The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday released an overview of the federal government's automated vehicles policy, which includes a checklist for makers on various aspects of the cars they are developing, as well as guidelines to states on evolving a common framework for regulating the new technologies. "Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year," wrote Obama in an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Monday. That's what harnessing technology for good can look like. But we have to get it right," he added. Obama wrote that the quickest way to slam the brakes on innovation is if the public loses confidence in the safety of the new technology, and the responsibility of both government and industry is to make sure it doesn't happen.

The U.S. government has issued its first rules for automated vehicles. They include a 15-point set of "safety assessment" guidelines for self-driving systems. These cover issues such as cybersecurity, black box recordings to aid crash investigations, and how a car would deal with potential ethical conundrums on the road. The new policy will play a central role in shaping how autonomous vehicles proceed toward commercial use. Many automotive and technology companies are testing self-driving vehicles, and ride-hailing company Uber even lets customers in Pittsburgh order rides in prototypes (see "My Self Driving Uber Needed Human Help").

Even a year ago, the idea of autonomous cars roaming American streets seemed farfetched, and automakers were claiming to be focused on "stepping stone," incremental technology. Carmakers are deploying robots, and federal regulators in charge of how humans drive are finally catching up. Today, US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced guidelines that define a new approach to regulating--and encouraging--self-driving cars. In an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, President Obama wrote, "Government sometimes gets it wrong when it comes to rapidly changing technologies. That's why this new policy is flexible and designed to evolve with new advances."

President Barack Obama hasn't had to drive himself around for years. And he may not have to after he leaves office either. Obama Monday threw his weight behind self-driving cars -- as long as they're safe. His op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which will appear in Tuesday's print editions, lauds American innovation and comes just a day after Lyft CEO John Zimmer predicted the end of individual vehicle ownership and a week after Uber began an autonomous vehicle experiment in Pittsburgh. "The progress we've seen in automated vehicles over the past several years shows what our country is capable of when our engineers and entrepreneurs, our scientists and our students – backed by federal and private investment – pour their best work and brightest ideas toward a big, bold goal," Obama said.

Any doubt that driverless cars, trucks and buses are on a fast track to join their human counterparts on the nation's highways may be knocked aside Tuesday, when the Department of Transportation releases long-awaited guidelines for the development of autonomous cars. The guidelines, which specify safety criteria and promise to eliminate red tape, will help "bring lifesaving technologies to the roads safely while providing innovators the space they need to develop new solutions," said the U.S. Department of Transportation in an early summary released Monday. Automakers and tech companies have been barreling ahead in their race to churn out driverless vehicles, prompting the government to play catch-up when it comes to how to regulate the technology. Under the guidelines, car manufacturers and researchers will be required to submit to a "15-point safety assessment" for driverless cars, including how the vehicles respond to system failure, whether they make data available for crash reconstruction and even whether their artificial intelligence software takes driving ethics into account. The Transportation Department will hasten approval or rejection of special exemptions to regulations for driverless cars, with an upper limit of six months.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Federal regulators, faced with a growing number of self-driving car tests on roads across the U.S., plan to issue a flurry of new guidelines Tuesday aimed at automakers and tech companies. The U.S. Department of Transportation will require any new tech to meet a 15-point safety assessment, consider new powers to allow administrators to limit the deployment of experimental vehicles, and will issue a model for state self-driving car policies aimed at developing a cohesive set of national regulations. Officials will solicit public comments on the topic of self-driving car regulations for the next 60 days on the Transportation Department website and plan to update self-driving car policies annually. "We're laying it out there, what we care about, and inviting the industry to show us how they meet those standards," Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters during a briefing late Monday. "Some companies haven't dealt with us, but they'll learn quickly we can go really deep on these topics. We want the public to be safe."

You are statistically incredibly more likely to die in a car crash than on an airplane, but people still fear flying more than driving. Why? Partly, psychologists say, we blow the risks out of proportion because we don't like feeling out of control of our fate. Our life is in the pilot's hands. Self-driving cars will inevitably give people a similar feeling, even if they are much safer than today's vehicles. Computers are expected to be vastly better drivers than humans, but that requires people to turn over the wheel--knowing they won't have control over the computer's split-second decisions if there is an accident.

In a recent article we discussed the topic of cybersecurity and gave you 10 publicly traded cyber security companies you could invest in to play this theme. As with any technology niche, some of the most exciting players are often startups because they are high risk and high reward. For retail investors, it becomes very difficult to invest in startups but nonetheless you should be aware of what they are up to because those publicly traded stocks you hold might just be displaced by a nimble startup. So how can we tell which cybersecurity startups are the hottest? The best way is to follow the money and look at what venture capital (VC) investors think is hot.

A man in a wheelchair was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in a Pomona neighborhood on Sunday night, police said. Officers found the victim, whose identity has not been released, suffering from fatal injuries on a sidewalk in the 900 block of West Holt Avenue at 11:12 p.m., according to the Pomona Police Department. Paramedics pronounced the man dead. The driver fled before the officers arrived in the area, police said. The department's Major Accident Investigation Team is investigating the incident.

Around midnight one Saturday in January, Sarah Jeong was on her couch, browsing Twitter, when she spontane ously wrote what she now bitterly refers to as "the tweet that launched a thousand ships." The 28-year-old journalist and author of The Internet of Garbage, a book on spam and online harassment, had been watching Bernie Sanders boosters attacking feminists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. In what was meant to be a hyper bolic joke, she tweeted out a list of political carica tures, one of which called the typical Sanders fan a "vitriolic crypto racist who spends 20 hours a day on the Internet yelling at women." The ill-advised late-night tweet was, Jeong admits, provocative and absurd--she even supported Sanders. But what happened next was the kind of backlash that's all too familiar to women, minorities, and anyone who has a strong opinion online. By the time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of Sanders supporters were calling her a neoliberal shill. By sunrise, a broader, darker wave of abuse had begun. She received nude photos and links to disturbing videos. One troll promised to "rip each one of [her] hairs out" and "twist her tits clear off." The attacks continued for weeks. "I was in crisis mode," she recalls.