I wonder how this will affect their IPO and subsequent responsibilities to shareholders. Don't they have to make reasonable disclosures of potential risks as part of the process and as part of being a public company once it happens? Can't imagine people are going to be happy with yeah we did potentially illegal shit but it's encrypted and secret so we're fine will go over well. There's been a ton of skeletons falling out their closet already but it's Uber so who knows what else there may be.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
So the start of the Uber-Waymo trial is being delayed.
It's being delayed because the Judge is having to review newly available evidence that Uber has been withholding evidence from the court. From the tone of the article, the Judge in the case is fucking pissed:
“We’re going to have to put the trial off,” Alsup said. “If even half of what’s in that letter is true, it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to trial and not be able to prove the things said in that letter.
“To my mind, my court order said stuff like that had to be produced. It was withheld from me. Morrison Foerster (a law firm representing Uber) and the rest of the Uber lawyers withheld evidence, (despite) a direct order to produce stuff like that.”
Edit:
Jacobs confirmed that Uber offered training on how to "impede, obstruct or influence" ongoing legal investigations. Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.
He confirmed that Uber used encrypted, ephemeral messaging “to protect sensitive information and ensure we didn’t create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation.” It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.
...There's no way any of that is legal.
One thing that you keep seeing with techies is this idea that if you prevent a paper trail from forming, that will protect you. No, what actually happens is that the court realizes that you were being too clever for your own good, and makes negative inferences.
It's more that they think they can tech around the law, problem being that lawyers know the law better than them.
A lot of companies train their employees to watch what they say in permanent paper trails like email in case of future litigation. It sounds like Uber might have taken it a step further though, if they really did tell their employees that they intended to actively impede an investigation, or encouraged them to knowingly commit illegal acts with instructions for how not to get caught.
For years, Uber secretly spied on key executives, drivers and employees at rival ride-hailing companies as part of a larger intelligence-gathering operation that spanned multiple countries, according to a letter made public in a federal court on Friday.
The 37-page letter, written on behalf of Richard Jacobs, a former Uber security employee, detailed what he described as the formation of separate internal teams designed “expressly for the purpose of acquiring trade secrets” from major ride-sharing competitors around the world.
Those teams then worked to infiltrate chat rooms and scraped websites for data on competitors, according to the letter. Uber security employees occasionally impersonated drivers to gain access to chat groups, illegally recorded phone calls, and secretly wiretapped and tailed executives at rival companies over the course of 2016, the letter said.
“Uber has engaged, and continues to engage, in illegal intelligence gathering on a global scale,” Mr. Jacobs wrote.
At this point, they're apparently a white Persian short of being a James Bond villain.
So the start of the Uber-Waymo trial is being delayed.
It's being delayed because the Judge is having to review newly available evidence that Uber has been withholding evidence from the court. From the tone of the article, the Judge in the case is fucking pissed:
“We’re going to have to put the trial off,” Alsup said. “If even half of what’s in that letter is true, it would be a huge injustice to force Waymo to go to trial and not be able to prove the things said in that letter.
“To my mind, my court order said stuff like that had to be produced. It was withheld from me. Morrison Foerster (a law firm representing Uber) and the rest of the Uber lawyers withheld evidence, (despite) a direct order to produce stuff like that.”
Edit:
Jacobs confirmed that Uber offered training on how to "impede, obstruct or influence" ongoing legal investigations. Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.
He confirmed that Uber used encrypted, ephemeral messaging “to protect sensitive information and ensure we didn’t create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation.” It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.
...There's no way any of that is legal.
One thing that you keep seeing with techies is this idea that if you prevent a paper trail from forming, that will protect you. No, what actually happens is that the court realizes that you were being too clever for your own good, and makes negative inferences.
It's more that they think they can tech around the law, problem being that lawyers know the law better than them.
It's not just that lawyers know the law better it's that the law doesn't work the way the techies think it does. The techies think it is like a rule book with a strict black an white definition of what is and isn't allowed.
The law is not like that, especially common law systems. Intent, not just execution, matters.
Uber is officially a transport company and not a digital service, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.
The ride-hailing firm argued it was an information society service - helping people to make contact with each other electronically - and not a cab firm.
