{"id":179679,"date":"2017-11-29T19:09:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T00:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/11\/29\/worst-job-in-the-world\/"},"modified":"2017-11-29T19:09:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T00:09:00","slug":"worst-job-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/11\/29\/worst-job-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst Job in the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
Another day, another cache of toxic waste from the Kalanick era of Uber.<\/div>\n

Now, they have pissed off the judge in the trade secret theft lawsuit against them because they have been discovered to be lying in court<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A letter that detailed a secretive effort at Uber to gather intelligence on competitors and cover its tracks has the ride-hailing company on the defensive in a legal fight that has gripped Silicon Valley since February.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, the discovery of the letter caused a federal judge to delay a trade secrets trial \u2014 a day before jury selection was set to begin \u2014 between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet.<\/p>\n

Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco was alerted to the letter\u2019s existence by the United States attorney\u2019s office in Northern California. The judge accused Uber\u2019s lawyers of withholding evidence, forcing him to delay the trial until Waymo\u2019s lawyers could gather more information<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can no longer trust the words of the lawyers for Uber in this case,\u201d Judge Alsup said. \u201cIf even half of what is in that letter is true, it would be an injustice for Waymo to go to trial.\u201d <\/p>\n

Waymo sued Uber in February, claiming that a former engineer, Anthony Levandowski, conspired with Uber to steal trade secrets from Waymo. On Tuesday, Judge Alsup repeatedly rebuked Uber\u2019s lawyers for not sharing the document with the court. \u201cYou should have come clean with this long ago,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The letter was written in May or June by a lawyer for Richard Jacobs, a former Uber employee, to Angela Padilla, deputy general counsel at Uber. Uber hired Mr. Jacobs in March 2016 as its manager of global intelligence and fired him in April of this year, Mr. Jacobs testified in court on Tuesday. He is now a paid security consultant for Uber, after receiving a $4.5 million settlement following his dismissal.<\/p>\n

In discussions with other Uber employees, Mr. Jacobs testified, he learned of an internal organization that gathered trade secrets, code and other information about its competitors. It was called the \u201cmarketplace analytics team,\u201d according to the letter, which had been redacted by Uber. The group frequented the code-sharing site GitHub, searching for private material that may have been accidentally revealed by competitors.<\/p>\n

This Uber team also led efforts \u201cto evade, impede, obstruct, influence several ongoing lawsuits against Uber,\u201d according to the letter. The team also tried to find out what other companies were doing. And in 2016, Uber hired a man named Ed Russo to help recruit employees of competitors to steal trade secrets, according to the letter.<\/p>\n

This group relied on \u201canonymous\u201d servers separate from the rest of the Uber network, and some employees were expected to rely on devices that encrypted or automatically deleted messages after a certain amount of time, Mr. Jacobs testified. Email was a last resort.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe evidence brought to light over the weekend by the U.S. attorney\u2019s office and revealed<\/span><\/b>, in part, today in court is significant and troubling,\u201d said Johnny Luu, a Waymo spokesman. \u201cThe continuance we were granted gives us the opportunity to fully investigate this new, highly relevant information.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n

This is the first time I have ever heard of prosecutors doing this in a related civil trial.<\/p>\n

Also, the judge has probably cause to instruct the jury that Uber have lied to the court, and that the absence of evidence can be assumed to be interpreted in the most negative way.<\/p>\n

This is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another day, another cache of toxic waste from the Kalanick era of Uber. Now, they have pissed off the judge in the trade secret theft lawsuit against them because they have been discovered to be lying in court: A letter that detailed a secretive effort at Uber to gather intelligence on competitors and cover its …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,368,435,588,407,471],"class_list":["post-179679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-corruption","tag-crimes","tag-fail","tag-justice","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}