Alphabet's Waymo Asks Judge To Halt Uber’s Self-Driving Program

Anthony Levandowski

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car company, on Friday asked a federal judge to stop Uber from using technology it alleges the ride-hail giant stole from it.

The motion for preliminary injunction comes about two weeks after Waymo sued Uber alleging that Anthony Levandowski, the leader of Uber’s self-driving program, stole a crucial part of Waymo’s self-driving technology before leaving Waymo parent company Alphabet (Levandowski joined Uber when it acquired his self-driving truck startup, Otto, last summer).

Waymo’s motion includes sworn testimony from one of Google’s forensic engineers, alleging Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 files related to its self-driving car efforts. It also includes allegations against two other former Alphabet employees who decamped to Otto and later joined Uber which it claims allegedly downloaded proprietary data as well. Waymo’s filing requests a preliminary injunction that would stop Uber from using what it claims is proprietary technology.

Waymo’s lawsuit centers around laser technology called LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), which helps self-driving cars see and navigate the world. Waymo filed suit against Uber after inadvertently receiving an attachment from a supplier, which showed drawings of Uber’s laser technology. In its original complaint against Uber, Waymo argued that those designs bear “striking resemblance” to its own proprietary design.

“Competition should be fueled by innovation in the labs and on the roads, not through unlawful actions,” a Waymo spokesman said in a statement. “Given the strong evidence we have, we are asking the court step in to protect intellectual property developed by our engineers over thousands of hours and to prevent any use of that stolen IP.”

Uber said it was reviewing the latest court filings and reiterated an earlier statement decrying Waymo’s lawsuit as “a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor.”

Waymo's request for a preliminary injunction is clearly bad news for Uber — more so should it be granted by a judge. But the lawsuit is far from a death knell for the ride-hail giant&039;s self-driving ambitions. Though Uber is working to develop its own self-driving technologies, it&039;s also using some tech developed by others. The self-driving cars the company is piloting in Pittsburgh and Arizona, for example, both use Velodyne LiDAR.

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, a professor at Stanford Law School, told BuzzFeedNews that in trade secret cases, courts often decide whether to grant a request for an injunction based on “how quickly the accused infringer brings a product to market and whether that timeline is reasonable if they weren&039;t relying on the trade secret information.”

In Otto’s case, Levandowski started the company in May and sold it to Uber in August. In October, just five months after Otto launched, it made headlines for driving a trailer of 2,000 cases of Budweiser more than 120 miles across Colorado with a driver in the back seat.

Ouellette said it&039;s possible Levandowski could argue that since he has worked on multiple self-driving projects, he was able to quickly produce new self-driving technology for Otto. Employees who switch companies take the skills they acquired with them. “But they can’t take files,” she said, referring to allegations that Levandowski downloaded proprietary data before leaving Google. “That’s clearly not permissible.”

Quelle: <a href="Alphabet&039;s Waymo Asks Judge To Halt Uber’s Self-Driving Program“>BuzzFeed

AT&T Discriminated Against Low-Income Neighborhoods, Study Finds

Stephanie Keith / Reuters

Over the past decade, AT&T has likely engaged in “digital redlining” of high poverty communities in Cleveland, leaving households there with limited internet access, according to a study released Friday by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community, a Cleveland nonprofit.

Based on new government filings detailing broadband availability, the analysis “strongly suggests that AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies,” the groups said. The scope of the study was limited to the Cleveland area.

The groups argue that AT&T deliberately neglected key internet investments in many low income neighborhoods, where 35% of residents make less than the poverty threshold.

A spokesperson for AT&T told BuzzFeed news: “The report does not accurately reflect the investment we&#039;ve made in bringing faster internet to urban and rural areas across the US.”

Thirty-four million Americans, which is about 10 percent of the population, lack access to broadband internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Race, income, education, and geography each play a part in defining the digital divide. And even as more Americans are using smartphones to connect, the shift to mobile hasn&039;t solved the problem of connectivity for those who can only get online using their phones. These Americans tend to be people of color, less educated, younger, and lower income, which are the same groups that tend not to have internet at home, according to Pew researchers.

The Cleveland analysis looks specifically at AT&T&039;s broadband technology known as “fiber to the node,” in which data travels through fiber into a neighborhood device and then to individual homes. While most middle-income neighborhoods and suburbs that surround Cleveland have this technology, most of the high poverty communities inside Cleveland do not, the analysis found. These communities depend on older tech, in which data travels longer distances from a “central office” often located miles away from households, the groups said.

