U.S. judge says Uber withheld evidence, delays Waymo trial | Hacker News Reader

U.S. judge says Uber withheld evidence, delays Waymo trial

reuters.com

344 pointsAnimalMuppet141 comments

The trial seems to be ongoing right now, live tweets can be found here:

But this doesn't look good for Uber at all:

https://twitter.com/CSaid/status/935558449324212230

“Jacobs became aware that Uber thru Clark & Henley, had a sophisticated strategy to conceal, cover up or destroy docs w intent to impede govt investigations."

and

https://twitter.com/CSaid/status/935569588309327878

"Judge quotes Jacob's atty letter: Uber employees went to Pittsburgh to educate the AV group about ephemeral, encrypted communications "to prevent Uber's unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day""

I have seen people wonder on HN whether Uber gets flak due to their nature or are they inherently worse than other giants. While other companies are no saints the constant stream of stupid decisions makes it seem that Uber has (had?) a culture of always trying to find shady way of doing things.

> “Jacobs became aware that Uber thru Clark & Henley, had a sophisticated strategy to conceal, cover up or destroy docs w intent to impede govt investigations."

What does that even mean?

Does this mean that all Uber employees have been trained to 'communicate carefully', that their e-mails get deleted after X months, and that sensitive conversations that could hypothetically, and out of context, be held in person, as opposed to electronically?

If that's all it does, I would like to remind everyone - that's the kind of training that everyone in any Fortune 500 company receives.

> "Judge quotes Jacob's atty letter: Uber employees went to Pittsburgh to educate the AV group about ephemeral, encrypted communications "to prevent Uber's unlawful schemes from seeing the light of day""

Which parts of that are verbatim?

If someone who went through that training actually put the words 'our unlawful schemes' in an e-mail... Well, they are a complete idiot.

If it were anyone but Uber, this would be too comically inept to be true.

The article relaying the whole communication has been published:

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-Waymo-case-...

> The unit acquired leaked code from competitors via Github, dug up information on overseas drivers and researched global competitors, he said. While he didn’t believe that work was illegal, “I had questions about the ethics of it,” Jacobs testified.

> Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.

> It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

Fair point... But I'm not sure this has any bearing on Waymo vs Uber. This can, however, expose them to all sorts of patent litigation from the parties whose code they looked at.

> Tactics included use of attorney-client privilege on written documents, and encrypted, ephemeral communications.

I'm not sure about the former, but the latter is SOP at any company that has a legal department and regulatory concerns.

> It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

Shady shit, but not sure what bearing this has on Waymo vs Uber.

You don't understand. The problem is the letter itself, not even necessarily what it says. The letter should have been handed over as part of discovery. It wasn't. It only came to the judge through an independent case.

And therefore, since Waymo just now finds out about this, they get more time to see if there's anything in this that affects their case. And Uber has nobody to blame but themselves for the delay.

Too late to edit my other reply.

But I want to add a correction here. If I understand correctly, it didn't come to the judge through an independent case. It came to the judge because the judge referred the situation (Uber hiring Levandowski after Levandowski took documents from Waymo) to federal prosecutors. Those federal prosecutors got back to the judge with stuff that Uber should have turned over as part of discovery, but didn't. The judge is not amused.

From SFChronical: http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-Waymo-case-...

> While he didn’t believe that work was illegal, “I had questions about the ethics of it,” Jacobs testified.

> He confirmed that Uber used encrypted, ephemeral messaging “to protect sensitive information and ensure we didn’t create a paper trail that would come back to haunt the company in any potential criminal or civil litigation.” It also used “non-attributable devices” to communicate with third parties providing on-the-ground intelligence about threats to Uber, and to research Uber protestors, he testified.

...sound like "Just another Fortune 500" to you?

Sounds like union busting activities from the 1870s well into the 1940s, so business as usual in the neo-gilded age.

Actually, yes. I have seen Fortune 500 C-level execs use this exact behavior. When there is a merger in the works, use of burners and anonymous e-mail accounts are commonplace.

Not that it excuses Uber's behavior, but corporate execs don't trust that their comms aren't being monitored (by either the govt or hackers in their systems). I-banks and traders have spied on them for years, so it's not an unfounded fear.

> When there is a merger in the works, use of burners and anonymous e-mail accounts are commonplace.

That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

> That's to prevent leaks from driving the stock price up, and causing the buyout cost to increase. That's a little different than using it to hide the fact that they were knowingly breaking the law. Do you understand the difference?

You're making the assumption that they did it for that reason. It could be that covering up the crimes was just a side effect.

I keep all my e-mail in gmail forever, and it's delivered substantial business benefits. If someone asks me for details of something I did fifteen years ago, I can pull it up with ease.

