Technology News

Spurred by skyrocketing consumer demand during the pandemic, restaurant delivery companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats are rapidly expanding their services to grocers, convenience stores, pharmacies, pet stores and even department stores.

On Wednesday, Uber Eats unveiled its newest delivery option: flowers. Uber Eats will let users order flowers directly from its app as part of a partnership with ProFlowers, an FTD subsidiary. Flower delivery will be offered first in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and a few other U.S. cities; it will be available nationwide by early next year.

“If we can deliver your burrito in 30 minutes or deliver your ice cream still frozen, we should be able to deliver anything in under an hour,” said Fuad Hannon, the head of new verticals at DoorDash. “The technology makes that possible.”

Expanding beyond restaurant delivery is critical for Uber Eats and DoorDash, which have struggled to make a profit on the slim margins they get from restaurants.

Restaurant delivery can be profitable in dense urban markets, where drivers can complete multiple orders in an hour, said Ali Mogharabi, a senior equity analyst with Morningstar. But outside of cities, where deliveries take longer, adding orders from Walgreens or Costco makes better use of drivers’ time.

Offering more items for delivery also attracts customers, many of whom will fork over the $9.99 monthly fee DoorDash and Uber Eats charge for unlimited deliveries.

Raj Beri, Uber Eats’ global head of grocery and new verticals, said the company saw a huge influx of users after the pandemic began, and many are sticking with delivery even as the pandemic ebbs. To keep them, it needs to offer goods and services they value.

“More of our users are trying these verticals outside of restaurants. Those customers have more stickiness on the platform,” he said. “They’re more engaged, so the membership becomes more valuable to them.”

DoorDash and Uber Eats face stiff competition from established players like Instacart and Amazon, which are also experts in delivery logistics. Instacart currently controls 67% of the U.S. grocery pickup and delivery business, while Amazon controls 22%, according to Edison Trends. DoorDash and Uber Eats together control 1%.

Non-restaurant delivery makes up around 5% of sales at both Uber Eats and DoorDash. But that business is growing rapidly. DoorDash started working with convenience stores like 7-Eleven in April 2020 and more recently opened its own DashMart fulfillment centers. It’s already the market leader in convenience store delivery, with a 60% share of the market, according to Edison Trends.

And there’s enormous opportunity ahead. Beri says around 3 million customers per month are ordering non-restaurant deliveries from Uber Eats, but the company has a total of 98 million active users around the world. And Mogherabi estimates there will be $1 trillion worth of deliverable goods and services in the U.S. by 2025.

Delivery comes at a price. The in-store price of a gallon of milk at a Meijer in Michigan is $1.68; on the DoorDash app, it’s $2.99. But so far, the extra fees aren’t dampening demand. Uber Eats said non-restaurant delivery jumped 77% between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of this year. DoorDash said non-restaurant delivery rose 40% in the same period.

Cynthia Carrasco White, a single mother and a lawyer for a Los Angeles nonprofit, used to think delivery was a luxury she couldn’t afford. But she started getting meals, groceries and other necessities delivered last year so she could avoid taking her young, unvaccinated daughters to the store.

White has come to see delivery as a lifeline that saves her time, gas money and child care expenses. She uses various apps, including Uber Eats and DoorDash, and takes advantage of deals when she can.

“Now that I’ve seen how beneficial it is, I’ll figure out a way to cut costs and continue to use it,” she said.

Delivery also comes at a cost to stores, depending on the services they’re using. Some businesses, like Macy’s and Walmart, have customers order products on their own web site and use DoorDash to make deliveries. At other stores, like 7-Eleven or CVS, Uber Eats and DoorDash drivers do the shopping and make deliveries.

In some cases, it’s a mix. The grocery chain Alberstons recently signed a deal with DoorDash for delivery from nearly 2,000 U.S. stores. In some locations, DoorDash drivers do the shopping and delivery. At other stores, Alberstons workers pack the groceries and DoorDash is only used for delivery.

