Ride-hailing app Uber will introduce self-driving cars in Pittsburgh as soon as this month, Bloomberg reports citing many officials and engineers at the company. The move is the first part of a pilot program to explore the future of the technology, the report added. The company plans to test 100 Volvo XC90s outfitted to drive themselves. Still, the cars will be accompanied by two humans: an engineer who can take control of the vehicle when needed and a co-pilot who takes note. Bloomberg reports: The Volvo deal isn't exclusive; Uber plans to partner with other automakers as it races to recruit more engineers. In July the company reached an agreement to buy Otto, a 91-employee driverless truck startup that was founded earlier this year and includes engineers from a number of high-profile tech companies attempting to bring driverless cars to market, including Google, Apple, and Tesla. Uber declined to disclose the terms of the arrangement, but a person familiar with the deal says that if targets are met, it would be worth 1percent of Uber's most recent valuation.

Ford will mass-produce autonomous vehicles without steering wheels by 2021, Ford chief executive Mark Fields said today at the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, California. Recode reports:Fields announced that the company is working toward launching a fleet of commercial, level 4 (one level below a completely autonomous system, in which drivers don't have to be engaged) vehicles in a ride-hail service by 2021. The details of that ride-hail service -- such as which company Ford will partner with to operate it -- still haven't been determined. As part of that effort, Ford is investing in Velodyne, a self-driving tech company, and is working with three other startups. Ford has acquired Israel-based computer vision and machine learning company SAIPS, struck up an exclusive licensing agreement with machine vision company Nirenberg Neuroscience LLC and, as previously announced, invested in 3-D mapping startup Civil Maps.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: The Information has reported that GM has expressed interest in purchasing the ride-sharing company Lyft. GM reportedly specified a price it would've paid for the company, but Lyft declined their offer and opted instead to raise new funding. TechCrunch reports: "The Information's info suggests that GM's interest in the car sharing market extends beyond simply partnering up with an external party (Warning: paywalled). In statements to The Information, both companies expressed continued excitement and enthusiasm about their ongoing partnership. Depending on the size of the offer on the table, this could prove a risky move by Lyft. It already faces steep competition from Uber, which has far more cash on hand thanks to a series of monster equity and debt raises. Meanwhile GM could decide it wants to own its own operation, and either look around for another acquisition target like Daimler, or build an in-house on-demand ride-service, which is what Ford appears to be doing with its Smart Mobility subsidiary."

According to a report from Recode, the founder and CEO of Google Ventures (GV), Bill Maris, is leaving the firm and its parent company, Alphabet. Recode reports: "Sources say Maris is being replaced by David Krane, a managing partner for the venture arm and one of the earliest corporate communications managers at Google. Maris, an early web entrepreneur, founded Google's venture capital arm in 2009 and quickly built it into a formidable presence in Silicon Valley. In 2015, the firm managed upwards of $2.4 billion in capital. Although GV cut back on investments in Europe and with early stage companies, the firm is still willing to cut checks. For the first six months of this year, it passed Intel Capital as the most active corporate venture arm, according to CB Insights. Under Maris, GV has had some high-profile misses -- most notably, the disastrous app Secret. But those were outweighed by early bets in gigantic startups like Uber, Nest, Slack and Jet.com, which just went to Walmart for $3 billion. Lately, GV has upped its investment in startups working on health and biotech, a strong interest of Maris's." Recode followed up with Maris in a separate report and asked him several questions. When asked why he is leaving, Maris said, "I'm leaving because everything is great."

Uber's defeat by its local competitor in China was the latest of a string of such cases, and Google's experience trying to establish itself there is illustrative of the challenges facing all American tech companies that aspire to dominate in that market, writes reader mirandakatz. Steven Levy writes at Backchannel:Perhaps because its market share never rose high enough, Uber did not experience the brunt of China's regulation. Still, who's to say what would have happened if Uber had managed to outperform Didi? If Uber's market share topped fifty percent, would the government have sat by as a neutral observer? Would the Uber app start experiencing slowdowns? Would its drivers be stopped? Would airports welcome Didi cars and not Uber? My bet is that, mixed with disappointment at not winning the country, Uber executives might be feeling a bit relieved that such worries are now off the table. As it is, Uber has become one more casualty in China's other wall, a towering fortress of restrictions, regulations and unfair play that keeps down American internet companies.

Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Uber, which has been spending hugely in China over the last two years, has folded, striking a deal in which it will merge its Chinese operations with its main rival there, Didi Chuxing. Under terms of the deal, Uber China, the ride-hailing company's Chinese subsidiary, will be part of a larger Didi company valued at $35 billion. Uber gets a 20 percent stake in that -- Didi's previous valuation was $28 billion. That's a $7 billion value for upward of $2 billion that Uber has frittered away, um, spent there. In turn, Didi will invest in Uber at a valuation of almost $70 billion. That was about the value of Uber's last round. Now, everyone owns everyone everywhere.

"A new study casts doubt on Uber's claim that ride-sharing has reduced drunken driving," reports the Washington Post. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes their report: Researchers at Oxford University and the University of Southern California who examined county-level data in the United States before and after the arrival of Uber and its competitors in those markets found that ride-sharing had no effect on drinking-related or holiday- and weekend-related fatalities. One reason could be that, despite the soaring popularity of Uber and other ride-sharing services, there still may not be enough ride-share drivers available yet to make a dent on drunken driving, the authors said.

They also suggest that the tipsy riders who now call Uber are the ones who formerly would have called a taxi. For others, the odds of getting a DUI are still so low that many would prefer to gamble rather than lay out money for a ride-sharing service. Drunks, after all, are just not rational.
One reason for the low number of Uber drivers may be that the 10-year study only examined data through 2014. While other studies have found a decrease in drunk driving arrests associated with Uber -- for example, in California -- the Post's article suggests that ridesharing drivers may just be a drop in the bucket. "Although approximately 450,000 people now drive for Uber, there are 210 million licensed drivers in the United States -- and an estimated 4.2 million adults who drive impaired, the study says."

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Los Angeles Times: After teasing Part 2 of his "master product plan" for over a week, Elon Musk finally delivered. Los Angeles Times reports: "In a blog post published on the automaker's website, Musk introduced a multiyear, four-pronged strategy that includes new kinds of Tesla vehicles, expanded solar initiatives, updates on Tesla's 'autopilot' technology and a ride-sharing program. Commercial trucks, buses, a 'future compact SUV' and a 'new kind of pickup truck' will be added to Tesla's fleet of electric cars. A heavy-duty truck called the Tesla Semi and a shrunken bus that Musk called a 'high passenger density urban transport' vehicle are in early development stages 'and should be ready for unveiling next year,' he said. The smaller bus would be designed without a center aisle, with seats close to the entrances, and would be able to automatically pace themselves with traffic, the post said. The bus driver would become a 'fleet manager.' Musk also used the master plan to defend his bid for rooftop solar power provider SolarCity and said he aims to make Tesla's Autopilot robotic driver-assist system 10 times safer than cars that humans drive manually. Musk also plans to move Tesla into the popular ride-sharing business, not only with an Uber-like fleet but also with an app that lets Tesla owners rent out their vehicles when they're not using them, perhaps defraying a portion of their auto loans. This will happen, he said, 'when true self-driving is approved by regulators,' a turn of events that's at least several years away."

Andrew J . Hawkins, writing for The Verge: Ergo, the secretive, CIA-linked firm that was paid by Uber to investigate the plaintiff in one of the ride-hail startup's many lawsuits, has now admitted to lying and illegally recording phone calls during its probe, according to Law360. Lawyers for Ergo owned up to the infractions in oral arguments in court Thursday, drawing a rebuke from the judge overseeing the case. Last December, Spencer Meyer filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, alleging a scheme to fix prices in violation of antitrust laws. The same day, Uber hired Ergo to investigate Meyer out of concern he posed a security risk to Kalanick. But Ergo also gathered information on Meyer's lawyer, a move that some critics say went too far. Ergo's lawyer argued that the firm was unaware the investigation was tied to a lawsuit, even while admitting Ergo's investigator "dissembled and used false pretenses in his duties," Law360 said.

An anonymous reader write: To address the problem of motorists killed by police officers, Shervin Pishevar, the Iranian-born VC who backed Uber, is suggesting an app that allows police officers to communicate with motorists during traffic stops without either party leaving their vehicles. USA Today reports that Pishevar "says he has slept very little in the past 48 hours as he seeks input from law enforcement, software engineers and designers, lawmakers and from community members," and he's now working with former New York City police commissioner. Engadget has criticized Pishevar's proposal, writing "Dear Silicon Valley, not everything can be solved with apps."

At midnight on Friday, Uber also shut down their service for one minute "to create a moment of reflection for the Uber Community,", and also added a peace sign to their app, encouraging its users to "take a moment to think about what we can do to help," and changed the countdown for the arrival of a car into the amount of time left "to reflect on gun violence".

Fusion's Kashmir Hill is reporting about a five-foot-tall, white, egg-shaped robot that one can find at the company's inspection lot near Mission Bay in San Francisco. The K5 robot is a stand-in for a human security guard, and it sports multiple high-definition cameras for 360-degree vision, a thermal camera, a laser rangefinder, a weather sensor, a license-plate recognition camera, four microphones, and person recognition capabilities. The report adds:If someone suspicious comes into the lot, or starts messing with a car, the robot can't tase them or break out any weapons. Instead the robot can set off an alarm, send a signal to human security personnel, and record everything that person does to be used against them later by police. Customers of Knightscope, the company that manufactures the aforementioned robot don't buy the machines. They rent them, usually two at a time, so one can charge its battery while the other patrols. The cost is $7 an hour. "For the cost of a single-shift security guard, you get a machine that will patrol for 24 hours a day 7 days a week," said Stephens, citing wages of $25 to $35 hour for a human security guard.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Uber "has developed a new technology that it plans on using to track driver behavior, specifically if drivers are traveling too fast or braking too harshly..." according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which writes that "Information about how a driver is performing will be shared with Uber, but will also be shared with the driver, along with safety tips on how they can improve their performance." Uber will roll this out as an update to their app, using existing smartphone functionality, and "in some cities Uber will also monitor whether or not Uber drivers are picking up their phones (either to text or even just to look at maps) during a ride using the phone's gyroscope."
Ride-sharing companies seem to be growing more and more powerful. One Florida county actually received a grant to offer free Uber rides to low-income workers, and to allow the county transit authority to arrange rides for those residents without a smartphone. Uber recently even became the "official designated driving app" for Mother's Against Drunk Driving, and published a graph suggesting Uber pickups correlate to a drop in drunk-driving arrests. And in other news, Uber rides have apparently even been used by a group of human traffickers to smuggle migrants from Central America into the United States.

Over the past few weeks, we have seen a number of CEOs -- including Google's Sundar Pichai, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -- become victims of Twitter hacks. One must ask, what's wrong with Twitter that so many people -- including high-profile names -- keep getting hacked? BuzzFeed dives deep into the problem, and says it's how Twitter interacts with third-party apps that's at fault. From the article:Over the past several weeks, however, a three-person hacking team called OurMine has made clear that years after the problem first came to light, third-party authentication is still a security nightmare for Twitter. By gaining access to apps with third-party write access, OurMine has been able to post to the Twitter accounts of tech bigwigs like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. In other words, whichever write-authorized app connected to your Twitter is least secure is exactly how secure your Twitter account is. [...] The public nature of Twitter, whose main point is to share information as quickly and widely as possible, has made these attacks a much bigger issue for Jack Dorsey's company than they are for Facebook. And there's very little Twitter can do to solve the problem that doesn't defeat the incentives for third-party writing privileges in the first place: Speed and functionality. Adding layers of security -- like an extra login -- to access Twitter through a third-party app defeats the purpose of speedy cross-platform sharing. And disabling third-party writing would anger developers and hurt engagement, a cost Twitter probably isn't willing to bear.

Reader itwbennett writes: Security vendor FireEye said on Tuesday that malware that can spoof the user interfaces of Uber, WhatsApp and Google Play has been spreading through a phishing campaign over SMS. Once downloaded, the malware, which has struck Android users in Denmark, Italy and Germany, will create fake user interfaces on the phone as an 'overlay 's top of real apps. These interfaces ask for credit card information and then send the entered data to the hacker.

