An anonymous reader quotes Slate:
Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn't Amazon's same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil?

We don't mean evil in the mustache-twirling, burn-the-world-from-a-secret-lair sense -- well, we mostly don't mean that -- but rather in the way Googlers once swore to avoid mission drift, respect their users, and spurn short-term profiteering, even though the company now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users' or workers' trust. We mean ills that outweigh conveniences. We mean temptations and poison pills and unanticipated outcomes.
Slate sent ballots to "a wide range of journalists, scholars, advocates, and others who have been thinking critically about technology for years," and reported that while America's big tech companies topped the list, "our respondents are deeply concerned about foreign companies dabbling in surveillance and A.I., as well as the domestic gunners that power the data-broker business."

But while there were some disagreements, Palantir still rose to #4 on the list because "almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel."

Interestingly, their list ranks SpaceX at #17 (for potentially disrupting astronomy by clogging the sky with satellites) and ranks Tesla at #14 for "its troubled record of worker safety and its dubious claims that it will soon offer 'full self-driving' to customers who have already paid $7,000 for the promised add-on... Our respondents say the very real social good that Tesla has done by creating safe, zero-emission vehicles does not justify misdeeds, like apparent 'stealth recalls' of defects that appear to violate safety laws or the 19 unresolved Clean Air Act violations at its paint shop."

Slate's article includes its comprehensive list of the 30 most dangerous tech companies. But here's the top 10:

1. Amazon
2. Facebook
3. Alphabet
4. Palantir Technologies
5. Uber
6. Apple
7. Microsoft
8. Twitter
9. ByteDance
10. Exxon Mobil

There's also lots of familiar names higher up on the list, including both 8chan (#20) and Cloudflare (#21). 23andMe came in at #18, while Huawei was #11. Netflix does not appear anywhere on the list, but Disney ranks #15.

And Oracle was #19. "It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully," wrote Cory Doctorow, "but Oracle managed it."

"Not sure if this is good news (Oracle is very busy patching their stuff) or bad news (Oracle is very busy patching their stuff) but this quarterly cycle they tied their all-time high number of vulnerability fixes released," writes Slashdot reader bobthesungeek76036. "And they are urging folks to not drag their feet in deploying these patches." Threatpost reports: The software giant patched 300+ bugs in its quarterly update. Oracle has patched 334 vulnerabilities across all of its product families in its January 2020 quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU). Out of these, 43 are critical/severe flaws carrying CVSS scores of 9.1 and above. The CPU ties for Oracle's previous all-time high for number of patches issued, in July 2019, which overtook its previous record of 308 in July 2017. The company said in a pre-release announcement that some of the vulnerabilities affect multiple products. "Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply Critical Patch Update patches as soon as possible," it added.

"Some of these vulnerabilities were remotely exploitable, not requiring any login data; therefore posing an extremely high risk of exposure," said Boris Cipot, senior security engineer at Synopsys, speaking to Threatpost. "Additionally, there were database, system-level, Java and virtualization patches within the scope of this update. These are all critical elements within a company's infrastructure, and for this reason the update should be considered mandatory. At the same time, organizations need to take into account the impact that this update could have on their systems, scheduling downtime accordingly."

Areyoukiddingme writes: EFF has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, arguing that APIs are not copyrightable. From the press release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle's Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protections. The court is reviewing a long-running lawsuit Oracle filed against Google, which claimed that Google's use of certain Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in its Android operating system violated Oracle's copyrights. The case has far-reaching implications for innovation in software development, competition, and interoperability.

In a brief filed today, EFF argues that the Federal Circuit, in ruling APIs were copyrightable, ignored clear and specific language in the copyright statute that excludes copyright protection for procedures, processes, and methods of operation. 'Instead of following the law, the Federal Circuit decided to rewrite it to eliminate almost all the exclusions from copyright protection that Congress put in the statute,' said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. 'APIs are not copyrightable. The Federal Circuit's ruling has created a dangerous precedent that will encourage more lawsuits and make innovative software development prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, the Supreme Court can and should fix this mess.'" Oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court are scheduled for March 2020, and a decision by June.

