Strider- (Slashdot reader #39,683) shares a story from Reuters:
Canada’s Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a driver in a gig economy case that paves the way for a class action suit calling for Uber Technologies Inc to recognize drivers in Canada as company employees.
UberEats driver David Heller had filed a class action suit, challenged by Uber, aiming to secure a minimum wage, vacation pay and other benefits like overtime pay. Drivers are now classified as independent contractors and do not have such benefits.
A lower court had already ruled that Uber’s contracts included an arbitration clause that was “invalid and unenforceable,” Reuters, reports, and it was Uber’s attempt to appeal of that ruling that was dismissed by Canada’s Supreme Court in an 8-1 vote. Reuters notes that “The arbitration process, which must be conducted in the Netherlands where Uber has its international headquarters, costs about C$19,000 ($14,500).”
Meanwhile, CNN also reports that Uber and Lyft “could soon be forced to reclassify their drivers in California as employees or cease operating in the state as part of an escalating legal battle over a new law impacting much of the on-demand economy.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and a coalition of city attorneys intend to file for a preliminary injunction this week to force the two ride-hailing companies to comply with the new state law, according to a press release issued Wednesday…
“It’s time for Uber and Lyft to own up to their responsibilities and the people who make them successful: their workers,” said Becerra in a statement concerning the injunction the state is intending to file. “Misclassifying your workers as ‘consultants’ or ‘independent contractors’ simply means you want your workers or taxpayers to foot the bill for obligations you have as an employer.

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Source: Slashdot – Are Uber Drivers Employees? Uber Faces Two Big Court Challenges

Friday IBM Research updated their open source “IBM Differential Privacy Library,” a suite of new lightweight tools offering “an array of functionality to extract insight and knowledge from data with robust privacy guarantees.”

“Most tasks can be run with only a single line of code,” brags a new blog post (shared by Slashdot reader IBMResearch), explaining how it works:
This year for the first time in its 230-year history the U.S. Census will use differential privacy to keep the responses of its citizens confidential when the data is made available. But how does it work? Differential privacy uses mathematical noise to preserve individuals’ privacy and confidentiality while allowing population statistics to be observed.

This concept has a natural extension to machine learning, where we can protect models against privacy attacks, while maintaining overall accuracy. For example, if you want to know my age (32) I can pick a random number out of a hat, say ±7 — you will only learn that I could be between 25 and 39. I’ve added a little bit of noise to the data to protect my age and the US Census will do something similar.

While the US government built its own differential privacy tool, IBM has been working on its own open source version and today we are publishing our latest release v0.3. The IBM Differential Privacy Library boasts a suite of tools for machine learning and data analytics tasks, all with built-in privacy guarantees. Our library is unique to others in giving scientists and developers access to lightweight, user-friendly tools for data analytics and machine learning in a familiar environment… What also sets our library apart is our machine learning functionality enables organisations to publish and share their data with rigorous guarantees on user privacy like never before…

Also included is a collection of fundamental tools for data exploration and analytics. All the details for getting started with the library can be found at IBM’s Github repository.

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Source: Slashdot – IBM’s New Differential Privacy Library Works With Just a Single Line of Code

An anonymous reader quotes ADTmag:
The Eclipse Foundation this week announced Jakarta EE 9 Milestone 1, the final version of the enterprise Java specification before the first Release Candidate (RC). The Jakarta EE 9 release marks the final transition away from the javax.* namespace (which Oracle refused to give up) to Eclipse’s jakarta.*. This release updates all the APIs to use jakarta.* in package names. In fact, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, says that transition is really what this release is all about.

“The main purpose…is to provide a release that is very similar to Java EE 8,” Milinkovich told ADTmag, “with everything converted to the jakarta.* namespace. We’re providing a stable technical conversion platform, so all the tools and frameworks in the ecosystem that are using, say, javax.servlet, can make the change with confidence.” Giving the ecosystem solid footing for the transition from the Java EE coffee cup to the Jakarta EE sailboat is the Foundation’s way of setting the stage for rapid innovation, Milinkovich said, once the transition is largely complete.
“These technologies have been around for an awfully long time,” he added, “and we had to provide folks with a stable platform for the conversion. At the same time, thanks to a contribution from IBM, we have the Eclipse Transformer Project, which is going to provide runtime enablement. If someone has an application they don’t want to recompile, and that application is using the javax.* namespace, they will be able to run it on top of a Jakarta-compatible app server. That’s going to provide binary compatibility for apps, going forward…”

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Source: Slashdot – Jakarta EE 9 Specification Release ‘Marks the Final Transition Away From javax Namespace’