology Services' existing managed infrastructure clients, which means about 4,600 accounts, including about 75 percent of the Fortune 100.) See also: Cringely Predicts IBM 'Disappears Into Red Hat'

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Mercedes-Benz teases a new super-efficient electric car concept, the Vision EQXX, with more than 750 miles of range on a single charge. At Daimler's latest company update, the automaker teased a new technical program to develop "the longest-range and highest-efficiency electric car the world has ever seen." Mercedes-Benz's head of research and development, Markus Schafer, commented: "We have set up a group of our engineers to take on an extraordinary task: to build the longest-range and highest-efficiency electric car the world has ever seen. This is a serious project, chasing next-generation technologies. We intend to incorporate the learning into the next generation of series production cars." The German automaker said that the electric vehicle should be able to travel from Beijing to Shanghai, a journey that covers about 750 miles (1,200 km), on a single charge. This incredible range will be achieved through efficiency improvements rather than just a bigger battery pack. Daimler noted that the program will be used to test new technologies to improve efficiency and bring those to production cars: "While Vision EQXX is a technology program, it is expected to result in innovations that will quickly make their way into series production cars." They haven't disclosed when they plan to unveil the Vision EQXX electric prototype.

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After 44 years, there's finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem. From a report: When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even if they didn't manage to solve it, they figured, Klein would learn a lot in the process. He went along with the idea. "I didn't know to be intimidated," he said. "I was just a first-year grad student -- I don't know what's going on." Now, in a paper posted online in July, Klein and his advisers at the University of Washington, Anna Karlin and Shayan Oveis Gharan, have finally achieved a goal computer scientists have pursued for nearly half a century: a better way to find approximate solutions to the traveling salesperson problem. This optimization problem, which seeks the shortest (or least expensive) round trip through a collection of cities, has applications ranging from DNA sequencing to ride-sharing logistics. Over the decades, it has inspired many of the most fundamental advances in computer science, helping to illuminate the power of techniques such as linear programming. But researchers have yet to fully explore its possibilities -- and not for want of trying. The traveling salesperson problem "isn't a problem, it's an addiction," as Christos Papadimitriou, a leading expert in computational complexity, is fond of saying. Most computer scientists believe that there is no algorithm that can efficiently find the best solutions for all possible combinations of cities. But in 1976, Nicos Christofides came up with an algorithm that efficiently finds approximate solutions -- round trips that are at most 50% longer than the best round trip. At the time, computer scientists expected that someone would soon improve on Christofides' simple algorithm and come closer to the true solution. But the anticipated progress did not arrive. "A lot of people spent countless hours trying to improve this result," said Amin Saberi of Stanford University. Now Karlin, Klein and Oveis Gharan have proved that an algorithm devised a decade ago beats Christofides' 50% factor, though they were only able to subtract 0.2 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent. Yet this minuscule improvement breaks through both a theoretical logjam and a psychological one. Researchers hope that it will open the floodgates to further improvements.

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GameStop jumped as much as 27% after a strategic partnership with Microsoft gave investors fresh optimism that the video-game retailer can turn around its business. From a report: Under a multiyear agreement, GameStop will use Microsoft's cloud services to handle business operations, including finance, inventory and e-commerce, according to a statement Thursday. In-store workers also will use Microsoft Surface devices while they're helping customers. And GameStop will offer Xbox All Access, a monthly service for the Xbox gaming console. GameStop is expected to get a surge in sales when new video-game consoles arrive in coming weeks, and the Microsoft partnership could help them extend the momentum. A new Xbox and Sony PlayStation are debuting next month, which should drive traffic to GameStop's stores and e-commerce site.

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Apple told CNBC that it will extend some Apple TV+ subscriptions on a free one-year trial for three additional months. From the report: When Apple TV+ launched last fall, Apple bundled a free one-year subscription with the purchase of an Apple product, immediately boosting the number of people who could watch the streaming service. The first of those trial subscriptions were previously going to expire at the start of November, meaning that people on the one-year trial who had not cancelled were going to be charged $4.99 per month for the streaming service. Now subscribers whose trial expires before February will get three additional months of Apple TV+ for free. This means that someone who bought an iPhone on December 1 and activated Apple TV+ on the same day will have access to the service through March 1, when billing starts. Apple has not revealed the number of Apple TV+ subscribers. The service has fewer TV shows and movies than rivals like Disney+, which surpassed 60 million subscribers in August after launching last November. Netflix has more than 190 million subscribers around the world, it said in July. But unlike those services, Apple TV+ doesn't have a back catalog of reruns.

