Today, technology site Techdirt has opened up regarding the $15 million lawsuit filed against them last Wednesday in Boston. The lawsuit was filed by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, and alleges that Techdirt committed libel in their reporting of him and his claims.
The crux of the matter lies in Techdirt’s coverage of Ayyadurai’s assertion that it was he who invented email. Ayyadurai developed a program called « EMAIL » , and has used his copyright to bolster his claims that he is the inventor of the widely used internet communication tool. Techdirt, among others , has posted numerous articles debunking his claims, and it seems Ayyadurai has taken exception.
Particularly troubling is who represents Ayyadurai in the matter, Beverly Hills attorney, Charles Harder. Harder is perhaps best known for his role in Terrence Bollea (better known as Hulk Hogan) v. Gawker, which found the popular site on the losing end of a $140 million lawsuit. Harder, placed on retainer by billionaire Peter Theil, became a key component in the onslaught of lawsuits designed to bring Gawker to its knees. In August of last year, he succeeded, with Gawker filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy shortly before its assets were purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Univision and its eventual shutdown.
While Bollea’s specific case dominated the media cycle, Ayyadurai was also involved, himself suing Gawker in response to Gizmodo’s scathing coverage of his claims. His suit never progressed very far, considering shortly after the Bollea verdict was read Gawker agreed to settle, but it was one of many included in the settlement, netting him $750,000.
Techdirt is of course fairly concerned about the implications of this lawsuit. The Gawker case wasn’t the first time a wealthy individual tried to bury a media company under lawsuits , but it was the first to succeed on such a large scale, and Techdirt is of the mind that its elimination is Ayyadurai’s ultimate goal. Needless to say, many will be keeping a close eye on this case and its First Amendment implications.
You can click through to read their side of the story at the source link below.
Source: Techdirt | Money gavel image via Shutterstock

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When comparing cloud architectures, there are a few distinct benefits of public clouds when compared to private and hybrid clouds. First is the fact that as a public cloud customer, you never have to purchase any hardware or software. Your cloud service provider is responsible for all of this — and simply charges you for the services you consume. The other difference is that many public cloud offerings are managed by a service provider all the way up to the application itself. This is known as software as a service (SaaS) — and it can prove cost effective in many enterprise situations.
While many enterprise needs will require the use of a private or hybrid cloud architecture, there are some uses that truly take advantage of the benefits that only the public cloud can deliver. Today, we’re going to look at three examples where we think the public cloud is an absolute no-brainer.
1. Testing and development:
Whenever you are developing and testing out new applications, it is preferable to operate in an environment that not only is not in production, but also in an environment that can rapidly change and adapt to the immediate needs of the dev team. The public cloud can scale, morph and adapt to virtually any situation with a few clicks of a mouse. And when the development project is complete, the entire environment can be either significantly scaled back or even turned off since the public cloud uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model. In 2017, there are very few reasons to be developing in any other environment other than a public cloud.
2. E-mail:
While I think that most will agree that testing and development is an ideal fit for the public cloud, others may not agree that email makes just as much sense. But hear us out on this one. Electronic mail in today’s world is nothing more than a commodity application that can be easily offloaded to an SaaS provider such as Microsoft’s Office 365. Let’s be honest, your company’s internal IT staff are likely not doing anything ground breaking with an on-premise Exchange server. And from a reliability standpoint, you’re going to be hard pressed to beat a global SaaS provider. Your internal staff is also less likely to be able to keep the Office suite as secure as what you would receive from a cloud managed solution. Now, Is it possible to run your email more reliably and securely in-house? Sure, anything is possible. But the added time and money required to adequately operate a local email server these days simply doesn’t make sense.
3. Infrastructure Security:
One of the more recent ways to leverage the public cloud in enterprise-class organizations is to leverage the power of public cloud security services. And even though you can’t move all infrastructure security tools to the public cloud, the tools and services that can be moved are often vastly superior to on premises deployments. For example, cloud-based web and DNS security services have the distinct advantage of being able to protect your end users no matter where they are connecting to the Internet. And considering the fact that today’s enterprises are comprised of an ever-increasing number of mobile users, this is a very good thing. Global threat intelligence and prevention service feeds are another prime example of how public clouds can take security to a whole new level.
Conclusion:
If you sit down and really think about the applications and services that you currently manage in-house — or as part of a private or hybrid-cloud – you may be surprised to find that a public cloud might actually be a better fit. No other cloud architecture can provide the cost savings, scalability and reduction of common IT tasks. So while we’ve listed our top 3 list for no-brainer uses of the public cloud, you’re likely to have many more.

