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Databricks' software helps companies prepare data for analysis and artificial intelligence models.Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2019.Databricks, a start-up whose software helps companies quickly process large sets of data and get it ready for analysis, said Monday it has raised $1 billion in fresh cash, including from a few prominent corporate investors. Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's CapitalG venture arm and Salesforce Ventures all joined in, according to a statement. Microsoft, which invested in Databricks earlier, is also participating in...

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

As any grade-schooler can tell you, the alphabet weÂ’re using right now is made up of 26 letters. However, until not too long ago, this cast of letters had a few more characters that have since been killed off, quashed, or exiled into oblivion. The writing system used for modern English, along with many other European languages, is widely known as the Latin alphabet as itÂ’s the great-grandchild of the classical Latin alphabet spread across much of Europe by the Romans. However, like all writing systems, itÂ’s history is complex and muddled with a whole load of interconnected influences from...

Late last month the CEOs of four of the most powerful tech companies in the world — Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Alphabet, which owns Google — testified before the House Judiciary Committee, which has spent a year investigating their companies’ alleged anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. That’s quite a fall for Big Tech, which just a decade ago was viewed by Congress as an unalloyed social good. With every aspect of Big Tech’s behavior now under review, perhaps it’s also a good time to revisit its “patent troll” narrative. This is the notion, unlikely on the face of it, that somehow...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed millions of dollars to research treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe. Those endeavors are now fueling a lot of conspiracy theories. Of course even Bill Gates made some strange comments that fueled those conspiracy theories. Back in March he said, the country needs to go much further with a longer, coordinate shutdown to effectively turn back the spread of the disease. “We’re entering to a tough period that if we do it right we’ll only have to do it once, for six to 10...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is increasingly venting frustration to his national security team about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and showing renewed interest in a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to privatize the war, current and former senior administration officials said. Prince's idea, which first surfaced last year during the president's Afghanistan strategy review, envisions replacing troops with private military contractors who would work for a special U.S. envoy for the war who would report directly to the president. It has raised ethical and security concerns among senior military officials, key lawmakers and members of Trump's national security...

Election meddling by Big Tech companies comes into question once again after a long-time Hillary Clinton supporter confirms close ties between tech giant Google and the 2016 runner up. A Twitter war between Clinton and President Trump led to Clinton claiming research showing bias from Google in 2016 was debunked. However, Dr. Robert Epstein — a decades long Hillary supporter and the man behind the research — defended his conclusions in a Twitter rampage, where he referenced his testimony before Congress last month. “In 2020 — if all these companies are supporting the same candidate — there are 15 million...

(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it would buy Looker, a big-data analytics company, for $2.6 billion in cash, in the first major acquisition for new Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian. The deal builds on an existing partnership where the two companies share more than 350 customers, including BuzzFeed, Hearst and Yahoo , Google said in a statement. Looker provides a visualization tool that helps customers spot trends and draw other lessons from their data. It competes with tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Corp’s Power BI.

WASHINGTON — In his extensive report, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not “obtain or examine” the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in determining whether those servers were hacked by Russia. Instead, Mueller’s assessment of the DNC’s allegedly hacked servers relied upon the investigations conducted by the FBI and other agencies. “The Office understands that the FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the states have separately investigated that activity,” reads Mueller’s report. However, the DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation that Russia...

A group of Google employees is pushing the company to remove Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James from its new artificial intelligence (AI) council. The workers, identified as "Googlers Against Transphobia and Hate," say James's record on trans and immigrant rights should disqualify her from serving on the newly announced council dedicated to ethics in AI.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/289290-jeff-bezos-neil-degrasse-tyson-join-pentagon-innovation-board July 26, 2016 - 02:15 PM EDT Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos join DOD innovation board By Rebecca Kheel Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson were among the big names Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday as joining the Pentagon’s recently formed Defense Innovation Advisory Board. “I've given them the very specific task of identifying innovative private sector best practices that could be of use to DOD [the Department of Defense] — not unlike our recent Hack the Pentagon pilot program, which invited hackers to help find vulnerabilities in our networks," Carter said during an...