Albertsons laid off many of its own delivery workers earlier this year; at least some were given other jobs within the store, the company says. Amber Kappa, Albertsons’ vice president for e-commerce, said the chain simply couldn’t keep up with digital order demand, which nearly tripled last year.

“If we don’t offer one- to two-hour delivery fast and near-free, I don’t know how long we’d last,” Kappa said.

For some businesses, delivery companies are helping eliminate expensive shipping. Petco uses DoorDash to move heavy bags of kibble and kitty litter to customers’ doorsteps, which is much faster and cheaper than shipping them.

“It costs the same amount of money to take a 40-pound bag as it costs for a tennis ball in that DoorDasher’s trunk,” said Petco CEO Ron Coughlin.

But not every delivery driver is pleased about delivery’s expansion.

Barbara Mensch of Rutherfordton, North Carolina, who drives for both DoorDash and Instacart, said business was booming in the early days of the pandemic. But lately, customers have been tipping less generously, and she often turns down DoorDash orders. She doesn’t like shopping for goods in unfamiliar stores like Dollar Tree or idling at Walmart while a worker prepares a delivery.

“A $13 order that takes you 45 minutes? It’s not a good value for your time,” she said. “I would do better to stay at home and not use my car at all than go out and work for peanuts.”

But Kweli Murphy of Englewood, California, who drives for both DoorDash and Uber Eats, says he’s happy with the work. Murphy, 19, just bought his first car with his delivery earnings, which average around $150 for six hours of driving.

Most of his deliveries still come from restaurants, but he occasionally shops for orders in places like AutoZone and CVS.

“It’s not a big deal to go shopping for people. It’s just an opportunity to go into different places other than restaurants,” he said.

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AP Business Writer Joseph Pisani contributed from New York.

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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — As a member of the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Angus King has reason to worry about hackers. At a briefing by security staff this year, he said he got some advice on how to help keep his cellphone secure.

Step One: Turn off phone.

Step Two: Turn it back on.

That’s it. At a time of widespread digital insecurity it turns out that the oldest and simplest computer fix there is — turning a device off then back on again — can thwart hackers from stealing information from smartphones.

Regularly rebooting phones won’t stop the army of cybercriminals or spy-for-hire firms that have sowed chaos and doubt about the ability to keep any information safe and private in our digital lives. But it can make even the most sophisticated hackers work harder to maintain access and steal data from a phone.

“This is all about imposing cost on these malicious actors,” said Neal Ziring, technical director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate.

The NSA issued a “best practices” guide for mobile device security last year in which it recommends rebooting a phone every week as a way to stop hacking.

King, an independent from Maine, says rebooting his phone is now part of his routine.

“I’d say probably once a week, whenever I think of it,” he said.

Almost always in arm’s reach, rarely turned off and holding huge stores of personal and sensitive data, cellphones have become top targets for hackers looking to steal text messages, contacts and photos, as well as track users’ locations and even secretly turn on their video and microphones.

“I always think of phones as like our digital soul,” said Patrick Wardle, a security expert and former NSA researcher.

The number of people whose phones are hacked each year is unknowable, but evidence suggests it’s significant. A recent investigation into phone hacking by a global media consortium has caused political uproars in France, India, Hungary and elsewhere after researchers found scores of journalists, human rights activists and politicians on a leaked list of what were believed to be potential targets of an Israeli hacker-for-hire company.

The advice to periodically reboot a phone reflects, in part, a change in how top hackers are gaining access to mobile devices and the rise of so-called “zero-click” exploits that work without any user interaction instead of trying to get users to open something that’s secretly infected.

“There’s been this evolution away from having a target click on a dodgy link,” said Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an internet civil rights watchdog at the University of Toronto.

Typically, once hackers gain access to a device or network, they look for ways to persist in the system by installing malicious software to a computer’s root file system. But that’s become more difficult as phone manufacturers such as Apple and Google have strong security to block malware from core operating systems, Ziring said.