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Because of my long-standing association with the Apache Software Foundation , I’m often asked the question, “What’s next for open source technology?” My typical response is variations of “I don’t know” to “the possibilities are endless.”
Over the past year, we’ve seen open source technology make strong inroads into the mainstream of enterprise technology. Who would have thought that my work on Hadoop ten years ago would impact so many industries – from manufacturing to telecom to finance.
They have all taken hold of the powers of the open source ecosystem not only to improve the customer experience, become more innovative and grow the bottom line, but also to support work toward the greater good of society through genomic research, precision medicine and programs to stop human trafficking, as just a few examples.
Below I’ve listed five tips for folks who are curious about how to begin working with open source and what to expect from the ever-changing ecosystem.
1. Embrace the constant change and evolution of open source
Constant change: this is the first lesson anyone who is new to open source technology needs to learn and one of open source’s biggest differentiators from traditional software. The nature of open source is fluid and flexible with new projects regularly being invented for specific use cases.
This dynamic cycle propels products to get better faster. So, in order for companies to reap the full benefits of open source, they must be open to this change. The Spark vs. MapReduce debate is a perfect illustration of why this is important:
It’s true that folks are building fewer new applications based on MapReduce and instead are using Spark as their default data-processing engine. MapReduce is gradually being replaced as the underlying engine in tools like Hive and Pig, but that doesn’t make MapReduce obsolete.
It will continue to work well for existing applications for many years, and, for certain large-scale batch loads, may remain the superior tool. This trend follows the natural evolution of open source technology: MapReduce was the 1.0 engine for the open-source data ecosystem, Spark is its 2.0 engine, and someday there will be a 3.0 that will make Spark the legacy engine.
2. When introducing a new technology stack, start small and go from the top down
Rather than architecting and deploying point solutions, we now have general-purpose data platforms with many tools that can be combined flexibly for search, streaming, machine learning and more. Together these aspects require not just a different set of skills but a cultural shift around management style and organizational structure.
For this reason, it’s important to gain high-level support within an organization and introduce data management as an important boardroom-level discussion. I’d also recommend gradually building a new culture around a few new applications rather than replacing everything all at once to help everyone acclimate and starting with one specific use case.
3. Avoid cloud vendor lock-in by opting for open-source software
As more enterprise organizations and industries embrace the cloud, they should consider open-source software that’s not only becoming more robust, scalable and secure, but which can also help them avoid cloud vendor lock-in. By building on an open-source platform, organizations can employ cloud-vendor arbitrage to keep costs down, use different clouds in different regions, or use a combination of cloud-based and on-premises systems.
In fact, open-source platforms have also proven technically superior and will likely gain more ground in 2017. It’s difficult for a single vendor to compete against a large number of institutions collaborating in open source. In addition, open-source data systems now lead in performance and flexibility, and they’re improving more rapidly.
4. For job seekers, focus on the forest and not the trees in the open-source ecosystem
Job hunters in the fields of IT, programming and data science shouldn’t fixate on mastering individual technologies, but focus instead on understanding the best use of each of the components of the open source data ecosystem and how they can be connected to solve problems.
This high-level architectural understanding is the most valuable skill to companies innovating in technology. Because as new technologies arrive, it’s crucial to understand how they fit in, what they might replace and what they might enable.
5. Seek opportunity in the skills gap
The skills gap in big data will remain relatively constant in the next year, but this shouldn’t deter people from adopting Hadoop and other open-source technologies. As most of us know, when new technologies are created and vie for users, they are known by few.
Only once a particular type of software is a mature standard part of the canon do we begin to have a substantial number of folks skilled in its use — but even then the skills gap can persist. It will disappear only when we stop seeing big improvements to the stack, which I doubt we want. In short, the skills gap is one of the primary factors gating the rate of platform change, but it’s also a sign innovation is at hand.
Conclusion
The open source ecosystem and its implementation in meaningful projects will continue to expand over the coming years. As an impetus for collaboration, it brings together today’s brightest minds to move software development forward at a pace not possible ten years ago.
If you have an idea for improving existing technologies or want to rally behind a notion for breaking the status quo, this is the place. I encourage everyone interested to get involved and for those open source veterans to keep committing to the cause. Click here more information on joining the ASF community.
Tags open source hadoop big data cloudera apache Apache Software Foundation
More about Apache Software Foundation Click Cloudera Seek Spark

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While the numbers for CES 2017 haven’t been unveiled, it’s probably safe to say that the convention attendance is likely going to eclipse last year’s mark that saw over 100,000 people attend. Now that the crowds have died down and the out-of-towners have gone home, it only seems appropriate that Las Vegas would unveil some tech for the city with its pilot of a self-driving shuttle bus.
Las Vegas unveiled its first self-driving shuttle bus, Arma, that was unveiled to the public on Tuesday. The shuttle was developed by Navya and can hold up to a dozen passengers and travels up to speeds of 12 MPH. Although the shuttle can ramp up to speeds of 27MPH, the company has limited the speed during its trial run. The unmanned shuttle will be offering free rides to those that are curious, making trips up East Fremont Street between Las Vegas Boulevard and 8th Street. The shuttle will operate during the hours of 10am and 6pm, and will do so until January 20.
Source: Las Vegas Sun via Engadget

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Earlier last year at Google’s I/O 2017 developer conference, the company announced the first major update to its Android Wear platform, version 2.0. Developer Previews were set to have five total builds, coming out every six weeks, for a final release in late 2016. Unfortunately, that didn’t end up being the case, as the company ended up delaying the launch until 2017.
According to a new report from 9to5Google , Google has begun emailing developers to inform them of an early February release. This is still a bit ahead of schedule, as Developer Preview 4 launched in mid-December , so one might assume that Preview 5 would be available at the end of January, with a final build in early March.
There are also rumors that Google is planning to launch a pair of smartwatches to go along with its new wearable operating system, and they should be the first to launch with the OS. They won’t be Google-branded – so no Pixel, Watch by Google – and instead they’ll be OEM-branded; it seems like a Nexus-style type of thing.
Still, this is fantastic news for those that just can’t wait to get their hands on the first major Android Wear update. The Developer Preview program has been rather limited until this point, only offering builds for the Huawei Watch and the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition.
Once the update is finalized, it shouldn’t be too long before you receive it on your Android Wear watch, assuming that you have one that’s supported. Android Wear isn’t skinned like a regular build of Android is, so OEMs shouldn’t have to do as much work on it, and unless yours is LTE-enabled and locked, carriers won’t have to approve it either.
Source: 9to5Google

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