An anonymous reader shares a report: Veteran Silicon Valley executive Thomas Kurian surprised the tech world two years ago when he suddenly left Oracle to become CEO of Google Cloud. The reason may have just gotten a bit clearer. Kurian apparently had an unhappy tenure as head of Oracle's cloud, according to a lawsuit. He felt pressured by top management, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And he clashed with his people at Oracle, berating execs who reported to him for work he considered "atrocious" and "awful," the lawsuit alleges. The suit, filed on behalf of a group of investors led by Union Asset Management Holding AG, a Frankfurt-based investment firm, accused Oracle's top executives of painting an upbeat picture of the tech giant's cloud momentum in 2017 to 2018, even though they knew the company was falling behind in the cloud wars. The suit was originally filed in 2018. The amended suit, which was first reported by the Register, was filed last week. Kurian's email was part of a shareholder lawsuit before a federal court in California which claims that Oracle had misled investors on the state of its cloud business. Oracle rejected the suit's claims. "The suit has no merit and Oracle will vigorously defend against these claims," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger told Business Insider in an email. [...] The suit cited Kurian's email in which he also told Miranda that Oracle's cloud software "was considered so atrocious" that it was simply "a disgrace."

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The deadly outbreak of a novel coronavirus has the world on edge, but it has not yet developed into a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization. From a report: Although WHO has declared the outbreak a "public health emergency of international concern," the outbreak has not met the criteria needed to be described as a pandemic when it comes to its geographical spread and impact, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing with reporters on Monday. "Our decision about whether to use the word 'pandemic' to describe an epidemic is based on an ongoing assessment of the geographical spread of the virus, the severity of disease it causes and the impact it has on the whole society," Ghebreyesus said during the briefing. "For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus and we are not witnessing large-scale severe disease or deaths," he said. "Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely it has. Are we there yet from our assessment? Not yet. So how should we describe the current situation? What we see are epidemics in different parts of the world, affecting countries in different ways and requiring a tailored response."

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Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content on Netflix? Now you can jump on the bandwagon and check out the streaming service's most popular options. Netflix has added a Top 10 feature, the company said Monday. From a report: "Starting today you'll notice something new when you go on Netflix: The Top 10 row," the company said in a tweet. "The lists update daily to show what's popular in your country and are broken into three categories: Netflix overall, shows & films." The most popular Netflix offerings in your country should show up in their own row once you log in to your Netflix account, the company said. "The list is rolling out globally now and should be on your homepage by the end of the day at the latest."

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Since socialism is going to be a big "issue" for the foreseeable future, let me offer two pieces I wrote on the subject. First, The world is socialist in 2011. "Ayn Rand's philosophy might have worked in an agrarian society when people lived far apart, and couldn't pool their resources. When there wasn't much technology, so there wasn't much point in trying to fight disease or keep the trains running, because there was no medicine or trains." And Health care is socialist in 2017. "We don't know who will get sick, or when. So rather than take a risk that you'll be the one who gets the expensive disease, we pool our resources to pay a share of what the treatment would cost each year." I put "issue" in quotes because it isn't a real issue. Everything is socialist, it has to be, there is no other way. So it's redundant to say someone is a socialist. We all are.

An unprecedented data set shows where the encyclopedia's editors are, where they aren't, and why. From a report: Wikipedia matters. In a time of extreme political polarization, algorithmically enforced filter bubbles, and fact patterns dismissed as fake news, Wikipedia has become one of the few places where we can meet to write a shared reality. We treat it like a utility, and the U.S. and U.K. trust it about as much as the news. But we know very little about who is writing the world's encyclopedia. We do know that just because anyone can edit, doesn't mean that everyone does: The site's editors are disproportionately cis white men from the global North. We also know that, as with most of the internet, a small number of the editors do a large amount of the editing. But that's basically it: In the interest of improving retention, the Wikimedia Foundation's own research focuses on the motivations of people who do edit, not on those who don't. The media, meanwhile, frequently focus on Wikipedia's personality stories, even when covering the bigger questions. And Wikipedia's own culture pushes back against granular data harvesting: The Wikimedia Foundation's strong data-privacy rules guarantee users' anonymity and limit the modes and duration of their own use of editor data. But as part of my research in producing Print Wikipedia, I discovered a data set that can offer an entry point into the geography of Wikipedia's contributors. Every time anyone edits Wikipedia, the software records the text added or removed, the time of the edit, and the username of the editor. (This edit history is part of Wikipedia's ethos of radical transparency: Everyone is anonymous, and you can see what everyone is doing.) When an editor isn't logged in with a username, the software records that user's IP address. I parsed all of the 884 million edits to English Wikipedia to collect and geolocate the 43 million IP addresses that have edited English Wikipedia. I also counted 8.6 million username editors who have made at least one edit to an article. The result is a set of maps that offer, for the first time, insight into where the millions of volunteer editors who build and maintain English Wikipedia's 6 million pages are -- and, maybe more important, where they aren't.

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Ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh!

Six public health labs in the US plan to start monitoring the general population for the new coronavirus this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the risk of the virus still remains low for the general population. But activating the disease surveillance network will allow the CDC and other public health officials to find any undetected virus circulating through the country. From a report: "It's important because right now, all the efforts are focused on people who have a direct link to China, or a direct link to lab-confirmed cases. There's no system in place to detect low-level transmission that might be under the radar," says Edward Belongia, the director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The six labs -- in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City -- are already part of the nationwide influenza surveillance network, and they conduct regular monitoring of all types of viruses. At the labs, samples from sick people are tested for various pathogens, creating a big-picture look at how much various diseases are spreading through the community. Surveillance hasn't started yet, in part because of problems with the test for the novel coronavirus developed by the CDC. The test that will be used for surveillance that was designed to diagnose people who have symptoms of the illness caused by the virus called COVID-19. It was distributed to public health labs around the country last week, but the majority of the labs had trouble running it. The CDC says this often happens during the rollout of a new test, but it has not specified what the reasons for the errors are.

