Uber faces criminal probe over Greyball s/w used to evade regulation

[Razer]

On 05/06/2017 06:21 PM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
> On 05/06/2017 08:11 PM, Razer wrote:
>> It gave spotters for regulators in Portland 'false screens', essentially
>> blackballing the uber user.
>>
>> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-crime-exclusive-idUSKBN1802U1
>>
>>
>> In other news Uber's billionaire owners are running beg ads in the app
>> for users to donate to a medical insurance fund for drivers (b/c they
>> don't think it's their job... Like WalMart).
> Is Lyft any better? Is zTrip any better? If not, what should we use instead?
>

A taxi? You can call them. Most will deliver a car at an appointed time
if you want. (I used to go grocery shopping for less-than-ambulatory
senior citizens with the meter running regularly and pick up whiskey for
housebound drunks) If you use the same company often most DO allow
"Personals"... driver of your choice, if available. 

Don't know about ztrip, but here's a good writeup on Lyft, and the whole
"Sharing" biz in general by Marxist sociologist Darwin Bond-Graham

Sharing Rides, Hoarding Profits
How the SF Bay area's technology elite are destroying poor & people of
color's incomes by 'Disruptive Innovation'

            The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split
    along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with
    little economic or political power to defend themselves from the
    disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned
    upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their
    communities are becoming unaffordable… …

        “Disruption” is the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s tech industry,
    especially in the realm of startups. The mythos goes like this:
    small scrappy hackers with very little capital and a few computers
    can create new business models that will topple older fossilized
    companies, even whole industries. In the process the economy will
    become more efficient and everyone will have more choices. We all
    win thanks to the new Internet-enabled economy. That’s not at all
    what is happening in reality, however.

        The ideology of disruption goes back a long way in the annals
    theorizing capitalism, but the current ideology really owes more to
    Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and devout
    Mormon who has built his academic career on case studies of
    disruptors. Christensen’s seminal 1998 article in the Harvard
    Business Review on disruption tells a story about dominant companies
    atop their industries —Firestone, Xerox, IBM— that were caught flat
    footed, and in several cases destroyed, by their smaller creative
    competitors. They failed to innovate and grow beyond their core
    markets. They failed to recognize the potential of a new technology
    that would make their existing products and services obsolete. This
    has fidelity with the actual history of American business.

        Christensen, along with his son Matthew, manages a hedge fund
    that purports to bet on disruptors and short the stock of bumbling
    giants. Christensen also sponsors a think tank he named after
    himself, the Christensen Institute, which, according to its web site
    is, “dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation.”

        California’s tech entrepreneurs have embraced Christensenian
    disruption. The big case studies in tech that seem to confirm
    Christensen’s theory are well known. Digital cameras destroyed film.
    Personal computers displaced mainframes as the core hardware
    business, and laptops have since eaten into a huge share of the
    personal computer market. Now mobile devices are eroding PC sales.
    None was ever seen as a threat to the existing dominant product and
    producer, but displacement happened nonetheless. Tapes replaced
    vinyl, CDs replaced tapes, but MP3s and iTunes-like services have
    replaced CDs. Cloud is displacing both the idea of storing your data
    on physical drives you own. Software as a service is chipping away
    at the idea of buying and owning software. And so on…

        In a lot of cases disruption ends up being a battle of big
    corporations for market share. Consumers and employees within the
    industry aren’t necessarily better or worse off when the smoke
    clears and a winner emerges with a new technology and business model.

        But the tech boom today is characterized by a another kind of
    disruption. It’s social disruption. New technologies and business
    models don’t just attack the existing dominant corporations; they
    attack social relations and transform non-business spheres of life
    into methodical instances of economic exchange from which the new
    tech innovators extract revenue. The tech boom is also characterized
    by disruption of smaller competitive markets by emergent tech
    monopolists backed ultimately by huge pools of private equity and
    giant, monopoly-seeking corporations.


        The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split
    along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with
    little economic or political power to defend themselves from the
    disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned
    upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their
    communities are becoming unaffordable. Those with cultural capital,
    and access to economic capital have a shot at being disruptive, at
    skimming some wealth off of deregulated industry and precarious
    labor. And the wealthy individuals and companies that should be
    disrupted by a clever tech startup —the tax dodging banks, the
    Fortune 500, the health care companies and insurance giants— have
    the resources to defend themselves, fend off the geeks, deploy an
    equally clever response to retain market share, or to just buyout
    the scrappy competitor and fold it into their existing empire.

        The ridesharing phenomenon reflects all of this and more.

        Ridesharing companies like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar use the
    ubiquitous ownership of smartphones to connect casual drivers and
    passenger clients through their proprietary applications. Like any
    broker they take...


More: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/18/sharing-rides-hording-profits/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 7602 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20170506/a6d26c90/attachment.txt>