The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) is pushing for the implementation of conditional driver's licenses for the elderly by 2025, Yonhap News reports. How they'll determine who gets to keep their licenses will be via virtual reality. The Next Web reports: As of Monday, a three-year research project has been introduced, which will employ VR tech to assess whether drivers aged 65 years and older can remain behind the wheel. The program's total budget is expected to reach approximately $3 million (3.6 billion won). Contrary to other countries around the word, South Korea has no strict regulations regarding the driving license of seniors, unless they test positive for dementia. Currently, two measures apply: the three-year license renewal period for those aged 75 years and older, and the voluntary return of the driver's license for people over 65 years-old. However, the KNPA is still raising concerns over the number of accidents attributed to senior drivers, as well as the continuous aging of the country's population.

The VR test will asses driving, cognitive, and memory skills using a VR headset, close to how virtual reality technology is used in dementia clinics to check the brain functions of older people. While the specifics are yet to be disclosed, a similar academic research by independent scientists has run an experiment, testing driving performance evaluation based on virtual reality tech. The researchers conducted driving simulator experiments to measure various driving behaviors under many different driving conditions, in order to examine the participants' visual acuity. The virtual simulations included two scenarios: daytime and nighttime highway driving. In both cases, three unexpected incidents were created to test the drivers' performance [...].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.

Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Three former Google employees who were fired by the company in 2019 sued Google on Monday, claiming that the company violated the part of its code of conduct that says "Don't Be Evil." "Don't Be Evil" was, famously, Google's motto for years. The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet in 2015, but "Don't Be Evil" is still part of the company's official employee code of conduct: "Remember don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right -- speak up!," the final line of Google's code of conduct states. Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their employment at Google.

The new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google, comes as part of drawn out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25, 2019. Google claimed to fire the workers for leaking "confidential" information to the press, and because they engaged in "systematic searches" for information "outside the scope of their job." But the software engineers say they were fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which at the time was caging migrants and separating parents from children. They circulated a company-wide petition requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP or ICE. The three workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman, are now suing Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California public policy. California sued Trump in 2019 over the indefinite detention of migrant children. "The new complaint alleges that all three of the fired employees saw Google's collaboration with CBP under the Trump administration as 'evil' and had followed Google's mandate to call out unethical conduct by protesting the company's actions," the report adds. "It claims that Google never informed the fired employees that they had in any way violated the company's 'data security policy,' and that none of the employees had engaged in 'systematic searches.' They had only accessed documents that any full-time Google employee could have found on their own, court documents say."

Seeking to leverage a boom in food-delivery apps, Reef and competitors build restaurant kitchens in warehouses or trailers, which are meant to be cheaper and nimbler than traditional storefronts. From a report: Business models vary, but Reef generally acts as a franchisee, preparing and selling food with its own workers and paying a restaurant brand a percentage of each order. The concept has become particularly popular during the pandemic, as food delivery became clutch for many consumers and restaurants looked for cheaper places to prepare food they were delivering, not serving. Investors have poured more than $3.5 billion into ghost-kitchen startups in the past three years, according to data tracker PitchBook Data, a large slug of funding for a fledgling sector. Much of that funding has come from tech-focused investors who want the rapid growth often seen in software companies -- and delivery apps, such as DoorDash.

Reef's operational strains illustrate the challenges of meeting investors' high expectations in the food business, a sector typically defined by low profit margins and modest growth and one that depends on executing daily in the nondigital economy with workers, supplies and logistics. Reef, backed by investors including SoftBank Group, has said it plans to add thousands of mobile kitchens in parking lots around the world. The company says it currently has about 350. Big brands have begun to warm to the concept. Chick-fil-A and Yum Brands' KFC have been experimenting with their own versions of ghost kitchens, seeing them as a potential area for growth. Wendy's has joined with Reef in a deal that calls for Reef to open and operate up to 700 locations in North America, and the U.K. Reef's rivals include CloudKitchens, founded by Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber Technologies.

