This Week in Tech News

Lyft went public this week, and on shares, it was worth $23 Billion. Leo thinks that Wall Street is banking on a future when these ride-sharing companies will have driverless vehicles. Until then, Lyft has to share the fare with its drivers and even subsidize nearly 40% of what cabs would normally charge. But once driverless cars are the norm, Wall Street believes the profits will come. But the real question is, would you get into a driverless car and trust that the computer will get you to your destination safely? Especially with other human drivers on the road with it?

The City of Los Angeles will now allow rented scooters on the streets, but there's a catch. The scooter rental companies must transmit location data to the city within 24 hours to ensure code compliance. As one can imagine, there is a privacy issue and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy groups are getting involved. Leo says that the data would be anonymized, so it won't point to any specific person. Companies also have the option of saying no to the data, but they would have only 3,000 scooters.

Google announced STADIA, a new streaming gaming service that will enable gamers to play games using even the simplest of devices. The cloud is your platform. Leo says though, that while interesting, Google didn't announce a price or a date the service will launch. But when it does launch, it could be quite tempting to the casual gamer who doesn't want to invest in a lot of hardware to play games. But it'll really impact data caps and will be a non-starter for people living in rural areas. And if your internet connection has a lot of lag (latency), you'll hate it. 

There's a huge security flaw in WINRAR, that will enable hackers to take over your computer. So Leo advises that if you use WINRAR to zip/unzip your files, that you should update to the latest beta version. But you have to go to the WINRAR site and manually download the update. There is no automatic update.