The case arose after Uber was told to obey local taxi rules in Barcelona.
...
In its ruling, the ECJ said that a service whose purpose was "to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys" must be classified as "a service in the field of transport" in EU law.
It added: "As EU law currently stands, it is for the member states to regulate the conditions under which such services are to be provided in conformity with the general rules of the treaty on the functioning of the EU."
...
This ruling sets out clearly that Uber is, in legal terms at least, a transport company. Uber itself insists that there won't be a huge immediate impact on its business, but it could still affect how it operates in future and how it liaises with national governments.
Pretty sensible of the ECJ to designate Uber as a transport company. It’s still up to member nations what kind of regulations they want to impose, but they’ll be regulations on transportations.
Uber is officially a transport company and not a digital service, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.
The ride-hailing firm argued it was an information society service - helping people to make contact with each other electronically - and not a cab firm.
The case arose after Uber was told to obey local taxi rules in Barcelona.
...
In its ruling, the ECJ said that a service whose purpose was "to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys" must be classified as "a service in the field of transport" in EU law.
It added: "As EU law currently stands, it is for the member states to regulate the conditions under which such services are to be provided in conformity with the general rules of the treaty on the functioning of the EU."
...
This ruling sets out clearly that Uber is, in legal terms at least, a transport company. Uber itself insists that there won't be a huge immediate impact on its business, but it could still affect how it operates in future and how it liaises with national governments.
Pretty sensible of the ECJ to designate Uber as a transport company. It’s still up to member nations what kind of regulations they want to impose, but they’ll be regulations on transportations.
What's funny is that geeks cheered when the courts ruled "but with a computer" didn't make for a new business process, but this ruling will get denounced for being the same exact thing.
Also, Uber has used the "we're not a livery firm" argument to dodge things like compliance with disability access laws. This ruling ends that in Europe.
Today Uber, the biggest ride-sharing company in much of the world, got its hands on even more money by selling up to 20 percent of itself to Softbank and other investors in exchange for a giant sack of cash. But those investment dollars come with a catch. In order to raise more money, Uber sold a chunk of itself at a lower price than investors were once willing to pay. And with that, the company’s estimated worth suddenly looks incredibly different. It’s dropped by more than $20 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Uber has made headlines for years over how much investors imagined the company was worth, based on what now looks like generous guesswork. But for more than a year, that figure was a jaw-dropping $70 billion. Overnight and into the new year, you’re going to see a different number in headlines about Uber’s business. According to the Wall Street Journal, that price is now $48 billion—still very, very big. But big as it is, we’re looking at a more than 31-percent drop from its earlier value. Uber’s unreal-looking valuation, it turns out, really was quite unreal.
Reality is finally catching up to Uber in a number of ways.
Uber and their rabid fans are probably the only ones that don't believe they are a transit service. From what I've seen in marketing, no one there doesn't consider them a transit service.
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
Is a mini cab firm a transport company? By minicab firm I mean a dispatcher service that takes requests from members of the public and routes them to a fleet of car drivers who can choose to accept the request and drive to the member of the public's location to pick them up and take hem to their destination.
If so, in what way is Uber different from a mini cab service?
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
Our entrenched interests in this case are transport boards for cities such as London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, the latter of which brought the case.
Especially in London, residents have direct control over the executive of the TfL which is the mayor. In the Netherlands, the regional public transport is regulated by provincial government - implementations of which can be voted on by local councils. Long story short; as a citizen you have a fairly good way to exercise control over how local transport is regulated, so if you want Uber to continue operating as is... you can find a candidate to vote for.
And while we may start arguing about lobbying efforts, cheap transport is definitely a wedge with which you can beat back a lobbying effort. So personally, I think it'd be a very fair fight the outcome of which is definitely not a foregone conclusion in the long-term.
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
Well, yes.
There's no surprise that jurisdictions would rule in favour of entrenched interests, such as taxi drivers trying to make minimum wage, against American tech companies, who are bypassing the local regulation that tries to prevent the tragedy of the commons for wages of local taxi drivers.
Honestly, I believe that all these online service matching apps, whose only competitive advantage is to bypass local regulation, should be made illegal and aggressively pursued until such a time as they deign to play by the rules.