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people," Reuters reported Monday, citing internal documents. From the report: A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government's procurement website -- reported in the media for the first time -- details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases. A 5 million yuan ($782,000) contract was awarded on Sept. 17 to Chinese tech company Neusoft (600718.SS), which was required to finish building the system within two months of signing the contract, separate documents published on the Henan government procurement website showed. Reuters was unable to establish if the system is currently operating.

China is trying to build what some security experts describe as one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance technology networks, with millions of cameras in public places and increasing use of techniques such as smartphone monitoring and facial recognition. U.S.-based surveillance research firm IPVM, which has closely tracked the network's expansion and first identified the Henan document, said the tender was unique in specifying journalists as surveillance targets and providing a blueprint for public security authorities to quickly locate them and obstruct their work.

The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.

The New York Times tells the remarkable story of Uber's need for more intelligence gathering back in 2016: Uber was expanding aggressively into foreign markets. The pushback was swift and sometimes violent. Taxi drivers staged widespread protests, and in Nairobi, Kenya, several Uber cars were lit on fire and drivers were beaten. Competitors in China and India used sophisticated methods to collect Uber's data and undercut its prices. To fight back, Uber began to recruit a team of former C.I.A. officers like [Nick] Gicinto, law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts. The team would gather intelligence about threats against Uber drivers and executives, and investigate competing companies and potential acquisitions. "They didn't know what was going on, on the ground," Mr. Gicinto said. "They recognized that they needed somebody who understood the human aspect of these things and understood foreign environments...."

In addition to Uber's recruitment from the C.I.A., Google, Facebook and Amazon poached hackers from the National Security Agency to fend off cyberattacks, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to staff teams responsible for fielding law enforcement requests and former Pentagon officials to advise on defense contracts.
A history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle tells the Times it's not at all unusual for tech companies to hire from the intelligence community, a long-standing practice to protect intellectual secrets.

So for example, Uber's team "outsourced some of the projects to intelligence firms, which sent contractors to infiltrate driver protests... the team filmed Waymo's vehicles and scraped competitors' apps to collect pricing information." The men who gathered intelligence for Uber were supposed to be ghosts. For years, they were un-Googleable sentries, quietly informing executives about the actions of competitors, opponents and disgruntled employees. But the secrecy of the tightknit team ended abruptly in 2017 when one of its members turned on the others, accusing them of stealing trade secrets, wiretapping and destroying evidence. They flouted the law while carrying out Uber's dirtiest missions, their former co-worker, Richard Jacobs, claimed in an April 2017 email sent to top Uber executives. His lawyer followed up with a letter that said the team went so far as to hack foreign governments and wiretap Uber's own employees.

But Mr. Jacobs's most damning allegations of illegal activity were not true. In June, nearly four years after his claims drew wide attention, he retracted them. In a letter to his former co-workers that he wrote as part of a legal settlement, Mr. Jacobs explained that he had never intended to suggest that they broke the law. "I am sorry," he wrote. "I regret not having clarified the statements at an earlier time and regret any distress or injury my statements may have caused." Gary Bostwick, a lawyer for Mr. Jacobs, declined to comment....

Testifying in court, Mr. Jacobs seemed to distance himself from some of the claims in the letter. He hadn't had much time to review it before his lawyer sent it, he said, and he wasn't sure if Mr. Gicinto and his other former co-workers had broken the law. "I did not believe it was patently illegal. I had questions about the ethics of it," Mr. Jacobs testified. "It felt overly aggressive and invasive and inappropriate."
The Times reports that Uber had paid $7.5 million to cooperate with an investigation into Jacobs' allegations (according to legal filings), and while the findings were never made public, the co-workers accused in the letter "said they had been told that they were cleared of any wrongdoing...

"In 2021, Mr. Jacobs settled the libel lawsuit by his former co-workers. The terms of the settlement are not public."