http://ift.tt/GNVgXA RSS feed for motherboard.vice.com en Mon, 23 May 2016 15:24:58 +0000 http://ift.tt/1WcRFbc Mon, 23 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000
One Saturday night after staying out too late in the West Village’s seedy bars, a close friend asked me to share an Uber with her back to Brooklyn.
A pit developed in my stomach. I couldn’t untangle what exactly about the app made me uncomfortable, but I felt guilty about taking an Uber. There’s the cost, for one thing. The app seems like a luxury in Manhattan, where taxis are plentiful and the subway runs all night. But that wasn’t it. I just had a feeling that Uber, the company, was bad.
“Let’s just get a cab,” I said.
For a certain sect of mostly young and wealthy Americans, the allure of Uber is hard to pass up. Once you’ve connected your credit card to the app, it’s mindlessly easy to summon a car to take you wherever you want to go.
But for some people, the act of patronizing Uber is too fraught to take lightly.
Matt Buck, a tech entrepreneur based in Austin, where both Uber and Lyft recently stopped operating due to a dispute with the city, never permitted himself to use Uber in his hometown.
“There seems to be a lot of blind trust in new apps that make something in our lives a little easier.”
“Learning about CEO Travis Kalanick’s fascination with Ayn Rand was enough to turn me off of Uber,” he explained to me in an email.
I asked if his strict avoidance of Uber caused any social friction; he said it didn’t, because his friends don’t use the app, either. “Most folks I encounter already consider Uber to be a pretty slimy company,” he said.
He admitted he does occasionally break his abstinence while traveling.
For some of the people I spoke to, Uber merely epitomized greater concerns that the sharing economy or digital technology in general present.
“Really it’s all about the bigger injustice of this entire system,” said Heather Thompson, a 27-year-old English professor in New Jersey. “Uber just scares me because it’s so popular, but people don’t seem to realize how messed up the whole business model is. It’s just working towards further class stratification.”
“I have a few opinions about the moral status of Uber, mainly that it’s the apotheosis of the American concept of capitalism within a weak-willed, complicit regulatory apparatus,” said Alex Kemmler, 31.
Like many Chicago residents, Kemmler started using the service because it was sometimes more convenient than getting a taxi. But he started to feel uncomfortable with how the company was treating its drivers, especially after he saw an article shared on Facebook that explained how Uber reportedly discourages tipping.
Following a $100 million dollar lawsuit in April, drivers will now be able to put small signs in their cars stating that “tips are not included, they are not required, but they would be appreciated,” although Uber told me that its official stance on tipping has not changed—tips are not included in the fare, and riders "not obligated" to pay one in cash.
"I find Uber's treatment of its ‘contractors’ more than a little suspect,” he said. “I frequently say that Uber (along with Amazon) only employ humans as prototypes for the robots that are in development to replace them."
New York City museum worker Robin Carol, 27, is as suspicious of other apps as she is of Uber.
“I’ve never used Uber or any ridesharing apps on my phone,” she said. “I’m a bit stubborn and skeptical about the security of my information, so I also don’t use Venmo, Seamless, Mint, or really any app that links to my credit card.”
“Even though technology has the potential to solve so many problems, it’s also evolving quickly and we sometimes don’t think about the consequences,” she continued. “There seems to be a lot of blind trust in new apps that make something in our lives a little easier.”
Image: Shaye Anderson
Several people who practice Uber abstinence also pointed out that in some circumstances, the app may pull resources away from already struggling public transportation systems.
“There’s this idea that transit will eventually separate into these 'private' and 'public' tiers—again, creating more options for those who can pay more and leaving everyone else with a broken system,” Gizmodo Urbanism editor and Los Angeles resident Alissa Walker said.
If there is a winner in this scenario, it’s Lyft. Many people I spoke to said spending their dollars with the other San Francisco-based ride-hailing app just sat a little better with their consciousness.
San Francisco resident Emily Peters switched to Lyft after her Uber account was hacked. “It was surreal to get the message saying ‘your ride is here’ and then to watch the car putt around a foreign city without me,” she said.
An Uber representative just told her to cancel her credit cards and change her password, which felt brusque. She’s used Lyft ever since.
“The drivers are always friendly," she told me, and "The other riders on Lyft Line make for excellent networking and conversation. It's a company that I feel much better endorsing.”
“I feel very comfortable taking Lyft," said Chris Orris, 26, who said he tried out both apps for a while when he first moved to San Francisco.
He started asking his Lyft drivers, who typically also drive for Uber, which company was better.
"Every single one, with one exception, confirmed that Lyft gave much better commissions and was easier to deal with in general." Lyft drivers are also nicer, he said.
Orris is now a Lyft loyalist. "In fact their app is pretty awful compared to Uber's and I've been late to things over and over again because of crappy time estimations and directions,” he said. “But despite that and the extra cost, I choose Lyft anyway."
Uber also has an almost Trumpian reputation with some riders when it comes to the subject of women.
Uber abstainers cited a BuzzFeed report that said the company may have been misrepresenting the number of sexual assaults that had been perpetrated by Uber drivers and riders, as well as the sexist remarks Kalanick made in in his contentious GQ profile from 2014.
Uber has a “horrific track record of suppressing violence against women in Uber cars,” Hillary Hafke, 24, who lives in Palo Alto, explained to me. “I’m a former college activist and I don’t use Uber because they haven’t made violence against women a priority."
“The misogyny runs as deep at Uber as at most of the startups in SF,” 46 year-old native San Francisco resident Brooke Biggs told me.
