Last year, all four major U.S. payment providers -- Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Discover -- announced plans to remove the requirement that merchants collect signatures for card transactions. Those plans officially go into effect today, or Saturday in the case of Visa. CNET reports: [D]on't despair if you actually like writing your signature at retail stores, because their ultimate demise will likely take a while. The change is only optional, with merchants, not customers, given the new power to decide whether to get rid of signatures. So, if asked to sign, please don't insist to your next cashier that you no longer need to -- it won't work. Also, plenty of retailers will likely want to keep signatures, particularly if their workers are paid based on a lot of tips, or they sell pricey items. Still, the change marks a clear awareness from payment providers that the signature doesn't really work as a strong protector against fraud.

The change is being handled a little differently by each payment provider. For instance, Mastercard, Discover and American Express said they'll let retailers make every kind of card payment optional for a signature, regardless of whether you've got a new chip card or you still swipe. Visa, meanwhile, isn't changing its requirements for payments using a swipe card, but it did relax its policy for chip card and contactless payments like Apple Pay. Visa noted that over 75 percent of face-to-face transactions using its cards in North America already don't require a signature, thanks to lower-value transactions.

Uber drivers are independent contractors, not full-time employees of the ride-hailing company, a federal judge in Philadelphia ruled in what is said to be the first classification of Uber drivers under federal law. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson on Wednesday said San Francisco-based Uber does not exert enough control over drivers for its limo service, UberBLACK, to be considered their employer under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. The drivers work when they want to and are free to nap, run personal errands, or smoke cigarettes in between rides, Baylson said. Jeremy Abay, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he would appeal the ruling to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 3rd Circuit would be the first federal appeals court to consider whether Uber drivers are properly classified as independent contractors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A data breach in 2016 exposed the names, phone numbers and email addresses of more than 20 million people who use Uber's service in the U.S., authorities said on Thursday, as they chastised the ride-hailing company for not revealing the lapse earlier. The Federal Trade Commission said Uber failed to disclose the leak last year as the agency investigated and sanctioned the company for a similar data breach that happened in 2014. "After misleading consumers about its privacy and security practices, Uber compounded its misconduct," said Maureen Ohlhausen, the acting FTC chairman. She announced an expansion of last year's settlement with the company and said the new agreement was "designed to ensure that Uber does not engage in similar misconduct in the future."

In the 2016 breach, intruders in a data-storage service run by Amazon.com Inc. obtained unencrypted consumer personal information relating to U.S. riders and drivers, including 25.6 million names and email addresses, 22.1 million names and mobile phone numbers, and 607,000 names and driver's license numbers, the FTC said in a complaint. Under the revised settlement, Uber could be subject to civil penalties if it fails to notify the FTC of future incidents, and it must submit audits of its data security, the agency said.

Google says it is working on a big refresh for Gmail on the web. From a report: The upgrade was revealed in a message from Google to administrators of G Suite accounts -- G Suite being the suite of Google services that organizations can use on their own web domains, rather than Google's. The message stated that the changes would be coming to consumer Gmail accounts, as well as G Suite accounts. Google said the refresh would include not only a "fresh, clean look for Gmail on the web," but also easy ways to access other Google services, such as Google Calendar, from the Gmail web app. The company recently started winding down its Chrome apps for all platforms but Google's own Chrome OS. Windows, Mac and Linux users are now being encouraged to instead use Google's web apps, and it's only logical that those interfaces are now getting upgraded to include the functionality that would otherwise be lost. The Verge has screenshots of the new interface.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an interview with Today airing Friday morning, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg insisted that Facebook does not sell or give away user information, but made clear that Facebook's entire model is based on being able to share user data with advertisers. If Facebook users don't like its ad-based model, the only other option would be to have users pay for the service so they could keep their data to themselves. As Sandberg told Today: "Our service depends on your data, [so] we don't have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to re-apply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber's current permit in California expires March 31. "We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Given this, we decided to not reapply for a California permit with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future."

Uber's decision not to reapply comes in tandem with a letter the DMV sent to Uber's head of public affairs, Austin Heyworth, today. The letter pertains to the fatal self-driving car crash that happened in Tempe, Arizona last week. "In addition to this decision to suspend testing throughout the country, Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California," DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in the letter. "By the terms of its current permit, Uber's authority to test autonomous vehicles on California public roads will end on March 31, 2018." This comes following Arizona's decision to block Uber's self-driving cars in its city.

Last week, a user found that Facebook had a record of the date, time, duration, and recipient of calls he had made from the past few years. A couple days later, Ars Technica published an account of several others -- all Android users -- who found similar records. Now, Slate Magazine is reporting that Facebook has acknowledged that it was collecting and storing these logs, "attributing it to an opt-in feature for those using Messenger or Facebook Lite on an Android device." The company did however deny that it was collecting call or text history without a user's permission. From the report: "This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook," the company said in a post Sunday. "People have to expressly agree to use this feature. We introduced this feature for Android users a couple of years ago. Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with."

