Under the ABC test, a worker is considered an employee and not an independent contractor, unless the hiring entity satisfies all three of the following conditions:
The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact;
The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.
Uber has laid off 435 employees across its product and engineering teams, the company announced today. Combined, the layoffs represent about 8% of the organization, with 170 people leaving the product team and 265 people leaving the engineering team.
Transport for London (TfL), which operates public transport in the capital, has made the decision not to renew the app-based taxi’s license in the city.
The license was renewed in May, but for a period of only five months. It will run out on 30th September, though the company will be allowed to continue to operate during the appeal process.
According to the TfL regulatory board, the ‘approach and conduct’ of Uber showed a lack of corporate responsibility, which could have resulted in public safety and security issues. It also raised concerns with the company’s ‘approach to explaining the use of Greyball, software that could be used to block regulatory bodies from gaining full access to the app.’
To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents.
There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Mr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.
而 Uber 的搞法是針對蘋果總部所在地點屏蔽這個功能：
So Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code for people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.
然後被蘋果工程師抓到，於是 Tim Cook 把人叫來喝咖啡：
The ruse did not last. Apple engineers outside of Cupertino caught on to Uber’s methods, prompting Mr. Cook to call Mr. Kalanick to his office.
Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business. (Lyft, too, operates a competitive intelligence team.)
I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receipts from online purchases.
The founders of unroll.me were pretty dishonest, which is a large part of why the company I worked for declined to purchase the company. As an example, one of the problems was how the founders had valued and then diluted equity shares that employees held. To make a long story short, there weren't any circumstances in which employees who held options or an equity stake would see any money.
I hope you weren't emailed any legal documents or passwords written in the clear.
It is clear to me that the team at Uber under-engineered this problem. Thoughtfully designing this service could trim down the number of nodes by an order of magnitude and save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. That may sound like pittance to a company valued at more than the GDP of Delaware, but in my eyes that’s the salaries of a few engineers and a few good engineers can go a long way. Maybe even further than the few extra Mercedes-Benz S-Classes they could add to their fleet from the money they could be saving...
The move steps up competition with Amazon’s burgeoning grocery-delivery service and provides a potential new avenue of growth for Uber and Lyft. The idea is to let Wal-Mart customers pick out groceries online and then have employees fill the order and give it to one of the ride-hailing companies’ drivers. Shoppers will pay a $7-to-$10 delivery charge to Wal-Mart to have the groceries brought to their door.
