Month: September 2024
CEO of “health care terrorists” sues senators after contempt of Congress charges
Suing an entire Senate panel seen as a “Hail Mary play” unlikely to succeed.
The infamous CEO of a failed hospital system is suing an entire Senate committee after being held in contempt of Congress, with civil and criminal charges unanimously approved by the full Senate last week.
In a federal lawsuit filed Monday, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre claimed the senators “bulldozed over [his] constitutional rights” as they tried to “pillory and crucify him as a loathsome criminal” in a “televised circus.”
The Senate committee—the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), led by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—issued a rare subpoena to de la Torre in July, compelling him to testify before the lawmakers. They sought to question the CEO on the deterioration of his hospital system, which previously included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. Steward filed for bankruptcy in May.
Epic Games Accuses Samsung and Google of Colluding to Prevent Sideloading on Galaxy Devices
Fortnite creator Epic Games today filed a lawsuit against Google and Samsung, accusing the two companies of anticompetitive behavior that discourages Android users from downloading games and apps outside of the Google Play Store.
At issue is a Samsung feature called Auto Blocker, which is designed to prevent Galaxy devices from installing applications from unauthorized sources. Enabled by default, Samsung says that Auto Blocker keeps users safe from unknown apps and malware, but it does disable sideloading.
With Auto Blocker, when users attempt to install an app from an unknown or unauthorized source, they’ll receive a pop-up alert letting them know that installation was prevented. Auto Blocker can be overridden during the setup of a Galaxy device, and there is also an option to temporarily remove it. Auto Blocker was first introduced last October, and Epic Games says that the feature is in fact a “coordinated effort” to block competition in app distribution.
“Auto Blocker cements the Google Play Store as the only viable way to get apps on Samsung devices, blocking every other store from competing on a level playing field,” says Epic Games.
Epic Games is accusing Samsung and Google of creating Auto Blocker with the purpose of undermining the result of the Epic Games v. Google lawsuit, where a nine-member jury agreed that Google had an app store monopoly and that Google’s agreements with OEMs were anticompetitive.
When speaking to journalists earlier today (via The Verge), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said that he did not have proof that Google and Samsung had colluded on the Auto Blocker feature, but he is hoping to find evidence during the document discovery process. He also did not ask Samsung to make Epic Games an authorized source for games.
Further, Sweeney claimed that Epic was filing the lawsuit on behalf of all developers, and not just to get Epic Games special treatment. “If we’d fought Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google solely on the basis of Epic getting special privileges, perhaps settlement discussions with Apple and Google might have been fruitful,” said Sweeney. “But if we did that, we’d be selling out all developers.”
Evidence from the Epic v. Apple trial suggests that Sweeney did, at that time, seek a special deal with Apple that would not have been available to all developers. In 2020, Sweeney wrote a letter to Apple asking for permission to add support for third-party payment processors in Fortnite, and it’s only when Apple said no that Epic filed a lawsuit against Apple. When questioned about this letter at trial, Sweeney confirmed that he was seeking a special deal for Fortnite and would have accepted it even if Apple didn’t offer the same deal to other developers.
Sweeney has suggested multiple times that the lawsuits Epic is filing against Apple, Google, and Samsung are for all developers, but realistically, Epic Games is looking out for its own interests.
Epic Games is aiming to have the court force Samsung to remove Auto Blocker as a default device setting. Samsung in a statement to The Verge said that Auto Blocker is a security and privacy feature that users can disable at any time. “We plan to vigorously contest Epic Game’s baseless claims,” said Samsung. Google called the lawsuit “meritless.”Tags: Epic Games, Fortnite, Google, SamsungThis article, “Epic Games Accuses Samsung and Google of Colluding to Prevent Sideloading on Galaxy Devices” first appeared on MacRumors.comDiscuss this article in our forums
Fortnite creator Epic Games today filed a lawsuit against Google and Samsung, accusing the two companies of anticompetitive behavior that discourages Android users from downloading games and apps outside of the Google Play Store.
