Technology

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has sent subpoenas to Uber and Lyft that asks them to provide information pertaining to how each company classifies its drivers (W2 employees versus 1099 contractors), as well as pay and benefits.

The subpoenas also request a list of drivers who have either started or ended at least one ride in SF between 2015 to the present day and proof that any driver classified as an independent contractor meets the three criteria set forward by a recent California Supreme Court ruling. According to the April 30 ruling, companies must classify workers as employees unless they can prove the person is not under the control of the company, works outside the companygeneral scope of business and has an independent business or job of the same nature of the work they do for the company. Still, the ruling does not constitute law, and neither Uber nor Lyft were parties in the case.

&Lyft has a long track record of working collaboratively with policymakers, including the SF City Attorney, on important issues,& a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch. &We look forward to helping the City Attorneyoffice fully understand Lyftbusiness model, including our relationship with drivers.&

Itworth noting that both Uber and Lyft generally describe their drivers as people who do this type of work as a side hustle, rather than as people who operate their own transportation companies.

&The argument that these companies have tried to use in the past — that they&re just a technology platform — doesn&t pass the smell test,& Herrera said in a press release &People go to Microsoft or Salesforce for software. People go to Uber or Lyft for a ride.&

With the subpoenas, Herrera wants to ensure Uber and Lyft are legally classifying their drivers as independent contractors. If not, then Herrera wants Uber and Lyft to offer drivers minimum wage, sick leave, health care and paid parental leave.

&San Franciscolaws help ensure that employers provide a fair daywage for a fair daywork,& Herrera said. &Our laws also guarantee employees basic humane benefits like sick leave, health care, and paid parental leave. We are not going to turn a blind eye if companies in San Francisco deny workers their pay and benefits. We are not going to tolerate any company shirking its responsibility to pay for benefits and shifting that burden onto taxpayers when drivers without health insurance turn to the emergency room. If your company is valued at $62 billion, you can afford to give your workers health care.&

I&ve reached out to Uber and will update this story if I hear back.

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig asking their companies to help remove the listings for fake pay TV boxes from their respective websites. These boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo, the letter informed, and are used to perpetuate &intellectual property theft and consumer fraud.&

With the rise in cord cutting, a number of consumers have found itjust as easy to use a software app like Kodi on a cheap streaming media device to gain access to content — like TV shows and movies — that they would otherwise miss out on by dropping their pay TV subscription. As an added perk, various software add-ons enable consumers to stream movies still in the theaters, too. Itan easier way to access pirated content than visiting The Pirate Bay and downloading torrent files.

While Kodiopen-source software itself doesn&t facilitate piracy, through a number of downloadable add-ons, itrelatively easy for consumers to figure out how to stream pirated content thanks to online tutorials and YouTube videos.

Itnot clear if people know that they&re doing something illegal, or just don&t care because there are seemingly no repercussions related to their behavior.

Amazon, Netflix and major Hollywood studios have gone after these box makers through the court system already. In January, for example, aU.S. District Court judgehanded down a preliminary injunction against TickBox TV, a Georgia-based set-top box maker that was profiting from the sale of its so-called &Kodi boxes.&

Amazon and eBay also proactively remove devices facilitating piracy from their websites, the FCC acknowledged in its letter.

Amazon, for example, prevented the sale of &tens of thousands of unlawful devices& through its &automated proactive detection, preventative investigations, and notices of infringement from rights holders,& the letter stated. Ebay, meanwhile, also removes devices reported as infringing and removes those that say things like &never pay another cable bill& or &fully loaded& in their descriptions.

But the FCC wants the companies to do more, and faster, it seems.

&Unfortunately, despite your good work in this area, devices continue to make it to consumers through your website,& writes FCC Commissioner Mike O&Rielly. &Many of these devices contain harmful malware that will most certainly be passed on to the consumer. Moreover, the consumer may unwittingly believe that the device is lawful since they were able to purchase it from a legitimate company.&

The FCC is additionally concerned because many devices use the FCC logo to aid in their attempt to defraud consumers.

It notes that nine set-top box distributors were referred to the FCC in October for streaming pirated content, and seven of those displayed the FCC logo even though there was no record of their compliance with the commissionrequirements.

The letter specifically asks both Amazon and eBay to step up their enforcement, by &swiftly removing& devices the FCC alerts them to; it also asks the companies to provide the FCC with information about the manufacturers, distributors and suppliers, when requested.

The move not only pushes Amazon and eBay to more quickly and thoroughly cooperate with the FCC, it also serves as a warning about the U.S. governmentplan to further its crackdown on these fake pay TV boxes.

Of course, therea bit of irony here regarding Amazonparticipation in this fight — its Amazon Fire TV Stick, or &firestick& as consumers tend to refer to it, is one of the most popular devices out there today for enabling piracy.

People either buy the &firestick& themselves and install Kodi and various add-onsor they buy a slightly more expensive, hacked firestick from a local reseller whohawking them on under-the-radar backchannels, like Facebook Groups or online message boards. The hacked firestick is set up with Kodi pre-installed and the various add-ons for free streaming already configured. (A search for &kodi box& on Amazon.com also returns the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV as the top two results thanks to &sponsored& placements by Amazon. Hmmm.)

The U.S. is not alone in its Kodi box crackdown. Recently, business owners in Wales who sold fully loaded Kodi boxes were sentenced to prison,for example, and its courts have ruled Kodi boxes illegal before. Canada has gone after websites that enable piracy through Kodi, as well.

In response to the letter, eBay says it plans to cooperate with the FCC:

We&re committed to working in collaboration with the FCC to prevent the sale of these illegal products. As outlined in the letter, eBay utilizes a variety of measures to prevent these products from being sold on our platform. These include proactive filtering and manual site reviews to identify illegal products, as well as taking action on direct referrals received from the FCC. We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with the FCC to keep these illegal products off our site.

Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Amazon has shared its statement, which was written in its own letter to the FCC.

(h/t: FireceCable)

Virgin Galactic is celebrating a successful second test flight of SpaceShipTwo, the rocket-powered passenger spacecraft that may someday take tourists to the edge of space. Todaytest took the VSS Unity, the second craft built in this class, up to 114,500 feet and Mach 1.9, or nearly 1,300 miles per hour.

Unityfirst powered flight was less than two months ago, which was itself the first powered flight Virgin Galactic had attempted since the fatal breakup of the companyprevious SpaceShipTwo-class spacecraft, Enterprise, in 2014.

Much has been redone since then, but the basics of the Virgin Galactic flight style are the same. A relatively traditional jet-powered plane, a WhiteKnightTwo class plane (in this case the VMS Eve), carries the SpaceShipTwo craft (Unity) up to somewhere around 45,000 feet. There the latter detaches and fires up its rocket engine, accelerating to high speed and high altitude, after which it glides to the surface and lands more or less like any other plane.

Todaytest flight followed these parameters to the letter, though the numbers were considerably higher than Aprilflight. The rockets burned for 31 seconds total, and the craftunique &feather& system for slowing its descent was deployed successfully.

The Unity is designed to handle nearly twice the speeds achieved today, but these tolerances must of course be approached gradually and the various systems tested under friendly conditions before moving on to hostile ones.

&It was great to see our beautiful spaceship back in the air and to share the moment with the talented team who are taking us, step by step, to space,& said Virgin founder Richard Branson in a press release. &Seeing Unity soar upwards at supersonic speeds is inspiring and absolutely breathtaking. We are getting ever closer to realizing our goals. Congratulations to the whole team!&

I&ve asked the company for a few more details on the flight, as well as when we can expect a third test.