In a direct and urgent call to address gun violence in America, the chief executives of some of the nation's best-known companies sent a letter to Senate leaders on Thursday, urging an expansion of background checks to all firearms sales and stronger "red flag" laws. From a report: "Doing nothing about America's gun violence crisis is simply unacceptable and it is time to stand with the American public on gun safety," the heads of 145 companies, including Levi Strauss, Twitter and Uber, say in the letter [PDF], which was shared with The New York Times. The letter -- which urges the Republican-controlled Senate to enact bills already introduced in the Democrat-led House of Representatives -- is the most concerted effort by the business community to enter the gun debate, one of the most polarizing issues in the nation and one that was long considered off limits. The debate and the decision to sign -- or not sign -- are a case study in how chief executives must weigh their own views and the political risks to their businesses. Missing from the list, however, are some of America's biggest financial and technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

California lawmakers passed a landmark bill on Wednesday that threatens to reshape how companies like Uber and Lyft do business. The legislation, known as Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), was passed in the state Assembly and now heads to Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk. From a report: Uber and Lyft maintain that AB5 won't immediately change independent contractors into employees. Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer, said on a call with reporters that the bill builds on legal tests already established in California around how drivers should be classified. West said drivers may not necessarily fall under the new rules laid out in AB5. "Under that three-part test, arguably the highest bar is that a company must prove that contractors are doing work 'outside the usual course' of its business," West said. "Several previous rulings have found that drivers' work is outside the usual course of Uber's business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces." West said Uber intends to follow AB5 should it be put into law next year, but that it will continue to try to prove that it doesn't fall under its legal framework. "Uber is no stranger to legal battles, that's for sure," West said. "We operate in a very regulated environment, and we recognize that there will be legal challenges on all fronts much of the time."

California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a yearslong debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure. From a report: The bill passed in a 29 to 11 vote in the State Senate and will apply to app-based companies, despite their efforts to negotiate an exemption. California's governor, Gavin Newsom, endorsed the bill this month and is expected to sign it after it goes through the State Assembly, in what is expected to be a formality. Under the measure, which would go into effect Jan. 1, workers must be designated as employees instead of contractors if a company exerts control over how they perform their tasks or if their work is part of a company's regular business.

The bill may influence other states. A coalition of labor groups is pushing similar legislation in New York, and bills in Washington State and Oregon that were similar to California's but failed to advance could see renewed momentum. New York City passed a minimum wage for ride-hailing drivers last year but did not try to classify them as employees. In California, the legislation will affect at least one million workers who have been on the receiving end of a decades-long trend of outsourcing and franchising work, making employer-worker relationships more arm's-length. Many people have been pushed into contractor status with no access to basic protections like a minimum wage and unemployment insurance. Ride-hailing drivers, food-delivery couriers, janitors, nail salon workers, construction workers and franchise owners could now all be reclassified as employees.

Uber has laid off 435 employees across its product and engineering teams, the company announced today. Combined, the layoffs represent about 8% of the organizations, with 170 people leaving the product team and 265 people leaving the engineering team. From a report: The layoffs had no effect on Eats, which is one of Uber's top-performing products, and Freight, according to a source familiar with the situation. Meanwhile, the company is lifting the hiring freeze on the product and engineering teams that has been in effect since early August, according to the source. "Our hope with these changes is to reset and improve how we work day to day -- ruthlessly prioritizing, and always holding ourselves accountable to a high bar of performance and agility," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. "While certainly painful in the moment, especially for those directly affected, we believe that this will result in a much stronger technical organization, which going forward will continue to hire some of the very best talent around the world." Great timing to dump this announcement.

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn't use the internet.

That's exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Francisco startup Bridgefy's Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network...

While you can chat privately with contacts, you can also broadcast to anyone within range, even if they are not a contact.

That's clearly an ideal scenario for protesters who are trying to reach people but cannot use traditional SMS texting, email, or the undisputed uber-app of China: WeChat. All of them are monitored by the state.
Wednesday another article in Forbes confirmed with Bridgefy that their app uses end-to-end RSA encryption -- though an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute warns in the same article about the possibility of the Chinese government demanding that telecom providers hand over a list of all users running the app and where they're located.

Forbes also notes that "police could sign up to Bridgefy and, at the very least, cause confusion by flooding the network with fake broadcasts" -- or even use the app to spread privacy-compromising malware. "But if they're willing to accept the risk, Bridgefy could remain a useful tool for communicating and organizing in extreme situations."