Other than covering up crimes, what advantage do you imagine would be worth the loss of those benefits?

Well, in the current context, deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit. Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong but maybe just something you wrote that expressed doubts about a strategy, for example.

But there's also just cleaning out all the cruft which makes finding useful stuff harder. Since going all-in on Gmail, I delete far less than I used to and that's not entirely a bad thing but I also have to sift through a lot more stuff when I'm looking for something.

> deleting stuff that could be used against you in a lawsuit.

> Doesn't need to be something you did that was wrong

Deleting something that can be produced of evidence of wrong-doing is illegal all by itself.

Leaks can be incredibly expensive. Millions of dollars of lost revenue.

Yes I do; and the F500 Cs I know use it for both purposes. There's somewhat of a code of honor between F500-level execs that anything said in private stays private; you need to be able to have frank backchannel conversations without worrying about antitrust or regulatory problems. Most common is when a communication is rather innocent, but taken out of context or worded in the wrong way it could look very bad.

If the objection is to the technology: Lots of companies use special techniques to avoid creating a paper trail.

It's called "phone calls" and "talking privately". Using that to do bad stuff is bad, but conducting certain matters in a way that doesn't leave a paper trail is not by itself objectionable. I don't know any workplace that tries to ensure all communications leave a paper trail (though I did have a Facebook friend who insisted he only worked at such places, which must be false, since he's employed).

>If they objection is to the technology: Lots of companies use special techniques to avoid creating a paper trail. It's called "phone calls"

I had a friend who worked at a nonprofit who always knew when the general counsel wanted to discuss something sensitive - because he'd call on your office phone. (I suspect he thought it was harder to record a phone call than a 1:1 convo)

What's funny is he didn't realize that the mere chain of calls contained metadata. For example, if the first workday after a boozy company party the HR rep in charge of the interns gets a call, then an intern, then the intern goes into HR, then a senior staffer gets a call, then the senior staffer goes in to speak with HR... certain inferences can be drawn.

Ya, but only inferences. Anyways, it’s much harder for discovery than a complete conversation.

Once you put everyone under oath, unless everyone agrees to the same story, it's not too difficult to make the truth come out.

>Does this mean that all Uber employees have been trained to 'communicate carefully', that their e-mails get deleted after X months, and that sensitive conversations that could hypothetically, and out of context, be held in person, as opposed to electronically?

>If that's all it does, I would like to remind everyone - that's the kind of training that everyone in any Fortune 500 company receives.

Both of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for have also followed that up with something to the tune of "and if you don't want it quoted in the New York times you should think about why you're discussing it in the first place."

Having worked at multiple large companies I can say this is unusual behavior. Most companies want to maintain a paper trail to defend their actions because on average it's a net gain, not assume their actions are problematic and by default remove all evidence as soon as possible.

Not a lawyer, but I don't think it's unusual to have a retention policy that says when documents should be deleted. This is apparently legal as long as it's a blanket policy. (For example, by default all email gets deleted after a year, unless someone takes action to save it.) Of course anything under legal hold has to be kept.

It's also not unusual to make sure employees know about attorney-client privilege and how to use it properly, or that you should avoid discussing legal matters in a discoverable medium under the assumption it may be used against the company in a lawsuit. This is basic employee training stuff.

So, yeah, no. Sometimes maintaining a paper trail is the thing to do but this isn't the only thing companies do.

While a specific retention policy is always a good idea 1 year is very short and would often cost you information for any annual process. Their are various standards like 5 years in banking or 7 years in healthcare. And some industry's are required to maintain records for significantly longer than that

I worked for a big pharma (#2 in the world by most measures), and their email retention policy was 90 days. If you have built any enterprise messaging software, you know you have to support retention policy or it won’t sell to the big companies. Slack can be configured to be aggressive as delete-after-one-day

Not to call big parma ethically challanged, but international documents are more likely to Hirt them than help.

this is so downvoted that I can't even read it.

Drag your mouse over it to highlight the text.

that doesn't improve readability for me, instead of light grey on lighter grey, it becomes isoluminant light grey on light blue

Then either something got screwed up in your config or your monitor is severely miscalibrated. Highlighted text should not be hard to read, and the blue should not be light at all.

Toss something like this in usercontent.css?

  ::selection { color:white; background:black;}
  ::-moz-selection { color:white; background:black;}

I think that most companies have 'N-month email retention policies', where N is somewhere between 1-6.

Did the malfeasance happen more than a few months ago? Gee, sorry, no internal communications; that's policy. Did someone keep incriminating communications from more than a few months ago? Oooh, that's against policy - the recalcitrant employee has since been terminated and clearly does not represent our lofty ideals.

