An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: SoftBank warned investors on Monday that the value of its technology fund may have dropped by as much as $16.7 billion over the last fiscal year (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), as its investments have been hit hard by the fallout from the coronavirus and by big bets on unprofitable companies like WeWork. SoftBank, which had deployed a $100 billion Vision Fund to make huge wagers on young companies like WeWork and Uber over the last few years, said in a statement (PDF) posted to its website that the fund would record a loss of 1.8 trillion yen for the fiscal year that ended in March "due to the deteriorating market environment."

While the loss will be partially offset by revenue from SoftBank's other businesses, the company said it expected to end the year with a 1.35 trillion yen loss, its first annual loss in 15 years. The disclosure marked another stumble for SoftBank, which upended the start-up investment world when it began the Vision Fund in 2017 but has lately been struggling. The fund was the largest pool of money ever raised for private technology companies, with backing from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, as well as Apple and Foxconn.

The Bay Area Newsgroup just interviewed the author of "Abolish Silicon Valley: How to liberate technology from capitalism". Q: How do you fix this broken system?

A: Overall the goal that I'm thinking about is that you have the private sector so overfunded and glorified that it seems like the only way to do things, but things could be much better serviced by the public sector without the profit motive that the private sector demands. Reclaim the wealth from capital, push back capital and fund public innovation... Right now the way it works is all these tech companies are predicated on a very particular way of regulating work and will hire people short-time and pay them nothing and not provide them with safety nets.

There are also companies that shouldn't necessarily exist. A lot of companies are being funded to do something the public sector could've provided. Instead of good public transit, we have Uber. Instead of a good social mobility system, we get paid scooters. What people want is to streamline a centralized system that is run in a way that is accountable and actually serves the public...

My Utopian view is to put tech companies in full public view. Expropriate platforms and turn them into municipal services, public services and make them open-source.

The major tech companies are scrambling to craft digital options for this year's summer intern class, as businesses remain shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. These companies said they're moving their programs online: Google said it will pay its interns the full rate.
Twitter said its intern class may shrink this year.
Microsoft said it will have its biggest ever intern class -- more than 4,000.
Lyft, which will have the same number of interns as originally planned, limit them to just two start dates to provide students with more of a common experience.
Salesforce, which also plans a similar size intern class as intended. These companies are still hoping have at least some interns on-site for at least part of the summer: Apple said it plans to hire more than 1,000 people for a mix of online and in-person internships and pledged in a statement to "extend to our interns the same precautions and care that we're extending to all our other personnel as a part of the ongoing COVID-19 response."
Amazon said it expects its biggest-ever class of interns globally, though it said the vast majority of internships will be virtual.
Intel, which does plan to have its interns work remotely but hopes to move them on-site should the situation and health authority guidelines make that possible.
Uber, which has made plans for online on-boarding and will keep the program online if their offices remain closed, but will aim to have its interns work in the office if that is possible.
Doordash said, for now, it "plans to stay the course" with its summer internship program, but is exploring options for conducting the program remotely and will "continue to re-evaluate as the situation progresses."

Uber said on Monday its app will list job openings in the delivery, food production and grocery industry that its U.S. drivers can access during a slump in ride-hailing demand due to the coronavirus. From a report: Beginning on Monday, drivers can find job listings of other companies in a new section of their app, Uber said in a blog post. Uber also said it would reach out to the more than 240,000 of its registered drivers holding commercial licenses to connect them to logistics companies for employment and contract opportunities. It also encouraged drivers to sign up for its Uber Eats food delivery service, saying restaurant orders have seen a significant increase since mid-March. Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement the company will keep expanding economic opportunities in coming months by using technology to create fast and flexible access to work.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reyna is a teenager in Florida whose family is strapped for cash amid the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus. When the uber-popular beauty influencer Jeffree Star tweeted that he'd be giving out $30,000 via payment service Cash App to a random person who retweeted him, she did just that. Star's offer seems to have been legitimate -- and drummed up a lot of attention for the influencer. A woman actually won the $30,000, and Reyna missed out. But then another Twitter user messaged Reyna asking whether she wanted to get $250, she told Quartz. "My goal is to help those in need or need emergency cash," the person said. The catch was that she'd have to pay $25 first. "Your deposit along with our other earnings allows us to immediately send you your payment," the person said. Reyna sent the cash, and that's when the Twitter user blocked her, and her money was gone, she said.