At issue is a Samsung feature called Auto Blocker, which is designed to prevent Galaxy devices from installing applications from unauthorized sources. Enabled by default, Samsung says that Auto Blocker keeps users safe from unknown apps and malware, but it does disable sideloading.
With Auto Blocker, when users attempt to install an app from an unknown or unauthorized source, they’ll receive a pop-up alert letting them know that installation was prevented. Auto Blocker can be overridden during the setup of a Galaxy device, and there is also an option to temporarily remove it. Auto Blocker was first introduced last October, and Epic Games says that the feature is in fact a “coordinated effort” to block competition in app distribution.
“Auto Blocker cements the Google Play Store as the only viable way to get apps on Samsung devices, blocking every other store from competing on a level playing field,” says Epic Games.
Epic Games is accusing Samsung and Google of creating Auto Blocker with the purpose of undermining the result of the Epic Games v. Google lawsuit, where a nine-member jury agreed that Google had an app store monopoly and that Google’s agreements with OEMs were anticompetitive.
When speaking to journalists earlier today (via The Verge), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said that he did not have proof that Google and Samsung had colluded on the Auto Blocker feature, but he is hoping to find evidence during the document discovery process. He also did not ask Samsung to make Epic Games an authorized source for games.
Further, Sweeney claimed that Epic was filing the lawsuit on behalf of all developers, and not just to get Epic Games special treatment. “If we’d fought Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google solely on the basis of Epic getting special privileges, perhaps settlement discussions with Apple and Google might have been fruitful,” said Sweeney. “But if we did that, we’d be selling out all developers.”
Evidence from the Epic v. Apple trial suggests that Sweeney did, at that time, seek a special deal with Apple that would not have been available to all developers. In 2020, Sweeney wrote a letter to Apple asking for permission to add support for third-party payment processors in Fortnite, and it’s only when Apple said no that Epic filed a lawsuit against Apple. When questioned about this letter at trial, Sweeney confirmed that he was seeking a special deal for Fortnite and would have accepted it even if Apple didn’t offer the same deal to other developers.
Sweeney has suggested multiple times that the lawsuits Epic is filing against Apple, Google, and Samsung are for all developers, but realistically, Epic Games is looking out for its own interests.
Epic Games is aiming to have the court force Samsung to remove Auto Blocker as a default device setting. Samsung in a statement to The Verge said that Auto Blocker is a security and privacy feature that users can disable at any time. “We plan to vigorously contest Epic Game’s baseless claims,” said Samsung. Google called the lawsuit “meritless.”
This article, “Epic Games Accuses Samsung and Google of Colluding to Prevent Sideloading on Galaxy Devices” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums
How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm
This aerial picture taken on September 27th, 2024, shows a flooded street after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Steinhatchee, Florida. | Photo by Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images
The Southeastern United States is reeling from Hurricane Helene, a monstrous storm that made landfall in Florida on Thursday before cutting a terrifying path all the way up to Tennessee. How did it get this bad?
The storm has killed more than 100 people, and hundreds more are still missing. Power is out for millions of people. Residents around Asheville, North Carolina — one of the hardest-hit areas — are reportedly struggling to find food, water, and cellphone service. We don’t yet know what the full impact of the storm is; search and rescue missions are still underway, and scientists are finalizing data on how powerful the storm was.
But it’s clear that the storm was disastrous because of its unusual size, intensity, and speed. The perfect conditions were in place to supercharge the storm.
“Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”
“It had all the different weapons at its disposal that a hurricane [can have],” says John Knox, distinguished teaching professor and undergraduate coordinator of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. “Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”
While Helene was still churning in the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters were already warning that the storm was going to be “unusually large.” At its maximum, tropical storm-force winds extended nearly 350 miles away from Helene’s center. That enormous reach put Helene in the 90th percentile for storm size, according to the National Hurricane Center. On the ground, that means the effects of the storm — wind, storm surge, and heavy rainfall — were felt across an unusually large area.
