Tribune News Service

The state's IT infrastructure is decades old and has been implicated in the shameful backlog of unemployment claims and in last year's voter-registration debacle at the Department of Motor Vehicles. However, if this is a tech issue, then why was it appropriate for the state's top public health officer to step down in the middle of a public health crisis?

Five months into the biggest crisis of Gavin Newsom's governorship, technology problems have become major stumbling blocks to his coronavirus strategy.

The governor said that although Dr. Sonia Angell resigned Sunday, effective immediately, he bears ultimate responsibility when technology or human error occurs in state government.

Teams from the California departments of Technology and Public Health continue to “work around the clock to address the underreporting issue,” a Public Health spokeswoman said.

In a letter Wednesday, more than half the members of the California Legislature called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to begin paying residents immediately in many cases where unemployment claims have been stalled in the Employment Development Department's system. The lawmakers also suggested several possible technological changes and updates to the system, which has come under considerable scrutiny recently.

The California Department of Public Health confirmed the undercounting in an update to its dashboard after individual counties, including in the Sacramento area and Southern California, reported earlier in the week that they’d been made aware of the problem.

The director of the Employment Development Department told members of a California State Assembly budget subcommittee that a “longer-term solution” is needed to address issues with the agency’s tech infrastructure.

The California Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will start collecting information on COVID-19 patients’ sexual orientation and gender identity – which is also an aim of an active Senate Bill amended Monday to include the reporting of that information for all communicable diseases reported to HHS.

Officials are using the COVID-19 pandemic to reinvent how the city operates, including greater use of technology, more people working from home, streamlined problem-solving and increased focus on city assets like buildings.

The only way to know whether a program's findings are accurate enough to be used as evidence in court, some say, is to examine its source code for bias and inaccuracy. But companies that sell such software to law enforcement organizations often state in court that their programs are trade secrets.

As November looms, county election officials say they’ve been working behind the scenes to redeem voters’ confidence after meltdowns that left gaps in trust among voters, poll workers and candidates.

National protests have prompted Amazon to halt police use of its facial recognition tech for one year, but advocates take issue with the company’s law enforcement partnerships, which enable police to access video recordings from doorbell cameras in private homes.

Malware attacks on prominent businesses and institutions are nothing new. But experts say the shift to working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic may be making it easier for hackers to find a way in.

Santa Cruz's move this week was backed by a coalition of dozens of civil liberty and racial justice groups, including the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Santa Cruz chapter of the NAACP.

Police officials say the technology is important to its goal of reducing gun violence. Opponents say the devices also increase the frequency of police interactions, which they say increases the risk for Black residents of becoming the victim of police brutality or harassment.

Poll books, the digital equivalent to paper voter rolls used at traditional polling places, suffered from major delays due to network and capacity issues, according to the report by the the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office.

If utilities cut power again this summer, as they did last year, home offices that were set up during the pandemic could go dark and stay dark for days, and remote workers will have no corporate offices to flee to for power.

Faculty unions and some key legislators call Calbright a botched experiment that duplicates the work of traditional community colleges. Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley, however, says lawmakers should be accelerating online learning amid soaring unemployment.

In fact, the grand jury found that the county's computer network has been hacked into and breached at least five times between July 2017 and August 2018. In addition, more than half of Marin's cities — Corte Madera, Fairfax, Larkspur, Novato, Sausalito and Tiburon — have had their cybersecurity compromised.

The app — or an alternative system that allows for the same type of employee-employer assessments and data reporting — will be required for both private-sector and government employees under Sonoma County's shelter-in-place order as of June 1, as well as mandatory temperature checks for workers.

Marin County government and most of its 11 cities and towns have fallen victim to financial fraud and network breaches — most of which were not reported to the public, the report says.

Glydways, a South San Francisco-based company, is in talks with Richmond, San Jose and other cities to develop transportation systems, and pathways are envisioned in Alameda, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties.

The department already has been using the software as part of an 18-month trial with maker Veritone, a Costa Mesa-based company. The new contract is for $35,000 for a one-year subscription that runs through April 2021.

If Attorney General Xavier Becerra sticks to the law's timetable, companies will face potential fines of up to $7,500 per violation in two months. That prospect has created anxiety for small, struggling brick-and-mortar shops, said the president of the California Retailers Association.

The utility does aerial inspections that cause little disruption to residents and are intended to protect its system against fire ignitions.