Revealed: The secret CEO texts that tell the tale of Uber-Waymo's self-driving tech spat

Hundreds of unsealed text messages between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski have revealed an intriguing insight into the relationship between the two – and raised more questions about whether they conspired against Levandowski's former employer. Released into the public domain as …

[Anonymous Coward]

One sided text conversations

Hold on, how does Levandowski's phone not have the messages sent to him? Whether an iPhone or an Android, both sides of a conversation are saved, so even if Kalanick's "30 day delete" thing is true the messages he sent aren't getting deleted on other people's phones!

[cyber7]

Re: One sided text conversations

I suggest you RTFM or Google "Automatically Delete iPhone Messages After 30 Days". Messages received are deleted after 30days. That other people received his text messages is precisely why investigators have a one sided conversation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One sided text conversations

The claim was that they have only one side of a conversation between two people. If you have the 30 day deletion set on your phone it won't delete anything off MY phone. I will still have both sides of our complete conversation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One sided text conversations

In other words for every conversation there will be two copies of every message. One on party#1's phone and one on party#2's phone. You delete all messages after 30 days and the whole conversation still exists on the other party's phone.

I'm not sure how you would end up with just one side of a conversation. To do that you would need to delete three streams of messages while retaining one stream. (All messages on one phone and then the one side of the conversation on the other phone).

However if they are prepared to pretend that a large group of messages don't exist, then surely they would just delete any messages that had them bang-to-rights individually. I can't see them handing those over, if it completely undermined their case.

[DainB]

Gell-Mann amnesia

An exemplary case.

[Speltier]

Ottomotto Zero to Self Driving in 6 Months

Isn't likely. If they could do that, we'd have self driving cars for the masses by now, a mere 12 months later!

Oddly, Otto's self driving trucks seem to have driven into a black hole and disappeared after they were bought out. Plus, that self driving truck stunt is starting to stink of mechanical turk. Apparently no one cares, and no one is talking.

[paulf]

Re: Ottomotto Zero to Self Driving in 6 Months

I know this whole affair stinks of something awful, and anything Uber gets involved with is more likely to be dodgy than not (El Reg passim), and I'm concerned I'm tacitly supporting the case for the other side (i.e. The very big data collection and advertising extravaganza Corp), but:

"Levandowski left Waymo in January 2016 and set up his own self-driving truck company, Ottomotto, that was bought by Uber for $680m in August 2016." How on earth could you set up a company (presumably from scratch) then get bought out for more than HALF A BILLION BUCKS about 6 months later and expect people to think that wasn't dodgy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ottomotto Zero to Self Driving in 6 Months

Plus, that self driving truck stunt is starting to stink of mechanical turk. Apparently no one cares

Well, I suspect that after an initial puff of enthusiasm ("Great, now more wages, no more unions") the customers realise that the technology is decades away from being capable of doing the required job, even then it will only supplant fairly low paid employees, and until you can automate various other steps, particularly the receiving logistics, you can't run the truck for any longer operating hours.