Others recalled Uber's fling with using its tracking capabilities to keep tabs on journalists, including the time an Uber manager used the company’s tracking software to allegedly follow a reporter in 2014 and the time BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith heard an executive say that the ridesharing behemoth was willing to spend a million dollars to pry into the personal lives of reporters.
If there is a winner in this scenario, it’s Lyft
“The journalist stalking story was not something we should ever hear from an American company,” Dr. Monya De, a journalist and medical doctor in Los Angeles told me.
But for some, the reason for not using Uber has little to do with labor relations, human rights, or the company’s ideology.
“I once threw up in an Uber,” said a male 24-year-old Washington, DC resident, who asked to be anonymous, “and they charged me a hundred bucks, so fuck that company.”
Uber Earth is Motherboard’s exploration of the ways Uber has already changed the world and how it stands to do so in the future. Follow along here.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TyS0l8 Louise Matsakis for Motherboard i don't do uber Uber uber earth Lyft ridesharing UberX uber black taxis transportation sharing economy Travis Kalanick uber abstinence capitalism silicon valley apps ride hailing http://ift.tt/1TqWb5t Mon, 23 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000
For a company whose business depends on sending fleets of new cars out onto the road, Uber’s environmental proposition is a strong one.
The theory is quite simple: Uber, along with other ride-hailing startups, will decrease carbon emissions in cities where it operates by lessening people’s reliance on personal automobiles, minimizing traffic congestion on roads, and eventually disincentivizing the perks of owning a vehicle in the first place.
“A city that welcomes Uber onto its roads will be a city where people spend less time stuck in traffic or looking for a parking space,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick once said. “It will be a cleaner city, where fewer cars on the road will mean less carbon pollution—especially since more and more Uber vehicles are low-emission hybrid vehicles.”
But so far, we’ve seen a staggeringly small amount of meaningful data to verify any of Uber’s grand claims about its ability to reduce the transportation industry’s carbon footprint. When nearly every other aspect of the gig economy has been quantified, why are we left clueless when it comes to the issue of Uber’s environmental impact?
"Nobody had ever studied the environmental impact of ride-hailing companies before."
Uber has a long history of holding its user and driver information close, especially when it entails valuable and potentially proprietary activity data. Because of the startup industry’s brutally competitive nature, young and successful companies such as Uber often err toward secrecy, which can hurt their transparency in the short term. Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission issued the company a $7.6 million fine for failing to report accessibility and driver safety data back in 2014.
“Believe it or not, if you had a big data set and started to crunch the numbers, you’d be able to see an awful lot about their business—when and where they’re most successful. Information abstracted from data like this could inform new or existing competitors,” Dr. Susan Shaheen, co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, told me.
Some of Uber’s unwillingness to open parts of its API to researchers and stakeholders can also be interpreted as due diligence, or perhaps just paranoia. Over the last couple of years, the company’s security credentials have been patchy at best. Multiple data breaches, accidental leaks of customers’ personally identifiable information, and deeply troubling evidence that Uber employees were able to track riders through its “God Mode” tool might have influenced the company’s hush-hush attitude.
Instead, Uber has decided to periodically released its own in-house reports on ridership, sustainability, and emissions—all of which are provided with unclear methodology, and inherent bias.
In a 2015 blog post touting its new ride-sharing service UberPool, the company asserted that “San Francisco’s uberPOOL efforts prevented about 120 metric tons of CO2 emissions from Feb-Mar 20th, equivalent to the output of over 128,000 pounds of coal.” According to the post, anonymized UberPool data collected over a one month period was fed through an Open Source Routing Machine to calculate the mileage and emissions customers saved by carpooling, rather than opting for solo rides.
What Uber failed to disclose was that three separate promotional offers for discounted UberPool fares were issued during that time period, which could have artificially inflated the number of people who used the service. Additionally, the study assumed that every vehicle users hailed was an efficient Toyota Prius getting an ideal gas mileage of 50 miles per gallon. This conjecture is confusing, seeing as UberX car requirements for San Francisco don’t limit drivers to hybrid cars only. And even among Prius owners, reports of actual versus advertised fuel economy vary, suggesting it’s much lower than Uber guessed, at 30 to 45 mpg. Perhaps most egregiously of all, Uber never accounted for the possibility that UberPool riders might have otherwise taken more sustainable modes of public transportation, biked, or walked to their destinations.
Uber has also made bold declarations about drastically reducing the amount of cars on roads in congested cities like New York. The company stated one of its “simple” goals was to remove 1 million cars from New York City’s streets. But how does that stack up against its actual deployment numbers?
Of the 30 largest US cities, New York had the highest share of carless households in 2014, coming in at 56.5 percent. That’s out of roughly 3 million total households, which leaves a whopping 1.3 million cars spread out over a mere 322 square miles of land. In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio accused Uber of adding approximately 20,000 UberX cars to New York’s busy streets. In 2014, that number was hovering somewhere around 10,000. The Taxi and Limousine Commission estimated that 14,088 black and luxury cars were operating on Uber’s platform within five boroughs, as opposed to the city’s 13,587 yellow cabs.
The average passenger vehicle emits 4.7 metric tons of CO2 per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Therefore, in three years, Uber should have contributed 94,000 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in New York City alone, which equates to nearly 101 million pounds of coal burned.
Visit Todd Schneider's site for a dynamic version of this graph.
But the data isn’t that simple. According to open data compiled by Todd Schneider, New York City's yellow cabs averaged just under 352,000 trips per day in January 2016, while Uber vehicles made 150,000 trips per day. Uber’s New York contractors also work fewer hours during the week than their taxi-driving counterparts. And it’s unclear whether Uber’s “new” cars were recent additions to its fleet, or simply existing taxi vehicles that had been absorbed into its platform.
Uber has also kept mum about the efficiency of the proprietary algorithm it uses to direct drivers to new passengers. We know, theoretically, how its routing engine works, but there are a lot of unknowns in regards to how successful it is at charting actual trips, and whether or not drivers are relying on it. However, both drivers and passengers have complained about Uber’s in-app navigation feature before, accusing it of suggesting longer routes. It’s also not uncommon for drivers to use alternate GPS services, such as Waze, to navigate cities during peak traffic hours.
How this affects something like UberPool, which must use the shortest linear route possible to be as sustainable as Uber claims it is, is vague. The company presented its carpool service as a way to raise overall earnings for drivers by combining two separate rides into one trip along a similar route, but according to numerous negative posts on the Uber Drivers Forum, not all of them agree with that sentiment. Because many drivers feel they’re doing more work for a negligible fare increase, there’s little incentive to accept UberPool trips, especially when they might make more off single-rider trips during surge pricing. Some drivers admit they turn down 100 percent of UberPool requests.
“We don’t want everyone chauffeured around the city. There’s no room for that in San Francisco.”
That doesn’t mean ridesharing can’t be environmentally friendly, though. In 2014, MIT researchers conducted a computational study of 172 million New York City taxi trips completed in 2011. By modeling different shareability networks throughout the city, the authors were able to see that certain carpooling algorithms were able to cut trip lengths by 40 percent or more, reducing driver costs, emissions, and rider fares. On average, they found, every trip within their sample set was shareable with 100 other trips.
Uber reiterated this vision in a statement to Motherboard, saying that "When people forego car ownership, a city’s overall vehicle miles traveled (VMT) can also decrease—which can mean less gasoline is consumed and fewer emissions are generated. Furthermore, Uber helps enable smarter transportation policy choices. Fewer personal cars require fewer parking spaces and parking lots, freeing up space for more productive and sustainable uses."
Image: b k/Flickr
Yet the company has heretofore made it difficult to independently study how far along this track it might be. It was this sort of opacity that instigated a massive and unprecedented review by UC Berkeley transit researchers and the National Resources Defense Council of Uber’s environmental impact claims. According to Dr. Shaheen, who is heading up the study, Uber has agreed to submit company data, platform data such as anonymized driver and rider information, and will also be issuing a rider survey which aims to collect sociodemographic and attitudinal data from its customers.
All research will be conducted by a neutral third-party, without funding or control from Uber. Unlike previous reports and analysis released by Uber’s own data team, the study will be independently verified. Lyft will also be analyzed, and the team’s results will be published as early as fall of this year.
“The way that the study came about is that I was being asked by regulators, legislators, and stakeholders to weigh in on a variety of legislation related to Lyft and Uber. But nobody had ever studied the environmental impact of ride-hailing companies before,” Amanda Eaken, deputy director of urban solutions and sustainable communities at NRDC, told me.
A spokesperson for Uber told Motherboard she didn’t think they would have anything to say on the study.
Some of the key metrics the investigation will look at is whether ride-hailing companies like Uber have influenced changes in auto ownership, if they’ve had notable impacts on miles traveled, and what that all equates to in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore, the study is coming at a time when Uber is heavily shifting its resources toward UberPool, which will provide experts and regulators with helpful comparisons between carpooling services and classic services such as regular, single-ride taxicabs.
It’s possible their findings will suggest competing trends, such as some Uber riders taking cars to and from mass transit stations, and others choosing to hail cabs in lieu of more environmentally conscious options like biking. In cities with multiple public transportation options, Uber might also be encouraging people to hop in cars to avoid things like bus transfers.
Dr. Shaheen led a smaller, less exhaustive study in 2014 that observed a randomized group of 380 ride-hailing customers in downtown San Francisco. The survey was carried out before the emergence of carpooling services like UberPool, and should not be interpreted as representative of today’s market, but nevertheless revealed a curious theme. Half of the trips the group surveyed replaced non-taxi modes of transportation, including public transit, walking, and biking.
Will that trend be duplicated in the ongoing study? It’s still too early to tell. It would be to Uber’s benefit if results indicated that ride-sharing instigated behavioral shifts such as more people feeling empowered to take public transportation, or deciding against purchasing a car. After all, Uber needs to cohabitate with existing transit options, and should not only be complementary to other environmentally friendly modes of transport, but also adaptive to ongoing initiatives cities are pursuing to make their carbon footprints as small as possible.
“There’s a sweet spot to these services. Are they convenient, cheap, and quick? But are they also green and equitable?” asked Tim Papandreou, chief innovation officer at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. “We don’t want everyone chauffeured around the city. There’s no room for that in San Francisco.”
If UberPool is found to be as sustainable as Uber assures it is, a transportation authority like the SFMTA might consider developing carpooling networks inside of city limits to incentivize the company to focus on its ridesharing services, Papandreou told me. But this first snapshot of Uber’s footprint is just that—a snapshot. Several years of additional studies would need to be completed before regulators could propose any changes to the industry.
Regardless, riders, drivers, and legislators alike will soon have the best comprehensive look yet at Uber’s environmental impact. Where that takes us is yet to be seen.
In the wake of all this, the CPUC has ordered Uber to validate its carpooling claims through an independently conducted study of its own services. Currently, there’s no relationship between Dr. Shaheen’s research and the CPUC ruling. But either way, a verdict has been hailed, and not a minute too late.