Edit: I mean at some point, we either have to figure that these jobs are not important to keep people gainfully employed in and allow the gig economy to fill them on the cheap, or the regulation that protects the jobs is important and woe betide those that teaches it.
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
I agree that uber is a transit company, and it is by far the weakest argument uber makes to say that they aren't. They are a different model for that kind of business but that is clearly the business they are in.
I also think many western european countries have far better public transit solutions which include cabs than the vast majority of America. And in the places America has great public transit, the cabs are almost always privately owned and incredibly unfriendly to the consumer so that they can hold onto thei rmonopolies.
Uber pushing their model into Europe was honestly a bad idea; you can't justify their existence there like you can in America where cab services straight up sucked / continue to suck
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
No surprise to me that the ECJ would rule in favor of entrenched interests. The EU has been consistently hostile toward American tech companies just in general.
I can assure you that this is most definitely not the case in the UK, where us tech companies are given the royal treatment. I mean Cameron even had the husband of Google's pr executive as his chief technology advisor for crying out loud.
They designed a trivial app and don't want to be considered a transit company.
It's basically sophistry meant to reduce Uber's legal and regulatory exposure - for example, if they're not a livery service, then they're not obliged to meet requirements for disabled access (which would most likely require them to actually maintain vehicles for said access.) The problem isn't that the ECJ called them on their gooseshit, but that it's taken so long for someone to do so.
They designed a trivial app and don't want to be considered a transit company.
It's basically sophistry meant to reduce Uber's legal and regulatory exposure - for example, if they're not a livery service, then they're not obliged to meet requirements for disabled access (which would most likely require them to actually maintain vehicles for said access.) The problem isn't that the ECJ called them on their gooseshit, but that it's taken so long for someone to do so.
afaik uber just hadn't run into regulation that required an ECJ decision. Here in the Netherlands it's not really relevant for example, since taxi drivers are independent-ish contractors as a rule with their own labour agreement and all uber drivers must be taxi drivers driving an actual taxi. basically regardless of whether you're a transport service or an energy company or a school you have to pay and deal with the taxis your hire as taxis. the thing is that countries are obligated to have regulation that is at least equal to EU standards, it's fine to be even stricter or have a different approach as it were as long as it complies with EU standards.
like they said, they already operate under transport law in most countries. this is only a possible problem for the future in other countries.
In May 2015 about 10 investigators for the Quebec tax authority burst into Uber Technologies Inc.’s office in Montreal. The authorities believed Uber had violated tax laws and had a warrant to collect evidence. Managers on-site knew what to do, say people with knowledge of the event.
Like managers at Uber’s hundreds of offices abroad, they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco. When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.
Most tech companies don’t expect police to regularly raid their offices, but Uber isn’t most companies. The ride-hailing startup’s reputation for flouting local labor laws and taxi rules has made it a favorite target for law enforcement agencies around the world. That’s where this remote system, called Ripley, comes in. From spring 2015 until late 2016, Uber routinely used Ripley to thwart police raids in foreign countries, say three people with knowledge of the system. Allusions to its nature can be found in a smattering of court filings, but its details, scope, and origin haven’t been previously reported.
You know, acting like you're a mob outfit should have raised some red flags for people there.
In May 2015 about 10 investigators for the Quebec tax authority burst into Uber Technologies Inc.’s office in Montreal. The authorities believed Uber had violated tax laws and had a warrant to collect evidence. Managers on-site knew what to do, say people with knowledge of the event.
Like managers at Uber’s hundreds of offices abroad, they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco. When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.
Most tech companies don’t expect police to regularly raid their offices, but Uber isn’t most companies. The ride-hailing startup’s reputation for flouting local labor laws and taxi rules has made it a favorite target for law enforcement agencies around the world. That’s where this remote system, called Ripley, comes in. From spring 2015 until late 2016, Uber routinely used Ripley to thwart police raids in foreign countries, say three people with knowledge of the system. Allusions to its nature can be found in a smattering of court filings, but its details, scope, and origin haven’t been previously reported.
You know, acting like you're a mob outfit should have raised some red flags for people there.
...
I'm actually offended that they dared use Ripley's name for a tool used to help a corporation harm people.