Former Slashdot contributor Nick Kolakowski is now a senior editor at Dice Insights, where he's just published a list of the top programming skills employers were looking for during the last 30 days.
If you're a software developer on the hunt for a new gig (or you're merely curious about what programming skills employers are looking for these days), one thing is clear: employers really, really, really want technologists who know how to build, maintain, and scale everything database- (and data-) related.

We've come to that conclusion after analyzing data about programming skills from Burning Glass, which collects and organizes millions of job postings from across the country.
The biggest takeaway? "When it comes to programming skills, employers are hungriest for SQL." Here's their ranking of the top most in-demand skills:

1. SQL
2. Java
3. "Software development"
4. "Software engineering"
5. Python
6. JavaScript
7. Linux
8. Oracle
9. C#
10. Git

The list actually includes the top 18 programming skills, but besides languages like C++ and .NET, it also includes more generalized skills like "Agile development," "debugging," and "Unix."

But Nick concludes that "As a developer, if you've mastered database and data-analytics skills, that makes you insanely valuable to a whole range of companies out there."

"Linux kernel head Linus Torvalds has warned engineers against adding a module for the ZFS filesystem that was designed by Sun Microsystems -- and now owned by Oracle -- due to licensing issues," reports ZDNet: As reported by Phoronix, Torvalds has warned kernel developers against using ZFS on Linux, an implementation of OpenZFS, and refuses to merge any ZFS code until Oracle changes the open-source license it uses.

ZFS has long been licensed under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License as opposed to the Linux kernel, which is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). Torvalds aired his opinion on the matter in response to a developer who argued that a recent kernel change "broke an important third-party module: ZFS". The Linux kernel creator says he refuses to merge the ZFS module into the kernel because he can't risk a lawsuit from "litigious" Oracle -- which is still trying to sue Google for copyright violations over its use of Java APIs in Android -- and Torvalds won't do so until Oracle founder Larry Ellison signs off on its use in the Linux kernel.

"If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it and I cannot be bound by other people's kernel changes," explained Torvalds. "And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's OK to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd," Torvalds continued.

"Other people think it can be OK to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it OK, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so."

The Pentagon is urging US telecoms equipment makers to join forces on 5G technology in a drive to offer a homegrown alternative to China's Huawei. From a report: Lisa Porter, who oversees research and development at the defence department, has asked US companies to develop open-source 5G software -- in effect opening up their technology to potential rivals -- warning they risk becoming obsolete if they do not. Making 5G tech open-source could threaten American companies such as Cisco or Oracle, the biggest American suppliers of telecoms network equipment. This technology -- known as open radio access networks -- would allow telecoms carriers to buy off-the-shelf hardware from a range of vendors, rather than bespoke systems. US officials hope it will provide an alternative to Huawei. The Chinese equipment maker dominates the market, but many in Washington believe it poses a threat to US national security.

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle has a huge commitment to the Bay Area. The software giant is based in Redwood Shores, a short drive south from San Francisco. It remains one of the largest employers in Northern California. And until recently, the Golden State Warriors were playing in Oracle Arena in Oakland. Just as the naming rights to that arena expired -- and the Warriors moved across the Bay to San Francisco -- Oracle bought the naming rights to the San Francisco Giants' stadium. For more than 20 years, Oracle has held its annual OpenWorld trade show in San Francisco, as well. The 2019 edition of the event, held in the Moscone Convention Center, drew 60,000 people to the already traffic clogged city, driving hotel prices to dizzying heights. But no more. Oracle today confirmed that starting next year it's moving OpenWorld to Caesars Forum, a new 550,000 square foot conference center in Las Vegas due to open next year. CNBC reports that the San Francisco Travel Association told members via email today that the decision reflects feedback from attendee complaints about high hotel rates and "poor street conditions."

A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software. The civil complaint, filed on behalf of plaintiff Tayo Daramola in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, contends that Oracle violated whistleblower protections under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, the RICO Act, and the California Labor Code.