Uber Earth is Motherboard’s exploration of the ways Uber has already changed the world and how it stands to do so in the future. Follow along here.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySyY7 Sarah Emerson for Motherboard Uber uber earth ridesharing environment carbon transportation http://ift.tt/1TuEVqI Mon, 23 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000
Rarely does a startup enter the collective consciousness as rapidly as Uber. In 2010, it was humbly introduced to the world as UberCab, which sounded a lot like just another app. “UberCab Takes The Hassle Out Of Booking A Car Service,” wrote TechCrunch.
Just a few years later, Uber is now a common verb. It’s a major employer. It’s raised over $10 billion in venture capital. It’s upended the taxi industry. It’s facing off against Google in the race to develop a self-driving car. It’s launched a thousand trend stories, changing the way we date, the way we work, the way we sell drugs, and the way we think about distance.
At Motherboard, we’re devoting our May theme week to Uber. How has this company changed the planet, and how will it continue to do so in the future? How has it changed our culture? How much of their disposable income do people spend on Uber? We know Uber has had an impact in major cities around the world, but can it make it in the heartland?
We’ll be tackling these questions and more this week. Follow along here, and share your thoughts with letters@motherboard.tv.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySaJ1 Motherboard uber earth Uber theme week announcements http://ift.tt/1TyRO59 Mon, 23 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000
An explosion is the release of a high energy density within some material. Ignite a wad of gunpowder, for example, and the result is a chemical reaction generating heat, which represents a sudden accumulation of energy. The heat causes gas to expand quickly enough that a pressure differential is created between the rapidly expanding gas and the atmosphere around it. This high-pressure front is what goes on to destroy things—maybe a whole city, or a galaxy, or a nanoscale bit of human tissue.
That last example is what occurs in laser surgery: A bit of tissue is heated and then vaporized in an ultratiny explosion. Indeed, lasers are a great way to make things explode—as in laser ablation, generally—as they enable the delivery of large amounts of energy very suddenly into the guts of some material. This is most often envisaged with optical wavelength laser beams, but the electromagnetic spectrum is of course much broader than this.
A large team of researchers hailing from Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute, among others, has been hard at work blowing things up using X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs), which they describe in a paper published Monday in Nature Physics. Generating X-ray pulses at femtosecond scales is a new capability, the physicists explain, and such pulses offer the very desirable benefit of creating dynamically simple explosions, at least relative to optical lasers.
"Explosions are spectacular and intriguing phenomena that expose the dynamics of matter under extreme conditions," the paper begins. "We investigated, using time-resolved imaging, explosions induced by ultraintense X-ray laser pulses in water drops and jets. Our observations revealed an explosive vaporization followed by high-velocity interacting flows of liquid and vapour, and by the generation of shock trains in the liquid jets."
"These flows are different from those previously observed in laser ablation, owing to a simpler spatial pattern of X-ray absorption."
Image: Stan et al
The basic idea is that the incoming beam of X-rays results in the creation of positive ions within the target liquid, which then go on to trap electrons via the electrostatic force (positive charges heart negative charges, etc.) These electrons, meanwhile, are absorbing photons from the pulse, and soon enough the result is an abrupt, extreme heating in a long, narrow region through the liquid droplet following the path of the beam.
The extreme energy density together with the long filamentary explosive region are something never before seen in more typical laser ablation experiments. Firing an optical laser beam into a water droplet instead has the effect of focusing the beam into a single point, or hotspot. With an X-ray pulse the beam cuts right through, leaving instead a long explosive thread of energized matter.
As an X-ray explosion preceded in the group's experiments, the eventual result was the fragmentation and vaporization of the water droplet being targeted, leaving a disc-shaped cloud surrounding the original path of the pulse, rather than the sphere you might expect from an explosion bursting from a single focused point.
So, weird X-ray explosions are all well and good, but what's the actual use? For one thing, it's a way of creating relatively controlled explosions that don't suffer from the abovementioned point-focusing problem. And this offers the potential for using the beams to create and study usual new dynamics in matter.
As the authors explain, "such experiments may reveal, with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, the structure and dynamics of pure liquids and of chemical or biological samples in solution."
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySeIO Michael Byrne for Motherboard lasers explosions physics Earth Laser Stanford studies http://ift.tt/1s4VylV Mon, 23 May 2016 15:00:00 +0000
It was close to midnight and I was minutes away from missing my plane at the Cali airport in Colombia. The dark rural road forked and the sign for the airport pointed in the opposite direction my Uber driver had taken. He said it was a shortcut. Catching my plane suddenly became the least of my worries.
My Uber bubble was burst. Perhaps the ride-hailing service wasn’t the reliable, safe transit option I had thought it was and I was about to be kidnapped, raped, or even murdered. Then I saw the bright glow of the airport towers. My heart landed back in my chest when I realized we really had just taken a shortcut.
But were my fears unfounded?
Just a week later a woman was allegedly raped in an Uber in Mexico City. The driver is now behind bars, facing charges of rape and robbery. A similar incident occurred in Delhi, India, in December 2014 and actually led to Uber temporarily suspending its service there until it modified its security regulations. In London, 32 rape or sexual assault claims have been filed against Uber drivers in the last year, according to official figures.
The website whosdrivingyou.org compiles information on safety incidents involving ride sharing applications and links to more than 125 incidents involving sexual assault over the past three years. An information leak obtained by Buzzfeed in March showed that in Uber’s database, a search query for “sexual assault” yielded 6,160 customer support tickets; a search for “rape” yielded 5,827. Uber rebutted these claims when contacted by Buzzfeed.
