Month: December 2016

In new lawsuit, Instacart shoppers say they were regularly underpaid

“Instacart—like Uber—seems to be clearly misclassifying their workers.”

(credit: Kristin Sloan)

On Thursday, 12 Instacart “shoppers” across 11 states filed a proposed federal class-action lawsuit against the San Francisco startup, alleging a breach of state and federal labor laws.

The Instacart lawsuit is one of several currently targeting so-called “sharing economy” startups, and they all get at the same question: can workers be accurately classified as independent contractors, or should they properly be designated as employees? In Instacart’s case, customers order groceries online, but those groceries are then picked up and delivered by the company’s shoppers. So, should those shoppers be treated as employees?

Classifying such workers as employees rather than contractors would entitle them to a number of benefits under federal law. This includes unemployment benefits, workers’ compensation, the right to unionize, and, most importantly, the right to seek reimbursement for mileage and tips. This reclassification would also incur new and significant costs for Instacart and other affected companies, including Uber and Lyft. An on-demand cleaning service, Homejoy, shut down last year just months after it was hit with a similar labor lawsuit.

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SACEM Provides Details on Recent Torrent Site Raids in France

In recent weeks, French police targeted two huge torrent sites, What.cd followed by the even larger Zone-Telechargement. In an interview, the general secretary of anti-piracy outfit SACEM reveals further information about the latter, including arrests, seizure of overseas servers, real estate, and luxury cars.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Two weeks ago and seemingly out of the blue, popular private music tracker What.cd went offline. French military police targeted some of the site’s infrastructure at hosting provider OVH and the site responded by deleting itself.

The news came as a huge disappointment to the site’s users and the wider torrent community as a whole, but French police weren’t done yet.

In a follow-up action, French Gendarmerie targeted Zone-Telechargement (Download Zone), the country’s largest pirate site and 11th most-visited website in the region overall. That site went down too, closely followed by affiliated DDL site, DL-Protect.

Behind all of these actions is SACEM, the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music. This industry group has a mandate to collect and distribute royalties while protecting the copyrights of its members. And according to its general secretary, they’re only just getting started.

In an interview with French news site Le Monde, David El Sayegh said that SACEM and the police hadn’t “just woken up” to pirate sites operating in France. The actions against both What.cd and Zone-Telechargement were the result of a “long process and meticulous work.”

The SACEM chief said the investigation into the two million direct download link Zone-Telechargement began two years ago in partnership with another local anti-piracy outfit. It turned up a lot of useful information.

“We filed a complaint in 2014, joined by ALPA (French Association for the Fight against Piracy). This process was to identify accounts, assets, servers and advertising agencies. It’s always quite a complex and sophisticated system, they are large investigations,” he said.

“There were many advertisements on the site, often pornographic. [Zone-Telechargement] generated at least 1.5 million euros in sales per year, with offshore accounts located in Malta, Cyprus and Belize.”

David El Sayegh said that rightsholders were looking at damages of more than
75 million euros but the operators of the site were no longer resident in France. That didn’t stop their arrests, however. Seven people were arrested on Monday in France and Andorra, with police there calling the action ‘Operation Gervais‘.

“The two administrators, arrested by international mandates, had left France to settle in Andorra. Large seizures of assets were carried out: luxury cars, real estate, and savings accounts,” he said.

The Gendarmerie confirmed the seizure of 450,000 euros and two cars and said that the men, both aged 24, were “repeat offenders.” Authorities in Andorra confirmed that 250,000 euros across several accounts had been frozen.

“We are looking at a case of counterfeiting for profit, on a large scale,” El Sayegh continued. “These people do not pay taxes, they do not pay the rightful rightsholders, they do not respect anything. They have developed a very organized and sophisticated mechanism to voluntarily operate outside the law.”

With the site targeted in France and its operators arrested in Andorra, the operation spread further afield. SACEM says that servers were also seized in Germany and as far away as Iceland, a country often associated with high levels of privacy.

Of course, the recent shutdowns were very unpopular with users, but El Sayegh said that the law is on SACEM’s side.

“These are counterfeit business activities, these are people who have grown rich on the backs of creators. They make millions without paying one euro to creators. They are thugs who should not have the compassion of one person, and who will answer for their acts before justice.”

