Joyeur

So once upon a time Google invested in former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures. Then Intellectual Ventures went and secured 30,000 patents. Some of which the company is now reselling or, essentially, licensing to “startups” like Pragmatus AV — which is suing Google subsidiary YouTube along with Facebook and LinkedIn for patent infringement because they “allow users to upload, link to, and comment on videos.” Classy! Also classy? Righthaven’s legal eagles trying desperately to extricate themselves from an entirely frivolous copyright infringement lawsuit that ultimately led to potentially very costly Electronic Frontier Foundation countersuits. In more disturbing news, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill to give the United States Attorney General the authority to shutter any website where copyright infringement is declared “central to the activity” of the operation, even if it isn’t strictly breaking any civil or criminal law. And Former American President Bill Clinton is giving the keynote at the Dreamforce Cloud Computing conference, and hacks have been told no twittering on the internets — so any hackers on hand looking for media attention, help some bloggers out.

If the raw data feed from the millions of monkeys on Twitter is “web scale,” what’s the scale of the geodata logs from every mobile device transaction? Try three orders of magnitude and a factor of seven. Amazon, VMWare and Salesforce executives walked into a panel and joked that not only does Oracle not “get” the cloud, but that Larry Ellison is the new Ken “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” Olson. Speaking of Amazon, am I alone as both a film geek and a tech geek in scratching my head about Amazon Studios? No? Good. The United States Federal Communications Commission has contracted with Terremark to provide cloud hosting, joining USA.gov and Data.gov at the Miami-based company, while International Business Machines announced that the National Marrow Donor Program was using IBM analytics software in a private cloud environment to help match patients to potential donors. And apparently putting “cloud” in your resume is where it’s at for IT jobs (oh, and, uh, we’re hiring).

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