Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Google Pay continues to circle the drain. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Google is bringing on a new executive who it hopes will turn the beleaguered Google Pay division around. Bloomberg reports that Arnold Goldberg, PayPal’s chief product architect, will now run Google Pay after the former payments chief, Caesar Sengupta, left in April.

Of the Google services that survived 2021, Google Pay had one of the most brutal years of any product. In March, Google Pay rolled out a completely new app in the US, replacing the old Google Pay app that had existed for years.

This new app was originally developed for India and is dramatically different from the old Google Pay app used in the US. For starters, the new app switched to using a phone number for identification instead of a Google account, which meant that a ton of features US users were accustomed to were no longer supported. Indian consumers are used to phone number identity thanks to apps like WhatsApp, and the limitations are not a big deal for users in that country thanks to smartphones being many consumers’ only device.

Enlarge / GM’s Super Cruise system is tightly geofenced to divided-lane highways and only operates if the system can determine that the human in the driver’s seat is paying attention to the road ahead, ready to respond if there’s a problem. (credit: General Motors)

On Thursday, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced that it is creating a rating system for hands-free advanced driver-assistance systems like Tesla’s Autopilot and General Motors’ Super Cruise. Later this year IIHS will issue its first set of ratings, with grading levels of good, acceptable, marginal, or poor. Having a good driver-monitoring system will be vital to getting a good grade.

And the institute is not alone. Also on Thursday, Consumer Reports revealed that it, too, will consider the safety of such tech features, adding points if there’s a good driver-monitoring system. CR says that so far, only Super Cruise and Ford’s BlueCruise systems are safe enough to get those extra points. Meanwhile, from model year 2024, CR will start subtracting points for cars that offer partial automation without proper driver monitoring.

“Partial automation systems may make long drives seem like less of a burden, but there is no evidence that they make driving safer,” says IIHS President David Harkey. “In fact, the opposite may be the case if systems lack adequate safeguards.”

Enlarge / President Joe Biden talks to reporters during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on January 19, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

President Joe Biden yesterday expressed support for breaking up the Build Back Better Act, saying that the parts intended to combat climate change appear to have the most support.

“I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now, and come back and fight for the rest later,” Biden said at a press conference. “I’m confident we can get pieces—big chunks—of the Build Back Better law signed into law.”

The initial Build Back Better bill contained provisions for universal preschool, paid family leave, and free community college in addition to clean energy tax credits and other climate-related measures. That bill, which weighed in at $3.5 trillion, was met with skepticism by some moderate Democrats and was pared down to $1.75 trillion after jettisoning free community college and 12-week paid family leave. 

Enlarge / A person takes a rapid COVID-19 test. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Federal and state investigations into a large national chain of COVID-19 testing sites have turned up tests that were never labeled with patients’ names, tests piled into trash bags stored for long periods at room temperature, tests that were never processed, and test results that were clearly fake.

Behind the testing sites are two Illinois-based companies: Center for COVID Control (CCC) and Doctors Clinical Laboratory, Inc., which is said to carry out COVID PCR testing for CCC. The two companies share the same address, though CCC is owned by Chicago-area couple Akbar Syed and Aleya Siyaj, while the clinical company is owned by Mohammed Shujauddin.

Together, the companies claim to provide rapid and PCR testing for COVID-19, with fast turnaround times and no appointments necessary. So far, they have collected more than 400,000 samples from over 300 locations across the US. And they have billed the federal government over $113 million for running many of those tests.

Enlarge / Dan Ball, host of One America News show “Real America.” (credit: One America News)

One America News is in panic mode after DirecTV decided to drop the right-wing network from its channel lineup.

OAN host Dan Ball on Monday night urged viewers to dig up “dirt” on AT&T Board Chairman William Kennard, a Democrat who was Federal Communications Commission chairman during the Clinton administration and US Ambassador to the European Union under Obama. (AT&T is DirecTV’s majority owner.)

A Daily Beast article said Ball told viewers that OAN “is now at war with AT&T.” The Daily Beast article continued: