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Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

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Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#31

Post by nstoddar »

jrockway wrote: post #15
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #3

Oh, man. An attempted coverup is often punished harshly. Richard Nixon and Martha Stewart should have taught everyone that. How is this not obstruction of justice[1], or whatever Canada calls it? Obstruction charges can also be laid if a person alters, destroys, or conceals physical evidence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice

Obstruction of justice might be punished less harshly than whatever the data they were encrypting implicates them in. Generally the best legal strategy is to not do anything illegal, but sometimes that window has already closed ;)

Was this article just removed from the front page?

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#32

Post by angersock »

dang wrote: post #27

Hacker News is an English-language site. We don't in the least disparage other languages, but a submission like this is off topic here.

Don't worry, we fixed it!

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h...

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#33

Post by striking »

djoldman wrote: post #29
striking wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get your popcorn ready, Canada's going to set Uber on fire. According to the article (and what I can make of it via Google Translate) this is for tax reasons, because Canada considers Uber Canada an employer and it must collect tax. I honestly don't understand why they would bother doing this what with an almost certain Obstruction of Justice charge and the fact that it's pretty obvious that money goes from people to…

I don't know anything about the formal structure of working as an Uber driver, but could Uber make the argument that their drivers work for the passengers and that Uber merely facilitates the connecting of drivers to passengers?

I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver. So Uber drivers are employees in Canada (or will be soon, at any rate)

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#34

Post by tzs »

woah wrote: post #18
aikah wrote: post #11

wow, this clearly is criminal behavior from Uber HQ. Instead of fully complying with the investigation and using legal means to contest it they are behaving like a bunch of pedophiles trying to encrypt their hard drives so the police cannot get to their kiddy porn stash, despicable... edit: obviously i'm not against data encryption it's just funny how encryption is used in this case to obstruct justice, article in Fr…

Only pedophiles encrypt data?

Nothing he wrote implies that. He offered pedophiles as an example of a class that uses encryption to aid crime, not as an exhaustive list of all classes that use encryption.

If I wrote that in a recent program I used a functional approach, like they do in Lisp, would you think I'm claiming that Lisp is the only language with functional programming support? Because that's the kind of error you made in reading his statement.

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#36

Post by panarky »

laurencei wrote: post #4

I dont understand why they were trying to do this remotely? Wouldnt it have made more sense to have all the devices already encrypted? Then if someone does a raid - simply turn off all the devices - and your protected?

If you use full-disk encryption on your phone or laptop, it's vulnerable after you've logged in and supplied your credentials. Rebooting ensures that those credentials must be supplied again in order to decrypt.

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#37

Post by ethana »

gizi wrote: post #28

It is funny to see how 30+ different governments are now up in arms against something that is essentially just a set of computers running on the internet, i.e. the Uber platform. I wonder how many copycats will spring up in the future, and become Uber2, Uber3,and so on? In Canada, Uber obviously made a serious mistake. They should not be physically present anywhere. Their strategy does not work, if governments can ph…

Or block of their bank transactions.

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#38

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #27

Hacker News is an English-language site. We don't in the least disparage other languages, but a submission like this is off topic here.

I'd really prefer some latitude offered for stories which:

1. are generally significant, particularly

2. about a company closely followed by the HN community, and where

3. no obvious english-language alternative exists.

Sometimes it's through just such postings that the English language coverage is initiated.

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#39

Post by giaour »

striking wrote: post #33
djoldman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about the formal structure of working as an Uber driver, but could Uber make the argument that their drivers work for the passengers and that Uber merely facilitates the connecting of drivers to passengers?

I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver. So Uber drivers are employees in Canada…

That's quite an autocorrect snafu.

Re: Uber Tries to Remotely Encrypt Corporate Data During Government Raid

#40

Post by striking »

giaour wrote: post #39
striking wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Canada's revenue service wanted to obtain evidence that money went through Uber from consumers to employees. If it were possible to pay any Uber rider directly (perhaps with a separate payment to Uber) then Canada couldn't call Uber drivers "employees." But they are, really. Uber processes the transaction and skims some off the top while passing on the rest to a driver. So Uber drivers are employees in Canada…

That's quite an autocorrect snafu.

Um, yeah. I guess I had it coming, with the length of that comment and my inability to check my writing.
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