Gab has spent the past 48 hours proudly working with the DOJ and FBI to bring justice to an alleged terrorist. Because of the data we provided, they now have plenty of evidence for their case. In the midst of this Gab has been no-platformed by essential internet infrastructure providers at every level. We are the most censored, smeared, and no-platformed startup in history, which means we are a threat to the media and to the Silicon Valley Oligarchy. Gab isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t matter what you write. It doesn’t matter what the sophist talking heads say on TV....

Gab has gone offline. The self-described "free speech social media platform" is taking time off the internet, after landing under the spotlight when it was discovered the suspect involved in Pittsburgh's synagogue shooting was a poster and user on the site. SEE ALSO: Gab, a racist-friendly alt-Twitter, has been banned by PayPal and others Gab posted a message on its homepage, announcing that the site will be "inaccessible for a period of time" as it works "around the clock" to transition a new hosting provider. The platform has been banned by PayPal, and fellow online payment service Stripe is looking...

How Google's Jigsaw is fighting the darkest parts of the internet BY KERRY FLYNN JUL 20, 2017 Fake news, terrorist propaganda, hateful comments — the internet is not the nicest place in the world. Jigsaw is trying to change that. Formerly under Google, Jigsaw now is a subsidiary within Alphabet. The company, under the direction of Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas founder Jared Cohen who serves as founder and CEO of Jigsaw, focuses on researching some of the darkest corners of the internet and implementing ways to address them. Yasmin Green, director of research and development at Jigsaw,...

Eric Schmidt, billionaire chair of Alphabet, Inc. the parent company of Google, led a massive fundraising drive in December for leftist analytics firm Civis Analytics, represented by a law firm that partnered with Justice Department special prosecutor Robert Mueller—raising questions about Mueller’s impartiality in his so-called “Russia probe” into President Donald J. Trump’s campaign. In March 2014, WilmerHale announced Mueller would join its firm as a partner. Mueller left his position in May after the DOJ appointed him as a special prosecutor to look into alleged “ties” between President Trump’s campaign and Russia. WilmerHale represented Civis Analytics during a $22...

Ahead of a highly anticipated earnings report, America's most valuable company is now worth more than ever. Apple briefly hit a market capitalization of more than $776.59 billion on Tuesday, topping its previous peak market value of $774.91 billion to remain the only U.S.-listed stock with a market value of more than $700 billion. Even with other tech stocks near record highs, Apple dwarfs Alphabet, at $646.6 billion, Microsoft at nearly $536.4 billion and Amazon at $451.5 billion, according to FactSet.

CrowdStrike, the third-party company relied upon by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was financed to the tune of $100 million from a funding drive last year led by Google Capital. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party. On Thursday, a senior law enforcement official told CNN that the DNC “rebuffed” the agency’s...

President-elect Donald Trump's views on a range of issues, from immigration to climate change, alienated many left-leaning tech employees in Silicon Valley, but none more so than those working at Alphabet. During the presidential campaign, 33 employees at the tech giant donated $20,000 to Trump, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was a tiny fraction of the 1,400 employees who donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign, for a total of $1.6 million. And it wasn't just political donations. The revolving door between the Obama administration and the company swung hard and frequently during the past eight years: 22 former...

George and I have had several meaningful conversations via email. This one might be of interest to other readers and George gave me permission to reproduce the conversation. George: I want to thank you for your blogs. I read them all the time and they have been a BIG help! I've been trying to sell others on the fact that the Hebrew lettering system goes back further than the 4th century millennium BC thanks to your findings of the Ainu/Annu culture and their lettering system in their later homeland of Japan - but with no success. I definitely believe your...

Amid excavations at four different ancient sites in the Central Anatolian province of Yozgat, a cuneiform tablet has been unearthed in the Uflakle Mound at the Büyük Tafllek village. Thought to date back to around 2,000 B.C., the cuneiform tablet in the Sorgun district of Yozgat shows symbols of ishtar, known as the Hittite goddess of love, war, fertility and sexuality, more clearly than those on any other unearthed tablets. "Considering the intensity of archaeological materials on the surface and diffusion area, the mound tends to bear traces of Hittite Civilization. it is thought that the mound was affiliated to...