A university town with a burgeoning parking problem is spending $80,000 on license plate scanners to automate detection of scofflaws and enhance enforcement.
The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) is ready to put up to $550 million into a long-vacant site on Capitol Mall, aiming to build what would become the tallest office tower in Sacramento. But that doesn’t mean a new crane is coming soon to the banks of the Sacramento River to get started on construction.
An underlying cause of the DMV's misery this year is a familiar one in California state government: A creaky, decades-old computer system that the department agrees is "a 40-year-old dinosaur." The department also said it has had dozens of technology outages in the past 20 months that have disabled operations, sometimes for hours at a time.
Police in recent years have tapped into a vast database of license plate images to track drivers and solve crimes. Few people know, however, that Sacramento County welfare fraud investigators have been using that same data since 2016.
Los Angeles County's rail system will be the first in the United States to deploy body scanners that can detect suicide vests and other improvised explosives. The scanners resemble a small trunk on wheels and can scan people from 30 feet away.
Drones and aircraft equipped with infrared and other technology are helping California fire crews by offering a real-time bird's-eye view — even through smoke and flame — of what's happening on the ground.
California election officials are guarding their voting machines and registration lists against Russian hackers — although no one has spotted any. "I operate under the assumption that hacking is actually happening and California is a target," Secretary of State Alex Padilla says.
One of the world’s largest accounting firms chose the tried-and-true traditional option when the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration asked firms to start using a new online system for filing business sales tax returns. KPMG decided that for now, it was better off submitting tax returns on paper through the mail.
The Registrar of Voters website, which had been redesigned to feature more graphs and other visual elements to make the data more accessible to the general public, remained inaccessible most of the night.
Mineta San Jose International Airport has used facial-recognition technology since June for passengers arriving from other countries. Beginning this fall, that will be expanded to include all departing international travelers, officials said.
In a budget hearing on Tuesday, the Department of Motor Vehicles expressed opposition to a possible audit, calling the proposal a "strain" on resources that would take the department's focus away from reducing wait times.
A May data breach at San Francisco’s Institute on Aging, a nonprofit that provides home care and other support services for seniors in the Bay Area, may have compromised the personal information of nearly 4,000 clients and employees.
California's intensifying wildfires, which have killed at least 50 people since October, have sparked forceful calls by state lawmakers to improve emergency alert systems that the public relies on to be notified of danger during disasters — and Gov. Jerry Brown says he'll consider legislation to do so.
Incompatible software was one of the reasons that 118,000 people were left off Los Angeles County voter rosters on Election Day in June, according to an outside review that was made public Wednesday. The investigation by IBM Security found no evidence that a security breach caused the names to be left off the voter rolls, according to a summary of the report released by the county.
The Board of Equalization hired contractor Fast Enterprises to build a new tax filing system in August 2016, and the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration took over the project last year when the Legislature stripped the Board of Equalization of almost all of its powers.
Sacramento is poised to become the country's electric car capital under an ambitious program that will bring more than 400 sharable cars to city streets by spring, allowing residents to grab one at the spur of the moment and get around without owning a personal vehicle.
After raising prices at the gas pump last year, Gov. Jerry Brown wants to increase taxes on Californians again to overhaul the state's 911 emergency services system.
The Medical Board of California on Thursday announced the launch of the first "license alert" app. Before, patients used a search tool posted on the Medical Board of California’s website to find out whether any changes had been made to their provider’s medical license. Now, the app will directly notify users when changes are made.
Although California has received an "all-clear" from government agencies looking into Russian attempts to hack into voting data for states across the nation, safe today doesn't mean safe tomorrow, a leading computer security expert warned.
The California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System gives police access to national databases maintained by the FBI and the state of Oregon. But sometimes law enforcement workers tap into the vast trove of information improperly, breaking the rules about when the detailed information can be properly accessed.
Data privacy, once a second-order subject in Silicon Valley, has rocketed to the fore thanks to a battery of new laws. Among the big winners in the scramble to comply: Lawyers and corporate information technology firms.
Emails that California utility regulators withheld for years — and recently released under a court order — show that political appointees of Gov. Jerry Brown met privately to discuss state energy policy.
As Silicon Valley considers taxing its tech companies to help fight the downsides of its tech boom — from clogged roadways to skyrocketing housing costs — local leaders are looking north for a lesson on how not to go about it.
The Marin County Sheriff's Department plans to join more than 50 other California police and fire agencies by using drones as part of its operations — but the plan has critics.
Uber’s experiments with self-driving cars are taking a backseat for now, and one result is layoffs in the Bay Area. Last week, the ride-share giant laid off approximately 100 autonomous-vehicle operators in the aftermath of an accident in March in which an Uber self-driving car fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz.
Harry Sharp spent most of the last weekend of June sitting in front of his computer, trying resolutely to register his four newly banned guns on the California Department of Justice’s website.
A bicycle sharing program along the SMART train corridor is coming into focus as Marin and Sonoma counties work toward developing a plan. The program might employ GPS-enabled "smart-bikes" without traditional docking stations; the rider would not need to return the bike to a fixed location.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla says California's voting system wasn't compromised by Russia's attempt to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election. But the issue is in the back of his mind as he looks to safeguard the integrity of the vote. With increased attention to cybersecurity lately, California is making a sizable investment in its election infrastructure.
Facebook has created three Bay Area work hubs that each total at least 1 million square feet, following big leases with two legendary developers that widen its Silicon Valley footprint. The tech titan could employ as many as 19,000 in the expansion sites, located in Fremont, Sunnyvale and Menlo Park.
Ending a dispute over a proposed net neutrality bill, California Democratic legislators said Thursday that they agreed on a proposal that would provide the strongest protections of open access to the Internet in the country in response to last month's federal repeal of similar rules.