They are not Ripley, Hicks, Vasquez or even Gorman. They are Burke.
That's unbelievable, their processes for intentionally circumventing the law are so well defined... A company like this should not be allowed to exist.
That's unbelievable, their processes for intentionally circumventing the law are so well defined... A company like this should not be allowed to exist.
Again, it's the techie mentality of "no trail, no problems." Except that the last time I checked, interfering in an investigation is a crime.
And one thing that's amazed me is I've seen people trying to defend the use of Ripley as a tool to protect information from the government. This mentality utterly boggles me.
And one thing that's amazed me is I've seen people trying to defend the use of Ripley as a tool to protect information from the government. This mentality utterly boggles me.
I can... kinda see where that comes from?
I mean, it's dumb and wrong because it's not protecting information from "the government" so much as it's protecting information from a lawful investigation
But the idea that a company is going to extremes to say "fuck you" to the government when it comes to monitoring it's citizens is an idea that I can see some people getting behind
With a warrant you can’t go “hey log into this computer for me”?
They called headquarters and said, via codewords, said "We are being raided by law enforcement, please disable all our logins so we may look like we are complying while hiding the fact that we are willfully not complying."
With a warrant you can’t go “hey log into this computer for me”?
In America a warrant can’t do that, not sure about Canada. But that’s besides the point here. If you’re locked out from the server located in another state/country, physically preventing you from accessing data even if you tried, then the police are SOL. Well, for that charge. Those employees may have a whole new set of charges they may be facing now.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
With a warrant you can’t go “hey log into this computer for me”?
In America a warrant can’t do that, not sure about Canada. But that’s besides the point here. If you’re locked out from the server located in another state/country, physically preventing you from accessing data even if you tried, then the police are SOL. Well, for that charge. Those employees may have a whole new set of charges they may be facing now.
Not defending this but rather asking a question with some level of distinction here.
If the data is offsite, does the warrant cover getting data located in another facility, country, etc?
This might be the very best kind of bullshit pedantry that they might actually succeed at, at least until a warrant asks for the data from the data center facility.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
With a warrant you can’t go “hey log into this computer for me”?
In America a warrant can’t do that, not sure about Canada. But that’s besides the point here. If you’re locked out from the server located in another state/country, physically preventing you from accessing data even if you tried, then the police are SOL. Well, for that charge. Those employees may have a whole new set of charges they may be facing now.
Not defending this but rather asking a question with some level of distinction here.
If the data is offsite, does the warrant cover getting data located in another facility, country, etc?
This might be the very best kind of bullshit pedantry that they might actually succeed at, at least until a warrant asks for the data from the data center facility.
Potentially I would think it’s possible. But I’d hazard a guess that Montreal authorities have zero ability to do so since the data is in a wholly different country. Their warrants wouldn’t have any authority in San Francisco. Their best option is to probably to try and get the FBI to help.
Posts
It's more that they think they can tech around the law, problem being that lawyers know the law better than them.
At this point, they're apparently a white Persian short of being a James Bond villain.
It's not just that lawyers know the law better it's that the law doesn't work the way the techies think it does. The techies think it is like a rule book with a strict black an white definition of what is and isn't allowed.
The law is not like that, especially common law systems. Intent, not just execution, matters.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Pretty sensible of the ECJ to designate Uber as a transport company. It’s still up to member nations what kind of regulations they want to impose, but they’ll be regulations on transportations.
What's funny is that geeks cheered when the courts ruled "but with a computer" didn't make for a new business process, but this ruling will get denounced for being the same exact thing.
Reality is finally catching up to Uber in a number of ways.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
That's an... interesting way to put it.
Is a mini cab firm a transport company? By minicab firm I mean a dispatcher service that takes requests from members of the public and routes them to a fleet of car drivers who can choose to accept the request and drive to the member of the public's location to pick them up and take hem to their destination.
If so, in what way is Uber different from a mini cab service?
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Our entrenched interests in this case are transport boards for cities such as London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, the latter of which brought the case.
Especially in London, residents have direct control over the executive of the TfL which is the mayor. In the Netherlands, the regional public transport is regulated by provincial government - implementations of which can be voted on by local councils. Long story short; as a citizen you have a fairly good way to exercise control over how local transport is regulated, so if you want Uber to continue operating as is... you can find a candidate to vote for.
