Uber launches in Leeds, its third UK city

Uber’s UK footprint might be small, but it’s already come in for some heavy criticism, especially in London. As competitors ready new services in an attempt to leverage more custom, Uber has decided its ready to expand beyond London and Manchester by heading to Yorkshire, or more specifically, Leeds. As of now, city residents will be able to pull out their smartphone to hail an UberX ride (the company’s lowest-priced service) to move about the city. Hailo already operates in the area, but only offers traditional taxi pickups, giving Uber the opportunity to steal a march its rivals with its popular private hire service.

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Internet, Software

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Source: Uber Blog

China suspected in US Postal Service hack that exposed data on 800,000 workers

The United States Postal Service’s computer networks were breached, the USPS announced this morning. The breach was discovered back in September — it’s not clear when the actual attack(s) took place — and the Washington Post is reporting that Chinese government is responsible. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading investigations into the breach; FBI officials aren’t saying who they believe is responsible.

The entire USPS staff of over 800,000 employees is affected by the breach: “names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of employment and other information” were all taken, according to USPS officials. The breach reportedly doesn’t affect USPS customers, both in-store and online via USPS.com, though some customer information (names, email addresses and phone numbers) was also taken — if you “contacted the Postal Service Customer Care Center via phone or email between January 1st and August 16th.” Officials are saying no other customer info was taken. “At this time, we do not believe that potentially affected customers need to take any action as a result of this incident,” a statement from the USPS says.

All USPS employees are being offered one free year of credit monitoring in wake of the information breach, though we’re guessing that a few of those approximately 800,000 people are seeking employment elsewhere after today’s news.

Postmaster General Donahoe says that, during the past few months of investigation, he and the FBI “have seen no evidence of malicious use” of employees’ data. Whoever breached the system was after large amounts of US government employee data rather than credit card info — “a sophisticated actor that appears not to be interested in identity theft or credit card fraud,” is how USPS spokesperson David Partenheimer described the intruder to the Washington Post.

“We have recently implemented additional security measures designed to improve the security of our information systems, including certain actions this past weekend that caused certain systems to be off-line,” Partenheimer wrote in the USPS statement. “We know this caused inconvenience and partners, and we apologize for any disruption.” USPS employees were notified this morning.

Governments engage in information espionage all the time, of course. Both the United States and China are among the world’s best at intruding foreign government computer systems and mining for data. That doesn’t make it excusable when a government is caught in the act. As former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart A. Baker told the Washington Post, “It’s perfectly appropriate for us to do everything we can to embarrass and punish the Chinese if they’re in our systems, whether or not we’re in theirs.”

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Filed under: Networking, Internet, Software

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Source: The Washington Post

DARPA funds $11 million tool that will make coding a lot easier

DARPA is funding a new project by Rice University called PLINY, and it’s neither a killer robot nor a high-tech weapon. PLINY, named after Pliny the Elder who wrote one of the earliest encyclopedias ever, will actually be a tool that can automatically complete a programmer’s draft — and yes, it will work somewhat like the autocomplete on your smartphones. Its developers describe it as a repository of terabytes upon terabytes of all the open-source code they’ll find, which people will be able to query in order to easily create complex software or quickly finish a simple one. Rice University assistant professor Swarat Chaudhuri says he and his co-developers “envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears.” Also, the parts PLINY conjures up “should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.”

In the video below, Chaudhuri used a sheet of paper with a hole in the middle to represent a programmer’s incomplete work. If he uses PLINY to fill that hole, the tool will look through the billions of lines of code in its collection to find possible solutions (represented by different shapes in the video). Once it finds the nearest fit, the tool will clip any unnecessary parts, polish the code further to come up with the best solution it can, and make sure the final product has no security flaws. More than a dozen Rice University researchers will be working on PLINY for the next four years, fueled by the $11 million funding from the Pentagon’s mad science division.

[Image credit: Shutterstock / Yellowj]

Filed under: Science

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Source: Rice University