The difference in tech translates to vastly inferior internet speeds for economically disadvantaged communities. According to the analysis, fiber to the node can deliver speeds of 18, 24, 45, and 75 mbps. But the older technology delivers only 18 and 24 mbps, with customers experiencing 3 or 6 mbps depending on how far their homes are from the “central office.” That&039;s a significant disparity — someone with only 3 mbsp internet access can be quite limited in what they can do online compared to someone with 24 mbps speed.

The analysis shows “a clear and troubling pattern,” the report concludes. “A pattern of long-term, systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and to lower-income city neighborhoods.”

AT&T said in a statement that it has invested $135 billion in its wireless and wired networks in the past four years. But according to the study, “there is no indication that AT&T has expanded its [node] infrastructure to any new areas of the city of Cleveland since 2013.”

The analysis was based in part on documents AT&T filed with the Federal Communications Commission detailing where the company offers internet service, as well as city construction permits.

Quelle: <a href="AT&T Discriminated Against Low-Income Neighborhoods, Study Finds“>BuzzFeed

Do You Have What It Takes To Be A CIA Hacker?

The US spy agency uses some ridiculous names for its pretty scary programs — can you pick the real ones from the bunch?

Wikileaks’ latest document dump provided details about some scary-sounding projects being run out of the CIA.

The leaked documents, courtesy of the group that distributed emails stolen by Russian hackers during last year&#039;s election, are filled with projects aimed at figuring out how to hack things like your phone and smart TV. (Though they don&039;t say that the CIA has figured out how to break into your encrypted apps.) But in there with the detailed charts about the ways the CIA is trying to collect digital information, there are also things like a giant list of emojis and the revelation that some of the projects have totally ridiculous names.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images

Quelle: <a href="Do You Have What It Takes To Be A CIA Hacker?“>BuzzFeed

This Goldman Sachs Conference Has 76 Speakers And Only Five Are Women

Tamer Cosgun

Goldman Sachs is hosting a two-day technology conference in London where 76 people are scheduled to speak, and just five of them are women.

The event agenda, seen by BuzzFeed News, features investors, technology executives, Goldman employees, and even the former head of the British signals intelligence agency, discussing everything from “Driverless Cars: Turning Vision into Reality” to “Investing in a Time of Constant Disruption.”

But 93% of those speakers are men. Of the five women speaking, three of them are Goldman Sachs employees, one of whom was recently added to the agenda as a replacement for a male Goldman banker originally selected to speak.

Matthew Zeitlin

The gender disparity is most stark in the presentations to be given by technology companies, who select their own representatives to speak at the conference. Just one of those 37 presentations features a woman. About 11% of the investors attending the conference are women, the source familiar with the conference said.

Leaders and workers in the tech industry and beyond have frequently objected to the lack of women represented at industry conferences. The events offer speakers the chance to promote both themselves and their companies, and to network with industry leaders and financial power brokers like Goldman Sachs.

Just four events on the Goldman conference agenda have any female panelists or speakers. Sherry Coutu, an entrepreneur who runs Founders4Schools, a UK organization that brings businesspeople to schools to give talks to schoolchildren, will talk on a panel moderated by Joanne Hannaford, a Goldman technology executive. Stephanie Eltz, the founder of health startup Doctify, is scheduled to speak with the company&#039;s CEO, Oliver Thomas.

The four tech executives on a panel titled “What you soon won&039;t be able to live without” are all men, but they&039;ll be moderated by Sumana Manohar, a Goldman analyst. Another all-male panel, “The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Listed,” is being moderated by Katherine Ward, one of Goldman&039;s UK-based managing directors.

Ward is a new addition to the event: A version of the conference agenda available online Thursday listed another male executive moderating the panel. That agenda has since been updated, with Ward switched in as the moderator.

The male-dominated banks of Wall Street have launched a number of women-friendly initiatives in recent years, including Goldman 10,000 Women program, which invests in and trains female entrepreneurs. Just this week, State Street earned itself a round of friendly coverage when it set up a statue of a little girl facing down the famous Wall Street bull on International Women&039;s Day.

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Women made up 23% of the 84 Goldman bankers promoted to the coveted partner level in 2016, the highest proportion ever. But men still dominate the bank&039;s leadership, with just five women on its 33-person management committee and two women among its nine executive officers.

At a women-focused conference hosted by Fortune last year, Goldman&039;s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein joked that he could replace the bank&039;s staff with the participants in the 10,000 Women program.

“You could take the population of Goldman Sachs, brush them aside, give them a few more weeks of training, and we could replace them with this crowd,” he said. When asked to follow up on the comment, he said “I said ‘could,’ but that would be a little bit of a radical step.”

Quelle: <a href="This Goldman Sachs Conference Has 76 Speakers And Only Five Are Women“>BuzzFeed