And while we may start arguing about lobbying efforts, cheap transport is definitely a wedge with which you can beat back a lobbying effort. So personally, I think it'd be a very fair fight the outcome of which is definitely not a foregone conclusion in the long-term.
Well, yes.
There's no surprise that jurisdictions would rule in favour of entrenched interests, such as taxi drivers trying to make minimum wage, against American tech companies, who are bypassing the local regulation that tries to prevent the tragedy of the commons for wages of local taxi drivers.
Honestly, I believe that all these online service matching apps, whose only competitive advantage is to bypass local regulation, should be made illegal and aggressively pursued until such a time as they deign to play by the rules.
Edit: I mean at some point, we either have to figure that these jobs are not important to keep people gainfully employed in and allow the gig economy to fill them on the cheap, or the regulation that protects the jobs is important and woe betide those that teaches it.
I also think many western european countries have far better public transit solutions which include cabs than the vast majority of America. And in the places America has great public transit, the cabs are almost always privately owned and incredibly unfriendly to the consumer so that they can hold onto thei rmonopolies.
Uber pushing their model into Europe was honestly a bad idea; you can't justify their existence there like you can in America where cab services straight up sucked / continue to suck
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I can assure you that this is most definitely not the case in the UK, where us tech companies are given the royal treatment. I mean Cameron even had the husband of Google's pr executive as his chief technology advisor for crying out loud.
They designed a trivial app and don't want to be considered a transit company.
Tech companies don't follow the same regulations as transit companies.
It's basically sophistry meant to reduce Uber's legal and regulatory exposure - for example, if they're not a livery service, then they're not obliged to meet requirements for disabled access (which would most likely require them to actually maintain vehicles for said access.) The problem isn't that the ECJ called them on their gooseshit, but that it's taken so long for someone to do so.
afaik uber just hadn't run into regulation that required an ECJ decision. Here in the Netherlands it's not really relevant for example, since taxi drivers are independent-ish contractors as a rule with their own labour agreement and all uber drivers must be taxi drivers driving an actual taxi. basically regardless of whether you're a transport service or an energy company or a school you have to pay and deal with the taxis your hire as taxis. the thing is that countries are obligated to have regulation that is at least equal to EU standards, it's fine to be even stricter or have a different approach as it were as long as it complies with EU standards.
like they said, they already operate under transport law in most countries. this is only a possible problem for the future in other countries.
You know, acting like you're a mob outfit should have raised some red flags for people there.
...
I'm actually offended that they dared use Ripley's name for a tool used to help a corporation harm people.
They are not Ripley, Hicks, Vasquez or even Gorman. They are Burke.
Again, it's the techie mentality of "no trail, no problems." Except that the last time I checked, interfering in an investigation is a crime.
I can... kinda see where that comes from?
I mean, it's dumb and wrong because it's not protecting information from "the government" so much as it's protecting information from a lawful investigation
But the idea that a company is going to extremes to say "fuck you" to the government when it comes to monitoring it's citizens is an idea that I can see some people getting behind
It's never RICO.
The office in question was in Canada so even if it were RICO it wouldn't be RICO.
It is pretty definitely illegal as fuck though.
They called headquarters and said, via codewords, said "We are being raided by law enforcement, please disable all our logins so we may look like we are complying while hiding the fact that we are willfully not complying."
In America a warrant can’t do that, not sure about Canada. But that’s besides the point here. If you’re locked out from the server located in another state/country, physically preventing you from accessing data even if you tried, then the police are SOL. Well, for that charge. Those employees may have a whole new set of charges they may be facing now.
Not defending this but rather asking a question with some level of distinction here.
If the data is offsite, does the warrant cover getting data located in another facility, country, etc?
This might be the very best kind of bullshit pedantry that they might actually succeed at, at least until a warrant asks for the data from the data center facility.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Potentially I would think it’s possible. But I’d hazard a guess that Montreal authorities have zero ability to do so since the data is in a wholly different country. Their warrants wouldn’t have any authority in San Francisco. Their best option is to probably to try and get the FBI to help.