CNET reports on what happened when a new Uber driver received a call from Uber telling him to cancel the trip and verify his account: The caller asked for his email. He gave it. The caller asked for his Uber account password. He gave him that, too, after a brief hesitation. Then the caller said to tell him the confirmation code he'd be receiving shortly via text. The driver told him the code once he got the text. This was the two-factor authentication needed to get into the driver's Uber account. "Nothing happened for the rest of the week," the driver says. "I didn't think anything of this again until Saturday." But in those following three days, the scammer had changed the driver's account settings and waited for the perfect time to withdraw money.... By Saturday night, his $653.88 in earnings from that week had been nabbed from his account...

Apparently the scam has hit thousands of ride-hail drivers, and millions of dollars have been diverted from their accounts, according to a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's federal court last November... [A] couple of key elements about Uber make it possible. When passengers hail a ride with Uber, they see the name of the driver and the car's make, model and license number, and they get an anonymized phone number to call the driver. All of this ensures passengers safely connect with the right driver. But it also makes it possible for the wrong people to see lots of information about drivers.
When one of the scam victims complained to Uber, he "was told he had to wait until Monday when he could talk to a representative in person at one of its driver hubs," although eventually Uber "agreed to credit the $653.88 back to his account as a 'one-time repayment courtesy.'"

Other scammers have gone after Uber directly, CNET reports, using GPS-spoofing apps to simulate long rides as "a way to pocket money via stolen credit cards, essentially using Uber as a makeshift money laundering service." Uber's data science manager spotted the fake rides because "weird" altitude coordinates indicated that the drivers were flying through the sky.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Torrent Freak: In a comment to Australian media, Google states that it has demoted 65,000 [pirate] sites in search results, a list that's still growing every week. In total, the company received DMCA takedown requests for over 1.8 million domain names, so a little under 4% of these are downranked. The result of the measures is that people are less likely to see a pirate site when they type "watch movie X" or "download song Y." This means that these sites see a drop in visitors from Google and a quite significant one too. "Demotion results in sites losing around 90 percent of their visitors from Google Search," a Google spokesperson told The Age.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will invest $100 million into two research programs over the next four years to create the equivalent of a silicon compiler aimed at significantly lowering the barriers to design chips. "The two programs are just part of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) expected to receive $1.5 billion over the next five years to drive the U.S. electronics industry forward," reports EE Times. "ERI will disclose details of its other programs at an event in Silicon Valley in late July." From the report: Congress recently added $150 million per year to ERI's funding. The initiative, managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced on Monday that the July event will also include workshops to brainstorm ideas for future research programs in five areas ranging from artificial intelligence to photonics. With $100 million in finding, the IDEAS and POSH programs represent "one of the biggest EDA research programs ever," said Andreas Olofsson, who manages the two programs.

Together, they aim to combat the growing complexity and cost of designing chips, now approaching $500 million for a bleeding-edge SoC. Essentially, POSH aims to create an open-source library of silicon blocks, and IDEAS hopes to spawn a variety of open-source and commercial tools to automate testing of those blocks and knitting them into SoCs and printed circuit boards. If successful, the programs "will change the economics of the industry," enabling companies to design in relatively low-volume chips that would be prohibitive today. It could also open a door for designers working under secure regimes in the government to make their own SoCs targeting nanosecond latencies that are not commercially viable, said Olofsson.