But I don't think that most companies go out of their way to use encrypted platforms to shield communications which they know are likely illegal from investigators.

For Google, at least, I believe it's 18 months. And that's quite new, it happened after the Oracle fiasco, which had all sorts of goodies like:

Subject: Java class libraries

With talks with Sun broken off[,] where does that leave us regarding Java class libraries? Ours are half-ass at best. We need another half of an ass.

That came out in discovery.

It is such a shame groklaw is no longer a thing. Another Snowden casualty.

I missed that, how was groklaw connected to Snowden?

https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/groklaw-shuts-down-as-the-...

https://www.csoonline.com/article/2133906/privacy/groklaw-sh...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-cl...

You can read the post at the top of groklaw.net still, in case that ever changes (unlikely) here is a perma link [0]

Basically the author decided that she would rather disconnect from the internet than be spied on.

[0] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

I consider it a failure of journalism editing. Pamela (the author of groklaw) earnestly believed that her communications were being monitored and read by American intelligence services, which was a rational conclusion to draw from the prevailing news stories in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

She was so disillusioned with the perceived trampling of 4th amendment rights that she stopped posting to her blog and moved her email to Lavabit.

Such was the breathless nature of the reporting, that the editors and ombudsmen didn't consider that the reporting drew conclusions and made unfounded allegations based off of slide decks. Other countries' government secrets being taken through computers == "they monitor everything."

Now with the benefit of the Shadow Brokers leaks, we see that the NSA is severely constrained by manpower, processes, and software bugs. It's practically a joke compared to its perceived might in 2013.

I hope that she returns to writing, but I understand if she still feels privacy concerns with the internet.

> It's practically a joke compared to its perceived might in 2013.

But it's a lot worse than we thought before Snowden. And with stuff like this erring on the side of caution seems like a pretty good idea.

I whole heartedly disagree. Erring on the side of caution got us the TSA, DHS, the War on Drugs, the Iraq invasion, and justifies the continued operations in Afghanistan.

Erring on the side of caution is a rational individual strategy in many cases, but it has disastrous collective implications.

In a sense, if the editors of those publications had erred on the side of caution, then they could have reduced the drag on commerce and free expression that exaggerated claims yielded.

> I whole heartedly disagree. Erring on the side of caution got us the TSA, DHS, the War on Drugs, the Iraq invasion, and justifies the continued operations in Afghanistan.

That's nothing to do with the subject, which is an individual no longer comfortable with their online communications. Dragging all this other stuff in has no bearing on that.

Besides the fact that quite a few of those entries have absolutely nothing to do with 'erring on the side of caution'.

I wouldn't have brought them up if they weren't examples:

TSA: making searches mandatory just in case there's a hijacker

DHS: vastly expanding federal police powers just in case there's a terrorist in the country

War on Drugs: fund expensive and invasive federal and state police operations just in case someone overdoses

Iraq invasion: invade Iraq just in case there are weapons of mass destruction

Afghanistan occupation: stay there just in case the Taliban permits Wahhabi radicals to use the country as a home base for planning and training.

Okay, in this instance, it's "avoid doing stuff online just in case newspapers are right that my government is surveilling my actions." In this case, it's a radical life change that has little upside. She did not abandon her blog on a whim; she hated that she felt she was forced to do so.

But the risk was overblown: when the police kick down the door of Pamela Jones, I assure you they already have me and perhaps you (in the Netherlands) in prison as well.

TSA: Feel good security theater, practically quite useless.

DHS: Powergrab using terrorism as an excuse

War on Drugs: Paraphrased slightly: War on colored people, way to keep the prisons filled.

Iraq Invasion: Pretext to use large amounts of toys so MIC profits, nobody actually believed Iraq had WMDs.

Afghanistan Occupation: Belated attempt to go after Osama Bin Laden who actually was holed up in Pakistan.

I'm in full agreement with all those except for Afghanstan, you might want to re-check the time line.

I'm just saying that "erring on the side of caution" was how all these bad decisions were pitched to the public, and they agreed to it.

I keep hearing this here, but AFAIK there's plenty of record keeping regulation which won't allow for that. No?

I assume many companies auto-clean the user-facing mailboxes for different reasons, but they probably all are required to archive the emails on some type of long-term storage for a few years.

But maybe that's just industry-specific regulations...

But a lawsuit changes that. You don't get to delete stuff that's relevant to the lawsuit, no matter what your retention policy is.

Still the policy makes it <date of litigation hold> minus X months, rather than everything since the creation of the company.

Correct. And "litigation hold" is the term that I knew existed, but didn't come up with.

