And in non-election news today ...
- Over the weekend, a passenger riding in a Lyft vehicle was killed in a crash on Interstate 80, the first fatality connected to a vehicle driven by one of the company's drivers. An insurance industry group told the Chronicle the company's policy should cover the accident. Ride-service company insurance became a big issue after an UberX driver killed 6-year-old Sofia Liu on New Year's Eve last year. (SF Chronicle)
- A new USC Dornsife/LA Times poll shows Californians are taking a mellow approach to the Ebola scare. Just 18 percent of those surveyed said they were "somewhat worried" and 12 percent said they were "very worried." In other findings, 97 percent of those who had watched cable news within the last month had yet to remove the covers from over their heads. (Well, not really.) (SF Weekly)
- HomeAway, a competitor of Airbnb, is not happy about the recently passed law regulating short-term rentals, and the company is expressing said unhappiness in the form of a lawsuit. HomeAway has maintained that the law favors Airbnb because it requires renters to be permanent residents. Unlike Airbnb, most of HomeAway's listings are second homes owned by owners who don't live in the city year-round. The law also requires short-term rental sites to collect hotel tax, which HomeAway says it has no way of doing. Airbnb supports the law. (SF Chronicle)
- A Chinese national has been arrested and is awaiting extradition to San Francisco in connection with four so-called blessing scam incidents. Perpetrators of the scam exploit the superstitions of elderly Chinese by identifying them as suffering from an illness or curse. The fraud has been ongoing over the last several years, and victims have lost thousands of dollars in cash and jewelry. (SF Examiner)
- In other news to make you feel like solving today's Sudoku puzzle maybe isn't such a big accomplishment after all, an eighth-grader who goes to school in San Jose is now the youngest tech entrepreneur to receive venture capital funding, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Shubham Banerjee, 13, is the founder of Braigo Labs, which is trying to develop a low-cost Braille printer.
- You know that World Wide Web thingie you're looking at right now? Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, answered a few questions for the San Jose Mercury News recently. Responding to a query about the shift in computing to mobile, he said, "It's not just the smartphone... People will be using ultra-high-resolution TVs as a Web browsing screen." He also said with the current web standard, HTML 5, the difference between running web content as an app or using its web version has become minor.
- You probably don't care, but today's election might set a California record for apathy. (Sacramento Bee)