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Bug bounty platform HackerOne paid out $40 million in bounties in 2019, roughly equal to the total for all previous years combined. From a report: Moreover, the company announced that its community almost doubled in the past year to 600,000 registered hackers. The announcement comes as the cybersecurity industry struggles with a workforce shortage, which is in turn compounded by growing cyberattacks that could cost the industry $6 trillion by 2021. As companies invest significant resources in battling external threats, HackerOne aims to pay good actors to find bugs before bad actors enter the fray, reducing the need for costly remediation measures further down the line. Founded in 2012, HackerOne essentially connects companies with security researchers, or "white hat hackers," who receive cash incentives to find and report software vulnerabilities. The San Francisco-based company has raised north of $100 million since its inception, including a $36.4 million tranche a few months back, and has paid out $82 million in bounties since its inception. According to HackerOne, U.S.-based hackers earned 19% of all bounties in 2019, followed by hackers in India (10%), Russia (8%), China (7%), Germany (5%), and Canada (4%). These figures were released as part of HackerOne's annual hacker report, which included a survey of 3,150 hackers.

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Ming-Chi Kuo is out with a new analyst note today and the most interesting part of his forecast is that Apple will release its first Mac with an ARM processor in the first half of 2021. From a report: Kuo is predicting that one of Apple's new products to be released within the next 12-18 months will be a Mac with an in-house processor, instead of using an Intel CPU. There have been growing reports over the last couple of years about Apple making the switch to a custom-designed ARM processor for its Macs and today's report gives a concrete timeframe for when to expect that launch, which has actually held true since Kuo's prediction back in 2018. Since the coronavirus outbreak, Kuo highlights that Apple has been "more aggressive" with its funding for research, development, and production of 5nm process chips that are expected to show up in the first Macs with ARM CPUs. That's because 5nm chips will be integral to iPhone, iPad later this year, as well as Macs come 2021.

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Video demo of a feature coming soon in LO2, probably tomorrow. You can load in all your tweets for the day. Makes it easy to use Twitter as a place to record ideas that then flow through your outline.

Intel's sale of its consumer 5G modem unit signaled its exit from the smartphone business last year, but the company remains heavily committed to participating in the growing 5G marketplace -- primarily on the carrier and enterprise sides. Today, the company announced three chips built for various types of 5G computers, plus a 5G-optimized network adapter for PCs. From a report: Up first is an updated second-generation Xeon Scalable processor, now at a top speed of 3.9GHz and bolstered by additional AI capabilities to aid with inference applications. The new chip promises up to 36% more performance than the first-generation version, with up to 42% more performance per dollar, though early second-generation chips were introduced in April 2019. Intel says the Xeon Scalable is the "only CPU with AI built in" -- a pitch that's not exactly accurate, given the range of existing laptop and mobile CPUs with AI features, but one Intel further explains means "the only CPU on the market that features integrated deep learning acceleration." Xeon Scalable's Deep Learning Boost feature set promises up to 6 times more AI performance than AMD's Rome processors, though Intel won't quantify the number of TOPS available for AI processing, calling the metric "theoretical." Regardless, Intel says Xeon Scalable will support the cloud AI needs of Alibaba, AWS, Baidu, Microsoft, and Tencent, as well as other major companies. Network-optimized "N-SKUs" of the new Xeon Scalable will also be available, offering up to 58% more performance for network function virtualization workloads compared with the first chip. Customers such as China Mobile, SK Telecom, Sprint, and T-Mobile Poland are all using Xeon Scalable in their 5G networks. The boosted Xeon Scalable chips are officially available starting today. Intel is also introducing the Atom P5900, billed as the first Intel architecture SoC for base stations and designed from the ground up for radio access network (RAN) needs. Itâ(TM)s a 10-nanometer chip with hardware-based network acceleration features, including integrated packet processing, ultra low latency, and a switch for inline cryptographic acceleration.

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The US space agency's InSight probe detects over 450 significant seismic events since landing in 2018.

Markets closed out last week on an anxious note. It's not difficult to see why: the coronavirus continues to spread, and there are signs that some of the world's top economies could slide into recession as the outbreak compounds pre-existing weaknesses. From a report: Take Japan: The world's third-largest economy shrank 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2019 as the country absorbed the effects of a sales tax hike and a powerful typhoon. It was biggest contraction compared to the previous quarter since 2014. Then there's Germany. The biggest economy in Europe ground to a halt right before the coronavirus outbreak set in, dragged down by the country's struggling factories. The closely-watched ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment in Germany decreased sharply for February, reflecting fears that the virus could hit world trade. Bank of America economist Ethan Harris points to the number of smaller economies that are hurting, too. Hong Kong is in recession and Singapore could soon suffer a similar fate. Fourth quarter GDP data from Indonesia hit a three-year low, while Malaysia had its worst reading in a decade, he noted to clients on Friday. Meanwhile, engines of growth like China and India slowed in 2019. Fourth quarter GDP data for the latter comes out this week. All of this brings to the fore concerns about the global economy's ability to withstand a shock from the coronavirus. Harris says the weak quarter was likely a result of lingering damage from the trade war between China and the United States. The coronavirus is poised to make matters worse.

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Maybe the NYT was always this stupid, and we were too young and stupid ourselves to notice?

Is it any wonder that the presidential nominating process has become a weekly reality show, in every way.