What happened to Reyna is a popular Cash App scam called "cash-flipping," according to Satnam Narang, researcher at the cybersecurity company Tenable. Con artists are taking advantage of the coronavirus by pretending they are helping the needy. While Reyna simply got a direct message to lure her in after she expressed interest in a legitimate giveaway, other scammers have been promoting fake giveaways in public tweets adding "#coronavirus" in order to reach more people. Sometimes they will request money through Cash App pretending that it's a verification mechanism. "They'll say, you won this giveaway, send us $10 to verify to win 500 bucks," Narang said. The scammers say they have a special way of modifying the transactions through payment applications like Cash App, Paypal, Zelle, Venmo, or Apple Pay, Narang wrote in a blog post explaining the scams. "All they ask for is that the recipient share the initial cut with them for providing them this so-called service." This, of course, is all made up.

Long-time technology pundit Robert Cringely writes: IT — Information Technology — grew out of something we called MIS — Management Information Systems — but both meant a kid in a white shirt who brought you a new keyboard when yours broke. Well, the kid is now gone, sent home with everyone else, and that kid isn't coming back... ever. IT is near death, fading by the day. But don't blame COVID-19 because the death of IT was inevitable. This novel coronavirus just made it happen a little quicker...

Amazon has been replacing all of our keyboards for some time now, along with our mice and our failed cables, and even entire PCs. IT has been changing steadily from kids taking elevators up from the sub-basement to Amazon Prime trucks rolling-up to your mailbox. At the same time, our network providers have been working to limit their truck rolls entirely. Stop by the Comcast storefront to get your cable modem, because nobody is going to come to install it if you aren't the first person living there to have cable...

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) extends both the network and a security model end-to-end over any network including 4G or 5G wireless. Some folks will run their applications in their end device, whether it is a PC, phone, tablet, whatever, and some will run their applications in the same cloud as SASE, in which case everything will be that much faster and more secure. That's end end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It's the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver.

Since COVID-19 is trapping us in our homes it is forcing this transition to happen faster than it might have. But it was always going to happen.

Countless Uber drivers are now being pushed to the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, transporting humans, food, supplies, and maybe soon Covid-19 testing kits as shelter-in-place rules cause demand for delivery services to spike. Yet despite their exposure to infection, gig workers lack paid sick leave, health benefits, or unemployment insurance because of their status as independent contractors. From a report: Earlier this month, Uber, Lyft, and Amazon drivers protested the exclusion of gig workers from Silicon Valley's monumental heave to protect itself from the coronavirus. As technology employees go remote, contractors are burdened with extra demands and no additional support. Uber, Lyft, and Amazon eventually agreed to compensate gig workers through ad hoc funds, but OneZero spoke to Uber drivers who say this is hardly a safety net. "I think I'm going to fall through the cracks," said Kimberly James, a 46-year-old driver for Uber Eats in Atlanta, Georgia. After a series of devastating hardships, including losing her house in a fire, James has come to rely on food delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash to survive.

In 2012, James was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, and her weekly income of $400 means she cannot afford to get sick. Health officials have warned that the coronavirus is especially dangerous for immunocompromised people, so today James has no choice but to isolate indoors. One-time payouts are based on a person's average daily earnings for the past six months. Someone making $28.57 per day is eligible for a payment of $400, the equivalent of 14 days of average pay, while someone earning $121.42 per day can receive $1,700, Uber says on its website. To qualify, drivers must have completed one trip in the 30 days before March 6, 2020, when the global program was first announced.