According to the court filing, Daramola, a resident of Montreal, Canada, worked for Oracle's NetSuite division from November 30, 2016 through October 13, 2017. He served as a project manager for an Oracle cloud service known as the Cloud Campus BookStore initiative and dealt with US customers. Campus bookstores, along with ad agencies, and apparel companies are among the market segments targeted by Oracle and NetSuite. Daramola's clients are said to have included the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, the University of Texas at Austin, Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California.

The problem, according to the complaint, is that Oracle was asking Daramola to sell vaporware -- a charge the company denies. "Daramola gradually became aware that a large percentage of the major projects to which he was assigned were in 'escalation' status with customers because Oracle had sold his customers software products it could not deliver, and that were not functional," the complaint says. Daramola realized that his job "was to ratify and promote Oracle's repeated misrepresentations to customers" about the capabilities of its software, "under the premise of managing the customer's expectations." The ostensible purpose of stringing customers along in this manner was to buy time so Oracle could actually implement the capabilities it was selling, the court filing states.

As Daramola saw it, his job as project manager thus required him to participate "in a process of affirmative misrepresentation, material omission, and likely fraud."
"We don't agree with the allegations," Oracle told The Register "and intend to vigorously defend the matter."

The article also notes that in 2016 Oracle faced another whistleblower lawsuit, this one brought by a former senior finance manager at Oracle who'd said her bosses directed her to inflate the company's cloud sales. Oracle settled that lawsuit "while denying any wrongdoing."

According to The Register, Oracle is suing the Department of Labor for repeatedly accusing the company of discriminating against and underpaying women and minorities. From the report: In a lawsuit [PDF] filed Wednesday in a Washington DC district court, Big Red accuses the U.S. Department of Labor of "unprecedented overreach by an executive agency," and claims the agency doesn't have the authority to cut Oracle out of government contracts for its discriminatory practices or sue it for underpaying certain staff. With one hand holding the constitution and the other bashing its chest, the database giant warned perilously that "the rise of the modern administrative state has altered our government structure" but that it had "not undone our constitutional structure."

The folks at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) have "created a coercive administrative enforcement and adjudicative regime" the lawsuit bellows. "Without authority from any Act of Congress - indeed, in contravention of congressional legislation - a group of unelected, unaccountable, and unconfirmed administrative officials have cut from whole cloth this adjudicative agency enforcement scheme." The lawsuit is just the latest in a brutal battle between Oracle and the Labor Department that started in 2017 when the government sued the database biz for pay and employment discrimination. According to federal investigators, Oracle pays its white male employees more than women and minorities even when they are in the same job with the same title. It studied Oracle's hiring practices since 2013 and concluded that there were "gross disparities in pay even after controlling for job title, full-time status, exempt status, global career level, job speciality, estimated prior work experience, and company tenure."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear a dispute between tech giants Oracle and Google in a blockbuster case that could lead to billions of dollars in fines and shape copyright law in the internet era. The case concerns 11,500 lines of code that Google was accused of copying from Oracle's Java programming language. Google deployed the code in Android, now the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Oracle sued Google in 2010 alleging that the use of its code in Android violated copyright law.

Google won two victories in the lower courts but ultimately lost on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which ruled last year for Oracle. Oracle has previously said it is entitled to $9 billion in damages, though no official penalty has been set. Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle purchased in a deal valued at $7.4 billion that was completed in 2010. Underlying the legal issues in the case is a technical dispute over the nature of the code that Google used. Google has said that the code was essentially functional -- akin to copying the placement of keys on a QWERTY keyboard. Oracle maintains that the code, part of Java's application programming interface, or API, is a creative product, "like the chapter headings and topic sentences of an elaborate literary work." A number of high-profile tech firms urged the top court to take the case in order to side with Google.