Not only was the storm huge but it was also stronger than most. Storm systems this large don’t always develop a small inner core that allows them to quickly strengthen. But Helene was able to form a relatively small eye and then rapidly intensify, a term used to describe tropical storms with sustained wind speeds that rise by at least 30 knots (roughly 35 miles per hour) in a 24-hour period.
It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.
Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.
Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.
“It certainly has been a very catastrophic event in portions of Southeast US, especially the southern Appalachians where they’ve seen just tremendous amounts of rainfall and flooding,” says Daniel Brown, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center. But with damage and fatality reports still coming in, it’s probably still too soon to know how Helene compares to other storms, he says.
Adding to its rampage, the storm was fast, with a forward speed reaching between 20 to 30 miles per hour. By comparison, storms that land along the Gulf of Mexico typically only move forward at a speed of about 10 to 15 miles per hour, Brown said. Tropical storms tend to weaken once they move over land since they draw strength from heat energy from warm waters at the surface of the sea. Helene’s speed, however, allowed it to keep more of its strength as it moved inland.
“That is why the impacts were felt much farther inland than [people are] typically used to,” says Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The farther inland it goes, I mean, more people would be exposed to this hazard.” Another risk factor is that inland communities may not have as much experience preparing for hurricanes as coastal areas more used to coping with this kind of disaster.
Climate change is altering the calculus for storms like Helene. Rising global temperatures create conditions conducive to more intense storms that can gain strength quickly and stay more powerful onshore. Helene developed amid soaring sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Waters along the storm’s early path got as high as 31 degrees Celsius (87.8 degrees Fahrenheit), providing ample fuel. The atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, allowing for more severe downpours.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory
Sea surface temperatures on September 23rd.
To know how big of a role climate change played with Helene specifically, scientists will have to conduct more research. But Balaguru likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. “It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick,” Balaguru says.
Altogether, the pieces were in place for the perfect storm with Helene. “The storm started big, which was bad, it went over hot water, which was bad, it hit a place that is prone to high storm surge, and then it accelerated and went into populated areas and took wind and rainwater to those populated areas,” Knox says. “You don’t want to see much worse.”
This aerial picture taken on September 27th, 2024, shows a flooded street after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Steinhatchee, Florida. | Photo by Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images
The Southeastern United States is reeling from Hurricane Helene, a monstrous storm that made landfall in Florida on Thursday before cutting a terrifying path all the way up to Tennessee. How did it get this bad?
The storm has killed more than 100 people, and hundreds more are still missing. Power is out for millions of people. Residents around Asheville, North Carolina — one of the hardest-hit areas — are reportedly struggling to find food, water, and cellphone service. We don’t yet know what the full impact of the storm is; search and rescue missions are still underway, and scientists are finalizing data on how powerful the storm was.
But it’s clear that the storm was disastrous because of its unusual size, intensity, and speed. The perfect conditions were in place to supercharge the storm.
“It had all the different weapons at its disposal that a hurricane [can have],” says John Knox, distinguished teaching professor and undergraduate coordinator of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. “Everything that we say a hurricane can do, Helene did do.”
While Helene was still churning in the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters were already warning that the storm was going to be “unusually large.” At its maximum, tropical storm-force winds extended nearly 350 miles away from Helene’s center. That enormous reach put Helene in the 90th percentile for storm size, according to the National Hurricane Center. On the ground, that means the effects of the storm — wind, storm surge, and heavy rainfall — were felt across an unusually large area.
Not only was the storm huge but it was also stronger than most. Storm systems this large don’t always develop a small inner core that allows them to quickly strengthen. But Helene was able to form a relatively small eye and then rapidly intensify, a term used to describe tropical storms with sustained wind speeds that rise by at least 30 knots (roughly 35 miles per hour) in a 24-hour period.
It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.
Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.
Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.
“It certainly has been a very catastrophic event in portions of Southeast US, especially the southern Appalachians where they’ve seen just tremendous amounts of rainfall and flooding,” says Daniel Brown, branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center. But with damage and fatality reports still coming in, it’s probably still too soon to know how Helene compares to other storms, he says.