"Thousands of full-time rideshare drivers are still out on the streets trying to carve out a living," notes The Hustle, interviewing more than 50 full-time rideshare drivers facing a difficult choice: "Stay home and sacrifice a livelihood, or keep driving in a depressed market and risk contracting the virus." As independent contractors, rideshare drivers don't receive sick leave, unemployment insurance, or the many other benefits enjoyed by W-2 employees. During a pandemic, this has proven to be especially problematic... [Uber and Lyft are now offering 14 days of paid sick leave, but only to drivers who have contracted COVID-19 or are quarantined by a public health authority] Deemed "essential" workers, Uber and Lyft drivers have been encouraged to continue business as usual. But the current state of affairs has polarized drivers: In a survey of nearly 400 full-time Uber and Lyft drivers The Hustle conducted last week, 57% said they will continue to work at the peril of their health, while 43% have decided to stay home and sacrifice their sole source of income.

Many drivers told us that, while aware of the inherent exposure risks in carting strangers around in an enclosed metal box all day, they have no choice but to work... "I have a 6-month-old daughter, a family, and apartment rent on my head. I have bills to pay. I've been making about $40 a day since last Monday..." "They are vectors for this disease," Veena Dubal, a professor of law at U.C. Hastings, says of the drivers. "And they have no training in health and safety."

In early March, Uber and Lyft pledged to do their best to provide drivers with basic sanitation products like hand sanitizer and wipes. But the companies have struggled to find supplies during a global shortage and have since closed down the driver hubs where they were meant to be dispensed. (Uber and Lyft told us they are actively working to change this.) Many drivers we spoke with have turned to fellow drivers for help, using WhatsApp groups to swap Lysol cans, gloves, and masks.
With more potential passengers staying home, the drivers' real earnings are now averaging around $5.50 an hour. (One Uber driver, who rents his car, tells the site that "I'm not even breaking even.") Yet they're still braving the risks.

One New York City driver admits "I've literally been driving people to the hospital. I had one guy get into my car who was hacking for 10 minutes straight. I pulled over and cleaned my car for 20 minutes after."

Anthony Levandowski, former Google engineer and a pioneer of self-driving car tech, agreed to plead guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets from the internet giant. CNET reports: Levandowski left Google in 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, which was quickly acquired by Uber for $680 million. These actions set off a chain of events that led to Google's autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, suing Uber over alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. That lawsuit settled in February 2018 with Uber agreeing to pay Waymo $245 million. The prosecutors indicted Levandowski in August in a suit that involves 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. The activities allegedly took place as he prepared to leave the search giant to build out Uber's self-driving car operation.

Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft in an agreement in which federal prosecutors agree to drop the remaining charges, according to a filing with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California. The plea carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. "I downloaded these files with the intent to use them for my own personal benefit, and I understand that I was not authorized to take the files for this purpose," Levandowski said in the filing. No sentencing date has yet been scheduled.

Uber said on Tuesday that it has begun suspending shared rides on its ride-hailing platform in the United States and Canada to limit the spread of the coronavirus. From a report: The pooled option, which allows riders to book trips at lower prices by sharing the car with up to three other passengers traveling in the same direction, has been disabled for users opening the apps in the two countries. "Our goal is to help flatten the curve on community spread in the cities we serve," senior vice president Uber Rides and Platform Andrew Macdonald said in a statement. A spokesman said similar steps outside the U.S. and Canada would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Regular rides and the company's food delivery platform Uber Eats remain available, but Uber said it was in contact with local authorities to adjust operations as needed.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you'll ever see. They are representing "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you'll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos -- the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle. However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right? So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, "Labrador Diagnostics," which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.

Just over a month after Uber received a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) license to test driverless cars on public roads, the company has resumed autonomous testing in San Francisco. From a report: Uber says it will limit its time on the road to a "few weeks" while it completes a codebase and infrastructure update and that two of its Volvo XC90 prototypes will be deployed initially, each with a pair of safety drivers in the front seats. Previously, Uber was manually testing up to eight cars in San Francisco with safety drivers and copilots. The testing will no doubt be closely watched by industry observers, as it marks Uber's return to autonomous driving in California years after the company postponed further tests following a fatal accident. In March 2018, one of Uber's cars struck and killed a pedestrian while driving in autonomous mode, prompting a firestorm of criticism from legislators, regulators, and the public.