Ars Technica refuted their claim that everyone knowingly opted in. Instead, Ars Technica's Sean Gallagher claimed, that opt-in was the default setting and users were not separately alerted to it. Nor did Facebook ever say publicly that it was collecting that information. "Facebook says that the company keeps the data secure and does not sell it to third parties," Gallagher wrote. "But the post doesn't address why it would be necessary to retain not just the numbers of contacts from phone calls and SMS messages, but the date, time, and length of those calls for years."

According to the FCC, there are only about 100,000 phone booths left in the United States, and about a fifth of those are in New York. The number has decreased rapidly over the last couple decades as cellphones have been adopted by 95% of Americans. CNN reports of how these remaining pay phones still remain a steady business for some of the 1,100 companies operating them across the country: Pay phone providers reported $286 million in revenue in 2015, according to the most recent FCC report. They can still be profitable, particularly in places where there isn't cell phone or landline coverage, said Tom Keane, president of Pacific Telemanagement Services. Keane's company operates 20,000 pay phones around the country. "We have phones in Yosemite Valley that are extremely busy when there's not snow on the ground," he said. Victor Rollo said he is still making money off his 170 phones in the San Diego area. Rollo declined to say how much, but he believes pay phones are a lifeline for people who don't have other options and are valuable during emergencies or natural disasters. Rollo says he evaluates how many calls are made on the phones every month, how far away they are from each other, and how much his expenses are per month to determine whether to keep them in the ground. Phones in hospitals and along the border, where cell coverage is weak, are some of his most profitable ones.

Tesla is increasing the cost of the paid Supercharger access, but a spokesperson for the company says that it "will never be a profit center." Electrek reports: When introducing the program, Tesla said that it aimed to still make the cost of Supercharging cheaper than gasoline and that it doesn't aim to make its Supercharger network a profit center. Instead, they want to use the money to keep growing the network which now consists of over 1,180 stations and close to 9,000 Superchargers. But this week, the rates were updated across the U.S. Some states saw massive increases of as much as 100 percent -- though most regions saw their rates increase by 20 to 40 percent. For example, Oregon saw an increase of $0.12 to $0.24 per kWh, while California, Tesla's biggest market in the U.S., got an increase from $0.20 to $0.26 kWh and New York's rate went from $0.19 to $0.24 per kWh. A spokesperson for Tesla said in a statement: "We occasionally adjust rates to reflect current local electricity and usage. The overriding principle is that Supercharging will always remain significantly cheaper than gasoline, as we only aim to recover a portion of our costs while setting up a fair system for everyone. This will never be a profit center for Tesla."

Slashdot reader David Rothman writes: The oldest public domain publisher in the world, Project Gutenberg, has blocked German users after an outrageous legal ruling saying this American nonprofit must obey German copyright law... Imagine the technical issues for fragile, cash-strapped public domain organizations -- worrying not only about updated databases covering all the world's countries, but also applying the results to distribution. TeleRead carries two views on the German case involving a Holtzbrinck subsidiary...

Significantly, older books provide just a tiny fraction of the revenue of megaconglomerates like Holtzbrinck but are essential to students of literature and indeed to students in general. What's more, as illustrated by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S., copyright law in most countries tends to reflect the wishes and power of lobbyists more than it does the commonweal. Ideally the travails of Project Gutenberg will encourage tech companies, students, teachers, librarians and others to step up their efforts against oppressive copyright laws. While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, let's focus more on the needs of living creators and less on the estates of authors dead for many decades. The three authors involved in the German case are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).

One solution in the U.S. and elsewhere for modern creators would be national library endowments... Meanwhile, it would be very fitting for Google and other deep-pocketed corporations with an interest in a global Internet and more balanced copyright to help Gutenberg finance its battle. Law schools, other academics, educators and librarians should also offer assistance.

Uber booked more than half of the seats available for the London premiere of "Brilliant Jerks," a satirical play inspired by the car-ride startup's numerous scandals, and featuring a character similar to former CEO Travis Kalanick. From a report: The company purchased 50 of 90 available seats for the show's opening night at London's Vault theater, as originally reported by the Financial Times. The Financial Times reports that the play was inspired in part by the now-infamous blog post by Susan J. Fowler on Uber's toxic and sexist work culture, setting off a chain of events that ultimately led Kalanick to resign as chief executive of the company he cofounded. According to the Vault's website, "Brilliant Jerks tells the story of three people -- a driver, a coder, and a CEO -- working for one tech monolith, but living worlds apart."

Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google's involvement, Gizmodo reported on Tuesday. From the report: Google's pilot project with the Defense Department's Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project. Some Google employees were outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations, sources said, while others argued that the project raised important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning.