An anonymous reader writes: Taxi hailing platform Uber has experimented with vehicle financing schemes around the world this year: it launched a pilot program for car loans in three US towns in the summer and had a two year relationship with Santander too. It's South African arm has gone one step further, however, with an official vehicle leasing — rather than purchase — scheme backed by local lender Wesbank. For about $500 a month which covers the car, maintenance and even tire wear, drivers get access to a mid-sized sedan. Hertz and other car hire firms are also joining in with similar schemes to boost the number of Uber drivers in the country.

itwbennett writes: In late October, four delivery drivers for the app-based Amazon Prime Now service filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the company misclassifies its workers as contractors. In June, the California Labor Commission ruled that Uber drivers are employees, not contractors. Now, worker advocacy groups, companies offering services through apps (including Lyft, Etsy, Care.com, and Instacart), a variety of policy experts, and venture capitalists are proposing a new model for worker benefits that will be "portable" across the number of jobs they do in the new on-demand economy. "Self-employed workers choosing to engage in flexible work may also encounter unforeseen work disruptions or other hardships without the protections and benefits that may be provided through full time employment," the group said in a statement posted on Medium.

HughPickens.com writes: In the 1910s, the number of cars in the US exploded from 200,000 to 2.5 million. The newfangled machines scared horses and ran over pedestrians, but by the time government could pass the very first traffic law, it was too late to stop them. Now Kevin Matley writes in Newsweek that thanks to political gridlock in the US, lawmakers respond to innovations with all the speed of continental drift. New technologies spread almost instantly and take hold with almost no legal oversight. According to Matley, this is terrific for tech startups, especially those aimed at demolishing creaky old norms—like taxis, or flight paths over crowded airspace, or money. "Drone aircraft are suddenly filling the sky, and a whole multibillion-dollar industry of drone making and drone services has taken hold," says Matley. "If the FAA had been either farsighted or fast moving, at the first sign of drones it might've outlawed them or confined them to someplace like Oklahoma where they can't get in the way of anything too important. But now the FAA is forced to accommodate drones, not the other way around." Bitcoin is another example of a technology that's too late to stop. "But have you heard the word bitcoin uttered once in any of the presidential debates? Government doesn't even understand bitcoin, and that's been really good for it." Uber and Airbnb show how to execute this outrun-the-government strategy. By the time cities understood what those companies were doing, it was too late to block or seriously limit them.

Susan Crawford yesterday published at Medium a critique of Uber and similar ride-coordinating services, in the form of a kind of paean to the American taxicab. Though she didn't start out with negative feelings for Uber, Crawford writes, her sentiment has swung away from objections to taxis (such as that they seek unfair protection from competition) to an extravagant defense, though it comes with a long list of "shoulds": "[Cities] should be focusing on making their taxi services better," she writes. "Taxis should be more accessible to everyone. Taxi fares should be low, predictable, and uniform. Taxi geographies should be wide. Taxis should be clean, fuel-efficient, driven by trustworthy, well-trained drivers, and available for frictionless electronic hailing." Even with the flaws that list implies, Crawford's description of how well taxis work now is more positive than I've found to be true: "Their rates are regulated and set; their pricing is transparent and can be double-checked (just look at the meter, which is itself regularly tested); they look like a uniform fleet; they are subject to very strict licensing and safety requirements. With rare exceptions, they don’t employ surge/congestion pricing schemes."

Tim O'Reilly has written a response, calling Crawford's arguments "puzzling and unconvincing." O'Reilly dissects some of the math behind the business of driving others for money, as it applies to both conventional taxi drivers and "gig economy" drivers, as well as some of the qualitative effects of ride-dispatch services; surely some readers will take issue with his figures and examples, but they provide a plausible case for doubting Crawford's rosy picture of taxis and dark view of modern app-dispatched rides. O'Reilly writes: "Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose."

Kristine Lofgren writes: The SURE HOUSE, designed and built by the Stevens Institute of Technology, was announced today as the winner of the 2015 Solar Decathlon. The uber-efficient house exceeds Passive House standards and uses less than 10-percent of the energy that a standard house consumes. But beyond solar-powered efficiency, the house is also designed to be open and breezy when the weather is good, but when a hurricane strikes, the house can be locked tight against the onslaught. In fact, it's so tough that it can act as a solar powered community center for an area hit by a natural disaster. Congratulations to the SURE HOUSE team! The team's website has some additional pictures, as well as more explanation of their design decisions.

An anonymous reader writes: The UK's High Court has been hearing a case brought against ridesharing service Uber by Transport for London, the government body in charge of public transport in London. Their claim was that Uber drivers' smartphones should be considered meters because they use GPS and data from external servers to calculate the cost of a ride. Meters are banned in private hire vehicles (and TfL's claims were backed by associations for local taxi drivers and private hire cars). The High Court has found that Uber does not run afoul of that ban. Justice Ouseley said the technology was fundamentally different from standard taxi meters. Transport for London welcomed the decision, but transportation lobbyists are likely to continue challenging Uber in court whenever they can.

An anonymous reader writes: According to two unnamed Reuters sources the IP address of Lyft CTO Chris Lambert has been revealed by Uber's investigations to be associated with the accessing of a security key that was accidentally deposited on GitHub in 2014 and used to access 50,000 database records of Uber drivers later that year. However, bearing in mind that the breach was carried out through a fiercely protectionist Scandinavian VPN, and that Lambert was a Google software engineer before become CTO of a major technology company, it does seem surprising that he would have accessed such sensitive data with his own domestic IP address.

An anonymous reader writes: The mayor of London Boris Johnson has written a column in the Daily Telegraph condemning the way that Uber drivers in the UK capital can effectively circumvent black cabs' legal monopoly on being hailed by random passengers. Whilst supporting the principle of free enterprise, Johnson has no solution to the legal quandary, except to hobble Uber's business model in an absurdly Luddite move, or else level the playing field and condemn the well-outfitted but expensive black cab trade to extinction. Johnson is reluctant to ask such a thing of Parliament, noting that many people there don't 'have apps'.

HughPickens.com writes: Johana Bhuiyan has written an interesting article about how the Las Vegas taxi industry used every political maneuver in its arsenal to keep Uber and Lyft off the strip. Vegas is one of the most lucrative transportation markets in the country, with some 41.1 million visitors passing through it annually. The city's taxi industry has raked in a whopping $290 million this year to date (PDF). What made Vegas unique — what made it Uber's biggest challenge yet — was the extent to which local governments were willing to protect the incumbents. According to Bhuiyan, in Las Vegas, Uber and its pugnacious CEO Travis Kalanick really did run into the corrupt taxi cartel bogeymen they'd long claimed to be saving us from, and this cartel would prove to be their most formidable opponent. But when push came to shove and the fight turned ugly, the world's fastest-growing company ran right over its entrenched opposition.

An anonymous reader writes with The Stack's report that: The London Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA) has engaged a major firm of lawyers to present its case against Uber in the UK capital, citing lack of continuous insurance checks, Uber's tax avoidance practices and even 'loitering' Uber drivers as reasons to impose regulations which would eliminate Uber's competitive advantage in London. A lot of Londoners like to have that competition around, though.

An anonymous reader writes: Uber offices in Amsterdam have been raided by Dutch authorities, as reported by several local media sources (Google translation of original in Dutch). This follows intimidatory deterrence practices earlier in The Netherlands, with Uber drivers being fined in the past months, and fresh allegations that the company would act as a "criminal organization" by offering a platform for taxi rides without license (read: without the authorities earning money from the practice). Time for tech companies to consider moving their European offices elsewhere? Uber's lawyers must be incredibly busy. Proposed regulations in London would effectively end the company's service there, while the mayor of Rio de Janeiro said he would ban Uber's operations outright. They're receiving mixed messages from Australia — just a day after running afoul of regulations in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory is moving to legalize it.

sckirklan writes: Amazon has rolled out a new service called Amazon Flex. It lets people sign up to deliver packages using their mobile phone and their car, earning $18-25/hr while doing so. Think Uber, but for package delivery. Their goal is to fully support one-hour delivery within certain cities. The service is available in Seattle to start, and it'll soon expand to Manhattan, Baltimore, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Portland. No news on what they think of bicycle couriers, but given their focus on being green, I'd imagine something is in the works.

jfruh writes: Didi Kuaidi is China's biggest native ride-sharing app, and it's using its cash hoard to build an alliance to take on global giant Uber. On the heels of a $100 million investment in Lyft, the company is also investing in Ola, India's biggest entry in the market. The deals have been described as involving sharing technology and market knowledge. "We look forward to exchanging learnings from two of the worlds largest markets and the tremendous synergies this partnership can bring, towards our commitment of building mobility for a billion Indians," Ola said about the new deal in a statement Monday.