While working at a pharmaceutical co I was backing up a drive onto the os drive of our local pc for general it support / utilities when I got a call from the user. She forgot to tell me she was on legal hold. I stopped the backup, went through the e-discovery process on her drive, rebuilt the pc and did e-discovery on our pc as well, because it was now also covered by her legal hold. You don't want to involve yourself in a case by ignoring those discovery laws, they are very serious about enforcement in court.

structural engineers are required to keep all communications, notes, etc for seven to ten years, depending on the jurisdiction.

These super short email retention policies seem extremely unethical to me.

Same goes for financial firms.

Only for official RFIs though right? Not all email communication. (speaking from my experience as a structural engineer in Australia, things may be different here)

The Sony Pictures hack of 2014 caused a lot of companies to reflect on their data retention policies. Uber's special in that they set their retention policy to subvert criminal investigations, not to protect "trade secrets"

I agree about structural engineers being an ideal though--old school engineers get "accountability" better than anyone

These policies go two ways. Companies need to be able to delete data eventually, but they also need to make sure that employees are not deleting data on their own in order to hide illegal activity. Having a retention policy of X months then cuts both ways. If you delete data before 18 months, well that looks awfully suspicious.

Prior to even being sued the opposing sides lawyer can give you notice of a possible lawsuit and it is your responsibility to not destroy any documents related to it regardless of your companies retention policies.

If you look at CSaid's twitter stream, it looks a lot better for Uber now and Waymo looks like it might be in the judge's crosshairs.

Are you sure she didn't just mistype? There's nothing that supports Waymo being in trouble.

"Judge: Turns out Uber's server is only for the dummies, the real stuff goers on on the shadow system. There's enough under oath here for me to believe there's a 50-50 chance this will turn out to be something v bad for Uber; or 50-50 it's a dry hole"

"Judge to Waymo lawyers: You’re making the impression this is a total cover-up. Your client is in a bad way now. You’ve made me upset. U should be saying we’ll open our doors, get to the bottom of this. Instead you’re fighting every little thing."

"Media coalition argues for open courtroom. Waymo says it needs to shield info re deals with 7 entities, including Lyft. Judge says: I want the public to see how hypocritical this is. Waymo wants all the dirt on Uber to come out. But no no no, they don’t want any dirt on Waymo."

I think it's pretty clear that she meant to write Uber in the second tweet.

If you check anyone else that was livetweeting, it's clear that csaid mistyped the second tweet. Alsup addressed those comments at Uber's lawyers.

I use Keybase, Signal, even Snapchat daily. I wonder if a lawyer could pervert that into ‘shady’ behavior.

If you suffix that sentence with "...so the IRS will have trouble taking me to court for money-laundering", the lawyer wouldn't even have to "pervert" it. Privacy is not suspicious. Privacy with the explicit, stated intent of concealing illegal behavior is perfectly reasonably suspicious. Similarly - I would not bat an eye at the average car purchase, but I would think hard if someone asked me to recommend a car that would not be damaged if it hit someone. I would not give a friend access to my computer if they said they were going to use it to send spam email. Etc.

This isn't about the privacy tech. This is about Uber being evil, knowing that they are doing evil, and trying to hide their evil from the courts. The fact that they worked at a high level to hide their evil destroys any pretense that it was accidental or unintentional.

> If you suffix that sentence with "...so the IRS will have trouble taking me to court for money-laundering", the lawyer wouldn't even have to "pervert" it. Privacy is not suspicious. Privacy with the explicit, stated intent of concealing illegal behavior is perfectly reasonably suspicious.

[meme][1] Can't lose privacy [/1][2] If you don't tell people what you're doing in private [/2][/meme]

But seriously, it's a bit of a catch-22; engaging in privacy preserving behaviour but later falling under suspicion of some illegal act shouldn't imply that you engaged in those behaviours for the intent of covering up suspected but not proven illegal acts. It's a real issue -- but it someone were so stupid as to say "haha, I did x so you couldn't prove it!" ... well, that's basically an admission of guilt, isn't it.

The IRS doesn’t care about money laundering, they just want you to pay your taxes. The FBI in the other hand...

I think that that's an issue regardless of the action you're taking. I buy nice kitchen knives on Amazon because I cook. Lots of people buy nice kitchen knives on Amazon because they cook. But if I stab someone with a nice kitchen knife the day after it arrives in the mail, I bet that that purchase is going to get a reaaaaaaally careful look when the "premeditated" bit comes up in court.

(There's another issue here about normal everyday things being painted as unusual and bad. I think that that's what drove the post that I originally responded to, and I can't fault the overreaction - too many people have in seriousness said things like "if you have nothing to hide". For the listed reasons, however, I don't think that that's what's going on here, and I'd prefer to avoid giving the anti-privacy group ammunition in the form of weak arguments.)

