Technology

Today, Jack Dorsey tweeted a link to his companylatest gesture toward ongoing political relevance, a U.S. midterms news center collecting &the latest news and top commentary& on the countryextraordinarily consequential upcoming election. If curated and filtered properly, that could be useful! Imagine. Unfortunately, rife with fake news, the tool is just another of Twittersmall yet increasingly consequential disasters.

Beyond a promotional tweet from Dorsey, Twitter new offering is kind of buried — probably for the best. On desktop ita not particularly useful mash of national news reporters, local candidates and assorted unverifiable partisans. As Buzzfeed news details, the tool is swimming with conspiracy theories, including ones involving the migrant caravan. According to his social media posts, the Pittsburgh shooter was at least partially motivated by similar conspiracies, so this is not a good look to say the least.

Why launch a tool like this before performing the most basic cursory scan for the kind of low-quality sources that already have your company in hot water Why have your chief executive promote it Why why why

A few hours after Dorseytweet, likely after the prominent callout, the main feed looked a bit tamer than it did at first glance. Subpages for local races appear mostly populated by candidates themselves, while the national feed looks more like an algorithmically generated echo chamber version of my regular Twitter feed, with inexplicably generous helpings of MSNBC pundits and more lefty activists.

For Twitter users already immersed in conspiracies, particularly those that incubate so successfully on the far right, does this feed offer yet another echo chamber disguised as a neutral news source In spite of its sometimes dubiously left-leanings, my feed is still peppered with tweets from undercover video provocateur James O&Keefe — not exactly a high quality source.

In May, Twitter announced that political candidates would get a special badge, making them stand out from other users and potential imposters. That was useful! Anything that helps Twitter function as a fast news source with light context is a positive step, but unfortunately we haven&t seen a whole lot in this direction.

Social media companies need to stop launching additional amplification tools into the ominous void. No social tech company has yet exhibited a meaningful understanding of the systemic shifts that need to happen — possibly product-rending shifts — to dissuade bad actors and straight up disinformation from spreading like a back-to-school virus.

Unfortunately, a week before the U.S. midterm elections, Twitter looks as disinterested as ever in the social disease wreaking havoc on its platform, even as users suffer its real-life consequences. Even more unfortunate for any members of its still dedicated, weary userbase, Twitterlatest wholly avoidable minor catastrophe comes as a surprise to no one.

After nine years of service, half a million stars surveyed, and thousands of planets discovered around those stars, NASA astonishingly successful Kepler space telescope is finally taking a well-earned rest. Out of fuel but in a safe orbit, the spacecraft will drift through the solar system looking at nothing in particular as its immense trove of data continues to drive discoveries here on Earth.

Kepler launched in 2009 after, as is so often the case, decades of preparation, studies, and delays. Its mission, slated to last three and a half years, was to stare unblinkingly at one small patch of sky, watching each star for the minute changes that could indicate a planet briefly blocking its light.

The mission was successful beyond all expectations, and once the telescope was operational the data began producing exoplanets not by the dozen but by the thousand. And some came closer to an Earth analogue than astronomers had dared hope — suggesting rocky planets about our size aren&t all that rare. (Good news if we need to relocate.)

Kepler&first light& image showing its original field of view.

In 2014 the original mission was complete but Kepler was still going strong, largely due to robust construction and frugal fuel use. A second mission, dubbed K2, was approved, different from the first: instead of looking at a single patch for years, Kepler would shift its view to a new location every three months. Naturally the number of stars catalogued and observed skyrocketed.

Not all was well aboard, though: The craft lost one of its four reaction wheels, used to reorientate the craft against the pull of the sun and other forces, though fortunately it was designed to function without all of them. It was only the later failure of another wheel that essentially put a hard time limit on K2.

Without a reaction wheel to change its direction along all three axes, Kepler would have to burn precious fuel every time it needed to change its view or spin around to send data home.

Fuel or no fuel, Kepler was still churning out the data. Scientists verified and announced the existence of more than 1,200 more exoplanets in one go, while AI tools like Googlewere working to find others hidden in the noisy data.

But the end has come at last, and Kepler used the last of its reserves to maneuver into position to relay its final batch of data through the Deep Space Network. This, like the rest, will soon be available to citizen scientists and research organizations as well as NASAown teams.

As for the exoplanet hunt, thatbeen taken up by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, launched earlier this year and now in operation. Thereevery reason to think it&ll be as productive and inspiring as its predecessor and perhaps more so.

