Technology

A British cave diving expert who helped save the young Thai football team that got trapped in caves this summer is preparing a legal action against Elon Musk for making &false and defamatory statements&, TechCrunch has confirmed.

BuzzFeedreported the development earlier, after obtaining a letter sent to Muskhome on August 6 by a firm representing the diver, Vernon Unsworth.

The background here is that in ahighly offensive and extremely bizarre episode last month— even for the famously ‘loose cannon online& Musk — the Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to Twitter to attack Unsworth, branding him a &pedo guy&.

The bizarre attack came after Unsworth had given a critical interview to the media saying the mini sub which Musk had designed and brought to Thailand &had absolutely no chance of working&. Unsworth ended an interview segment by suggesting Musk should &stick his submarine where it hurts& — a tongue-in-cheek phrase which apparently triggered MuskTwitter outburst.

Facing a backlash over his comments about a man who had successfully helped rescue the boys, Musk subsequently deleted the offensive tweets and quasi-apologizedfor slurring Unsworth in a further set oftweets, on July 18, though these were only posted within a Twitter thread, rather than being broadcast to his ~22.4M Twitter followers.

At the time Musk said Unsworthcomment had angered him, and that had made him lash out, but he also added:&Nonetheless, his actions against me do not justify my actions against him, and for that I apologize to Mr. Unsworth and to the companies I represent as leader. The fault is mine and mine alone.&

The public element of the episode might have ended there butearlier this week Musk dredged it all up again by repeating his offensive insinuation against Unsworth during a debate with ex-TechCrunch journalist Drew Olanoff — who had brought up the &pedo guy& attack as an example of Musk himself telling untruths.

Yet instead of reiterating his apology to Unsworth, Musk doubled down on his original offensive attack — writing: &You don&t think itstrange he hasn&t sued me He was offered free legal services.&

To which Olanoff replied: &What I think is especially strange here is that you&re wondering why he hasn&t sued you while the rest of us are wondering why you did something so egregious that he could sue you for in the first place.&

We contacted the law firm for confirmation that it is representing Mr Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk. Partner Lin Wood was unavailable to speak about the matter when we called but he confirmed via email that the firm is representing Unsworth in a defamation suit against Musk, and that it is preparing a legal action.

In the letter sent by the firm to Muskhome earlier this month Wood informs Musk he has been retained by Unsworth on account of the defamatory statements made by Musk on Twitter alleging that he is a pedophile.

Wood also writes that he is preparing a civil complaint of libel and invites Musk to contact him &in an attempt to avoid litigation and to see the public record corrected&.

Itnot clear whether or not Musk had seen the letter at the time of his tweets to Olanoff.

We&ve reached out to Musk (via Twitter) for comment on the legal action and to ask whether he will be withdrawing his repeat allegation against Unsworth. We&ll update this story with any response.

The Tesla CEOerratic behavior online has caused other high profile headaches for his companies in recent weeks, after he tweeted about taking Tesla private — triggering wild swings in the stock price and scrutiny (and potential problems) from the Securities and Exchange Commission, only for the idea to be nixed weeks later.

The associated risks for shareholders in a public company whose CEO uses Twitter as a weapon to indulge personal spats and feuds — and to spitball major business decisions — without, apparently, any thought for the legal and reputational consequences for him or his companies, are hard to quantify but equally difficult to deny.

Sony Playstation Vue, the over-the-top TV streaming service thatnow up against a host of new competitors including Hulu and YouTube TV, is expanding its lineup to include more local stations. While the service had already offered some limited access to locals in select markets, this expansion brings 200 more stations across the U.S. to its service, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC stations.

In total, there are now more than 450 local stations available, the company says. (A list of the additions is available here.) It also today added ESPN College Extra.

The news is notable because of how far behind Playstation Vue has slid in terms of subscribers, since the launch of newcomers to the market. And many of these newcomers have been touting their access to locals as one of their benefits.

Playstation Vue, on the other hand, may have gained more locals this week, but it also recently lost all Sinclair-owned local stations, and before that, Viacom channels. While Sony says it doesn&t have plans to shut down Vue, it has also made statements about its &uncertain& future, which concerned its user base.

Likely because of its branding as &Playstation,& many consumers may believe that the service is something thatonly available to Playstation owners. Itnot, though & Vue also streams across platforms, including iOS, Android, the web, and connected media players like Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Fire TV, as well as Chromecast.

While an early player in streaming TV, Playstation Vue today lags on subscribers.

DishSling TV leads the pack with 2.3 millionpaying customers, followed by AT-TDirecTV Now with 1.8 million.Meanwhile, the newer Hulu Live TV service hit 800,000 subscribers in May, while YouTube TV passed 800,000 around the same time. Playstation Vue, however, reportedly has over 500,000subscribers, in comparison.

The major players are benefitting from their large corporate parents, Digiday recently pointed out. For example, AT-T acquired Time Warner and is now leveraging its wireless business to sells subscriptions. And Google can afford to market and fund YouTube TV as it grows, and has bought expensive partnerships like the World Series and NBA Finals along the way.

What Vue has going for it, is that the market itself & streaming & is growing, and its service is among one of the better-designed and more stable. But if itnot willing to rebrand Playstation Vue into something more approachable, it may never be able to come out ahead.

Google today announced that it is providing the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with $9 million in Google Cloud credits to help further its work on the Kubernetes container orchestratorand that it is handingoveroperational control of the project to the community. These credits will be split over three years and are meant to cover the infrastructure costs of building, testing and distributing the Kubernetes software.

Why does this matter Until now, Google hosted virtually all the cloud resources that supported the project, like its CI/CD testing infrastructure, container downloads and DNS services on its cloud. But Google is now taking a step back. With the Kubernetes community reaching a state of maturity, Google is transferring all of this to the community.

Between the testing infrastructure and hosting container downloads, the Kubernetes project regularly runs more than 150,000 containers on 5,000 virtual machines, so the cost of running these systems quickly adds up. The Kubernetes container registry has served almost 130 million downloads since the launch of the project.

Italso worth noting that the CNCF now includes a wide range of members that typically compete with each other. We&re talking Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, SAP and VMware, for example. All of these profit from the work of the CNCF and the Kubernetes community. Google doesn&t say so outright, but itfair to assume that it wanted others to shoulder some of the burdens of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, too. Similarly, some of the members of the community surely didn&t want to be so closely tied to Googleinfrastructure, either.

&By sharing the operational responsibilities for Kubernetes with contributors to the project, we look forward to seeing the new ideas and efficiencies that all Kubernetes contributors bring to the project operations,& Google Kubernetes Engine product manager William Deniss writes in todayannouncement. He also notes that a number of Googlewill still be involved in running the Kubernetes infrastructure.

&Googlesignificant financial donation to the Kubernetes community will help ensure that the projectconstant pace of innovation and broad adoption continue unabated,& saidDan Kohn, the executive director of the CNCF. &We&re thrilled to see Google Cloud transfer management of the Kubernetes testing and infrastructure projects into contributors& hands — making the project not just open source, but openly managed, by an open community.&

Itunclear whether the project plans to take some of the Google-hosted infrastructure and move it to another cloud, but it could definitely do so — and other cloud providers could step up and offer similar credits, too.