Popular health websites are sharing private, personal medical data with big tech companies, according to an investigation by the Financial Times. From a report: The data, including medical diagnoses, symptoms, prescriptions, and menstrual and fertility information, are being sold to companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Oracle and smaller data brokers and advertising technology firms, like Scorecard and OpenX. The FT analyzed 100 health websites, including WebMD, Healthline, health insurance group Bupa, and parenting site Babycentre, and found that 79% of them dropped cookies on visitors, allowing them to be tracked by third-party companies around the internet. This was done without consent, making the practice illegal under European Union regulations. By far the most common destination for the data was Google's advertising arm DoubleClick, which showed up in 78% of the sites the FT tested.

Oracle opened its appeal in a legal challenge of a Pentagon cloud-computing contract valued at as much as $10 billion with a familiar argument: the procurement was unfairly tailored for Amazon.com. From a report: In in its opening brief, which was filed on Friday, Oracle said the cloud project violated federal procurement law and was tainted by relationships between former Pentagon officials and Amazon. Oracle is appealing a July ruling from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that dismissed its legal challenge of the cloud contract based on similar claims. At the same time, Amazon is mulling its own potential legal challenge of the project after losing the deal to Microsoft Corp. late last month, Bloomberg has reported. The legal challenges could revive fresh criticism from industry, lawmakers and analysts of the Pentagon's handling of the controversial cloud project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The project is designed to consolidate the Pentagon's cloud computing infrastructure and modernize its technology systems. The Defense Department is facing accusations that former employees with ties to Amazon may have structured the deal to favor Amazon and that President Donald Trump may have unfairly intervened in the process against Amazon. Trump has long been at odds with Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

"In a message to the OpenJDK community, Bruno Borges announced that Microsoft has now formally signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement and has been welcomed to the Java community," reports JAXenter: He went on to reaffirm Microsoft's commitment to Java and that the team is looking forward to giving something back to the Java community. However, the team will not just barge in with a heavy hand, but will start with smaller bug fixes and the like so they can learn how to be "good citizens within OpenJDK."

Borges, himself a former Oracle developer, is Principal Product Manager for Java at Microsoft. He presents Martijn Verburg as the Java engineering team lead who will be working together along with other partners in the Java ecosystem. Verburg is also CEO of jClarity, a leading AdoptOpenJDK contributor acquired by Microsoft in August this year, so presumably he will stay true to form and continue to contribute to the Java world, only now with Microsoft at his back...

Microsoft's acquisition of jClarity was just the latest in their efforts to gain a foothold in the Java community. There are many Java developers and Java champions who now practice their trade under Microsoft's banner... At JAX London a few weeks ago, Program Chair Sebastian Meyen opened the conference by giving a speech in which he said "Microsoft is now a Java shop". He sees this as a great development, as "it's always good when industry giants stand behind Java."

Amazon must decide soon if it will protest the Pentagon's awarding of a $10 billion cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft, with one possible grievance being the unusual attention given the project by President Donald Trump. From a report: Amazon was long thought to be the front-runner in the competition for the huge military contract. Its Amazon Web Services division is far ahead of second-place Microsoft in cloud computing, and Amazon has experience handling highly classified government data. It survived earlier legal challenges after the Defense Department eliminated rival bidders Oracle and IBM and whittled the competition down to the two Seattle area tech giants before choosing Microsoft last week. And what else distinguishes the losing bidder? Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, have been frequent targets of Trump's criticism. The Pentagon was preparing to make its final decision when Trump publicly waded into the fray in July, saying he had heard complaints about the process and that the administration would "take a very long look." He said other companies told him that the contract "wasn't competitively bid." Oracle, in particular, had argued that Pentagon officials unfairly favored Amazon for the winner-take-all contract.

The October issue of Oracle's Java magazine includes an article reminding us that Java 13 includes a long-awaited new features: text blocks. With text blocks, Java 13 is making it easier for you to work with multiline string literals. You no longer need to escape the special characters in string literals or use concatenation operators for values that span multiple lines. You can also control how to format your strings. Text blocks -- Java's term for multiline strings -- immensely improve the readability of your code...

A text block is defined using three double quotes (""") as the opening and closing delimiters. The opening delimiter can be followed by zero or more white spaces and a line terminator. A text block value begins after this line terminator.