Harlequin80 writes: RMS (Roads & Maritime Service), the New South Wales' governing body for transport, has begun suspending the vehicle registration of UberX drivers. After failing to deter drivers through prosecutions, with Uber covering fines and legal costs of its drivers, RMS has begun suspending the registration of the vehicles as it forces the vehicle off the road for three months. Under the NSW Passenger Transport Act, paid ride sharing is illegal, and this will see UberX drivers losing the use of their vehicle for both Uber and personal use.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon had one of the most capable robotics research centers in the world. Then, Uber hired away dozens of workers in a frantic push to jump start development of autonomous driving technology, which left CMU reeling. Now the NY Times asks whether such high-tech labs can continue to exist; Silicon Valley seems ready to flood such organizations with money whenever a vital new technology is almost ripe. "Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. When researchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; they usually can't publish what they discover — or even talk about it over drinks with former colleagues. ... [Also], the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, ''basic'' problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money."

Nerval's Lobster writes: Not too long ago, a Forbes writer declared that a liberal arts degree had "become tech's hottest ticket." At so-called 'disruptive juggernauts' such as Facebook and Uber, George Anders wrote, 'the war for talent' had moved into non-technical realms such as marketing and sales. While there's undoubtedly some truth to Anders's thesis, technology recruiters and executives aren't seeing any less demand for strong technical skills in a wide variety of roles (Dice link). When there's a need for tech professionals with 'soft skills,' at least one recruiter just recruits computer-science majors from liberal arts schools, figuring those recruits will be more 'well-rounded.' To be clear, Forbes doesn't suggest that IT employers have begun mixing liberal-arts graduates into their technical teams; the article talks more about those graduates ending up in supporting roles such as sales and marketing, or else becoming intermediaries who translate the customer's product requirements into engineering solutions. But nobody should think that a strong technical background isn't as valued as ever throughout tech companies.

An anonymous reader writes: Uber's third attempt to overturn a California court ruling stating that its drivers are employees and not contractors has ended in failure, with the appeal dismissed by the California Employment Development Department (EDD). The California Labor Commission ruled in June on the matter, and in a later appeal one judge effectively decided that the difference between 'firing' a driver and deactivating their account is purely semantic.

itwbennett writes: On Thursday, ZDNet reported that Uber ride data had leaked into Google search results. Zach Minors confirms in this article that a "site-specific Google search for trip.uber.com produced dozens of links to Uber rides that have been completed and cancelled, in countries around the world including the U.S., England, Russia, France and Mexico. Each link leads to a Web site with a map showing the ride's route, with the pickup and destination tagged with markers. A card on the page also shows the first name of the rider and driver, along the driver's photo, make and model of the car, and license plate number." However, what appeared to be a privacy red flag was not a "data leak," according to an Uber spokeswoman: "We have found that all these links have been deliberately shared publicly by riders. Protection of user data is critically important to us and we are always looking for ways to make it even more secure."

An anonymous reader writes with a report at The Stack that "New York City cabs have begun testing a new app-based taxi system in an attempt to win back customers lost to Uber and Lyft." The app is called Arro, and is being trialled in about 7,000 New York cabs. It sticks with metered prices, rather than the demand-based price increases that Uber institutes for times of peak demand. With so many cabs on the road already, the makers boast that Arro will outpace Uber soon. At least based on my limited experience with each, real competition with Uber or Lyft would require some seminars on good customer service.

An anonymous reader writes: The past several weeks have been rife with major vulnerabilities in modern cars, but none were so dramatic as when Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek tampered with the systems on a moving Jeep Cherokee. Now, Miller and Valasek have left their jobs to join a research laboratory for Uber. It's the same lab that became home for a number of autonomous vehicle experts poached from Carnegie Mellon University. From the article: "As Uber plunges more deeply into developing or adapting self-driving cars, Miller and Valasek could help the company make that technology more secure. Uber envisions autonomous cars that could someday replace its hundreds of thousands of contract drivers. The San Francisco company has gone to top-tier universities and research centers to build up this capability."