“Evil”... I think the word you’re looking for is illegal (maybe not even that). There is not an objective moral code. I (and many others) view Uber challenging unethical laws as morally beneficial. I admit that’s my own personal opinion though and that there is no global concept of good/evil. Really odd to see this very conservative thinking creeping into the tech industry that in the past was very much against the establishment.

okay someone tell me if i missed anything uber has done...

* trying to dredge up dirt on journalist for being negative towards the company.

* kalanik denies that an incident involving a uber driver choking a passenger ever happened.

* kalanik boasting that he should have called the company "boober" from all the women he gets

* offering customers rides with "hot chicks" in france.

* having a "god view" that employees used to spy on exes, politicians and celebrities. they paid a measly $20k fine and supposedly continue to still allow employees to use god view.

* kalanik took people out to a escort bar in south korea (on company dime)

* created a greyball program, to try and avoid authorities from getting a ride and hide their wrong doings from city officials

* had a high level uber executive go into india and get the medical records of a rape victim and held onto those records for no good reason. oh yeah he also showed those records to kalanik and another executive and wasn't fired on the spot for it. they literally didn't fire him after their initial "cleaning up" of the company until news outlets started sniffing around

* ignored california's dmv and started putting self-driving cars onto the road, one of which decided to run a red light. then tried to pass off the issue as, "human error"

* paid off hackers to delete user data. did not notify proper authorities

* sexual harassment / toxic workplace issues

--------- and now ---------

* withholding evidence from a trial

* using ephemeral messages so they dont leave a paper trail

* allegedly denied areas from service by redlining them

It's the Trump strategy: do sleazy and illegal things at such a high rate that no one can keep up with the firehose. They know apologists will bamboozle the public by taking each instance in isolation and going "it's no big deal", and it works because no one has enough working memory to keep the whole picture in their head at once and be appropriately outraged enough.

I can'd find anything about Uber redlining -- what story are you referring to there?

one of the reporters who was in the courtroom from the testimony of richard jacobs:

https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/935575268160180224

> "That’s to say we could lower the operating costs by identifying high threat areas where crime takes place... help the company avoid those areas."

Thanks for the link!

That's interesting. Uber has marketed its service as a public good because it covered undeserved areas.

In addition to this, there is a known effect of surge pricing that routes demand from poorer areas to wealthier areas. I can't find the paper right now, but IIRC it was 2015.

And yet they inexplicably enjoy solid support here. They're one of the dirtiest companies in the tech industry, and people, for some reason, can't seem to get enough of them.

My cynicism leads me to believe it's because tech is (now?) more about making money and less about ethics or making cool stuff.

The first dot-com boom was so much better than this one. But the upcoming dot-com bust will be much more satisfying than the first one.

sounds like kalanik should run for president

Welp. Someone has committed perjury today. https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/935584091990138881

"Russo is on the stand now. He says that Jacobs' statement about recruiting inside sources at competitors is false."

When did some of these of prominent tech people begin thinking that acting like psychopaths was the way to achieve business success?

That's the reward structure of Big Capatalism. I don't think it's a tech thing. It's the enormous pyramid structure of large corps. Psychopaths are good at promotion.

"Big Capatalism"

That's a new one.

They became prominent, because such behavior is rewarded and praised.

When they successfully popularized the narrative of Founder-as-Ubermensch, as modern-day titans tirelessly hauling human progress forward.

And conversely, the narrative that those with grievance against startups or their actions are anti-progress, that opposition to a tech startup means you're either stupid or corrupt.

When you're operating under the notion that what you're doing will literally move the human race forward, it becomes very easy to rationalize things that don't pass a simple smell test. Surely a bit of minor illegality is acceptable when you're going to Change The World(tm)?

I for one am glad to see this lie finally being challenged en masse.

It's unclear to me still how much of Startup/Founder Mythology was intended for PR purposes, and how much did startup execs end up believing for themselves.

> It's unclear to me still how much of Startup/Founder Mythology was intended for PR purposes, and how much did startup execs end up believing for themselves.

Why choose? For a while, everyone who counted won - execs, investors, ibankers, even some of the workers, some of the time - when the rubes bought the line.

But eventually it starts causing problems - like when the rubes start actually expecting accountability. If you're the, ahem, ubermench, then you are also at fault when you screw up, as much as the Kalanicks of the world try to weasel, bully or deflect.

The sooner this bullshit dies, the sooner we can behave like a somewhat sane industry.

As teenagers when they developed a crush on Ayn Rand, I'd guess.

Well it worked for them, they're worth at least $50B (Softbank wants to buy shares at that price.)