Adding to its rampage, the storm was fast, with a forward speed reaching between 20 to 30 miles per hour. By comparison, storms that land along the Gulf of Mexico typically only move forward at a speed of about 10 to 15 miles per hour, Brown said. Tropical storms tend to weaken once they move over land since they draw strength from heat energy from warm waters at the surface of the sea. Helene’s speed, however, allowed it to keep more of its strength as it moved inland.
“That is why the impacts were felt much farther inland than [people are] typically used to,” says Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The farther inland it goes, I mean, more people would be exposed to this hazard.” Another risk factor is that inland communities may not have as much experience preparing for hurricanes as coastal areas more used to coping with this kind of disaster.
Climate change is altering the calculus for storms like Helene. Rising global temperatures create conditions conducive to more intense storms that can gain strength quickly and stay more powerful onshore. Helene developed amid soaring sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Waters along the storm’s early path got as high as 31 degrees Celsius (87.8 degrees Fahrenheit), providing ample fuel. The atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, allowing for more severe downpours.
Image: NASA Earth Observatory
Sea surface temperatures on September 23rd.
To know how big of a role climate change played with Helene specifically, scientists will have to conduct more research. But Balaguru likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. “It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick,” Balaguru says.
Altogether, the pieces were in place for the perfect storm with Helene. “The storm started big, which was bad, it went over hot water, which was bad, it hit a place that is prone to high storm surge, and then it accelerated and went into populated areas and took wind and rainwater to those populated areas,” Knox says. “You don’t want to see much worse.”
Is AT&T Fiber’s Cheapest Plan Fast Enough?
At $55 for 300Mbps, AT&T Fiber’s entry level plan isn’t the best deal, but there’s still plenty of value. Here’s what to know about AT&T Fiber 300.
At $55 for 300Mbps, AT&T Fiber’s entry level plan isn’t the best deal, but there’s still plenty of value. Here’s what to know about AT&T Fiber 300.
AMD announces a new update to address Ryzen 9000’s performance woes ahead of Intel Arrow Lake launch, but it has already blown its early advantage
AMD rolls out fixes to its rocky Ryzen 9000 series launch, but they come too late to gain a head start over Intel’s coming Arrow Lake chips.
There’s no question that the AMD Ryzen 9000 series had a troubled launch, but AMD’s latest fixes for the entire lineup of chips could go a long way to addressing the concerns of gamers and creators who might be holding off on buying one of the new chips.
The fix, which is part of the new AGESA ComboAM5 PI 1.2.0.2 microcode update to various AM5 motherboard UEFI BIOSs, comes in two parts, according to TechPowerUp.
First, users can configure the PPT of the AMD Ryzen 9600X and AMD Ryzen 9700X (cTDP) in the updated BIOS up to 140W (which translates to 105W TDP) while maintaining their warranty. This effectively allows users to overclock the base 65W (88W PPT) chips without the risk of wearing them out and not being able to replace them.
Second, the BIOS updates will improve the inter-core latency performance on the AMD Ryzen 9900X and AMD Ryzen 9950X. These two chips use two Complex Compute Dies (CCDs) rather than a single monolithic die for all cores.
In order to get the two CCDs — which have 6+6 and 8+8 cores for the AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X, respectively — to act as a single unit, there needs to be an interconnect between the two CCDs. This introduces latency whenever cores need to communicate with each other or when the OS scheduler needs to assign work to various CPU cores.
Typically, the chips are supposed to be optimized to negate this latency as much as possible, but according to AMD, the issue with the high core-to-core latency of the 9900X and 9950X “was mainly due to some corner cases where it takes two transactions to both read, and write, when information is shared across cores on different parts of a Ryzen 9 9000 series processor.”
“However, we’ve been working on optimizing this since the launch of the 9000 series. In the new 1.2.0.2 BIOS update, we’ve managed to cut the number of transactions in half for this use case, which helps reduce core-to-core latency in multi-CCD models.”
While the reported core-to-core latency might still be higher than with a monolithic die, in real-world use, this fix should boost the multi-core performance that users experience with these chips.