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Stewart Goodwin tried to put a stop to the constant flow of scooters into the plaza he oversees. He spoke to the government and scooter companies, but to no avail. "We still find scooters in our fountains," Goodwin, executive director of the Indiana War Memorials in Indianapolis, told CNN Business. "We find them in the canal. We find them strewn all over the sidewalks."

In the Wild West of transportation, no one knows what to do about scooters. They appeared suddenly in many cities, triggering complaints of clutter and blocked sidewalks. When ridden, scooters emerged as sidewalk bullies -- fast enough to unsettle pedestrians and create safety issues. But force scooters into the streets and they are slow and vulnerable amid two-ton vehicles, not to mention potholes that can swallow small tires.

Now, governments, communities and businesses -- even the scooter companies themselves -- are playing catchup on finding the right rules for scooters, and how to enforce them....

None of this is what was supposed to happen.
CNN notes that this summer Atlanta banned nighttime riding "following a string of scooter deaths," while other cities have totally banned scooters, "with lingering memories of how Uber stormed onto their streets and created long-lasting challenges for local governments."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For nearly 20 years," writes WIRED's Alex Davies in How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry, "the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil. None, though, deny that whether for good or ill, the benefit of society or himself, Levandowski has played a propulsive role in the development of self-driving tech."

But that's of little comfort to Levandowski, who was charged by the Feds earlier this week with stealing driverless-vehicle technology from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, prompting the New Yorker's Charles Duhigg to explain How the Anthony Levandowski Indictment Helps Big Tech Stifle Innovation in Silicon Valley. The Economic Espionage Act of 1996, Duhigg notes, "was mostly intended to be used against overseas saboteurs, but it has largely been directed at American citizens -- and, in effect, has made federal prosecutors into heavies operating on behalf of disgruntled tech firms."

The definition of a 'trade secret' in the statute, Duhigg adds, is so broad that it could very well mean anything. Daniel Olmos, an attorney who has represented individuals accused of stealing trade secrets, once told Duhigg, "I get calls all the time from scared engineers, who once put some work stuff on their home computer so they could work on it after dinner, and now they're worried if they try to jump to another firm they're gonna get sued. And you know what? They're right to be worried.

The city of Miami has notified a number of companies that they must remove their fleets of electric scooters from the streets in preparation for Hurricane Dorian, lest the devices become flying projectiles. From a report: Officials told the six companies that operate fleets in the city -- Bird, Bolt, Uber's Jump, Lime, Lyft and Spin -- to clear out their scooters by noon on Friday. The order is meant to prevent any potential hazards that could arise from the scooters being left out during the storm, including fears that the vehicles could be swept up in the storm's dangerous winds.

A number of scooter companies said they've also removed or reduced their fleets in Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando, which are also expected to be in the path of the storm. Hurricane Dorian, currently a strong Category 2 storm, is forecast to become a Category 4 storm with potentially "devastating hurricane-force winds," the National Hurricane Center said on Friday.

CEO of Uber, which posted a record $5.2 billion quarterly loss earlier this month, believes the company is on track to reach profitability. In an interview with Bloomberg Thursday [video], Dara Khosrowshahi said the company has "resolved all of the governance conflicts and legal issues." He said: We have a great investor base, we have taken the company public, and the company revenue gross bookings have grown 75% since I joined. We now have a path to profitability, I believe. So while we've had bumps on the road -- and every adventure has bumps on the road -- I like where we are and I especially like the position that we're in now for the next few years.

We want Uber to be available to everybody. And what we're doing now is going into the next step of introducing other transportation choices to Uber, we've always gone with the pool but for example, we're testing buses to bring the price of Uber down to the next level. We're introducing bikes and scooters for personal electric mobility so that essentially any way that you want to get around your city, we're going to be there for you... And if you want food, if you want even local commerce, which I think we will power, Uber Eats and some of the other services will be there for you as well. [...] These are extraordinary opportunities that we're funding, but I do believe that we're going to prove to our investors that we can take on a serial basis, big parts of our business, turn them profitable and use those parts of our business to fund investments in other areas.