"We take incidents like this very seriously, and our thoughts are with the victim and her family,” Uber stated in an e-mail response to my request for comment on the Mexico City rape case. “We immediately removed this driver-partner from the platform and we are working closely with law enforcement to assist their investigation.” Uber did not respond to my other questions regarding background checks and safety measures in time for publication.
A typical green-and-white bug taxi in Mexico City. Photo: Tinou Bao/Flickr
Transit and security is no joke in Mexico City, where I live and where women are constantly subject to groping and sexual assault in the city’s overcrowded subway wagons. The city introduced gender-segregated cars sixteen years ago, but it still hasn’t resolved the problem. When a recent hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso, which translates to My First Harassment, went viral in Mexico dozens of women shared their stories of men grinding up against them in the subway, masturbating in front of them, and even cumming on their legs.
Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world that has legally authorized Uber. And the most recent incident of a woman allegedly raped in an Uber makes it all the more clear: Women are now left with no safe transit options in the capital city of nearly 9 million people.
The government-run Women’s Institute estimates that between 300 and 350 women suffer some form of sexual aggression in the public transit every day. More than 95 percent of crimes are not investigated in Mexico and women say they often fear bringing complaints about sexual violence to the authorities. Last month, thousands of women took to the streets in protest of the violence they suffer daily, many focusing on harassment they are subject to in public places.
Taxis have a long standing reputation in Mexico and other Latin American countries for being vehicles for express kidnapping, where riders at gunpoint are brought to ATMs to take out as much cash as they can and then are left in an unknown location. Stories of women being sexually assaulted in taxis, especially those hailed in the street, are common in Mexico City in particular.
“He told me my middle school uniform turned him on and immediately jumped in the backseat. I kicked and hit him and got out,” Brenda Burgoa told me about a taxi driver’s attack on her when she was 13 years old. She says since that moment she only takes registered taxis or Uber. “I know who picks me up, their license plate, even their damn photo. It does freak me out that they have all my personal info saved, my common routes, [and] telephone,” added Burgoa.
In debates in the comment sections of online articles about the recent Mexico City rape case, readers wrote that the passenger (whose identity has been concealed and was thus unable to be reached for comment) probably did it just to “discredit Uber” and blamed her for being drunk and therefore guilty for what happened to her. “How is she sure that she didn’t have relations with someone in the bar and then when she was in the car blamed it on the poor Uber driver,” stated one comment on the website of the news outlet UNOTV.
“Now I will only take Uber as a last ditch option”
Ivonne Piedras, an NGO worker who lives in Mexico City, said she frequently rode in Uber until she had a bizarre incident. “One time the Uber driver was about to arrive and told me that he was bringing a man he was training with him even though it was 9 PM at night. I immediately cancelled the trip,” Piedras said, adding that this combined with the rape incident has made her wary of the private transit service.
The lingering threat of sexual violence women worldwide face in transit, be it in an Uber or traditional taxi, is spurring safer alternatives like SafeHer, which is set to launch internationally in the fall as a ride service “driven by women, for women and children passengers.”
“As a former Uber driver myself I picked up thousands of women who had horrible stories and thought that there had to be a better way,” said SafeHer founder Michael Pelletz. He said the plan is to roll out the service, which is currently contracting drivers, in eight countries, and that SafeHer is currently working with Mexican politicians to ensure that there will be stronger background checks of their drivers.
In the meantime it is likely that thousands of women in Mexico, myself included, will continue to take Uber as the safest option we got.
“Now I will only take Uber as a last ditch option,” said Piedras, who is still very weary of the service. “And if I do it, I will be in constant communication with someone to let them know where I am until I make it to my destination.”
Uber Earth is Motherboard’s exploration of the ways Uber has already changed the world and how it stands to do so in the future. Follow along here.
Follow Andalusia Knoll Soloff on twitter @andalalucha.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TFYkZl Andalusia Knoll Soloff for Motherboard uber earth Uber mexico city rape Women taxis sexual assault mexico ride-hailing transportation http://ift.tt/1TFHhXe Mon, 23 May 2016 14:15:00 +0000
HELMTT's handiwork. Photo: US Army
This story originally appeared on War Is Boring.
The US Army is looking into all sorts of ways to blast drones out of the sky. Including—get this—with a frickin’ laser beam.
In April 2016, the ground combat branch deployed a truck-mounted laser cannon to a trial at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. During the exercise, troops used the beam to torch a tiny, quadcopter-type drone , the kind you can buy online.
“We did a lot of preparation … seeing if we could track the airborne targets among ground clutter,” Adam Aberle, the program manager in charge of the High Energy Laser Mobile Test Truck, or HELMTT, told Army reporters. “We absolutely blew lots of stuff up.”
HELMTT works like this. From back of an eight-wheel, 10-ton truck, crews aim the turret-mounted 10-kilowatt laser blaster in any direction. Situated high on top of the vehicle, operators can even point the beam at a downward angle to snipe very-low-flying drones.
Unlike in Star Wars, the laser beam doesn’t hit its mark like a conventional bullet does. Instead, soldiers keep the laser pointed at a drone or other object until the target melts or bursts into flames.
Boeing's earlier prototype laser truck. Photo: US Army
For more than a decade, the Pentagon has been working on different types of energy weapons. The main goal is to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. The Army and its sister services quickly realized that the high-energy beams could also take out smaller rockets, artillery rounds and other targets.