Many Lyft and Uber drivers have seen a bump in business from the spreading coronavirus, but they're also weighing the risks of staying safe versus continuing to earn a paycheck. From a report: A study published Friday shows that more than half of ride-hailing drivers said they were now "very concerned" about reduced earnings as a result of the virus and 41% said they've modified their driving strategy as a result. These changes include reducing hours, refusing airport rides and halting driving entirely. The survey of 871 drivers in the U.S. from March 1 to March 4 compared data with similar four-day periods in 2020 and was conducted by driver productivity app Gridwise. "They are doing what they have to do to continue earning," said Brandon Sellers, a product growth specialist at the Pittsburgh-based startup. About one-third of drivers are now wiping down their cars with disinfectant after every ride, using hand sanitizer and wearing a mask, he said. "The data is telling us that drivers are afraid."

Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the center of the recent legal battle between Google's Waymo and Uber, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The move comes shortly after a California federal judge confirmed that Levandowski owed Waymo $179 million for theft of trade secrets. Ars Technica reports: Levandowski was an early member of Google's self-driving car team, earning tens of millions of dollars for his efforts. Then in early 2016, he left Google to co-found a self-driving startup called Otto. A few months later, Uber acquired Otto in a deal reportedly worth around $680 million. But a forensic investigation by Google revealed that Levandowski had taken thousands of confidential technical documents with him on his way out the door -- including schematics for Google's cutting-edge lidar technology. Google sued Levandowski and Uber for theft of trade secrets. Google and Uber settled their lawsuit in 2018, but Google's battle with Levandowski continued.

In December 2019, an arbitrator ruled that Levandowski and one of his colleagues -- ex-Googler and Otto co-founder Lior Ron -- had breached their legal obligations to the search giant. Ron has settled with Google for $9.7 million, TechCrunch reports. The arbitrator ruled that Levandowski owed Google $179 million. Reuters reports that a federal judge confirmed that ruling on Wednesday, triggering Levandowski's bankruptcy filing. In his bankruptcy filing, Levandowski says that he has fewer than $100 million in assets, while he owes between $100 million and $500 million to creditors -- presumably including the $179 million he owes to Waymo. However, Levandowski may still be able to get Uber to pay the damages on his behalf. Uber indemnified Levandowski when it hired him in 2016. However, Reuters notes that, in a regulatory filing, Uber said it expected to challenge paying Levandowski's nine-figure judgment.

France's top court ruling opens the way for Uber drivers to be reclassified as employees, the country's highest court ruled on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of rulings globally to grant more rights to gig workers. From a report: The Cour de Cassation in Paris said Uber drivers can't build a clientele, don't set rates or decide on terms and conditions, itineraries are imposed and destinations unknown to them. The top court said the fact that Uber "unilaterally determines its terms and rules" are all indications that drivers are more like employees of the company than self-employed. "The existence of a relationship of subordination between the company Uber and the driver when connecting to the digital platform" makes the "driver's self-employed status merely fictitious," the Cour de Cassation wrote.

Weeks after Uber exited India's food delivery market, conceding defeat to local giants Swiggy and Zomato, a new player is gearing up to challenge the heavily-backed duopoly: Amazon. From a report: The e-commerce giant plans to enter the Indian food delivery market in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The launch of the service, which would be offered as part of either Amazon's Prime Now or Amazon Fresh platform, could happen as soon as next month, we are told. In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant has been testing its food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore, the source said, requesting anonymity as details of the new business are still private.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ride-hailing trips today result in an estimated 69 percent more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace. The Verge reports: In cities, ride-hailing trips typically displace low-carbon trips, such as public transportation, biking, or walking. Uber and Lyft could reduce these emissions with a more concerted effort to electrify its fleet of vehicles or by incentivizing customers to take pooled rides, the group recommends. "However, those strategies alone will address neither the increases in vehicle miles traveled nor rising congestion concerns," the report says. "For ride-hailing to contribute to better climate and congestion outcomes, trips must be pooled and electric, displace single-occupancy car trips more often, and encourage low-emissions modes such as mass transit, biking, and walking."

It's a tall order, but both Uber and Lyft have shown a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. So far, their methods include introducing bike- and scooter-sharing services, integrated public transportation scheduling and ticketing into their respective apps, and incentive programs to get drivers to switch to electric cars. "We want Uber to be a part of the solution to address climate change by working with cities to help create a low carbon transportation future," a spokesperson said. "To unlock the opportunities we have to reduce emissions, we will continue to invest in products and advocate for policies that reduce car ownership, promote more pooled trips and support greater adoption of bikes, scooters, green vehicles and the use of public transit."

