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Situated on mount Parnassus in central Greece lies the city of Delphi. While the city now is mostly ruins, for over a thousand years the ancient world referred to it as the Center of the World. Millions from around the ancient world would flock to the city to inquire of the Oracle. To a select few, the Oracle would sit in the temple of Apollo and give prophecies or answer questions of business, trade, and war. Alexander the Great was said to have visited the Oracle to inquire as to whether he would conquer the world. While modernity can scoff...

We find ourselves at a fascinating—and perhaps terrifying, moment in history in which so much of the past seems irrelevant to answering the questions about our future. How to define misinformation from information. How to allocate accountability for guarding against harmful materials. How to balance individual freedom with responsibility. How to safeguard and promote the creation of original materials in an environment celebrated for disruption and the idea it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. It is no fluke that it is within this broader set of entanglements that the Supreme Court is set to take up arguments in...

The high-profile Supreme Court case between tech giants Oracle and Google has kicked into high gear. Last week the Supreme Court received over 30 filings in support of Oracle, from luminaries in law and technology, prominent former Members of Congress, and even the Trump administration. This is especially noteworthy because the Obama administration also supported Oracle’s position in a previous filing. The case arises from Google’s copying of 11,500 lines of Oracle’s computer code, known as “declaratory code,” to use in the Android platform. Google is using this litigation as an opportunity to argue for narrow intellectual property rights and...

Last week Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison held a fundraiser for President Trump’s re-election campaign at his Rancho Mirage estate near Palm Springs, Calif. At the time the fundraiser was announced, there was silence from The Resistance, which is unusual given the reality of today’s political environment – public figures who support Trump must be shamed and shunned. It turns out about 300 employees of the American multinational computer technology corporation protested Ellison’s fundraiser but they did so the day after the event which seems like an odd way of going about it. Oracle employs about 136,000 people,...

On Tuesday, the Internet Accountability Project (IAP) will file an amicus brief in the Oracle v. Google Supreme Court copyright case. In a nutshell, the brief explains why IAP believes it is time for the Supreme Court to course correct on Google’s outrageous interpretation of the “fair use” doctrine under U.S. copyright law. But the case is bigger than one single legal doctrine and goes to the very heart of why Google is anathema to conservatives and everything we stand for. In fact, the case is the poster child for what we at IAP call “the Great 21st Century Internet...

Employees at software giant Oracle are demanding that the company’s Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison cancel a fundraiser for President Donald Trump set to take place this week. Recode reports that following Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison’s decision to host a fundraiser for President Trump this week, employees at the company have demanded that Ellison cancel the event. Breitbart News reported that President Donald Trump is expected to attend a campaign fundraising event at Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate on Wednesday, just two weeks before California’s Super Tuesday primary. Ellison will be hosting supporters on a golf outing at his home on...

The left went bonkers on Twitter when news broke that Big Tech billionaire Larry Ellison was hosting a pro-Trump fundraiser. Lefty outlet Vox Recode characterized the billionaire founder of Oracle Corporation's decision to support President Donald Trump as "unthinkable for a tech titan" and “a major coup for the Trump team." Recode continued: "Ellison is, after all, the country’s fifth-richest person, with a net worth of almost $70 billion.” Vox Recode also issued a harbinger in its Feb. 12 report: “[T]he fundraiser [to be held in Ellison’s estate] is sure to expose the flamboyant 75-year-old billionaire [Ellison] to a new...

Article One, Section 9, clause 2 of the United States Constitution states, “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” It says something about the importance of that clause that, to this day, the right of habeas corpus has been suspended only twice in criminal cases: once in the case of Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War (rebellion), and once in the case of detaining suspected terrorists during the Bush administration (which, at least in theory, was tied to preventing something like...

Oracle, a major Silicon Valley tech company, will move its annual OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas next year – over concerns about San Francisco’s hotel rates and the city’s “poor street conditions,” according to reports. The loss of OpenWorld, which has been held in San Francisco for about 20 years, is raising new concerns about whether the city’s struggles with homelessness, open drug use and street violence may be scaring off tourism and other business, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “For the industry, for the city, to have a major conference leave us impacts all of us,” Kevin Carroll, chief...