Location social networks never took off, and Gowalla's star burned out fast. Gilt sold at a loss. And Tumblr, recently sold by Yahoo for less than 1 percent of what it originally paid, has become a cautionary tale. If you haven't been paying close attention, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Foursquare had fallen prey to the same fates as its once-hot peers. From a report: But you'd be wrong. This year, Foursquare's revenue will surpass $100 million, a critical mile marker for any company on its way to a public offering. In fact its story of success is a perfect tech-industry parable: A charming, rickety, vintage-2000s social app that's survived the last decade by evolving into a powerhouse enterprise data-extraction business. In 2014, Foursquare made a decision to shift its attention from its consumer apps to a growing business-to-business operation; five years later, 99 percent of Foursquare's business comes from its software and data products. Its clients include Uber, Twitter, Apple, Snapchat, and Microsoft. The company is still shining brightly, not because location-based social networks or New York's start-up scene have finally reached escape velocity, but because Foursquare had something that other start-ups didn't: location technology rivaled by only Google and Facebook.

[...] By 2014, Foursquare made the decision to focus on providing software tools and data to app developers, advertisers, and brands. Foursquare began charging developers for the use of its location technology in their own apps (it has worked with more than 150,000 to date) and selling its data to brands, marketers, advertisers, and data-hungry investors. The company's tools could measure foot traffic in and out of brick-and-mortar locations and build consumer profiles based on where people had recently visited. Soon, Foursquare began brandishing its power with public market predictions. It projected iPhone sales in 2015 based on traffic to Apple stores and, in 2016, the huge drop in Chipotle's sales figures (thanks to E. coli) two weeks before the burrito-maker announced its quarterly earnings. Co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley says the human check-ins gave Foursquare engineers and data scientists the ability to verify and adjust location readings from other sources, like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As it turns out, the goofy badges for Uncle Tony that made Foursquare easy to dismiss as a late-2000s fad were an incredibly powerful tool. [...] In addition to all of those active check-ins, at some point Foursquare began collecting passive data using a "check-in button you never had to press." It doesn't track people 24/7 (in addition to creeping people out, doing so would burn through phones' batteries), but instead, if users opt-in to allow the company to "always" track their locations, the app will register when someone stops and determine whether that person is at a red light or inside an Urban Outfitters. The Foursquare database now includes 105 million places and 14 billion check-ins.

Uber and Lyft, the two biggest rideshare companies, are telling their drivers they are willing to compromise with a proposal that includes a minimum wage of $21 per hour. From a report: The new proposal comes after days of protests that brought a caravan of rideshare drivers through San Francisco and ended in Sacramento Wednesday. The demonstrating drivers said they are demanding a living wage and pushing for Assembly Bill 5, which would classify rideshare drivers as employees instead of independent contractors. Lyft sent a message to its drivers, asking them to talk their legislators out of the bill, saying it could cause the company to "offload" or layoff hundreds of thousands of drivers. The message from Lyft also told drivers that AB5 could cost customers more money and make them wait longer for a car. In lieu of the legislation, Lyft said it is willing to compromise with drivers, promising they would get paid at least $21 dollars per hour, receive some benefits and also get their voices heard within the company.

Former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski was charged with stealing driverless technology from Alphabet's Waymo unit, resurrecting the intrigue of the biggest legal battle to grip Silicon Valley in recent memory. From a report: The 33-count indictment announced Tuesday by federal officials in San Jose, California, adds a new criminal chapter to the saga that hung over Waymo's civil claims of trade-secret theft against Uber. Even after the companies abruptly settled the litigation in the middle of a high-stakes trial last year, questions remained about the mysterious engineer at the center of the turmoil. "All of us have the right to change jobs," San Francisco U.S. Attorney David Anderson said at a press conference in San Jose. "None of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation." Levandowski, 39, voluntarily surrendered to authorities and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if he's convicted. Anderson said the government's investigation is ongoing, but he declined to discuss the probe further. Levandowski "didn't steal anything from anyone," his lawyer, Miles Ehrlich, said in a statement. The indictment "rehashed claims discredited in a civil case that settled more than a year and a half ago."

Uber and Lyft have slashed driver pay in recent years and now take a larger portion of each fare, far larger than the companies publicly report, based on data collected by Jalopnik. From a report: And the new Surge or Prime Time pricing structure widely adopted by both companies undermines a key legal argument both companies make to classify drivers as independent contractors. Jalopnik asked drivers to send us fare receipts showing a breakdown of how much the rider paid for the trip, how much of that fare Uber or Lyft kept, and what the driver earned. In total, we received 14,756 fares. These came from two sources: the web form where drivers could submit fares individually, and via email where some drivers sent us all their fares from a given time period.

