The Second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) is a wide-ranging piece of European legislation that will transform the payments industry. Alternatively referred to as the'Open Banking' initiative, PSD2 promises to increase consumer choice in the payments sector. It will force banks, who have traditionally held a monopoly over the provision of payments services, to allow new, third party providers to'build on top of' their existing payments infrastructure and offer their own services. The directive, incoming in January, is of seismic importance to both banks and payments providers. Banks are sensing the need to move quickly so as not to simply become'utilities' similar to the water or telephone company, with only a small stable of products to offer.

The bruising legal fight between Uber and Waymo over self-driving car tech took another explosive turn today, after the judge overseeing the case discovered Uber was withholding evidence that it had a department dedicated to gathering intelligence from competitors. The evidence also showed that Uber used systems that encrypted and deleted communications to prevent them from ending up in court. The evidence in question is a letter written by an attorney for Richard Jacobs, a former member of Uber's intelligence group. According to a filing by Waymo's legal team, the letter was sent to Uber lawyers more than six months ago, and was obtained by the US attorney's office as part of its own criminal investigation into the ride-hailing company. The letter was produced as part of a since-settled legal dispute between Jacobs and Uber.

A federal judge on Tuesday delayed a high-profile trial between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Alphabet, Google's parent company, saying that a new letter contradicted earlier statements made by the ride-hailing company. Waymo requested that the court push back the trial date to gather more information gleaned from the letter, which was only shared with the judge last week, and described Uber's alleged efforts to steal trade secrets from rivals. The letter was written by a lawyer for a former Uber employee, Richard Jacobs, who worked as a security analyst. Jacobs testified at Tuesday's hearing that Uber deliberately used messaging technology to avoid leaving a paper trail, including apps that automatically delete correspondence. He said that a special team at Uber was tasked with gathering code and trade secrets from competing businesses.

Uber had a team of employees dedicated to spying on rival companies and "impeding" legal investigations into the company, a former employee testified in federal court Tuesday. The dramatic public testimony, on the eve of jury selection for the hotly anticipated civil trial over allegations that Uber stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving car spinoff Waymo, came after it was revealed that Uber had withheld evidence, leading Judge William Alsup to delay the the trial indefinitely. Earlier this year, the attorney for Richard Jacobs, a former Uber employee, had sent a letter to Uber's in-house counsel with his allegations about the special group. But Uber had not provided the letter to Waymo as part of legal discovery before the start of the trial. On November 22, federal prosecutors, who are conducting a separate investigation, alerted the judge to the existence of the letter.

Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. The revelation triggered a delay in a high-profile trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing service stole self-driving car technology from a Google spinoff. The probe under way at the U.S. Justice Department centers on a 37-page letter that described allegations made by Richard Jacobs, Uber's former manager of global intelligence. Jacobs had the letter sent in May to an Uber lawyer. The letter contended that Jacobs had been wrongfully demoted and then fired for trying to stop the company's alleged misconduct.

Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. That has triggered a delay in a high-profile trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing company stole self-driving car technology from Google spinoff Waymo. The criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. Justice Department centers on information contained in a 37-page letter that Uber's former manager of global intelligence sent in May to a company lawyer. The investigation wasn't publicly known until Tuesday, when it surfaced in a court hearing that was supposed to set the stage for a trial pitting Uber against Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer that started within Google eight years ago and is still a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. The hearing instead quickly turned into a forum raising more questions about the ethics and conduct of Uber.

The testimony in a San Francisco courtroom Tuesday comes amid revelations that federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. That has triggered a delay in a high-profile federal trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing service stole self-driving car technology from a Google spinoff.

To the editor: The Times' article on whether cutting corporate taxes will boost the wages of American workers fails to address critical circumstances that are likely to lead to a devastating economic crash. We are being tickled a little now with things like hamburger kiosks and self-driving cars, but all of this is just the beginning. If corporations spend to increase production, they most likely will spend it to automate at the expense of workers. This will mean fewer people will be able to afford their products, leading to lower corporate profits and stock sales by wealthy investors. The likely result will be a severe economic crash much like, if not worse than, what our country experienced in 1929, 1987 and 2008.

Perhaps you remember the iconic theme of the globally popular Kung Fu Panda movies, "You are the secret ingredient!" This meant that self-belief is important and with it great things can be achieved--Po, for example, became the Dragon Warrior. My meaning here is that computer science is both a powerful enabler of rapid advances in all intellectual fields and a disruptor driving furious revolutions in commerce and society worldwide. Computer science is more important and potent than ever! Computing is driving unprecedented rapid change.

The adoption of automated, data-driven decision making in an ever expanding range of applications has raised concerns about its potential unfairness towards certain social groups. In this context, a number of recent studies have focused on defining, detecting, and removing unfairness from data-driven decision systems. However, the existing notions of fairness, based on parity (equality) in treatment or outcomes for different social groups, tend to be quite stringent, limiting the overall decision making accuracy. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the fair-division and envy-freeness literature in economics and game theory and propose preference-based notions of fairness -- given the choice between various sets of decision treatments or outcomes, any group of users would collectively prefer its treatment or outcomes, regardless of the (dis)parity as compared to the other groups. Then, we introduce tractable proxies to design margin-based classifiers that satisfy these preference-based notions of fairness. Finally, we experiment with a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets and show that preference-based fairness allows for greater decision accuracy than parity-based fairness.