The New York Times reports that a new study by researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania scanned 22,484 porn sites and discovered that they are riddled with tracking tools feeding data back to third party tech firms such as Facebook, Google, and Oracle. “Our results indicate tracking is endemic on pornography websites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-party,” the study concludes. The study scanned the sites in March of 2018 and found that 74 percent of trackers came from Google or its subsidiaries, 24 percent came from Oracle and 10 percent came from...

Gary Webb, reporter who exposed CIA, dies THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote a controversial series of stories linking the CIA to crack cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles, has died at age 49. Webb was found Friday morning at his home in Sacramento County, dead of an apparent suicide. Moving-company workers called authorities after discovering a note posted on his front door that read, "Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance." Webb died of a gunshot wound to the head, according to the Sacramento County coroner's office....

Along the south shore of Lady Bird Lake east of Interstate 35, Oracle has built a new campus that will eventually house 10,000 employees. At the end of 2015, one of the world's largest software companies announced it was expanding in Austin with the construction of a 565,000-square-foot campus located on South Lakeshore Boulevard just west of South Pleasant Valley Road, that sits on 40 acres of waterfront property. "We wanted to be in downtown Austin on the river and specifically I wanted to be in downtown Austin on the river because I thought it would be great to take...

Oracle Corp. is hiring another 5,000 employees for its cloud software business as it fights Salesforce.com Inc. for market share in the fast-growing industry. The hiring surge aims to beef up what’s already Oracle’s fastest-growing business, increasing revenue by 58 percent in the quarter it reported June 21 compared with a year earlier. The move is the latest in a back-and-forth between Oracle and its main rival that last week saw Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff bragging he was on track to generate $10 billion in cloud revenue this year, a goal Oracle was trying to hit first. It...

Julie BortDecember 20, 2016 There's an awful lot of angst in the tech industry about what a Donald Trump administration will do, and if he'll follow through on some of the more divisive promises he made on the campaign trail. On Tuesday, an Oracle employee working on the company's all-important cloud business publicly quit the company via a letter posted to LinkedIn. George Polisner was protesting Oracle CEO Safra Catz's decision to join Trump's transition team. Catz was part of a room full of tech industry leaders that met with the president-elect last week at Trump Tower in New York....

I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country," Bezos tweeted, two days after the election. In August, prominent venture capitalist Chris Sacca knocked “Trump's erratic behavior, repeatedly demonstrated ignorance of economics, and reckless statements." Sacca now says he's willing to give Trump a chance. “We in the tech community are open to helping President Elect Trump in any way he needs to help those Americans who need it most,” Sacca wrote in an email to The Hill. “We are hopeful he will immediately reach out to the tech...

A super PAC supporting Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign raised $2.5 million in January, including $1 million from tech billionaire Larry Ellison, according to a report filed Saturday with the Federal Election Commission. The donation from Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle Corporation, brings his total spending on behalf of Rubio to $4 million, making him among the top donors of the 2016 cycle. Conservative Solutions PAC spent nearly $11 million last month, mostly on ads and direct mail attacking Rubio’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ted Cruz and his former rival Chris Christie, who has since dropped out. The...

Google is replacing its implementation of the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in Android with OpenJDK, the open source version of Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK). The news first came by a “mysterious Android codebase commit” from last month submitted to Hacker News. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that Android N will rely on an OpenJDK implementation, rather Android’s own implementation of the Java APIs. “As an open-source platform, Android is built upon the collaboration of the open-source community,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “In our upcoming release of Android, we plan to move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based...

Call it failure to launch for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 80%as, despite a minor bump in the polls a month or so after his April presidential campaign launch, the 44-year-old junior senator from Florida is now officially relegated to the middle of the pack—where he’s been unable to climb out. Virtually every major pollster has shown Rubio’s chances at being a serious contender for the GOP nomination slipping away... Rubio was supposed to be the golden boy who could woo the donor class but still excite the grassroots. He’s succeeded in winning over lots of big-money backing, with billionaire donors...

In the wake of two videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts, Republicans in Congress are working to ensure that Planned Parenthood is stripped of its federal funding. However, it’s not only the government that fills Planned Parenthood’s coffers. According to 2nd Vote, a website and app that tracks the flow of money from consumers to political causes, more than 25 percent of Planned Parenthood’s $1.3-billion annual revenue comes from private donations, which includes corporate contributions. 2nd Vote researched the corporations and organizations to find which supported Planned Parenthood and found that more...