Of all the fares Jalopnik examined, Uber kept 35 percent of the revenue, while Lyft kept 38 percent. These numbers are roughly in line with a previous study by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute which concluded Uber's take rate to be roughly one-third, or 33 percent. (Per its filings with the SEC, Uber says it takes about 25% of what drivers earn as its "take-rate.") Of the drivers who emailed us breakdowns for all of their fares in a given time period -- ranging from a few months to more than a year -- Uber kept, on average, 29.6 percent. Lyft pocketed 34.5 percent. Those take rates are 10.6 percent and 8.5 percent higher than Uber and Lyft's publicly reported figures, respectively.

UK police have seized Bitcoin worth more than £920,000 ($1.1 million) from a 27-year-old convicted of computer crimes -- and they're now planning to sell it to compensate his victims.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Authorities said Grant West used a tool called Sentry MBR to launch brute-force attacks against 17 companies, where he gained access to user accounts, which he later hijacked and resold on the dark web to other criminals. London police said the list of victims included some high profile names such as Uber, Groupon, T Mobile, Just Eat, Asda, and Sainsburys... Authorities said West, who used the moniker of "Courvoisier," started trading stolen accounts on the dark web in March 2015, and made more than 47,000 sales before his arrest. He also sold cannabis, along with hacking tutorials. West did all of this using his girlfriend's laptop.

After his arrest, UK police said they found "fullz" (a term short for "full credentials" and used to describe email, username, and password combos) for more than 100,000 people on this laptop. They also found an SD card storing 78 million individual usernames and passwords, as well as 63,000 credit and debit card details.
The Guardian reports that West agreed to give up his Bitcoin after a judge told him that if he didn't, he'd spend an additional four years in jail.

Uber imposed a $1-per-ride surcharge it called a "Safe Rides Fee" in 2014, but it was a just a play for profit. From a report: The money collected by the company from the fee -- estimated at around $500 million -- was never earmarked specifically for safety and was "devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip," according to New York Times . At the time, Uber was facing rising costs from insurance and background checks, so the company came up with the idea of imposing a safety fee to help boost its margins. Meanwhile, its actual safety program consisted of little more than a short video course for drivers. It wasn't until years later that Uber began adding safety features to its app, such as an emergency button to call 911. Safe ride fees varied from market to market, but they generally amounted to a buck and some change. In San Francisco, riders were charged $1.35 per trip. Philadelphians paid $1.25, while riders in Los Angeles paid $1.65.

At least three of the 28 entities that have signed on for Facebook's planned Libra currency are now getting nervous about the project, according to a new report from the Financial Times. And Facebook is just as worried about being the only company currently with its "neck out," as regulators push back against the plan to create a new digital currency from thin air. From a report: The companies, which some have dubbed the "crypto mafia," include heavy hitters from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, like Uber, Spotify, Visa, and Mastercard. They're all partners in the Libra Association, a new organization based in Switzerland that is coming under scrutiny from governments around the world. The Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, EU antitrust regulators, the French Finance Minister, the Senate Banking Committee, the House Committee on Financial Services, and the Secretary of the U.S Treasury have all expressed doubts about Libra, so it's easy to see why some companies might be getting cold feet. But these companies aren't just worried about Libra's future as a digital currency. Their main concern seems to be that government regulators may want to look deeper into each company's primary business after they're done tearing Libra to shreds.

Uber and Lyft tapped transportation consultancy Fehr & Peers to examine their combined vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in six cities in September 2018, and compare that number to the total VMT in each area for the same month. "The results show that while they are vastly out-stripped by personal and commercial vehicles, Uber and Lyft are still responsible for significant shares of VMT in those cities," reports The Verge. From the report: The analysis looks at Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC. The results are presented on two levels: the regional area, including the surrounding towns and suburbs, and the "core" county of each region that contains the main part of the city with the densest concentration of jobs. The findings show that Uber and Lyft account for just 1-3 percent of VMT in the broader metropolitan areas of each city. But those numbers spike when zooming in on the core county of each city. In San Francisco County, for example, Uber and Lyft make up as much as 13.4 percent of all vehicle miles. In Boston, it's 8 percent; in Washington, DC, it's 7.2 percent.