Extra performance all around, but is it too late to compete with Intel?
(Image credit: AMD)
So I haven’t actually finished reviewing the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, as some may have noticed. There are a lot of scheduling reasons for that, but I did manage to test all four chips and found, like many, that the performance gains were not great, if they existed at all.
Across the board though, I was more impressed by the power efficiency of the chips, which effectively let you have Ryzen 7000 series performance at lower power levels. I actually thought that this was pretty great, since the Ryzen 7000 series are fantastic chips and offer more than enough performance for just about everyone, and I’ve been on a tear about how chipmakers need to call a truce on performance and focus on efficiency.
That said, I understand why many would want to have more performance and better uplift gen-on-gen, even if I’d counsel them to ask whether that’s really necessary.
In either case, though, it’s generally a good rule to offer consumers more choice rather than less, and in the case of the 9600X and 9700X, you get to decide whether better performance or more efficiency best suits your needs while not having to worry that you’re going to lose your investment in a chip because you increased its power draw.
As for the 9900X and 9950X, these two chips are specifically designed and marketed for high-performance use, so the importance of the gen-on-gen uplift is obvious. In that case, any fix for the underwhelming multi-core performance of these chips is welcome, though how much gain users will benefit from remains to be seen.
Of course, all this comes as Intel appears ready to introduce Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors later this month, meaning that the couple of months lead time that AMD had to gain an advantage early on in this generation might have been missed. It’ll now have to really fight it out with Intel to maintain its recent market share gains, but considering we haven’t seen what Intel Arrow Lake can do yet, it’s still a jump ball as to who will come out on top in the end.
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California Bans Legacy Admissions At Private, Nonprofit Universities
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California. California’s law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation’s fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges. “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Newsom said in a statement. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”
Like other states, California won’t financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice’s website. California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics. […] Public universities in California won’t be affected by the change. California State University does not consider legacy or donor ties, and the University of California system stopped doing so in 1998, two years after California voters banned race-conscious admissions through a statewide ballot measure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California. California’s law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation’s fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges. “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Newsom said in a statement. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”
Like other states, California won’t financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice’s website. California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics. […] Public universities in California won’t be affected by the change. California State University does not consider legacy or donor ties, and the University of California system stopped doing so in 1998, two years after California voters banned race-conscious admissions through a statewide ballot measure.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Uber beats crash victims’ attempt to try case in court instead of arbitration
Couple said daughter agreed to terms update when ordering food via Uber Eats.
A married couple can’t sue Uber over severe injuries they suffered in a 2022 car accident because of a mandatory arbitration provision in the ride-sharing company’s terms of use, according to a ruling issued by the New Jersey Superior Court appellate division.
In November 2023, a lower court denied Uber’s motion to compel arbitration and dismiss the complaint filed by plaintiffs Georgia and John McGinty. But the lower-court ruling was reversed on September 20 in a unanimous decision by three appellate court judges.
Georgia McGinty had agreed to Uber’s arbitration clause long before the accident. But the couple challenged the terms in part because they say their minor daughter, then 12, was the one who clicked the most recent terms agreement when the girl ordered food through Uber Eats. Those newer terms were also allegedly less specific about users waiving the right to a jury trial.
GM’s Cruise fined $1.5 million for omitting details about its gruesome 2023 crash
On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) fined Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle division, $1.5 million. The penalty was imposed for omitting key details from an October 2023 accident in which one of the company’s autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian.
Cruise is being fined for initially submitting several incomplete reports. The NHTSA’s reports require pre-crash, crash and post-crash details, which the company gave to the agency without a critical detail: that the pedestrian was dragged by the vehicle for 20 feet at around 7 MPH, causing severe injuries. Eventually, the company released a 100-page report from a law firm detailing its failures surrounding the accident.
That report states that Cruise executives initially played a video of the accident during October 3 meetings with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, NHTSA, DMV and other officials. However, the video stream was “hampered by internet connectivity issues” that concealed the part where the vehicle dragged the victim. Executives, who the report stated knew about the dragging, also failed to verbally mention that crucial detail in the initial meetings because they wanted to let “the video speak for itself.”