“It’s very difficult for an attacker to burrow into that layer in order to gain persistence,” he said.

That encourages hackers to opt for “in-memory payloads” that are harder to detect and trace back to whoever sent them. Such hacks can’t survive a reboot, but often don’t need to since many people rarely turn their phones off.

“Adversaries came to the realization they don’t need to persist,” Wardle said. “If they could do a one-time pull and exfiltrate all your chat messages and your contact and your passwords, it’s almost game over anyways, right?”

A robust market currently exists for hacking tools that can break into phones. Some companies like Zerodium and Crowdfence publicly offer millions of dollars for zero-click exploits.

And hacker-for-hire companies that sell mobile-device hacking services to governments and law enforcement agencies have proliferated in recent years. The most well known is the Israeli-based NSO Group, whose spyware researchers say has been used around the world to break into the phones of human rights activists, journalists, and even members of the Catholic clergy.

NSO Group is the focus of the recent exposés by a media consortium that reported the company’s spyware tool Pegasus was used in 37 instances of successful or attempted phone hacks of business executives, human rights activists and others, according to The Washington Post.

The company is also being sued in the U.S. by Facebook for allegedly targeting some 1,400 users of its encrypted messaging service WhatsApp with a zero-click exploit.

NSO Group has said it only sells its spyware to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

The persistence of NSO’s spyware used to be a selling point of the company. Several years ago its U.S.-based subsidy pitched law enforcement agencies a phone hacking tool that would survive even a factory reset of a phone, according to documents obtained by Vice News.

But Marczak, who has tracked NSO Group’s activists closely for years, said it looks like the company first starting using zero-click exploits that forgo persistence around 2019.

He said victims in the WhatsApp case would see an incoming call for a few rings before the spyware was installed. In 2020, Marczak and Citizen Lab exposed another zero-click hack attributed to NSO Group that targeted several journalists at Al Jazeera. In that case, the hackers used Apple’s iMessage texting service.

“There was nothing that any of the targets reported seeing on their screen. So that one was both completely invisible as well as not requiring any user interaction,” Marczak said.

With such a powerful tool at their disposal, Marczak said rebooting your phone won’t do much to stop determined hackers. Once you reboot, they could simply send another zero-click.

“It’s sort of just a different model, it’s persistence through reinfection,” he said.

The NSA’s guide also acknowledges that rebooting a phone works only sometimes. The agency’s guide for mobile devices has an even simpler piece of advice to really make sure hackers aren’t secretly turning on your phone’s camera or microphone to record you: don’t carry it with you.

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FINANCIAL MARKETS

Asian stock markets mixed after Wall Street rises to record

BEIJING (AP) — Asian stock markets are mixed as investors look ahead to a Federal Reserve report for an update on when U.S. stimulus might start winding down. Hong Kong declined while Tokyo and Shanghai advanced.

U.S. futures edged lower while oil prices advanced.

On Monday, the benchmark S&P 500 index rose 0.2%, shrugging off concern about the spread of the coronavirus’s more contagious delta variant.

Investors are waiting for the Fed’s update on the economy and interest rate plans. U.S.-traded Chinese stocks fell after Beijing announced new enforcement measures on technology, real estate and for-profit education.

CONGRESS-INFRASTRUCTURE

Senators, White House in talks to finish infrastructure bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators and the White House are locked in intense negotiations to salvage a bipartisan infrastructure deal.

Pressure is mounting on all sides to wrap up talks and show progress on President Joe Biden’s top priority.

Despite weeks of closed-door discussions, senators from the bipartisan group blew past a Monday deadline set for agreement on the nearly $1 trillion package. Instead they’ve run into disagreements over how much money should go to public transit and water projects. But labor issues are also a flashpoint, as is tapping COVID-19 funds to help pay for the package. Biden says he remains optimistic.

TESLA RESULTS

Tesla reaches milestone with first $1B quarterly profit

SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Tesla’s quarterly profit has surpassed $1 billion for the first time.