These figures suggest that Uber and Lyft are hitting some cities harder than previously thought. An independent study commissioned by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority looked at 2017 traffic patterns in the county and concluded that TNCs generated about 6.5 percent of the total VMT on weekdays, and 10 percent on weekends. (TNC, which stands for transportation network company, is an industry term used to describe ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft.) The findings from Fehr & Peers show totals "nearly twice that previous estimate," said Gregory Erhardt, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who has researched Uber and Lyft's effects on public transit ridership. "This difference may be due to the continued increase in TNC use over the intervening two years."

WeWork, the office-sharing, kegger-hosting phenomenon that has redefined the modern workspace, is also raising the bar for how much money a startup can lose and still be considered a buzzy investment. From a report: WeWork's corporate parent, the We Company, which released its IPO documents on Wednesday, loses roughly $5,197 per customer who inhabits its office space per year. That's considerably more than newly public companies like Uber or Beyond Meat are losing on their growing customer bases. WeWork, which says in the offering document that its corporate mission is no less than to "to elevate the world's consciousness," is on track to lose $2.7 billion this year from its operations, up from nearly $1.7 billion last year. The company's revenue in the first six months of the year nearly doubled from last year's first half, to $1.5 billion. The company said its losses rose just 10% from a year ago, but that includes a $470 million non-operating, and likely non-recurring, gain. Exclude that, and losses from the We Company, which says it will trade under the ticker symbol "WE," rose 60%. "If you work at WeWork, drive home with Uber, and then order food by DoorDash, you're engaging with three companies that are projected to lose about $13 billion this year," tweeted Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Further reading: WeWork Files For IPO After Losing $1.9 Billion Last Year.

SoftBank-backed startup offers 'human-assisted' artificial-intelligence; current, former employees say company inflates its tech expertise. WSJ reports: Startup Engineer.ai says it uses artificial-intelligence technology to largely automate the development of mobile apps, but several current and former employees say the company exaggerates its AI capabilities to attract customers and investors. The competing claims reflect a growing challenge in the tech world of assessing a company's proficiency in artificial intelligence, which refers to technologies that can allow computers to learn or perform tasks typically requiring human decision makers -- in many cases helping companies save money or better target consumers. Because AI technology is complex and loosely defined, nonexperts can find it hard to discern when it is being deployed. Still, money is flowing into the sector, and many startups can say they use AI as a way to lure investments or corporate clients even when such claims are difficult to vet.

London and Los Angeles-based Engineer.ai raised $29.5 million last year from investors including Deepcore, a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. Other backers include Zurich-based venture-capital firm Lakestar -- an early investor in Facebook and Airbnb -- and Singapore-based Jungle Ventures. Engineer.ai was spun out of an earlier company in 2016, the company has said. When announcing its funding last year, it said it had notched $24 million in revenue while self-funding its operations. Engineer.ai says its "human-assisted AI" allows anyone to create a mobile app by clicking through a menu on its website. Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber's or Facebook's. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically, it says, making the process cheaper and quicker than conventional app development.

[...] Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and several people familiar with the company's operations, including current and former staff, suggest Engineer.ai doesn't use AI to assemble code for apps as it claims. They indicated that the company relies on human engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of that work, and that its AI claims are inflated even in light of the fake-it-'til-you-make-it mentality common among tech startups.

Uber isn't letting tech workers join the ride, at least for now. From a report: The ride-hailing giant canceled scheduled on-site interviews for tech roles last week, and job applicants have been told positions are being put on hold due to a hiring freeze in engineering teams in the U.S. and Canada, according to multiple people who received the communications. In emails sent to job interviewees, Uber recruiters explained "there have been some changes" and the opportunity has been "put on hold for now," according to emails reviewed by Yahoo Finance. The hiring freeze comes after 400 layoffs in its marketing department earlier this month, which raised concerns and fears company-wide. During a recent all-hands meeting, a question about potential layoffs in the engineering department was also raised, but executives didn't provide any timelines. The number of hiring posts for software engineer roles at Uber peaked in March, according to data tracking firm Thinknum. The move highlights the challenges that Uber faces as it scrambles to prove to Wall Street, since its IPO in May, that it's on the right track to achieve profitability. The company, with 100 million monthly active users, reported $5.23 billion in losses for the second quarter last week.