Since the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing apps stopped service in Austin, drunk driving has increased, riders are hunting for alternatives, and the police are conducting undercover sting operations against unauthorized ride-sharing drivers. With Chicago also considering new restrictions on ride-sharing apps, Slashdot reader MarkWhittington shares this report from Austin: With thousands of drivers and tens of thousands of riders who once depended on ride-sharing services in a lurch, a group called Arcade City has tried to fill the void with a person-to-person site to link up drivers and riders who then negotiate a fare. Of course, according to a story on KVUE, the Austin city government, and the police are on the case. The Austin Police Department has diverted detectives and resources to conduct sting operations on ride-sharing drivers who attempt to operate without official sanction. Undercover operatives will arrange for a ride with an Arcade City driver and then bust them, impounding their vehicle and imposing a fine.
"The first Friday and Saturday after Uber was gone, we were joking that it was like the zombie apocalypse of drunk people," one former ride-sharing driver told Vocative.com. Earlier this month the site compared this year's drunk driving arrests to last years -- and discovered that in the three weeks since Uber and Lyft left Austin, 7.5% more people have been arrested for drunk driving.

In 2013, Uber told the Wall Street Journal that a typical Uber driver takes in more than $100,000 in annual gross fares. The ride-hail platform, which has shared similar estimates many times since, says that the company's efforts toward its drivers is a pathway to a modest, more attainable American dream. Turns out, the it has been exaggerating. According to BuzzFeed News, which obtained leaked documents, drivers in some markets don't take home much more than service workers at major chains like Walmart when it comes to net pay. According to the publication, drivers in three major U.S. markets -- Denver, Detroit, and Houston -- earned less than an average of $13.25 an hour after expenses. From the report:Based on these calculations, it's possible to estimate that Uber drivers in late 2015 earned approximately $13.17 per hour after expenses in the Denver market (which includes all of Colorado), $10.75 per hour after expenses in the Houston area, and $8.77 per hour after expenses in the Detroit market, less than any earnings figure previously released by the company.

An anonymous reader writes that Uber "has suffered double-losses in Europe, as both France and Germany continue to reject the company's validity in their regions." Meanwhile, a Boston Uber driver filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday accusing Uber of illegally classifying drivers as independent contractors to avoid providing full employee benefits. An Indianapolis driver has filed a similar suit, which also complains that Uber won't let them accept tips, and keeps any tips that customer's pay them through Uber's app. And remember when Uber and Lyft left Austin after losing a local election which would've required all their drivers to be fingerprinted? Now two lawsuits charge the companies were required to give 60 days notice to all their employees, and is demanding back pay and benefits.

But an anonymous reader quotes this column from the Los Angeles Times arguing that a federal judge's ultimate question is just "how sleazy" Uber really is. We're familiar with the Uber that talked about responding to bad publicity by digging up dirt on reporters following the company. Also the Uber that allegedly stalked passengers using its service, following their travel routes for the amusement of its party-goers... What about the Uber that secretly investigated a lawyer representing an adversary in a lawsuit, and then lied about it? That's the Uber that Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York wants to hear a lot more about. On Thursday he ordered Uber to turn over to the other side a pile of documents related to the investigation.
Slashdot reader chasm22 points out that the high-powered investigator hired by Uber is apparently a retired senior CIA officer -- a former chief strategy officer, chief of cyberthreat analysis and chief of counterintelligence.

Scheduled rides are coming to Uber. The ride-hailing announced on Thursday that users in Seattle can now schedule a pickup request as far out as 30 days in advance. GeekWire reports: The ride-sharing service said scheduling is a top-requested feature from business travelers and the company said priority access will be given to riders who have Business Profiles or are linked to their company's Uber account. Uber says it will bring it to other "major" cities soon.

Quartz did a story in 2014 in which, citing comScore's data, it noted that most smartphones users download zero apps per month. Two years later, the data from Nomura reveals that the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20% in the United States. While there are exceptions -- Uber and Snapchat continue to attract new users worldwide -- it appears that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to get new people to download and try their apps. Recode reports: But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.What's your take on this?

In April, a group of Harvard Business School students created an app called Urbanhail that allowed users to see side-by-side real-time pricing -- including surge rates -- for different ride-sharing apps including Uber. The app received a tremendous response from users. Shortly after that, the group received emails from several Uber representatives, asking them to remove Uber's data from the app citing terms and policies. "Uber's developer terms explicitly forbid using its data in any manner that is competitive to Uber," said Chris Messina, Lead at Uber Developer Experience. This has resulted in Urbanhail removing Uber's data from price-comparison-list. Urbanhail's Amber James didn't find Uber's stance on the matter. He said: They are absolutely a champion of competition when it's them against taxi companies or them against regulators. However, in its own ride-hailing niche of the transportation market, Uber's stance is ironically absolutely anti-competitive.