“There is a need for short-range air defense, and lasers are one of those technologies that will meet that need,” Aberle noted. As the Pentagon trimmed down after the fall of the Soviet Union, Army air-defense units were some of the first to go.
A foreign air force hasn’t attacked American forces on the ground since North Vietnamese biplanes bombed a radar site in Laos in an odd, singular incident during the Vietnam War. Today, most of the Army’s air-defenders operate Patriot missiles, which are best suited to taking down high-flying jets and missiles.
The Army National Guard owns almost all of the remaining shorter-range Avenger systems. With their eight Stinger missiles and single machine gun, these trucks are better able to handle lower- and slower-flying aircraft.
But the American monopoly on pilotless planes and choppers is long over. So, in September 2014, the Army and Boeing first tested a prototype of the laser-armed heavy truck against mortar rounds and small drones.
A year later, the ground combat branch entered into a research partnership with Boeing to work together on the weapon. HELMTT is the latest product of this arrangement. It uses many of the same components as the earlier system.
The engineers eventually want to replace the existing laser with a new version that’s six times as powerful. This upgrade would allow gunners to hit targets farther away and better pierce through dust and fog.
Without sufficient power, particles in the air can deflect, and as a result weaken, laser light. “To put it in perspective, if you double the power, you half the engagement time,” Aberle explained. To point the laser in the right direction to begin with, any finished product will also need powerful radars and other sensors.
Unfortunately, the Army probably wants these beam cannons, like, yesterday. Enemy drones are increasingly popping up in conflicts all over the world.
During a recent flare-up in the disputed Caucasian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in April 2016, Azerbaijani forces reportedly used an Israeli-made suicide drone to kill a bus-load of ethnic Armenian volunteers. Unlike a traditional missile, the IAI Harop can loiter over the battlefield, waiting for the best opportunity to ram itself into an enemy position.
In Iraq and Syria, Islamic State terrorists regularly film their attacks using quadcopters like the one HELMTT zapped in the recent test. The group claims it is also using the easy-to-fly drones to help direct its troops.
Officials in Washington worry that militants could strap small explosive payloads to these cheap flying machines. Regardless of how effective that idea might be, there’s no doubt drones have tremendous P.R. value. Their cameras can capture great footage for slick-looking propaganda videos.
And this is to say nothing of larger, purpose-built military drone types such as China’s CH-4. Similar in many respects to the American Predator, the missile-armed CH-4 has shown up in the arsenals of Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia.
An IFPC launcher fires a Hellfire missile. Photo: US Army
Whenever engineers do finish their work on the laser truck, it will still only be one part of Army’s new anti-aircraft arsenal. With so many potential threats, the ground combat branch doesn’t want to rely on just one weapon.
For as long as it’s been working on HELMTT, the Army has been developing a more conventional mobile missile-launcher called the Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC.
Installed on a smaller standard, six-wheel Army truck, IFPC can hold up to 15 missiles of different types.
In March 2016, engineers test-fired the new weapon multiple times at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The truck successfully launched AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles — a common air-to-air weapon for American fighter jets — and the ubiquitous Hellfire laser-guided anti-tank munition.
On top of that, the Army truck lobbed a number of Israeli Tamir interceptors during the experiments, as seen in the video below. Tamir is the weapon behind the Iron Dome defense system. Since 2011, Iron Dome has shot down more than a thousand terrorist rockets, according to Israeli authorities.
As the tests continue, it is entirely possible the Army’s weaponeers will try out even more different missiles in the launcher. The final version could be able to destroy enemy planes and drones, blast incoming artillery rounds, and attack targets on the ground. The Army hopes to have a completed design sometime in 2017.
To complement the missile system, troops may also get a massive cannon. In April 2015, Army testers blasted yet another small drone with an experimental gun. The ultimate plan calls for a twin-barrel, 50-millimeter weapon that can spit out 200 rounds per minute.
It shouldn’t be long before the Army has lots of different ways of taking out enemy drones.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TFYdNb Joseph Trevithick for Motherboard lasers military weapons laser weapons drones us army war HELMTT http://ift.tt/22lHkJS Mon, 23 May 2016 12:05:00 +0000
Quite literally, every day someone gets hacked. Whether that's a telecommunications company having its customer data stolen, or another chain of businesses being ripped for all the credit cards it processes, today one hack just seems to melt into another.
In our series Another Day, Another Hack, we do short posts giving you what you need to know about the hack, so you can figure out whether your bank account, website logins or anything else might be at risk. Because, even if the hack might not be the most sophisticated, real people are still getting fucked over somewhere, and should know about it.
Last week, a community of furries—people with an interest in anthropomorphic animal characters such as wolves and foxes—witnessed a popular online hub disappearing. Content including art submissions and user profiles on enthusiast site “Fur Affinity” was wiped, and hackers may have run off with email addresses and hashed passwords.
“We have just learned the attackers have access to personal user data, such as encrypted passwords and email addresses,” the site’s self-described Director of Operations, known as “Chase,” wrote last Friday on the Fur Affinity forums. Around Monday morning, a user called Fender announced that site passwords had been reset.
The Fur Affinity Twitter account has some 41,000 followers, and describes the site as “The world’s largest community of furries, anthros, dragons and more!” Fur Affinity, essentially an online gallery, allows users to upload music, writing, and art.
According to Fender, the problems started at the beginning of May, when researchers disclosed a vulnerability in the ImageMagick library that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on websites. In this case, hackers downloaded Fur Affinity's source code before the administrators had patched the site.
