Uber, the  newly designed and re-engineered rider’ app has been rolled out to 100% of its users in India and around the globe, across Android and iOS platforms. Uber riders can now enjoy the faster, smarter and more personalised Uber experience on the new rider app which has been rebuilt completely from the ground up for the first time since 2012.

Apurva Dalal, Head of Engineering, Uber India said

Uber is based on a simple concept: push a button, get a ride. What started as a way to request premium cars, now offers a range of products, making millions of rides possible across  the world. While providing seamless on-demand transportation for riders remains our central focus, the  newly designed rider app is unique as we rebuilt it from ground up to deliver a much faster and improved interface for riders. We are excited that riders across India will now have this superior experience.

The new rider app has been re-engineered, keeping in mind the changing needs of riders around the world. It aims to recapture the clean and simple aesthetics of the original Uber experience, without sacrificing on the choices riders can now expect.

Some of the major changes to the rider app that contribute to a superior Uber experience include:

• A faster app with a new design
• Clearer vehicle options, with upfront pricing view
•  Smarter pickups to help reduce ETA
•  Personalised in-app shortcuts

The new app offers a host of features, which have already been appreciated by the riders in India:

• Destination first : The new Uber experience is reimagined around a simple question – ‘Where to?’ After all, riders use Uber to get somewhere-or to someone. And by starting with the rider destination, we can tailor the journey better.
• Shortcuts : The new Uber app learns from riders’ routines. Frequent riders will see ‘shortcuts’ that predict where one could be headed. This means riders can get moving with just one tap.
• Saved places : The new app allows riders to save locations that they frequent. This could be a hotel that they prefer to stay at while traveling, favourite restaurants, client’s office, dentist’s clinic or even a friend’s house.
• Rider ratings : To give riders more visibility into how drivers are rating them, Uber is making rider ratings much more accessible in the app. Now, a rider’s rating will be displayed right under their name in the app’s menu.
• Pickup experience : The pickup is a core part of the Uber experience. In an effort to make it easier, riders can update their pickup location after they book a ride. This simple fix gives them more control over their pickup experience, and saves everyone time and avoidable headaches.
• Calendar integration : Riders can now sync their calendar with Uber. With this, riders meetings and appointments will automatically appear as ‘shortcuts’, saving them the hassle of digging through another app to find the right address.
• Choose the car & compare upfront fare : After entering the destination in ‘where to’, riders can also decide how to get there. They prefer different types of rides for different moments. If the rider is on the way to a party or with business associates, a more spacious uberX ride is preferred, while an uberGO serves as the most affordable everyday ride. And for a run-of-the-mill trip to the market or the lowest cost option, an uberPOOL works well. It’s now much easier to compare the cost of all these options with upfront fares, so the rider can make an informed choice.
• Once the rider is on the trip, the focus is on helping them make the most of their ride. They can still split the fare, keep track of estimated time to destination and share trip status with friends.
• On-trip integrations : Soon, it will offer more experiences tailored around rider destinations that will include on-trip integrations with other utility based mobile applications, social media platforms, and news aggregators, among others.

To top these, here are the features most loved by riders in India :

Schedule a ride : A top-requested service from riders around the world, especially from business travelers who use Uber rides for important meetings, appointments, trips to airports and stations, etc., has been rolled out in India. This new feature adds to  the reliability and convenience riders have come to experience on Uber. An uberX or an uberGOride can now be scheduled for as little as 15 minutes to as many as 30 days in advance.

Request a ride for others : Riders have often booked rides for their friends and family members. However, it involved the hassle of coordinating the pickup or managing payments. With the new update, it now works in a much simpler manner. If the pickup location differs from the detected location of the person booking the ride, the app will prompt if the ride is being booked for someone else. If yes, they can select the option and the app will allow them to choose a contact. At this point, the person booking the ride can also choose the desired payment method. Meanwhile, the rider will get two text messages – one with the driver and car details and the second with a link to track the ride.

Split fare : Another interesting feature added by Uber was a fare split, that enabled riders to split the Uber bill with friends. After the trip begins, riders can select ‘Split Fare’ and choose a contact to hit send. The rider’s friend(s) will receive a text with a link that will open the Uber app on their phone. Once they confirm their willingness to split the bill, the fare automatically gets divided between the riders.

Share trip details : Uber’s ride sharing feature enables a rider to send details of the driver-partner and their ride with friends or family members. Once the trip begins, riders can share these details from the app by tapping the ‘send status’ option and choosing a contact on their phone. This functionality is extremely useful to track trip progress in real time.

Choose payment mode : Riders can choose a payment option that works best for them – cash, digital wallet, credit card and debit card.

