Friday, February 24, 2017

Waymo sues Uber over self-driving tech. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 2017 By Darrell Etherington

Uber's now facing a serious lawsuit as well as its internal cultural crisis, space balloons are a real thing and the FCC just watered down some net neutrality permissions. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for February 24, 2017.

1. Uber's female engineers tell Kalanick the company's problems are "systemic"

Uber continues to deal with the fallout of its disastrous treatment of a female employee who faced sexual harassment from a superior. The company's CEO met with a group of over 100 women engineers, and leaked audio of the meeting reveals a lot of pent-up frustration.

Criticism from the female engineers suggest Uber's problems are much more ingrained in its culture than many might've suspected. It's also clear that at least some at the company feel bringing in former AG Eric Holder to suss out the problems isn't going far enough – because the problems are apparent to everyone affected already.

Uber

2. Waymo sues Uber

Uber's major internal problems are bad enough, but now it's also facing a lawsuit from Alphabet-owned self-driving company Waymo. Waymo alleges that Uber self-driving lead and Otto founder Anthony Levandowski stole its trade secrets prior to his departure from Waymo, and used these to found his own self-driving trucking startup. The timeline of events in Waymo's complaint reads like a corporate espionage thriller.

3. Early Uber investors aren't happy with the company's treatment of sexual harassment claims

Early Uber investors Freada Kapro Klein and Mitch Kapor said that they're not happy with how Uber has responded to its sexual harassment issues. They say that Uber has picked insiders to make the tough calls, which is not as likely to lead to meaningful change.

4. FCC takes some of the bite out of net neutrality regulations

The FCC has changed the threshold at which broadband providers have to share data about some of their services. The limit used to be 100,000, but now it's 250,000 – letting larger companies get away with less transparency regarding their communication to customers of key aspects of their service.

5. World View just opened a spaceport in Arizona

Would you like to go to space? World View might offer the most affordable, lowest risk way to do so in a few years' time – the company uses stratospheric balloons to put objects at the upper edge of the Earth's atmosphere, and it's hoping to do the same for capsules containing up to six human passengers soon, too.

6. Google's RCS native messaging standard expands to 27 more carriers and phone OEMs

RCS is kind of like iMessage but for Android, though it requires buy-in from carriers as well as device OEMs. It's gaining ground, however, in terms of buy-in and that could help Google fight back a bit more against one of iOS's greatest moats.

7. Cloudflare's big bug

Cloudflare's contend delivery network had a big bug that allowed passwords, cookies and authentication tokens to show up in plaintext from its customers websites. This is potentially a huge breach, allowing anyone who noticed the flaw to pick up a large number of logins and other sensitive info without much effort. Cloudflare says the ultimate impact was minimal, but it's frightening that it could happen at all.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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