The results come as the electric car pioneer navigated through a pandemic-driven computer chip shortage that has caused major headaches for other automakers. The financial milestone announced Monday extended a two-year run of prosperity that has erased questions about Tesla’s long-term viability raised during its early years of losses and production problems.

Tesla posted a $1.1 billion profit for the April-June period while producing more than 200,000 cars for the first time. But Tesla cautioned its recent momentum could be slowed by a persisting shortage of chips that have become vital parts in modern cars.

BITCOIN-RISING AGAIN

Airlines cite concerns about fuel shortages at some airports

NEW YORK (AP) — Bitcoin’s price surged again Monday after speculation that Amazon may be entering the cryptocurrency sector after it posted a job seeking a “digital currency and blockchain product lead.”

Bitcoin jumped more than 12% in the past 24 hours, nearly reaching $40,000 per coin before settling closer to $37,000. The five-week high reached Monday comes after a long slide from an April high of nearly $65,000. There is also speculation that the price surge may have also been partially due to traders buying up bitcoin to fill positions they were short on.

AIRLINES-FUEL CHARGES

Airlines cite concerns about fuel shortages at some airports

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) —The fuel needle is moving closer to “empty” at some U.S. airports. That’s according to American Airlines, which is asking pilots to take steps to save fuel.

American is reporting low fuel levels at “several” small to midsize airports, mostly because of a shortage of fuel tankers and drivers. Other airlines are seeing the effects too. Delta Air Lines says it sees a shortage is Reno, Nevada. Southwest says the fuel situation isn’t affecting flights, but it’s adding more fuel on some planes to limit the amount needed at airports with shortages.

VIRUS OUTBREAK-VACCINES

Moderna expanding kids vaccine study to better assess safety

WASHINGTON (AP) — Moderna plans to expand the size of its COVID-19 vaccine study in younger children to better detect rare side effects.

The company said Monday it is in talks with the Food and Drug Administration to enroll more study participants under age 12. The announcement comes as U.S. cases are rising and schools are preparing to welcome students back to classrooms.

t the same time, FDA continues to review rare cases of heart inflammation reported in several hundred young people who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Pfizer is also testing its vaccine in young children. On Monday, the company said that if it makes changes to its testing program, it will provide an update then.

BRIBERY INVESTIGATION-OHIO

FirstEnergy reevaluates denial of ratepayer funds in bribe

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Utility giant FirstEnergy Corp. says it’s reevaluating previous denials that the company used customer money to secretly fund a $60 million bribery scheme.

The Akron-based company filed notice with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio on Friday saying its deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department requires a re-examination of those denials that ratepayers funded the scheme to win legislative approval in 2019 for a $1 billion bailout for two unprofitable nuclear power plants it owned at the time. FirstEnergy agreed last week to pay a $230 million penalty to potentially avoid criminal prosecution.

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LONDON (AP) — The British government said Tuesday it will ease coronavirus quarantine rules for thousands more essential workers — including prison guards, veterinarians and garbage collectors — in an attempt to end staff shortages that are hobbling parts of the economy.

About 26 million Britons have downloaded a health service phone app that tells them to self-isolate for 10 days if they come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. With the U.K. recently recording tens of thousands of new virus cases a day, the system has caused disruptive employee absences for restaurants and other businesses and led to gaps on some supermarket shelves.

Starting Aug. 16, anyone who has been fully vaccinated in Britain will be able to take daily coronavirus tests rather than self-isolating. But many businesses are pushing for the change to happen sooner.

Last week, the government said food and transport workers, border staff, police and firefighters could opt for the daily tests. Now it has expanded that system to more jobs, including refuse collectors, prison staff, veterinarians, tax collectors and defense workers.

The government said 2,000 sites would be set up to meet the increased demand for tests.

One person “pinged” by the app is Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had to self-isolate after Health Secretary Sajid Javid tested positive this month. Johnson’s 10-day spell in isolation ended at midnight Monday.