Over a week later, Fur Affinity heard that people at an unnamed convention were handing out USB sticks containing that source code. The same day, the site was attacked again, and this time hackers deleted content. They were stopped before things such as journals and notes could be wiped, an administrator who calls themselves Dragoneer wrote last week on the Fur Affinity forums.
“While we were investigating [the USB sticks], somebody launched a second attack against the site using information gleaned from the source code,” Dragoneer said.
Fender wrote that, “At this time we do not know who executed the attacks on this site. An analysis of the attack vector used suggests these individual(s) were experienced attackers and not casual bystanders.” (However, the researchers who discovered the ImageMagick vulnerability said that the “exploit is trivial.”)
Fur Affinity has been restored from a May 11 backup, so the damage isn't too bad, and site passwords are supposedly hashed and salted. This means they might not be immediately cracked, though that is still possible.
The lesson: Even if a site, organisation or company says that no passwords have been stolen in an attack, you should reset yours anyway, especially if you used the same password on multiple services.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TyS8kn Joseph Cox for Motherboard Another Day Another Hack furries Fur Affinity hacking hacks passwords Internet Insecurity ImageMagick http://ift.tt/1Tqq3Pk Mon, 23 May 2016 12:00:00 +0000
Algorithms are boring until your life depends on them. People with Type 1 diabetes use algorithms all day long. They perform mental calculations to manage their blood-sugar levels, which are measured by hand with a finger prick, or with a wearable sensor that fits under the skin. If they stray too far from baseline, the consequences can range from exhaustion and depression, to coma and death.
Usually when humans are doing something for which a computer would be much superior, such as performing calculations, a company will jump in and automate it. Algorithms for managing diabetes are no different. Any competent programmer with access to either long-term or real-time glucose and insulin data could start creating customized apps and tools that make life easier for people with diabetes.
But that’s the problem: the data isn’t readily accessible. That’s why digital health activists like Dana Lewis, who has type 1 diabetes, are hacking into medical devices, to create tools that manufacturers won’t.
“Most people don’t understand that medical device technology is about ten years behind everything else,” Lewis, a Seattle-based data analyst, told me over Skype. “It’s very frustrating to not get your data from your body out of the device.”
A woman with a Continuous Glucose Monitor. Image: Intel Free Press/Flickr
The first time Lewis, who is 27, hacked into her Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), a small device that attaches to her body and reads her blood-sugar level every five minutes, all she wanted was to make it louder. The device beeps a warning if her glucose falls or climbs too steeply. She can either increase or decrease her insulin intake with an insulin pump. But Lewis found that she was sleeping through the alarm at night, and the consequences of not waking up in time left her feeling terrible in the morning.
Once she and her husband Scott Leibrand got glucose data off the device, they realized they could do more than sync it to a louder alarm. So they developed a program and started inputting data points for each action she took with her insulin pump—if she was increasing or decreasing the insulin—in response to the data from her CGM.
With those two datasets, Lewis was able to develop a predictive algorithm that mimicked the mental calculations she and other people with Type 1 diabetes are already performing all the time.
Basically, she taught the pump to read her CGM and respond automatically. When the monitor and the pump work together, they become what Lewis has dubbed the Artificial Pancreas System (#OpenAPS). She calls it “closing the loop.”
“Diabetes is a disease of patterns"
Lewis compares managing diabetes to driving on the highway. Most of us have a pancreas that does the “driving” for us—that organ is responsible for regulating our insulin levels, but in people with type 1 diabetes, it doesn’t work—and we don’t have to think about it. People with Type 1 diabetes have to “drive” themselves. In this analogy, the CGM is their speedometer, and the insulin pump is their gas pedal.
The #OpenAPS system is like cruise control. People with diabetes still have to steer, but this little piece of homemade software makes the driving a lot easier, says Lewis.
An artificial pancreas is a risky piece of technology. If it malfunctions, someone might get the wrong dose of insulin, which is a potentially fatal drug. Lewis argues that people with Type 1 diabetes are accustomed to risk, and can judge for themselves whether the payoff outweighs any danger. #OpenAPS users report more peace of mind and better health, with lower average glucose levels, she said. As of May 17, 59 people had adopted her system.
While not everyone is ready to hand over the reins of their insulin pump to a DIY piece of software, there are a great many who want to be able work with their own data, but aren’t allowed because device manufacturers won’t open up their APIs or make the data available to download. (Lewis blames this on the fact that most of the existing devices were built, tested, and approved by the FDA before users started demanding access.)
A finger prick test. Image: Victor/Flickr
Take Nightscout, a program that makes hacked GCM data available in the cloud, so it can be accessed from anywhere. Nightscout won’t tell an insulin pump what to do, but with this tool, parents of children with Type 1 diabetes are able to monitor their kids’ GCM stream any time, from wherever they are.
A chief advocate for data liberation is Anna McCollister-Slipp, a digital-health entrepreneur with Type 1 diabetes. She takes 14 different medications every day, has many associated complications (kidney, nerve, and eye disease), and keeps six different devices with her at all times. With these, she generates a lot of data.
“Diabetes is a disease of patterns,” she said over the phone from her home in Washington, D.C. “Understanding what impacts your blood-glucose is essential, so you can make critical decisions about how to mitigate and treat those factors. All I’ve wanted for the last five years is to put all this data into a single timeline.”
While device manufacturers show the data on their own apps and software platforms, visibility is not the same as accessibility. There’s a lot more that patients could do if they were able to work with the data. Case in point: Lewis’s artificial pancreas system.