But while harshly criticizing site operators, El Sayegh tone was a little more moderate when speaking of their users. He asked them to consider how creators are to earn a living in the face of piracy but suggested that they’re only chasing the bigger fish.

“The challenge is mainly to stop those who trade works. But the objective above all is to attack the evil at its source, and the administrators of the pirate sites,” he said.

Other unnamed targets are also in SACEM’s sights. However, it seems unlikely that many sites will continue their stay in France following the events of the past couple of weeks.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Stop pretending there’s a difference between “online” and “real life”

Seriously just cut it out. The stakes are too high.

Enlarge / My face is made of internet. (credit: Fiona Staples)

Sometimes I get into one of those conversations about the Internet where the only way I can reply is to quote from The IT Crowd: "Are you from the past?" I say that every time someone asserts that the online world is somehow separate from real life. You'd be surprised how much this comes up, even after all these years of people's digital shenanigans leading to everything from espionage and murder to international video fame and fancy book deals.

But now that the U.S. has a president-elect who communicates with the American people almost exclusively via Twitter and YouTube, it's really time to stop kidding ourselves. Before the election, many of us (including me) would have shrugged off the fake news stories piling up in the margins of our Facebook feeds. Nobody takes that stuff seriously, right? The election of Donald Trump and several recent tweets from the House Science Committee are two strong pieces of evidence that, yes, people do.

In reality, politics have straddled the digital and meatspace for decades. Though government officials may have just learned about "the cyber," people working in computer security have been dealing with criminal and whimsical incursions into their systems since the late 20th century. It was 1990 when the infamous Operation Sundevil swept up innocents in a massive Secret Service dragnet operation to stop carders. The Stuxnet worm, which affected physical operations of centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant in Iran, is only the most obvious example of how digital ops can have consequences away from the keyboard.

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Hisense A2 leaked: dual-screen phone with AMOLED and E Ink displays

Hisense A2 leaked: dual-screen phone with AMOLED and E Ink displays

Chinese electronics company is probably best known in the West for its televisions, but the company also produces smartphones, and it looks like one upcoming model is a dual-screen version with an AMOLED screen on one side of the phone and an E Ink display on the other.

This wouldn’t exactly be the first device of its type, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen this kind of dual-screen phone. The Hisense A2 hasn’t gone on sale in China yet, but the phone did pass through the TENAA website recently, suggesting that it’s coming soon.

Continue reading Hisense A2 leaked: dual-screen phone with AMOLED and E Ink displays at Liliputing.

Hisense A2 leaked: dual-screen phone with AMOLED and E Ink displays

Chinese electronics company is probably best known in the West for its televisions, but the company also produces smartphones, and it looks like one upcoming model is a dual-screen version with an AMOLED screen on one side of the phone and an E Ink display on the other.

This wouldn’t exactly be the first device of its type, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen this kind of dual-screen phone. The Hisense A2 hasn’t gone on sale in China yet, but the phone did pass through the TENAA website recently, suggesting that it’s coming soon.

Continue reading Hisense A2 leaked: dual-screen phone with AMOLED and E Ink displays at Liliputing.

Kate Rubins just scienced the @$!# out of the International Space Station

A molecular biologist sequences DNA, grows heart cells and watches them beat.

NASA

The International Space Station fills several roles for NASA—providing a toehold in outer space for human activity, testing closed-loop technologies for long-duration spaceflight, and developing international partnerships. But perhaps the station's biggest selling point is science. It was, after all, designated a national laboratory in 2005. And what does a lab need? Scientists.

Yet despite the vastly increased diversity of the astronaut corps since the early, macho days of the Mercury 7, many astronauts today are still fighter pilots, engineers, and surgeons. Relatively few are bonafide research scientists. But Kate Rubins is, and she spent 115 days on the space station this summer and fall. Before becoming an astronaut, Rubins trained in molecular biology and led a laboratory of more than a dozen researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She and her team specialized in viruses such as Ebola and Marburg, and their field work took them to Central and Western Africa.

