California, Technology | featured news

A Berkeley city councilman has proposed a tiny levy on senders of large batches of unwanted time-wasters. The most courageous politician in California — probably the nation — is a Berkeley city councilman, Gordon Wozniak.

A California woman has been fired from her job as an ice cream store manager after she referred to President Barack Obama with a racial slur on Facebook and wrote “maybe he will get assassinated."

California took the fast lane to the future on Tuesday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that lets self-driving cars onto public roads. Brown rode to the signing ceremony at Google Inc headquarters in the passenger seat of a vehicle that steered itself, a Prius modified by Google. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and State Sen. Alex Padilla, who sponsored the bill, were along for the ride. An engineer for the technology company, Chris Urmson, sat in the driver's seat, but the car drove itself.

The California tax man cometh, and he's headed for the Internet. State tax collectors are preparing to crack down on renegade Internet merchants who don't collect sales taxes, and nearly 100 new state auditors, lawyers and other specialists are being hired to help over the next three years.

Hacker Dojo is equal parts shared office, lecture hall and after-hours salon for a variety of tinkerers, software coders and entrepreneurs who intend to reinvent the future. The idea for Pinterest was cooked up here. The makers of Pebble watches used the space as their West Coast headquarters. Today, however, it is threatened with extinction. City officials in Mountain View have ordered Hacker Dojo to comply with city regulations for offices or move out.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles experienced a statewide computer outage Tuesday, disrupting many in-office services to customers, officials said.

Global Tel Link, which supplies state lockups with pay phones, will install technology to disable cellphones, which have been used by inmates to run criminal enterprises, intimidate witnesses and organize attacks on guards. A private company has agreed to pay millions to install technology in California prisons to block Web searches, text messages and phone calls by inmates using smuggled phones.

Conservative media publisher and activist Andrew Breitbart, who was behind investigations that led to the resignations of former Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York and former U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, has died in Los Angeles. He was 43....

The iPad 3 is widely-tipped to be launched on 7 March as Apple announces a special event in San Francisco.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says his company is now seeing almost 250 million tweets every day, up from 100 million at the beginning of 2011. That’s a billion tweets every four or five days. Costolo made the comments in an on-stage interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Monday night.