Bytes: What’s new in tech

Autonomous vehicle homicide charges

A “safety driver” in an Uber autonomous vehicle was charged last week in the death of a pedestrian in 2018, said Kate Conger in The New York Times. Rafaela Vasquez has been charged with negligent homicide in what is believed to be “the first pedestrian death caused by self-driving technology.” Investigators say Vasquez was in the car “watching a video on her phone” when the vehicle struck Elaine Herzberg while traveling at about 40 mph. “In 2019, an Arizona prosecutor’s office said Uber would not face criminal liability for the incident,” although regulators faulted “an inadequate safety culture” at Uber at the time. Days before the crash, a departing Uber engineer had emailed the head of the company’s self-driving program to say the cars “shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles.”

Apple fires back at Fortnite maker

Fighting Epic Games’ efforts to get around App Store fees, Apple suggested Epic started its legal battle to “draw attention to a flagging franchise,” said James Vincent in TheVerge. com. Epic had sued Apple, alleging it was violating antitrust law by requiring a 30 percent commission on in-app purchases. In a brief filed this week, Apple responded that Epic’s problems are self-inflicted, and its Fortnite can return to iOS any time—“just as soon as Epic removes the custom in-app payment system that triggered the game’s removal” from the App Store last month. “Epic started a fire,” the brief says, “and poured gasoline on it, and now asks this court for emergency assistance in putting it out.”

Digital gap proves hard to span

A massive effort to close the “digital divide” in California is “hardly making a dent,” said Issie Lapowsky in Protocol.com. Tech CEOs have donated many millions of dollars “to cover the cost of laptops and internet access” for students who need them. But “six months later, with schools back in session, only a fraction of the devices those contributions were supposed to purchase are actually in students’ hands.” The California Department of Education says it has used donations to deliver 73,065 computing devices, but “it’s still waiting on a shipment of 20,000 Chromebooks that have been back-ordered for months.” Meanwhile, some mobile hot spots used to provide free internet to students in Los Angeles don’t have enough bandwidth to support multiple siblings, so some students are getting marked absent because they can’t log in to classes.