Johnson said he understood people’s frustration, but urged them to “stick with the program.”

“We do need to use the tools that we have. Self-isolation is the one that we’ve got. I urge people to do it,” he said.

Those notified by the app aren’t legally required to self-isolate. And there have been reports that people have deleted the app from their phones. The app’s contact tracing function can also be turned off.

Britain removed most remaining pandemic restrictions, including mandatory mask rules and capacity limits, on July 19, despite several weeks of rising infections driven by the highly contagious delta variant of the virus.

Despite that easing, cases have fallen for seven straight days. On Tuesday, the U.K. reported 23,511 new confirmed cases, more than 1,000 fewer than the day before, and a seven-day total a third lower than the previous week. Scientists said the decline could reflect the end of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament, which drew crowds to games, pubs and parties, and the recent end of the school year for most pupils.

Britain has also given 70% of adults both doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

The number of people with COVID-19 being hospitalized and dying continues to rise, but they remain far fewer than was the case during previous peaks. The U.K. reported a further 131 deaths on Tuesday, the highest daily toll since March.

But authorities caution that the impact of the end of restrictions on July 19 hasn’t yet been felt in the figures.

Johnson said “it is very, very important that we don’t allow ourselves to run away with premature conclusions” about the infection rate.

“People have got to remain very cautious, and that remains the approach of the government,” he said.

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for the 2019 abduction and murder of a 21-year-old college student who mistook his car for her Uber ride.

The jury took a little more than an hour to find Nathaniel Rowland guilty of killing Samantha Josephson, a University of South Carolina student who disappeared from Columbia’s Five Points entertainment district in March 2019.

“Her dreams were my dreams, and her death was my death. I close my eyes, and I feel what she endured at his hands,” the victim’s mother, Marci Josephson, said during the sentencing phase of Rowland’s trial Tuesday.

The student from Robbinsville, New Jersey, got into Rowland’s car thinking it was an Uber ride that would take her back to her apartment, prosecutors said. Instead, she found herself trapped because Rowland had the childproof locks on, investigators said. She was never seen alive again.

Covered in roughly 120 stab wounds, her body was later found in remote woods about 65 miles (105 kilometers) from Columbia. The death cast a national spotlight on ride-hailing safety and led to some changes, including more prominent displays of driver’s license plates.

Rowland maintained his innocence before he was sentenced, but Judge Clifton Newman noted that all the evidence pointed to Rowland.

“She obviously put up an amazing fight against you and left a sufficient trail for the jury to see what you did,” Newman said after sentencing Rowland to life in prison. A person convicted of murder is not eligible for parole in South Carolina.

The prosecution spent about a week presenting voluminous evidence and called nearly three dozen witnesses. Experts linked Josephson’s blood to the interior of Rowland’s Chevrolet Impala and to the suspected murder weapon, a knife with two blades. Her blood was also found on cleaning supplies in the trash behind the home of the man’s girlfriend at the time — and on a sock and bandana owned by Rowland, the experts testified.

Other evidence included cellphone tracking data pinpointing Rowland’s location the night of the crime. One forensic scientist testified that DNA collected from Rowland’s fingernails matched the victim’s genetic material, and DNA belonging to both suspect and victim were found on gloves also located in the trash.

Rowland’s defense attorneys pointed out that scientists weren’t absolutely certain Rowland’s DNA was on the knife. His attorneys also argued that although Josephson appeared to fight her attacker, none of Rowland’s DNA was found on her body and he had no visible marks of such a fight after his arrest. The defense called no witnesses, and Rowland did not testify.

Before resting the defense’s case, Rowland’s lawyer asked the charges be thrown out because prosecutors had a circumstantial case — never showing that Rowland actually killed Josephson nor that he was driving the vehicle when she disappeared.

Circuit Judge Clifton Newman rejected the request, saying there was an avalanche of direct and circumstantial evidence that a jury should consider.

Rowland faces up to life in prison without parole at sentencing.

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Liu is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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