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Uber Hires Hackers Who Remotely Killed a Jeep
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."
now, we have the name for our band.
Uber envisions being able to mysteriously stop Google self-driving cars that aren't on the Uber payroll :)
Autonomous cars are for the lazy and the inept
Im only drunnk, you insendsitive clod!
Why is offering someone a job poaching?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It now seems clear to me that Uber wants to be a provider of autonomous livery vehicles. No wonder they don't seem overly concerned with their employee -- I mean independent contractor -- satisfaction: they plan to get rid of them as soon as possible.
Now if you drive for the competition, and your car happens to break down...you've been Ubered!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Yes, the fever dream of capital: eliminate labor costs.
In the race to the bottom, some citizens will, of course, be made redundant. Don't stand in the way of progress, comrade, even if it destroys homes, families, and livelihoods!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Yes, the fever dream of capital: eliminate labor costs.
It is also its promised death: without labor costs, there is no more consumers.
This is the business model they're using: set up a service in which pseudo-independent contractors do all your work for you, while you aren't liable for their wellbeing or behavior while under your command, get super rich and fat off other people's sweat while robbing professionals of their livelihoods (the taxi driver's,) by undercutting them which you can do because the rules they are obliged to follow don't apply to your "independent" contractors, then use THAT money to fire all your workers, replacing them with robots. In essence become your own former employees' competition, and do to THEM the same thing they helped YOU to do to people who used to do this job for a living.
Call it "disruption". Profit, then buy a small island somewhere and leave the mess you created to other, better people to have to slog through and figure out how to fix.
At the end of the day, if you ignore all the irrelevancies, and trivialities of detail, if you just FOLLOW THE MONEY, you'll see that what happens is, these people, who are basically financial or economic hackers, exploit what are basically security holes or flaws in the economic operating system, steal a bunch of files, (money,) and then disappear. They're thieves, in other words, and the "drivers" in this case, their unwitting accomplices.
And people think somehow gay marriage or abortion or school prayer is the problem?
Sheesh!
Sehr intelligent
But on the way, the top 1% will get even more fucking rich. Who cares about the long term effect when you yourself have all the money to buy everything you need to survive?
The self-driving car is very much going to project that sinks Uber. It's an enterprise so far outside their core business, with such a sheer volume of money required to bring to fruition, and they're just not going to get there. Moreover, it's not at all clear that their financials support being able to back a project like this if it doesn't bring quick and immediate success.
Google are probably the current leaders in this field. And to their credit, there's a logical value there - Google's business is, essentially, AI - which is what the problem boils down to (and integrates nicely with the rest of their search business - object identification, categorization etc.).
When investors start wanting to cash out, Uber is going to wind up sliced and diced and a lot less valuable then it looked on paper due to projects like this which they can't possibly fulfill.