They might have to pay a few billion in fines or damages but that's all. New CEO will apologize and we'll forget it. And that is because they got caught...

Not defending them, just saying in many cases these tactics work.

Uber is just trying to fit in the taxi industry:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/nyregion/taxi-king-is-cha...

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/taxi-king-nyc-sexually-h...

"Apologize rather than ask for permission" has always been a common mantra in tech. It's just that with Uber it's a freelancer marketplace so they're dealing with actual people instead of just data, which magnifies their actions. If you could take the time to make a wider observation, you'll find that online freelance marketplaces are generally lightning rods for hate

Has it been? I was around for Bubble 1.0 and I don't recall the level of brazen lawlessness we're seeing with Uber.

I indulged in a bit of forward-fantasy, imagining an eventual death penalty for Uber.

The objection to a corporate death penalty is usually "but what about the employees?"

Well, what about them? The desk-workers are mostly in high demand, no problem.

And the drivers ... well, I see lots of Lyft and Uber stickers on the same cars. If there's no Uber in town, Uber users will likely use Lyft.

Is that an unseen danger for corporations in the "sharing" economy? Your employees are portable by definition?

This got me also thinking, why isn't there a two way auction for ride sharing, with companies competing to "sponsor" the ride, and drivers competing to drive the ride, and on the other side, customers competing to buy a ride. Or just cut out the Uber/Lyft middlemen and have independent drivers compete?

Is it too soon to "Fix Ride Sharing!"?

Real-time bidding for ride sharing would be pretty cool, across any number of services and independents. A regulatory mess for sure, but as we're seeing, the extant players already constitute a regulatory mess.

Exchanges for distributed bidding exist for financial securities. It's a bit of an IT hassle, but not an unsolved problem.

As it does for adtech which I was referring to. I’m sure it’s part of Uber and related services as well, but it should be applied across services to create maximal competition.

Did I get this right ? They got the letter because some one from a 3rd company CC'ed Waymo instead of Uber on an email containing that letter (the one that 1. Claims Uber did some nasty things and 2. Uber didn't submit as evidence as if it didn't exists) ?

That's either one hell of a fuck up, or someone took as big a stand as they could

Wasn't that how they initially found out about uber stealing their trade secret? When the LADAR manufacturer accidentally emailed Google instead of Uber?

In its filing, Waymo said it was inadvertently copied on an email from one of its suppliers with drawings of Uber’s circuit board design for its lidar technology, short for light detection and ranging, ” that are laser-based sensors used in self-driving cars. Waymo said Uber’s design bore “a striking resemblance” to its proprietary and highly secret design and infringed on Waymo’s patents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/technology/google-self-dr...

Judge Alsup got the letter because the US Attorney's office passed it along to him. I haven't seen anything about how the US Attorney obtained it, but presumably criminal prosecution and subpoenas provide a greater disincentive to lying than civil suits. Also, there were two parties who would have had this letter: Uber and the lawyer(s) who wrote the letter on behalf of the former Uber employee. Unlike Uber, those attorneys would have little incentive to be anything but transparent.

Oh, now we know how the USA got it: https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/935912822478794752. Uber "voluntarily disclosed the Jacobs letter" because Jacobs threatened to involuntarily disclose it. However, Uber tried to hide it in this case (despite it/Jacobs mentioning Waymo); the USA gave it to Judge Alsup because he had initially recommended the case for criminal investigation and they thought he might find it relevant in his trial. At this point, Uber has lied so consistently it seems like they should forfeit their opportunity to offer testimony. I wonder if the judge will allow any of this to be brought up with the jury.

Only in @kateconger's replies[0], but it appears Alsup is still deciding whether he'll allow the Jacobs letter to be admitted as evidence for the jury. Excluding a letter alleging Uber stole Waymo trade secrets would be a big blow to Waymo. Especially one that Uber paid $7.5m to suppress. There isn't going to be a smoking gun, so Waymo has to make the case that Uber probably stole Waymo trade secrets because they've acted like they probably did.

[0]: https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/935971693192818688

I was joking about Alsup allowing Uber's pretrial malfeasance to be disclosed to the jury. But the quotes in this Ars Technica article[0] make me wonder. "My normal inclination is, let’s decide the case on the merits but I’ve never seen a case where there are so many bad things like Uber has done." "It looks like you covered [the Jacobs letter] up, refused to turn it over to the lawyers that were most involved in the case, [and] to me, for reasons that are inexplicable." It sounds like Alsup is split on the Jacobs letter because he might be a "disgruntled employee who sees the handwriting on the wall". And he really wanted to know why Jacobs' lawyer got $3m for writing a letter. Alsup knows something doesn't smell right about the Jacobs settlement. If it is allowed...