The new rider app which has been developed using a completely new architecture, also opens up a plethora of possibilities for improving the new rider feed, as well expanding this to the driver app, and even building for the future.

To learn more about the new Uber app, please visit uber.com/whereto

Yahoo announced Athenz, an open-source platform for fine-grained access control, to the community. Athenz is a Role-Bsed Access Control [RBAC] solution, providing trusted relationships between applications and services deployed within an organization requiring authorized access.

If you need to grant access to a set of resources that your applications or services manage, Athenz provides both a centralized and a decentralized authorization model to do so. Whether you are using container or VM technology independently or on bare metal, you may need a dynamic and scalable authorization solution.

Athenz supports moving workloads from one node to another and gives new compute resources authorization to connect to other services within minutes, as opposed to relying on IP and network ACL solutions that take time to propagate within a large system. Moreover, in very high-scale situations, you may run out of the limited number of network ACL rules that your hardware can support.

Prior to creating Athenz, we had multiple ways of managing permissions and access control across all services within Yahoo. To simplify, we built a fine-grained, role-based authorization solution that would satisfy the feature and performance requirements our products demand. Athenz was built with open source in mind so as to share it with the community and further its development.

At Yahoo, Athenz authorizes the dynamic creation of compute instances and containerized workloads, secures builds and deployment of their artifacts to our Docker registry, and among other uses, manages the data access from our centralized key management system to an authorized application or service.

Athenz provides a REST-based set of APIs modeled in Resource Description Language [RDL] to manage all aspects of the authorization system, and includes Java and Go client libraries to quickly and easily integrate your application with Athenz. It allows product administrators to manage what roles are allowed or denied to their applications or services in a centralized management system through a self-serve UI.

Access Control Models

Athenz provides two authorization access control models based on your applications’ or services’ performance needs. More commonly used, the centralized access control model is ideal for provisioning and configuration needs. In instances where performance is absolutely critical for your applications or services, we provide a unique decentralized access control model that provides on-box enforcement of authorization.  

Athenz’s authorization system utilizes two types of tokens: principal tokens [N-Tokens] and role tokens [Z-Tokens]. The principal token is an identity token that identifies either a user or a service. A service generates its principal token using that service’s private key. Role tokens authorize a given principal to assume some number of roles in a domain for a limited period of time. Like principal tokens, they are signed to prevent tampering. The name ‘Athenz’ is derived from ‘Auth’ and the ‘N’ and ‘Z’ tokens.

Centralized Access Control : The centralized access control model requires any Athenz-enabled application to contact the Athenz Management Service directly to determine if a specific authenticated principal [user and/or service] has been authorized to carry out the given action on the requested resource. A service receives a simple Boolean answer whether or not the request should be processed or rejected. In this model, the Athenz Management Service is the only component that needs to be deployed and managed within your environment. Therefore, it is suitable for provisioning and configuration use cases where the number of requests processed by the server is small and the latency for authorization checks is not important.

The diagram below shows a typical control plane-provisioning request handled by an Athenz-protected service.

Decentralized Access Control : This approach is ideal where the application is required to handle large number of requests per second and latency is a concern. It’s far more efficient to check authorization on the host itself and avoid the synchronous network call to a centralized Athenz Management Service. Athenz provides a way to do this with its decentralized service using a local policy engine library on the local box.

The authorization policies defining which roles have been authorized to carry out specific actions on resources, are asynchronously updated on application hosts and used by the Athenz local policy engine to evaluate the authorization check. In this model, a principal needs to contact the Athenz Token Service first to retrieve an authorization role token for the request and submit that token as part of its request to the Athenz protected service. The same role token can then be re-used for its lifetime.

The diagram below shows a typical decentralized authorization request handled by an Athenz-protected service.

With the power of an RBAC system in which you can choose a model to deploy according your performance latency needs, and the flexibility to choose either or both of the models in a complex environment of hosting platforms or products, it gives you the ability to run your business with agility and scale.

Looking to the Future

Yahoo is actively engaged in pushing the scale and reliability boundaries of Athenz. As Yahoo enhances Athenz, it looks forward to working with the community on the following features:

• Using local CA signed TLS certificates
• Extending Athenz with a generalized model for service providers to launch instances with bootstrapped Athenz service identity TLS certificates
• Integration with public cloud services like AWS. For example, launching an EC2 instance with a configured Athenz service identity or obtaining AWS temporary credentials based on authorization policies defined in ZMS.

Their goal is to integrate Athenz with other open source projects that require authorization support and we welcome contributions from the community to make that happen. It is available under Apache License Version 2.0. To evaluate Athenz, we provide both AWS AMI and Docker images so that you can quickly have a test development environment up and running with ZMS [Athenz Management Service], ZTS [Athenz Token Service], and UI services. For more information, please visit Athenz