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Neo Hammer: The Magnetic Hammer

Designer Jung Soo Park has come up with a nice idea of a new standard hammer call “Neo Hammer” with its handle could suck in and “carry” several nails at a time. It means worker will not have to bring a special nail storage or no need to clamp the nails with their lips anymore. […]

Designer Jung Soo Park has come up with a nice idea of a new standard hammer call “Neo Hammer” with its handle could suck in and “carry” several nails at a time. It means worker will not have to bring a special nail storage or no need to clamp the nails with their lips anymore. […]

UHD-Blu-ray: PowerDVD spielt 4K-Discs

4K-Filme auf dem Computer: Die neue Version der Software PowerDVD wird Ultra-HD-Blu-ray-Discs abspielen. Sie soll Anfang 2017 erhältlich sein. (PowerDVD, HDTV)

4K-Filme auf dem Computer: Die neue Version der Software PowerDVD wird Ultra-HD-Blu-ray-Discs abspielen. Sie soll Anfang 2017 erhältlich sein. (PowerDVD, HDTV)

Raumfahrt: Europa bleibt im All

Nicht so viel wie gewünscht, aber genug zum Weitermachen: Die Ministerkonferenz der Esa-Mitglieder hat einen Etat von zehn Milliarden Euro für die europäische Raumfahrtagentur bewilligt. Damit kann die Esa wichtige Projekte umsetzen, etwa die zwei Exomars-Missionen und die Verlängerung der ISS-Laufzeit. (ESA, Raumfahrt)

Nicht so viel wie gewünscht, aber genug zum Weitermachen: Die Ministerkonferenz der Esa-Mitglieder hat einen Etat von zehn Milliarden Euro für die europäische Raumfahrtagentur bewilligt. Damit kann die Esa wichtige Projekte umsetzen, etwa die zwei Exomars-Missionen und die Verlängerung der ISS-Laufzeit. (ESA, Raumfahrt)

Mandatory Piracy Filters May Violate EU Law, Scholars Warn

A group of prominent legal scholars has warned that the EU Commission’s plans to modernize copyright law in Europe appear to be incompatible with EU law. One of the main problems is the mandatory piracy filter Internet services are required to use, which largely ignore existing case law and human rights.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

uploadLast September, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize EU copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to do more to fight piracy.

Specifically, Article 13 of the proposed Copyright Directive requires online services to monitor and filter pirated content, in collaboration with rightsholders.

This means that online services, which deal with large volumes of user-uploaded content, must use fingerprinting or other detection mechanisms to block copyright infringing files.

“The Commission proposal obliges such service providers to take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure the protection of user-uploaded works, for example by putting in place content recognition technologies,” the Commission explained.

The Commission stressed that the changes are needed to reinforce the negotiating position of copyright holders, so they can sign licensing agreements with services that provide access to user-uploaded content.

However, the proposal is drawing wide criticism from the public, digital rights activists, and legal scholars. Just recently, a group of legal experts bundled several of their main concerns in a paper.

TorrentFreak spoke with Dr. Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, Associate Professor in IT and IP law at the University of Southampton, who is one of the authors of the paper.

Stalla-Bourdillon and her colleagues warn that, in its current form, the proposal goes against existing EU law.

For one, the general obligation to monitor the content that users are transmitting, directly opposes Article 15 of the E-Commerce Directive. This article prohibits general monitoring obligations for service providers.

“Such an obligation [to monitor contents] goes against Article 15 of the E-commerce Directive, which prevents Member States from imposing upon intermediary providers general monitoring obligations,” she notes.

More importantly, the legal scholars also note that the filtering requirement also contradict Articles 8 and 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. These articles protect people’s freedom of expression and access to information, as well as their personal data.

Both articles were also cited in the Netlog filtering case that went before the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) a few years ago. At the time, the Court held that requiring an online platform to install broad piracy filters is incompatible with EU law.

In the proposed Copyright Directive the filters will be put in place in collaboration with rightsholders. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the human rights dimension is largely ignored.

“Requiring that filtering systems be put in place in collaboration with rightholders is not enough to eliminate these human rights challenges,” Stalla-Bourdillon says.

“The CJEU did not imply in Netlog that if the database of protected works was produced in collaboration with rightholders themselves, the general obligation to monitor imposed upon the service provider would thus be transformed into a permissible, special obligation to monitor.”

With their paper, the researchers are making a case for a complete re-assessment of the filtering requirement. They ask the EU Commission to carefully look at the new requirements, and make sure that they are in line with existing case law and legislation.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.