Software engineer Kieran Potts asks: does JavaScript need to be renamed? There's no doubt there are problems with JavaScript's branding...

- Correctly, "JavaScript" refers to a subset of ECMAScript specified by Mozilla, but the word is used interchangeably to refer to multiple different ECMAScript supersets, depending on context.

- JavaScript is a trademark of Oracle Corporation, which doesn't fit comfortably with the language's position as a central component of the web platform, which is meant to be built entirely from open technologies and standards.

- There isn't even an official logo for JavaScript, let alone a cute mascot like Go's gopher or PHP's elephant.

- And famously, JavaScript is unrelated to Java. This has confused the hell out of non-technical managers and recruiters for decades.
The article also suggests "a standard convention" to identify the runtime's host system (for example, "WebJS" or "ServerJS").

But in response to the question of rebranding JavaScript, "the most common, knee jerk reaction was a quick guffaw and an exclaimed 'no!'" notes tech columnist Mike Melanson, "while others offered that the simple contraction to JS would suffice."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The U.S. government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, the Department of Defense has confirmed. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads. It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, and for a while it was up in the air as to whether Microsoft or Amazon would win this particular one. IBM and Oracle were both eliminated for the bidding back in April, leaving just Microsoft and Amazon as the only companies that could meet the requirements. The contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and Oracle lost a legal challenge after it claimed the contract has conflicts of interest. The contract will last for 10 years and is likely to be resisted by employees, who have in the past have called on the company to drop its HoloLens U.S. Army contract and stop its work with ICE.

Mark Hurd, who was co-chief of Oracle, one of the world's top business-software firms, until he stepped aside last month for health reasons, died Friday. He was 62. From a report: "Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle," Oracle chairman Larry Ellison wrote. "All of us will miss Mark's keen mind and rare ability to analyze, simplify, and solve problems quickly. Some of us will miss his friendship and mentorship. I will miss his kindness and sense of humor." Hurd announced a leave of absence from Oracle in September due to unspecified health reasons. Oracle stock had gone up about 37% since he and Safra Catz were appointed as CEOs in September 2014.

Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company -- Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy -- at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition. Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering recent developments in computing, Bill Joy, who is now concentrating on climate change solutions, recalled that Sun tried to do natural language processing, but the hardware was not fast enough. Regarding the emergence of the iPhone, Joy said the advent of mobility and data networks has been transformational for society. He noted that Sun had that kind of vision with Java ME, with Sun trying to do programmable smartphones. "But the hardware was just really nascent at the time," Joy said. Machine learning, though, will be as transformational as the smartphone, he added.

McNealy emphasized Sun's willingness to share technology, such as the Network File System (NFS), which helped to bring about the open source software movement now prevalent today. "We didn't invent open source but we [made it] happen. We were the leader of that parade." Asked if Sun should have moved from Sparc Risc processors and Solaris Unix to Intel processors and Linux, McNealy said he did not want to talk about mistakes he had made as Sun CEO but such a switch was not what Sun should have done....

Among those proudest of Sun's achievements was Sun founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who, taking the stage, had some sharp words for Facebook, which now occupies one of Sun's former Silicon Valley campuses, without mentioning Facebook by name. "I remember some company moved into one of our old headquarters buildings," McNealy said. "And the CEO said, we're going to leave the [Sun Microsystems] logos up because we want everybody in our company to remember what can happen to you if you don't pay attention. This company could do well to do one-one-hundredth of what we did."

The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a many-decades-old nonprofit that defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and shares its performance results with the industry.

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear says they've just released some surprising news: The TPC organization reported on October 5 that OceanBase, an open-source relational database from Ant Financial, a business unit of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has topped the TPC-C benchmark, more than doubling the score achieved by Oracle Corp. which had held the world record for the past 9 years.

OceanBase v2.2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning scored at 60,880,800, while Oracle Database 11g R2 Enterprise Edition w/RAC and Partitioning achieved 30,249,688.

TPC Benchmark C is industrial standard OLTP benchmark, measuring on-line transactions per minute (tpmC).