Month: September 2017

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Uber is fighting a proposed class-action lawsuit that says it secretly over charges riders and under pays drivers. In its defense, the ride-hailing service claims that nobody is being defrauded in its “upfront” rider fare pricing model.

The fares charged to riders don’t have to match up with the fares paid to drivers, Uber said, because that’s what a driver’s “agreement” allows.

“Plaintiff’s allegations are premised on the notion that, once Uber implemented Upfront Pricing for riders, it was required under the terms of the Agreement to change how the Fare was calculated for Drivers,” Uber said (PDF) in a recent court filing seeking to have the class-action tossed. “This conclusion rests on a misinterpretation of the Agreement.”

The suit claims that, when a rider uses Uber’s app to hail a ride, the fare the app immediately shows the passenger is based on a slower and longer route compared to the one displayed to the driver. The rider pays the higher fee, and the driver’s commission is paid from the cheaper, faster route, according to the lawsuit.

Uber claims the disparity between rider and driver fares “was hardly a secret.”

“Drivers,” Uber told a federal judge, “could have simply asked a User how much he or she paid for the trip to learn of any discrepancy.”

A contract is a contract

Uber doesn’t consider its drivers employees, and it doesn’t call their pay “commissions.” Instead, it allows drivers to keep the fare presented to them in the Uber driver app, even if the fare is different than what the rider was charged. The driver then pays Uber a “service fee“—a percentage of the fare earned by the driver.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing service also claims that it took “significant risk” under this “upfront” fare pricing model, which began last year.

Plaintiff further alleges that, after Upfront Pricing began, Drivers continued to earn based on the trip’s distance and the amount of time it actually took to complete the trip. Plaintiff claims the Upfront Price is often higher than the Fare, which is the basis of what is remitted to him. He neglects to mention, however, the significant risk placed on Uber, not Drivers, by Upfront Pricing: the User’s Upfront Price may just as easily disadvantage Uber, for example, where an actual trip takes longer than expected, yet the Driver’s earnings calculation remains constant.

What’s more, a rider might also pay Uber more than what the driver’s fare is based on because a driver’s contract allows Uber to “adjust” the fare known and paid to the driver, according to Uber’s legal filing.

“The Agreement allows Uber to adjust the Fare under various circumstances. For example, Uber is permitted to make changes to the Fare Calculation based on local market factors,” Uber said in its federal court response. “Likewise, Uber may adjust the Fare based on other factors such as inefficient routes, technical errors, or customer complaints.”

And here’s the kicker:

Drivers disclaim any right to receive amounts over and above the Fare produced by the Fare Calculation.

The suit, which seeks class-action status, demands back pay and legal fees. It wants a Los Angeles federal judge to halt the alleged “unlawful, deceptive, fraudulent, and unfair business practices.”

A hearing is set for December 1.

Mark Walton

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The Fire HD 10 was always the odd one out in the Amazon Fire tablet line up. Neither premium enough to warrant its £170/$230 price tag, nor cheap enough to excuse cost-cutting concessions like a 1280×800 pixel resolution screen (resulting in a paltry 149 PPI when stretched over 10-inches), there was little reason to recommend the HD 10 over its cheaper and smaller cousins.

I would, however, recommend the new Fire HD 10. Amazon has fixed the tablet’s most glaring issues—the most important of which is the introduction of a full HD 1080p IPS display—while reducing the price to an impressive £150/$150. It even features a hands-free integration of Alexa, instead of the touch-to-talk of other Fire devices.

Few tablets boast a quality full HD screen for £150, let alone robust build quality and the backing of one of the biggest names in tech.

Amazon has made concessions to hit that price point, of course—mostly via the limitations of Fire OS—but let’s start with the good stuff. The 10.1-inch 1920×1200 pixel IPS screen is colourful, bright, and has excellent viewing angles. It’s laminated to the glass too, making it clear and easy to read. The shiny rear surface of the old Fire 10 has been given the shove, replaced with a hard-wearing, textured plastic that provides plenty of grip, without feeling cheap (or, at least more premium than the price tag suggests).

Internally, the Fire HD 10 has had an upgrade too. It’s powered by a 1.8GHz, quad-core MediaTek processor that promises to be 30 percent faster than the processor in the old Fire HD 10. While not as sprightly as the Apple or Qualcomm equivalent, it provides more than enough grunt to navigate Fire OS smoothly. The front-facing HD camera and 5MP rear-facing cameras remain unchanged but are adequate for video calls and some light video recording (up to 1080p), if not still photography.

Battery life has been given a boost to a claimed 10 hours of mixed usage, there’s 2GB of memory, and the base level of storage has been increased to 32GB from 16GB. There’s even a microSD card slot for memory expansion.

Like all Amazon tablets, the Fire HD 10 is powered by Fire OS, Amazon’s own proprietary operating system based on Google’s Android. If you have an Amazon Prime account and make most of your digital purchases through Amazon, this is no bad thing. Everything you need to watch films, TV shows, read books and listen to music is built-in from the off. So too is Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, which can do everything from tell you what meetings you’ve got lined up for the day, to searching for songs via snippets of lyrics.