McCollister-Slipp is calling on the companies who make medical devices to open up their APIs. “I think it’s incredibly unethical that companies choose to keep the data streams inaccessible when the health and safety of patients is at stake.”
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySbg1 Mark Mann for Motherboard hacking health apps health data Diabetes type 1 diabetes hacks health monitoring http://ift.tt/25bgl5D Mon, 23 May 2016 11:00:00 +0000
Valmaster, one of Team YP’s top Street Fighter players, will be barred from showcasing his sponsorship at official events. Image credit: VSFTV.com
I’m still not entirely sure why popular tube site YouPorn decided to invest in an eSports team. I suppose there’s a strong potential audience there—folks watching eSports events have to do something between matches and events, after all. And really, with Anheuser-Busch and Poker Stars courting the eSports audience, it seems a bit weird to single out YouPorn as a sponsor you don’t want playing in your tournament.
But that’s exactly what’s been happening with Team YP (note the distinct lack of “YouPorn” in the team name). Earlier this year, the team was told by the world's largest eSports organization ESL that it was not welcome at its events. But Team YP has quite a few players across several different games, and some of the best known are their Street Fighter V players like Filipinoman and Valmaster. In response to the ESL’s blanket ban, Joey Cuellar, the head of the largest fighting game event in the world, EVO, tweeted that Team YP would be welcome at its event.
However, late last week Street Fighter V developer Capcom posted updated rules and regulations for Capcom Pro Tour events—which includes EVO’s Street Fighter V tournament. Among the new rules is this nugget:
Capcom will not allow Players to participate in any Tournament if sponsored by adult content sponsors, such as a publisher of pornographic websites, or any other sponsor Capcom deems inappropriate at its sole discretion. Players who are sponsored by alcoholic beverages, cigarettes or vaping (e-cigarette) products will not be precluded from competing in a Tournament.
At first, this looked like a blanket ban on Team YP’s participation in EVO and all major tournaments with Capcom Pro Tour affiliations (including Stunfest, a French multi-game event that took place this weekend), but Capcom soon clarified that the players aren’t totally barred in a tweet:
In the meantime, we won’t promote sponsors we deem inappropriate but all players are allowed to compete. Thanks for understanding.
Capcom Fighters May 21, 2016
So technically, while Team YP’s players can still play in the Capcom Pro Tour, they can’t do it under their team banner. Considering that sponsorship deals help players with travelling expenses in exchange for visibility and promotion, however, the rule still severely cripples Team YP’s members. This isn’t the first run-in with the “CapCops” (as fans jokingly call the Capcom tournament authorities) for Team YP either: At last year’s Capcom Cup, Valmaster was allowed to compete—sans Team YP jersey.
One could easily accuse Capcom and the ESL of simply being prudes, but the reality of the situation is a bit more complex than that.
eSports events are a global phenomenon, taking place in—and being viewed in—locales around the globe. Some of these locales, such as China and various Middle Eastern countries, have very strict laws about anything that could be even potentially tied to pornography. The last thing a global eSports league wants is to run afoul of any government, as that could spell huge problems for leagues, players, and the games they play. As eSports gains legitimacy, regulations similar to other “pro” sports seem likely—some countries are eyeing regulations already—but the industry wants to stay out of the targeting reticle of officials as much as possible. This puts the leagues in a challenging situation: While eSports teams have a right to be formed and sponsored by whomever they choose in the country they’re incorporated in, said sponsors could cause serious problems on a global scale. There simply aren’t easy solutions that can make everyone happy.
One thing we can probably all agree on, though? Those pink, black, and gray Team YP jerseys are snazzy as heck.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySp75 Heidi Kemps for Motherboard gaming street fighter youporn porn vaping capcom EVO http://ift.tt/1qEjzz5 Mon, 23 May 2016 10:00:00 +0000
The new Doom is out, and the enthusiasm we expressed for its single-player campaign last week still hasn't dimmed. But that's not where Doom's ultimate longevity will come from. The original Doom from 1993 has thrived for years on mods, to the point that where we still cover them with some regularity.
New Doom's nod to that legacy is the "SnapMap" feature that lets players design their own levels, but as a new video from YouTuber MarphitimusBlackimus demonstrates, it's far from ideal.
For his SnapMap, Mr. Blackimus tries to create a map with over 100,000 revenants—demons with shoulder-mounted missile launchers grafted into their flesh—into a single room. If it sounds a little childish, it is, but this was the kind of silly (and processor-demanding) stuff that used to make us give each other high fives when the original Doom first came out. The video is the chronicle of his struggle.
He first discovers there's no way he can get 100,000 revenants on the existing design grid, so then he tries to put a mere 25,000 revenants in a "crap ton of rooms" Again, failure. And again. Eventually, he whittles down his efforts to a mere 64 revenants standing before 21 empty rooms. But even that's not the end of it, as he learns he can only have 12 demons alive at any time. That becomes the map's name: "12 demons and 21 empty rooms." Hellishly exciting.
It certainly highlights some of the severe limitations of SnapMap's capabilities, and potentially the Doom's lifespan. A recent piece from PC Gamer revealed many other issues, such as the way you can design your own layouts and command the AI to work within the established parameters of the coding, but you can't do any wacky things like design antigravity rooms. Thanks to a limited tileset, all of the maps—however creative—end up looking like a deserted, demon-infested Martian facility.
It's cool, but it's not still-designing-maps-20-years-later cool. And that's a shame.
]]> http://ift.tt/1TySrfh Leif Johnson for Motherboard gaming doom modding FPS pc bethesda first person shooter Motherboard
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