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Uber CEO Plays with Fire

nytimes.com

501–510 of 529 posts

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kalanick is a Napoleonesque figure, a great conqueror who doesn't know when to pull back on the reigns, because he knows nothing else. Our memories are short, we're skewering him for being exactly the kind of animal that not to long ago most everyone was rooting for.

lol

Not here, please.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a bit of SKUs, but not enough to make the phone unique itself. You'd ultimately need something more special to do so, such as the MAC address. It's not clear if such code would work today on the latest iOS version but maybe. They probably used a private API to do so, and that itself was obfuscated in the compiled binary such that apples automatic analysis would fail to catch it.

No, they fingerprint the phone like browser fingerprinting. Unique settings, apps installed etc. Very hard to have a non-unique set up with enough data points.

Doubt it. You can't use those methods to identify users if the phones are just being used to mine new accounts.

I'd assume the miners just wipe a phone clean, reinstall Uber & create a new account.

There are no special settings & variability in installed apps in that case.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#503
post #472
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Clinton wasn't gaslighting; she was just espousing the (correct, as far as I can tell) idea that in order to be a successful leader, you have to convince different sides that you believe different things Not sure how well that worked for her. See "Poll: Just 12 percent of Dems see Clinton as 'honest and trustworthy'" and similar headlines. Plus losing to a pretty bad opponent.

Yeah, I agree. She doesn't quite have the temperament for what America wants from a leader: duplicity is hard for her and straight-up gaslighting even harder. She can't pull it off in a way that is convincing, and so people perceive her as untrustworthy. Meanwhile, her opponent is almost a parody of the stereotype of the politician who lies about everything to get votes, and people just assume he's playing 11-dimensi…

Personally I think being straightforward can work pretty well which I think Obama mostly was for example.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#504

Buried lede here: "They spent much of their energy one-upping rivals like Lyft. Uber devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of…

Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here. I am an unroll.me user, but had no idea they sell user data to companies this way. Their whole value proposition is to help people control their own privacy and now I kind of feel betrayed..

BTW: unroll.me's parent company Slice has the exact same business model.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do anything novel. I have my private key on three devices.

How do you get that private key on each of your devices, this is a real issue for a lot of less technical users.

Unless they're using an HSM, that would most likely be a matter of just copying a file.

With an HSM, it would have to be marked as exportable (bad for security), or to happen via some proprietary HSM to HSM cloning method endorsed by the vendor.

That said, I don't see that much HSM usage outside of the government or their contractors.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#506
post #474

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Couldn't you leak anonymously?

I don't believe in that. For one, there is no such thing as anonymity to begin with, for another, I think if you do a thing like that you should stand by it.

Plus if you do it anonymously it's easy for the company to spin it as "hit pieces" which is what Uber does.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company that nearly acquired unroll.me. At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets. A large part of Slice buying unroll.me was for access to those email archives. Specifically, they wanted to look for keyword trends and for receip…

Probably (and hopefully) only a matter of time until someone starts to work on an Open Source version of Unroll.me.

This is a good idea. I'd love a version of UnRoll.me that I could host on my own servers.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#508
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious how that would even work on the technical level. As an app developer, I'm not making the connection here as to how iOS would even allow that. Edit: Read up a bit more on it. Turns out it was the practice of fingerprinting and tracking after re-installs, not after an uninstall. TechCrunch provided a better technical description: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/23/uber-responds-to-report-th...

To me it seems like this is mischaracterized to make it sound worse than it is. Can someone explain why people are making a big deal about this practice?

Well for one, it's against Apple's rules to do this. And just because it's "industry practice" doesn't mean you get a free pass.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a clever media hack. Using provocative headlines and misleading lead to get clicks and shares, but using a separate medium (Twitter) to get away with it. Clever, but it's disappointing that even NYT is turning into this madness.

They've also updated the article text now: "To halt the activity, Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents." Note that this was at least 4 hours after the outrage on Twitter started. Seems like a very intentional, well-…

Large news sites like the NYT have editing procedures and internal hoops to go through. This isn't just joe shmo's blog that is updated at a whim. I've written freelance articles with editing periods of months, you can imagine that it's a lot harder when it's news.

Re: Uber CEO Plays with Fire

#510
post #97

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they're cheaper because they can subsidize their fares via VC money

> they're cheaper because they can subsidize their fares via VC money That's not the (only) reason why they're cheaper. They're cheaper because they offer drivers less downtime, therefore the drivers can end up earning more money since they're driving more of the time and earning fares. They're also cheaper because services like uber pool and lyft line allow riders to spilt the fare among themselves. I also think tha…

Except they're still losing billions of dollars every year.
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