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/waymo-asks-ubers...

Is there a transcript available yet? I love Alsups no-nonsense attitude and reading those are always great entertainment. Not to mention it's a primary source :)

I'm pretty sure it's still going on (so no), both https://twitter.com/kateconger and https://twitter.com/CSaid are live tweeting.

Unfortunately, @CSaid mistakenly used Waymo instead of Uber in a few places, but she did have an interesting tidbit I haven't seen in any of the subsequent articles[0]: the former employee of Uber claimed that he was reprimanded in a performance review and then demoted for "not protecting more info from discovery." How is that not a huge deal?

[0]: https://twitter.com/CSaid/status/935573560461967360

Are you sure that that should say Uber and not Waymo?

Judging by the tweets around there it was Waymo's turn to speak, and it seems more likely Waymo would be quoting the letter than Uber.

I think it is a pretty big deal

I didn't say the tweet I referenced was one she was mistaken about. I said it had an interesting tidbit that I had not otherwise seen reported. For ones she got wrong, see https://twitter.com/CSaid/status/935599952515837952 and https://twitter.com/CSaid/status/935541698284863488. The judge was clearly upset at Uber's lawyers, not those of Waymo. Mistakes happen, but it made her stream more confusing than it should have been, because you had to think harder about each reference to either company. @KateConger's stream was much clearer, but she didn't mention the performance review testimony.

Ah your right, my mistake.

And Uber wants this trial to be heard by a jury? Are they stupid or they can’t settle this out of court without Waymo owing their ass?

I mean almost weekly in the press the public hears about how horrible Uber is and is operated.

Maybe the jury will be all older ppl and those who don’t have smartphones.

I think you’re overestimating how much the general public cares about Uber. The scandals haven’t negatively affected Uber financials, I doubt they will have an impact on the trial.

> haven’t negatively affected Uber financials

SoftBank share purchase discounts Uber by 30%

https://www.ft.com/content/2a2131e0-d3ef-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5...

It never fucking ends with this company, does it?

White collar tech bros will not hold up under investigation. A ivy-league mba has way too much to lose to risk going to jail over some stock options. Doing this kind of dirt can only survive via staying under the radar-- somebody is gonna flip and this whole house of cards is gonna go down in a stampede of Uber employees rushing to drop the dime on each other.

This is a civil lawsuit. Why would anyone go to jail?

Cause this stuff is illegal and high profile. And Uber has been skating if not nakedly flaunting the law for a long time now. If the DA starts sniffing, people are going to start talking.

Furthermore, the odds of the leaks continuing approach certainty at this point. Even in a civil trial, who would perjure themselves over a job? (Pleading the fifth is a potential option even in a civil case, but is real problematic and probably will make a criminal investigation even more likely.)

The judge has referred it to the US attorney (prosecutor) for possible criminal prosecution. The big new piece of evidence today (the letter) was given to the judge by the US attorney as relevant evidence they have found. So there is clearly an ongoing criminal investigation into the same thing.

Evidence of criminal activities could become apparent during a civil trial, and lead to subsequent criminal charges.

Plus perjury, etc.

"The letter said an organization within Uber called marketplace analytics “exists expressly for the purpose for acquiring trade secrets, code base and competitive intelligence.”

That sure sounds like illegal activity, in fact lots and lots of it.

It’s a RICO case, no?

People organize to do something illegal. RICO

> A ivy-league mba has way too much to lose to risk going to jail over some stock options.

And yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Rajaratnam and co

Ultimately the engineers who created these tools can be help criminally culpable if they knew or should have known that the tools they were creating were intended for an illegal purpose.

It isn't the kind of thing that is likely to get charged but certainly something that investigators can use to put pressure on low level employees and get them to testify against their bosses.

Uber has pissed off a lot of people so don't underestimate the "karma" that they have coming to them. Lots up people lining up to piss on their grave while laughing heartily.

Not much detail yet. I'm hoping for some more as time goes by...

>Not much detail yet. I'm hoping for some more as time goes by...

This has ben just posted with some more details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15799737

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-Waymo-case-...

This whole time I've been asking where is Uber in really deep shit? So here you go, Drogans, there could be some deep shit flooding out from Uber's septic tank. And the Trial is delayed again, at Judge Alsup's request. This whole time Alsup has been like 'let's get this on with already'. Now he's pushing back the trial date based on what the DOJ showed him behind a closed door. Now here's a weird thing. Larry Page has 3 flying car companies, and he funds them all himself. One of them is Kitty Hawk, of which Sebastien Thrun is CEO. Anthony Levandowski has worked for Kittyhawk, but I'm having a hard time figuring out if Levandowski was doing work for Kitty Hawk after he left Waymo, but it's possible he did. Larry Page also has a secret Flying car company called Tiramisu[1]:

>A motion filed last month by Uber to force Google's self-driving car spinoff company Waymo to provide witnesses on a range of topics reveals the existence of Tiramisu.