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sciencehabit writes: OSIRIS-REx is ready to get the goods. On 20 October, after several years of patient study of its enigmatic target, NASA's $800 million spacecraft will finally stretch out its robotic arm, swoop to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and sweep up some dust and pebbles. The encounter, 334 million kilometers from Earth, will last about 10 seconds. If it is successful, OSIRIS-REx could steal away with up to 1 kilogram of carbon-rich material from the dawn of the Solar System for return to Earth in 2023. Since OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) arrived in 2018, Bennu has yielded surprises, not all of them welcome. The 500-meter-wide asteroid was not smooth, as expected, but studded with more than 200 large boulders that could upset the sampling maneuver. And every so often, the asteroid ejected coin-size pebbles, probably propelled by meteoroid impacts or solar heating. The boulder hazard, in particular, forced the team to target an area just 16 meters across for sampling, 10 times smaller than planned. "Bennu has not made things easy for us," says Mike Moreau, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Despite the logistical challenge, the boulders contain a prize: veins of carbonate minerals thicker than your hands, the team reports in one of six studies published today in Science and Science Advances. The minerals, which precipitate out of hot water, popped out of data gathered during a close flyby of light-colored boulders near the target site, called Nightingale. Researchers believe the veins grew in channels of fluid circulating within Bennu's parent body, a larger planetesimal thought to have formed beyond Jupiter's orbit soon after the dawn of the Solar System 4.56 billion years ago, before being smashed apart in the asteroid belt within the last billion years. Heat from the decay of radioactive elements in its interior presumably drove the churning, and the presence of so much carbonate "suggests large-scale fluid flow, possibly over the entire parent body," says Hannah Kaplan, a planetary scientist at Goddard who led the work. This ancient water world is consistent with the idea that objects like Bennu delivered much of Earth's water when they struck the planet billions of years ago, says Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. The veins also suggest watery bodies like Bennu were a cauldron for the organic chemistry that generated the amino acids and other unusual prebiotic compounds found in carbon-rich meteorites.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday, Congress revealed whether it thinks Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are sitting on monopolies. In some cases, the answer was yes. But also, one app developer revealed to Congress that it -- just like WordPress -- had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier -- and that when the dev dared send an email to customers notifying them of the change, Apple threatened to remove the app and blocked all updates. That developer was ProtonMail, makers of an encrypted email app, and CEO Andy Yen had some fiery words for Apple in an interview with The Verge this week. We've known for months that WordPress and Hey weren't alone in being strong-armed by the most valuable company in the world, ever since Stratechery's Ben Thompson reported that 21 different app developers quietly told him they'd been pushed to retroactively add IAP in the wake of those two controversies. But until now, we hadn't heard of many devs willing to publicly admit it. They were scared. And they're still scared, says Yen. Even though Apple changed its rules on September 11th to exempt "free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool" from the IAP requirement -- Apple explicitly said email apps are exempt -- ProtonMail still hasn't removed its own in-app purchases because it fears retaliation from Apple, he says. He claims other developers feel the same way: "There's a lot of fear in the space right now; people are completely petrified to say anything." [...] "For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there," he says. (They'd launched on iOS in 2016.) "But a common practice we see ... as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money."

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Microsoft today announced a slew of new features coming to its Chromium Edge browser. From a report: There are PDF improvements, a built-in screenshot tool, support for more themes, and new shopping features in time for the holiday season. But the most notable addition is the one powered by Skype because for better or for worse, 2020 is the year of video calling. When Zoom usage exploded this year, Microsoft tried to save face by making it easier to join Skype calls -- the company dropping account sign-up requirements and expanded the number of supported users. Microsoft is now bringing that functionality to Edge's new tab page with a dedicated Meet Now button (not to be confused with Google Meet). [...] Microsoft claims "Edge is the best browser for shopping this holiday." To make the case, Edge is getting a feature called price comparison that compares the price of a product you're searching for across other retailers. If you add a product to a collection, you can then click "compare price to other retailers" to see a list of prices of that item across other retailers.

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There are few things as revealing as a person's search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect. From a report: In August, police arrested Michael Williams, an associate of singer and accused sex offender R. Kelly, for allegedly setting fire to a witness' car in Florida. Investigators linked Williams to the arson, as well as witness tampering, after sending a search warrant to Google that requested information on "users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson." The July court filing was unsealed on Tuesday. Detroit News reporter Robert Snell tweeted about the filing after it was unsealed. Court documents showed that Google provided the IP addresses of people who searched for the arson victim's address, which investigators tied to a phone number belonging to Williams. Police then used the phone number records to pinpoint the location of Williams' device near the arson, according to court documents. The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect. "This 'keyword warrant' evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, it's likely unconstitutional."

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Waymo, the Google self-driving-project-turned-Alphabet unit, is beginning to open up its driverless ride-hailing service to the public. From a report: The company said that starting today members of its Waymo One service will be able to take family and friends along on their fully driverless rides in the Phoenix area. Existing Waymo One members will have the first access to the driverless rides -- terminology that means no human behind the wheel. However, the company said that in the next several weeks more people will be welcomed directly into the service through its app, which is available on Google Play and the App Store. Waymo said that 100% of its rides will be fully driverless -- which it has deemed its "rider only" mode. That 100% claim requires a bit of unpacking. The public shouldn't expect hundreds of Waymo-branded Chrysler Pacifica minivans -- no human behind the wheel -- to suddenly inundate the entire 600-plus square miles of the greater Phoenix area. Waymo has abut 600 vehicles in its fleet. About 300 to 400 of those are in the Phoenix area. Waymo wouldn't share exact numbers of how many of these vehicles would be dedicated to driverless rides. However, Waymo CEO John Krafcik explained to TechCrunch in a recent interview, that there will be various modes operating in the Phoenix area. Some of these will be "rider only," while other vehicles will still have train safety operators behind the wheel. Some of the fleet will also be used for testing.

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