The twist with the Fire HD 10 is the introduction of hands-free Alexa, which can be toggled on and off via the notification pane. Instead of having hold down the virtual home button to activate Alexa, you can now just say “Hey, Alexa.” Quite why it’s taken so long for this feature to make its way onto Amazon’s own tablets (well, one of them at least) is a mystery, but now that it’s here it’s easily the best way to interact with Alexa. Anything you can do with an Echo Dot or an Echo you can do with the Fire HD 10, with the addition of handy visual cards like weekly weather reports and Wikipedia summaries.

Amazon won’t say whether hands-free Alexa will make its way to other Fire devices, but given it brought Alexa over to the Fire 5 after launching with the Fire 8 and Fire 7, it’s more than likely.

Really, the only reason not to buy the Fire HD 10 is if you’re not enamoured with Amazon services. Sure, the Amazon App Store features essential apps like Spotify and Facebook, but without access to the full Google Play Store, many simply aren’t available (technically minded people can side-load any missing Android apps, however).

Personally, I don’t think it matters. If all you want to do is watch videos, flick through Facebook and do a spot of online shopping, the Fire HD 10 is ideal. And the money saved over the more productivity-focused iPad Pro 10.5 can be put towards an Amazon Prime, Spotify, or Netflix subscription instead.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK

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Update: As if to reconfirm Microsoft’s interest in cross-console play, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer said on Twitter that he “would have liked to see [Epic] leave it on.”

Original story

People playing Epic’s Fortnite on consoles recently were surprised to discover a new feature had been quietly added to the game: the ability to play with gamers on other consoles.

Over the weekend, a number of Reddit users posted evidence of players from other consoles showing up in their Fortnite games, including a father/son combo playing on two different consoles in the same room.

The cross-console connection became apparent because of a little-known naming convention between the two consoles: Microsoft’s Xbox Live allows players to use spaces in their online handle, while Sony’s PlayStation Network does not. Thus, when PS4 players noticed random opponents in their matches with handles that included spaces, they knew something odd was going on.

An Epic spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica that cross-console play had been turned on for the game recently, adding in the same breath that the addition had been a mistake. “We had a configuration issue, and it has now been corrected,” the spokesperson said by way of official comment.

While further on-the-record information isn’t forthcoming (Sony has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica), it’s not hard to guess what happened here. Since Microsoft started publicly pushing for cross-console play last year, a number of developers have gone on record complaining that Sony is the only remaining bottleneck to letting PS4 and Xbox One players join together for online play. “All we have to do is check that box and it would be up and running in less than an hour all over the world,” Psyonix VP of Publishing Jeremy Dunham memorably told Polygon about cross-platform play on the PS4.

The reality of Fortnite‘s brief “configuration error” allowing Xbox One and PS4 players to connect only goes to further prove that there are no remaining technical issues to be overcome here. While developers do have to deal with complications surrounding friends lists, invitations, and voice chat when tying the two networks together, no intractable compatibility issues prevent the servers from talking to each other. As Fortnite has inadvertently proven, the only problems keeping PlayStation and Xbox gamers apart are now political.

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Former Soviet Air Defense Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the man known for preventing an accidental nuclear launch by the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War tensions, has passed away. Karl Schumacher, a German political activist who first met Petrov in 1998 and helped him visit Germany a year later, published news of Petrov’s death after learning from Petrov’s son that he had died in May. Petrov was 77.

Petrov’s story has since been recounted several times by historians, including briefly in William Taubman’s recent biography of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Gorbachev: His Life and Times. Ars also wrote about Petrov in our 2015 feature on Exercise Able Archer. On the night of September 26, 1983, Petrov was watch officer in charge of the Soviet Union’s recently completed US-KS nuclear launch warning satellite network, known as “Oko” (Russian for “eye”). To provide instant warning of an American nuclear attack, the system was supposed to catch the flare of launching missiles as they rose.

That night, just past midnight, the Oko system signaled that a single US missile had been launched. “When I first saw the alert message, I got up from my chair,” Petrov told RT in a 2010 interview. “All my subordinates were confused, so I started shouting orders at them to avoid panic. I knew my decision would have a lot of consequences.”

Then a second alarm sounded. “The siren went off for a second time,” Petrov recounted. “Giant blood-red letters appeared on our main screen, saying START. It said that four more missiles had been launched.”

If the alarm had been real, it meant that missiles would reach the Soviet Union in 30 minutes. At the time, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was ailing. If Petrov had followed procedures in place, he had less than 15 minutes to alert Andropov of a nuclear launch—and an immediate launch of ICBMs would have been ordered.

“My cozy armchair felt like a red-hot frying pan, and my legs went limp,” Petrov told RT. “I felt like I couldn’t even stand up. That’s how nervous I was when I was taking this decision.”

Because of the relatively small number of detected launches, Petrov was convinced the alert was some sort of error. Doctrine held that the US would stage a massive first strike if it decided to preemptively attack the Soviets. Furthermore, there was no data on bomber launches or other signals of impending attack. Petrov overruled the alert, which was later determined to have been caused by solar reflections off of clouds over the United States.

Because the human in the loop was a thinking human—Stanislav Petrov—Andropov was never alerted, and there was no response to a falsely detected attack. And because of that, we are all still here today. Покойся с миром (Pokoysya s mirom), Colonel Petrov. Rest in peace.