Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle

arstechnica.com

118 pointsshawndumas24 comments

A friend did a stint at oracle, before quitting in disgust. He'd been sold the position as working on innovation in their cloud division. It turned out to be more like industrial espionage, constantly changing tack to follow Google, never actually shipping anything, or pursuing any particular strategy other than "me too!". Under the hood their cloud is a broken pile of limping goshu that they barely understand themselves, as the guys who threw it together a few years back have also churned out. Their main cloud customer is.... Oracle!

Unless they start running their own race and stop looking at what the guy in the other lane is doing, they're going zombie.

Destroying the sun grid group and bad mouthing cloud wasn't the smartest way to handle the buyout of Sun, in retrospect.

Solaris engineers know quite a bit about their stack and what it can and cant do.. the trouble is trying to make a standard consortium by relying on garbage code that sort of works on Linux. Anything you do better than Linux will just be a problem for achieving ultimate bland.

Engineering manager at Google posts story where whistle blowers that target Google are called anti-Google researchers. The original article references another article that calls the group a shadowy project that's attacking Google. By the way, when's Google finishing the Wedding Crashers trilogy? I need to see how great moving to California is again.

Who is an engineering manager at Google?

shawndumas, the guy who posted the link.

They are doing this because people have very good opinion about Google and imagine Oracle as some evil corporation that want to attack their favorite sites (google, gmail, youtube etc). They would never win any lawsuit with jury because of that - this is their motivation, change people emotions towards Google.

It's incredible to me how much people look the other way for Google. Talk about privacy invasive features in Microsoft's products, everyone loses their minds. Talk about privacy invasive features in Google products, people think you're being paranoid.

Nobody thinks you're being paranoid by thinking google is selling your data, that's known.

But Microsoft previously did not do this, and you're paying for the operating system. To my knowledge you don't pay for google products. (excluding the business apps suites, which are still cheap for what they are).

Nor Google nor Microsoft sell any data

One is an advertising company and the other also has an advertising division, your data is used to target those advertisements, they're both absolutely selling your data.

No, they are selling ad space.

But if you're sure that they are selling the data to third parties, can you provide any source for that claim?

Google can match you with an advertiser based on your data without selling or disclosing that data to the advertiser.

If an advertiser wants people who have searched for things related to cars in the last month, Google can send them impressions to bid on without any information about you changing hands at all.

Ok, I understand SV giants slinging IP lawsuits at each other. But do any of them really gain from slinging mud at each other? Put another way: is this a profit-maximising buisness move, or just Larry Ellison's personality shining through.

The irony is that this sort of rough-and-tumble accountability is a good thing. So the only actual effect of this funding might be to make the world a better place, whether Larry likes it or not.

Oracle should probably invest that money in doing actual R&D for itself. It hasn't been doing well of late in the ERP market. Have oracle's cloud moves failed?

>> Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle

Does it matter? Research is either legit or BS. That's all that matters, doesn't it?

I think the obvious question is how much research is it and how much is it just Oracle trying to give Google a hard time. A lot of people and/or press probably have a hard time distinguishing.

Depends what one calls BS. Quick look at GTP-generated news gives impression that all covered topics are quite legal, but presentation looks FUDish. Like: “Google employees have enjoyed revolving door during Obama administration” [1]

[1]: http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-door/

FUDish as it might be, it gave people -- including us here at HN -- an opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of such things.

This is what democracy looks like.

Anything has a range of interpretations or "partial representation of the facts" that can be used to provide spin to a story.

Narratives are powerful, and "independent research groups" can provide that (purposeful) narrative for their backers' gain.

At least, a watchdog that talks about accountability and transparency should be accountable and transparent and it seems that they are not. That casts a doubt about the intention and the results

who decides what to publish and what to shut down?

hint: it's the people funding the research

> Research is either legit or BS. That's all that matters, doesn't it?

Yes but:

1. It's non-trivial to distinguish between the two

2. It's not a binary distinction. It could be 1%/99%, 99%/1% or anything inbetween.

So - a useful heuristic for those of us who can't take a few months off to reproduce the study is to 'follow the money'.

Your enemy's enemy is your friend

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