Investigators finally found out about the dragging after the NHTSA asked the company to submit the full video. The government agency says Cruise also amended four other incomplete crash reports involving its vehicles to add additional details.
The NHTSA’s new requirements for Cruise include submitting a corrective action plan, along with others covering its total number of vehicles, their miles traveled and whether they operated without a driver. It also has to summarize software updates that affect operation, report citations and observed violations of traffic laws and let the agency know how it will improve safety. Finally, Cruise will have to meet with the NHTSA quarterly to discuss the state of its operations while reviewing its reports and compliance.
The order lasts at least two years, and the NHTSA can extend it to a third year. Reuters reported on Monday that, despite the fine, the NHTSA’s investigation into whether Cruise is taking proper safety precautions to protect pedestrians is still open. Cruise still faces probes by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
To say the incident sparked shakeups at Cruise would be an understatement. The company halted its self-driving operations after the accident. Then, last November, the dominoes began to fall: Its CEO resigned, and GM said it would cut its Cruise investment by “hundreds of millions of dollars” and restructure its leadership. Nine more executives were dismissed in December.
Nonetheless, Cruise is trying to rebound under its new leadership. Vehicles with drivers returned to Arizona and Houston this year, and GM said it’s pouring an additional $850 million into it. Earlier this month, it began operating in California again, also with drivers — which, it’s safe to say, is a good thing.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/gms-cruise-fined-15-million-for-omitting-details-about-its-gruesome-2023-crash-210559255.html?src=rss
On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) fined Cruise, GM’s self-driving vehicle division, $1.5 million. The penalty was imposed for omitting key details from an October 2023 accident in which one of the company’s autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian.
Cruise is being fined for initially submitting several incomplete reports. The NHTSA’s reports require pre-crash, crash and post-crash details, which the company gave to the agency without a critical detail: that the pedestrian was dragged by the vehicle for 20 feet at around 7 MPH, causing severe injuries. Eventually, the company released a 100-page report from a law firm detailing its failures surrounding the accident.
That report states that Cruise executives initially played a video of the accident during October 3 meetings with the San Francisco Mayor’s Office, NHTSA, DMV and other officials. However, the video stream was “hampered by internet connectivity issues” that concealed the part where the vehicle dragged the victim. Executives, who the report stated knew about the dragging, also failed to verbally mention that crucial detail in the initial meetings because they wanted to let “the video speak for itself.”
Investigators finally found out about the dragging after the NHTSA asked the company to submit the full video. The government agency says Cruise also amended four other incomplete crash reports involving its vehicles to add additional details.
The NHTSA’s new requirements for Cruise include submitting a corrective action plan, along with others covering its total number of vehicles, their miles traveled and whether they operated without a driver. It also has to summarize software updates that affect operation, report citations and observed violations of traffic laws and let the agency know how it will improve safety. Finally, Cruise will have to meet with the NHTSA quarterly to discuss the state of its operations while reviewing its reports and compliance.
The order lasts at least two years, and the NHTSA can extend it to a third year. Reuters reported on Monday that, despite the fine, the NHTSA’s investigation into whether Cruise is taking proper safety precautions to protect pedestrians is still open. Cruise still faces probes by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
To say the incident sparked shakeups at Cruise would be an understatement. The company halted its self-driving operations after the accident. Then, last November, the dominoes began to fall: Its CEO resigned, and GM said it would cut its Cruise investment by “hundreds of millions of dollars” and restructure its leadership. Nine more executives were dismissed in December.
Nonetheless, Cruise is trying to rebound under its new leadership. Vehicles with drivers returned to Arizona and Houston this year, and GM said it’s pouring an additional $850 million into it. Earlier this month, it began operating in California again, also with drivers — which, it’s safe to say, is a good thing.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/gms-cruise-fined-15-million-for-omitting-details-about-its-gruesome-2023-crash-210559255.html?src=rss