This Week in Tech – 02/04/2018: Uber Wants to Make It Illegal to Operate Your Own Self-Driving Car in Cities
Uber Wants to Make It Illegal to Operate Your Own Self-Driving Car in Cities
Beleaguered ridesourcing giant Uber has been criticized for a wide variety of sins, both real and imagined. But their biggest sin yet may be what they apparently want to do to the public in the future: force everybody to use Uber’s service by outlawing private automobiles. (I warned this might happen back in 2014.)…
The NSA Literally Deleted ‘Trust’ and ‘Honesty’ From Its Core Values
The National Security Agency — which as whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, hasn’t been truthful about how much data it collects on phone calls and internet traffic — just removed “honesty” from the core values listed on its website…
Fitness Tracking App Strava Gives Away Location of Secret US Army Bases
Sensitive information about the location and staffing of military bases and spy outposts around the world has been revealed by a fitness tracking company…
Bitcoin Mania Is Hurting PC Gamers by Pushing Up GPU Prices
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin have soared in value over the past year, thanks to continued interest from a range of investors. As the price of these cryptocurrencies has increased, graphics cards have also seen big price increases thanks to retail stock shortages. A range of mid- or high-end graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia are in short supply, mostly due to cryptocurrency miners buying them in bulk to build machines to mine bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies…
Google Removed Over 700,000 Bad Apps, 100,000 Developers From Play Store in 2017Â
Google on Tuesday announced that Google Play in 2017 took action against “bad apps” by eliminating apps and developer accounts from the platform. The tech giant claims to have used machine learning to identify bad apps with identifiers like impersonation, inappropriate content, and malware to root out over 700,000 apps and 100,000 developers in 2017, which is a 70 percent jump from the preceding year. “In fact, 99 percent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them,” was a claim mentioned on Android Developers Blog…
Uber Sets A Tip Limit, Without Informing Drivers
Uber spokesperson claims the tip limit is meant to combat “fat fingers.” “Generosity should be something that you have no limit on,” drivers argue…
‘Human Uber’ Lets You Pay Someone to Live Your Life for You
Japanese researcher Jun Rekimoto has developed a special screen that can be strapped to a person’s face and allow them to live on your behalf. By dressing up as you and having your face shown where theirs usually is, you’ll be able to pay someone to go about your life instead…