>The company is listed as relevant to an ongoing Uber-Google self-driving car spat because it alleges that Anthony Levandowski, the engineer accused of stealing lidar and other technical secrets from his workplace at Google's self-driving car project and taking them to Uber, may have been working for the company in his free time.

Now, in the Depositions of Larry Page and Travis Kalanick, it had been revealed that they had been in talks about Flying Cars, or VTOL aircraft. Possibly you recall when Uber dropped the white paper for Uber Elevate[2]. Uber has been talking about flying cars in the news, and has forecast 2020[3] as the year they reveal or deploy some kind of autonomous vertical take off and landing taxi.

So there is possibility that Uber and Larry Page are involved together in some way in Tiramisu. If true, there is also a possibility that Sebastien Thrun and Anthony Levandowski have both been involved. And as an extension of that, there is the possibility that they've already been using Waymo's top-secret technology in flying autonomous vehicles for Tiramisu for years. This increases the liklihood that Page may have known about the Otto stunt before it happened.

Alsup I think just learned about all this from the DOJ. Something is going on there with Tiramisu that screws everything up.

[1]https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/433maw/larry-page...

[2]https://www.uber.com/info/elevate/

[3]https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16613228/uber-flying-car-...

is there anyone in that company who's not an asshole? the lack of any culture there is appalling.

They have a culture. Just not a very good one.

One of the nicest, shyest, and most polite persons I've worked with left Google for Uber a couple years ago. So I can assure they've got great people too, apart from the shady ones that make the news.

I hope they go hard on them. I hate the way in the US it's just become expected that everyone is corrupt as hell.

I hope Google/Alphabet end up owning Uber after this trial. Then they can shut it down.

Can a judge hold a company in contempt and fine them for disobeying a judge? Even if Uber isn't guilty of stealing IP from Waymo they have certainly been less than forthcoming. I'm sure that Waymo has done some shady stuff too. If a person withholds evidence or obstructs a case a judge can throw them in jail. What's the equivalent stick that the judge has to compel a corporation?

> "I'm sure that Waymo has done some shady stuff too."

Please point us to the memo from Uber that proves Waymo is operating a "Competitive Intelligence" team that looks more like a CIA Ops team than a Business Intelligence unit. I'll wait.

This "2017 and there's Bad Guys on Both Sides" bullshit needs to die.

Seriously, what's with this widespread assumption that because there are two sides, they must be relatively equal? The amount of harm this absurd belief has caused is immeasurable.

It's just another form of the law of averages, the signature ingredient in the rationalizer's cookbook.

That was most definitely not the point I was trying to make, nor was it the question I asked.

Why would a wholly-owned subsidiary that has no commercial products need a Business Intelligence arm? Of course Waymo doesn't have anything like that.

"shady stuff" != "competitive intelligence team"

I hear you. If I'm understanding you properly, you're just saying "Waymo has done some shady stuffy too" to establish that you're not a fanatical "yay Waymo boo Uber" person and are willing to see fault regardless of which side it's on.

Wow my comment was gravely misinterpreted it seems. I was asking if Alsup could fine Uber for their bad behavior. Normally a judge would throw a person in jail for contempt but you can't do that with a corporation. You can be held in contempt regardless of the outcome of the trial- i.e., even if Uber isn't found guilty would/could Alsup still fine them for slowing the trial down?

The part that seems to have been misinterpreted was the extra comment about Waymo. I was trying to head off the eventual comment where someone said that Waymo hadn't played 100% fairly either (it's possible, they have lawyers too). I'm not saying that Waymo is bad, I was just trying to head off someone bringing up some sort of "both sides are doing it, so why not fine both sides" argument.

You can jail executives for the bad behavior of a corporation. (I know of one case where executives of a medical device corporation were trying to ignore the FDA, and the US Marshalls marched them out the door in handcuffs. Not even the door of a courtroom - they arrested them at their office.)

What is the world did Waymo do that was shady here? Put something like that out there kind of need to back it up with something?

The backlash here shows that Uber has already been found guilty in the eyes of the public, the case isn't resolved.

Waymo have a team of lawyers too, and they can't all be saints. They are in this to win and set back a competitor's efforts.

In terms of shady stuff, do you remember how this case surfaced? Waymo was emailed Uber's design files by "accident." That's shady from day one on Waymo's side.

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