There’s more bad news for Uber. The company was sued yesterday in a joint action by San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco is the online ride sharing company’s headquarters.
The lawsuit lists several areas in which the DAs for both cities claim the company acts illegally. For starters, it misleads its customers about the extent of background checks its drivers undergo, while charging UberX passengers a “Safe Rides Fee” of one dollar related to those checks. In addition, the suit claims the company’s rates are set without the required approval of state agencies and that it operates illegally at state airports while charging special airport fees that are not turned over to the airports.
At a press conference yesterday, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said that Uber claims to have an “industry-leading background check process,” which he said is far from the truth.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
“[A]n open source contributor (and) artist friend” of Joseph’s has already put their artistic talent to work and come up with 
While we in the States were dealing with family and turkey, the EU was busy working on preparing Google’s head for the platter. The European Parliament yesterday passed by a wide margin a non-binding resolution urging anti-trust regulators to break up the company. For those keeping score, the final vote was 384 yeas and 174 nays.
Let me be clear, for those GNOMEistas who might just have their proverbial knickers in a bunch: GNOME has been a remarkable FOSS citizen providing a better-than-adequate desktop environment for many FOSS users, perhaps even a majority of FOSS users. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Further, I will say this for GNOME: Unity should be more like GNOME. Compliment? You decide.
I know this is old news and it seems like implementation of the technology in such manner is years away — but I think it’s coming quicker than we think. Some may even think this to be no big deal. After all, what’s wrong with the fuzz having the ability to pick lawbreakers out of downtown pedestrian traffic or while on a jaunt across the parking lot to Office Depot at a local strip mall? Wouldn’t that include the ability to get dangerous violent criminals off the street?