Lyft, meanwhile, dismissed the report as "misleading." "This report, like many before it, makes misleading claims about rideshare," a spokesperson said. "Lyft encourages the use of shared rides, was the first rideshare company to put public transit information into our app, and last year, made one of the largest single deployments of electric vehicles in the nation. We are eager to continue this work in partnership with cities, to advance shared, sustainable transportation."

Long-time Slashdot reader DogDude shared this article from CNN: Tucked into the sign-up process for many popular e-commerce sites and apps are dense terms-of-service agreements that legal experts say are changing the nature of consumer transactions, creating a veil of secrecy around how these companies function. The small print in these documents requires all signatories to agree to binding arbitration and to clauses that ban class actions. Just by signing up for these services, consumers give up their rights to sue companies like Amazon, Uber and Walmart before a jury of their peers, agreeing instead to undertake a private process overseen by a paid arbitrator...

The proliferation of apps and e-commerce means that such clauses now cover millions of everyday commercial transactions, from buying groceries to getting to the airport... Consumers are "losing access to the courthouse," said Imre Szalai, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.

The Wall Street Journal remembers how five years ago, Uber's co-founder "was so confident that Uber's rides would prompt people to leave their cars at home that he told a tech conference: 'If every car in San Francisco was Ubered there would be no traffic.'"

He was wrong. Rather than the apps becoming a model of algorithm-driven efficiency, drivers in major cities cruise for fares without passengers an estimated 40% of the time. Multiple studies show that Uber and Lyft have pulled people away from buses, subways and walking, and that the apps add to the overall amount of driving in the U.S. A study published last year by San Francisco County officials and University of Kentucky researchers in the journal Science Advances found that over 60% of the slowdown of traffic speeds in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016 was due to the introduction of the ride-hail companies...

The reversal of ride-hailing from would-be traffic hero to congestion villain is the sort of unintended consequence that has become a recurring feature of Silicon Valley disruption. Companies seeking rapid growth by reinventing the way we do things are delivering solutions that sometimes create their own problems... Silicon Valley is particularly prone to focusing on positive potential effects of new technologies given a decadeslong culture of utopian ideals, said Fred Turner, a Stanford University communications professor who has written a book on the topic... Tech companies tend to have an engineering-like, narrow focus on solving specific problems, often missing the broader picture as a result. "You're not rewarded for seeing the landscape within which your device will be deployed," he said... [I]n hindsight, some of the pitfalls -- such as cars cruising empty between passengers -- seem obvious...

Riders also take car trips that wouldn't have happened before Uber and Lyft. Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant and former New York City official who has studied the topic, said in his paper that surveys in numerous cities found roughly 60% of riders in Ubers and Lyfts would have walked, biked, taken public transit or stayed home if a ride-hail car hadn't been available.

On Tuesday, California State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) introduced legislation to protect restaurants from being exploited by food delivery platforms that add restaurants without permission and withhold customer data. Motherboard reports: For years now, companies such as DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates, and Uber Eats have engaged in shady practices to add more restaurants to their platforms, extract more fees from restaurants and customers, and defeat rival platforms. One consequence of this arrangement is that delivery apps do not share information with restaurants about where customers are located or how to get their feedback. According to a press release about the proposed legislation, this means restaurants have little control over the customer experience and the data may even be used by platforms to drive customers to so-called "host kitchens" that they operate.

Assembly Bill 2149 (the Fair Food Delivery Act) would require platforms to not only share customer information with restaurants but reach an agreement with restaurants before adding them onto the food delivery app. The hope with AB 2149 is that by giving restaurants the ability to opt-out of being added to the platforms (or get the customer data if they opt-in), there will be less of this exploitative extraction directed at restaurants. As for protecting workers from exploitation, Gonzalez also introduced bill AB 5, which went into effect this year and promises to reclassify gig workers (including delivery drivers) as employees owed a minimum wage, benefits, and dignity that these platforms deny them.