&When we started conceiving this mission 35 years ago we didn&t know of a single planet outside our solar system,& said Keplerfounding principal investigator, William Borucki, since retired. &Now that we know planets are everywhere, Kepler has set us on a new course thatfull of promise for future generations to explore our galaxy.&

Having delivered its last package, Kepler has completed its final duty and now enters a rather pleasant retirement. Unlike Cassini, which ended up a new crater on Saturnsurface (a sudden but glorious end), Kepler will simply fall into an Earth-like orbit some distance behind its home planet, likely to remain stable (barring the extraordinarily unlikely possibility of a cosmic debris strike) for many years to come.

We won&t hear from Kepler, and Kepler won&t hear from us. But itnice to think it&ll still be looking.

Letstart with a basic premise that the vast majority of the worldworkloads remain in private data centers. Cloud infrastructure vendors are working hard to shift those workloads, but technology always moves a lot slower than we think. That is the lens through which many cloud companies operate.

The idea that you operate both on prem and in the cloud with multiple vendors is the whole idea behind the notion of the hybrid cloud. Itwhere companies like Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Oracle are placing their bets. These died-in-the-wool enterprise companies see their large customers making a slower slog to the cloud than you would imagine, and they want to provide them with the tools and technologies to manage across both worlds, while helping them shift when they are ready.

Cloud-native computing developed in part to provide a single management fabric across on prem and cloud, freeing IT from having two sets of tools and trying somehow to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

What every cloud vendor wants

Red Hat — you know, that companythat was sold to IBM for $34 billion this week — has operated in this world. While most people think of the company as the one responsible for bringing Linux to the enterprise, over the last several years, it has been helping customers manage this transition and build applications that could live partly on prem and partly in the cloud.

As an example, it has built OpenShift, its version of Kubernetes. As CEO Jim Whitehurst told me last year, &Our hottest product is OpenShift. People talk about containers and they forget ita feature of Linux,& he said. That is an operating system that Red Hat knows a thing or two about.

With Red Hat in the fold, IBM can contend that being open source; they can build modern applications on top of open source tools and run them on IBMcloud or any of their competitors, a real hybrid approach.

Microsoft has a huge advantage here, of course, because it has a massive presence in the enterprise already. Many companies out there could be described as Microsoft shops, and for those companies moving from on prem Microsoft to cloud Microsoft represents a less daunting challenge than starting from scratch.

Oracle brings similar value with its core database products. Companies using Oracle databases — just about everyone — might find it easier to move that valuable data to Oraclecloud, althoughthe numbers don&t suggest thatnecessarily happening (and Oracle has stopped breaking out its cloud revenue).

Dell, which spent $67 billion for EMC, making the Red Hat purchase pale by comparison, has been trying to pull together a hybrid solution by combining VMware, Pivotal and Dell/EMC hardware.

Cloud vendors reporting

You could argue that hybrid is a temporary state, that at some point, the vast majority of workloads will eventually be running in the cloud and the hybrid business as we know it today will continually shrink over time. We are certainly seeing cloud infrastructure revenue skyrocketing with no signs of slowing down as more workloads move to the cloud.

In their latest earnings reports, those who break out such things, the successful ones, reported growth in their cloud business. Itimportant to note that these companies define cloud revenue in different ways, but you can see the trend is definitely up:

• AWS reported revenue of $6.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $4.58 billion the previous year.
• Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, which incorporates things like Azure and server products and enterprise services, was at $8.6 billion, up from $6.9 billion.
• IBM Technology Services and Cloud Platforms, which includes infrastructure services, technical support services and integration software reported revenue of $8.6 billion, up from $8.5 billion the previous year.
• Others like Oracle and Google didn&t break out their cloud revenue.

Show me the money

All of this is to say, there is a lot of money on the table here and companies are moving more workloads at an increasingly rapid pace. You might also have noticed that IBMgrowth is flat compared to the others. Yesterday in a call with analysts and press, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty projected that revenue for the hybrid cloud (however you define that) could reach $1 trillion by 2020. Whether that number is exaggerated or not, there is clearly a significant amount of business here, and IBM might see it as a way out of its revenue problems, especially if they can leverage consulting/services along with it.

There is probably so much business that there is room for more than one winner, but if you asked before Sunday if IBM had a shot in this mix against its formidable competitors, especially those born in the cloud like AWS and Google, most probably wouldn&t have given them much chance.

When Red Hat eventually joins forces with IBM, it at least gives their sales teams a compelling argument, one that could get them into the conversation — and that is probably why they were willing to spend so much money to get it. It puts them back in the game, and after years of struggling, that is something. And in the process, it has stirred up the hybrid cloud market in a way we didn&t see coming last week before this deal.