Yahoo Big-Data Spinoff Hortonworks Reveals Its IPO Price

Hortonworks co-founder and architect Arun C. Murthy. Hortonworks

Hortonworks—the big-data company spun off from Yahoo—has confirmed that it will make its initial public offering on Friday. The company hopes to raise $100 million from 6,250,000 shares offered at $16 per share under the NASDAQ symbol HDP. Underwriters will have the option of purchasing an additional 937,500 shares.

Hortonworks sells support and services for Hadoop, an open source number crunching platform inspired by work first published by Google in the early 2000s. The software—whose development is overseen by the non-profit Apache Software Foundation—has spawned several different companies — including Cloudera and MapR — and Hortonworks is the first of these to go public.

The Hortonworks IPO is good news for all of these startups, says former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata, who founded a startup dedicated to offering Hadoop in the cloud called Altiscale. “It’s a confirmation of what most people already think about Hadoop: that it’s becoming a must-have piece of infrastructure,” he says. “And that open source is becoming the preferred form for IT buyers.”

It should be said that Hortonworks stomached a $86.7 million loss on $33.3 million in revenue so far this year, according to an Security Exchange Commission filing made public last month. But the technology it offers is proven. Hadoop has gone from being an obscure tool used by web companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Facebook to powering large scale data analysis in even stodgy old industries like financial services.

Hortonworks co-founder and architect Arun C. Murthy says that Hadoop’s success was about much more than Yahoo or Hortonworks. It was about the whole community of contributors, both inside and outside Yahoo. “You had Facebook come in, LinkedIn wanted to do social graph analysis,” he says. “Hadoop became a great amalgamation of all these use cases. It was improved in all these directions simultaneously by all these different contributors.”

And these collaborations spawned much more than just Hadoop. LinkedIn spun-out Confluent to commercialize its open source tool Kafka. Former Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray started Continuuity to offer a cloud service for storing and processing data inspired by his former employer’s solution. University of California computer scientists Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica started Databricks, a company based on their next-generation data crunching platform Spark.

“I hope we look back in five years and say this IPO was just the beginning,” Stata says.

Yahoo Big Data Spinoff Hortonworks Reveals IPO Pricing

Hortonworks co-founder and architect Arun C. Murthy. Hortonworks

Hortonworks—the big data company spun-off from Yahoo—has confirmed that it will make its initial public offering on Friday. The company hopes to raise $100 million from 6,250,000 shares offered at $16 per share under the NASDAQ symbol HDP. Underwriters will have the option of purchasing an additional 937,500 shares.

Hortonworks sells support and services for Hadoop, an open source number crunching platform inspired by work first published by Google in the early 2000s. The software—whose development is overseen by the non-profit Apache Software Foundation—has spawned several different companies — including Cloudera and MapR — and Hortonworks is the first of these to go public.

The Hortonworks IPO is good news for all of these startups, says former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata, who founded a startup dedicated to offering Hadoop in the cloud called Altiscale. “It’s a confirmation of what most people already think about Hadoop: that it’s becoming a must-have piece of infrastructure,” he says. “And that open source is becoming the preferred form for IT buyers.”

It should be said that Hortonworks stomached a $86.7 million loss on $33.3 million in revenue so far this year, according to an Security Exchange Commission filing made public last month. But the technology it offers is proven. Hadoop has gone from being an obscure tool used by web companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Facebook to powering large scale data analysis in even stodgy old industries like financial services.

Hortonworks co-founder and architect Arun C. Murthy says that Hadoop’s success was about much more than Yahoo or Hortonworks. It was about the whole community of contributors, both inside and outside Yahoo. “You had Facebook come in, LinkedIn wanted to do social graph analysis,” he says. “Hadoop became a great amalgamation of all these use cases. It was improved in all these directions simultaneously by all these different contributors.”

And these collaborations spawned much more than just Hadoop. LinkedIn spun-out Confluent to commercialize its open source tool Kafka. Former Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray started Continuuity to offer a cloud service for storing and processing data inspired by his former employer’s solution. University of California computer scientists Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica started Databricks, a company based on their next-generation data crunching platform Spark.

“I hope we look back in five years and say this IPO was just the beginning,” Stata says.

Apple’s Ridiculous Censorship of the Nudity in Papers, Please

nagi0330/Steam Community

The award-winning border agent simulator Papers, Please is coming to iOS, but not without a few changes. According to a tweet from creator Lucas Pope, the nudity in the game had to be removed because Apple deemed it “pornographic content.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Sure, Apple has a blanket ban on pornographic content. What’s the problem?” First off, Papers, Please‘s pixelated, low-res nudity—which is seen when you use a body-scanning X-ray machine on the citizens who wish to enter your country—is hardly pornography, neither titillating nor sensual. Second, Apple is happy to sell you movies on iTunes that have actual naked humans, so it has a double standard for games.

But the biggest issue is that removing Papers, Please‘s nudity defangs the game’s artistic impact. Papers, Please is about the degradation to which those crossing the border into a totalitarian nation are subjected, and the bleakness of working in that situation.

To be fair, the nudity in Papers, Please can be disabled in the original game. But in that case, it’s a choice that can be made by the player. Do you want to let entrants maintain the dignity of keeping their underwear on, or do you want your scanners to expose them fully?

The nudity exists to drive home the point of how dehumanizing and invasive the use of nude body scanners at checkpoints is—whether at the border of the glorious fictional nation of Arstotzka, or in the security line at JFK.

Delhi Cops May Get a Squadron of Night-Vision Spy Drones

Getty Images

Drones with night vision cameras may soon patrol the streets of India’s capital city.

The Delhi police plan to launch an ambitious drone-based surveillance project as early as next month, according to the Times of India.

Citing an unnamed source at the police department, the paper reports that the each drone will fly about 200 feet above the ground and cover an area of three to four kilometers. Quick Response Teams, or QRT, will monitor the video streams in real-time, the paper says.

The move follows a high profile accusation that an Uber driver raped a woman in Delhi last week. But the safety of women in India has been a matter of concern for quite some time, and received international attention thanks to mass protests following the gang-rape of a 23-year-old women in Delhi in 2012.

Still, the city’s drone surveillance program will likely raise major privacy concerns, not to mention questions about the safety of having large numbers of drones circling the skies.

The police will begin by deploying drones in the north district area, the same part of town that the Uber incident occurred occurred, the Times reports. “With this project, north Delhi will become the first district with complete camera surveillance in Delhi,” the source told the paper. “This would be achieved with the combined range of with CCTVs and drones.”

If successful in Delhi, the project could be expanded to other cities the paper’s source says. But for now, the police department is still in the process of procuring the equipment.

Human DNA shows traces of 40 million-year battle for survival between primate and pathogen

Examination of DNA from 21 primate species -- from squirrel monkeys to humans -- exposes an evolutionary war against infectious bacteria over iron that circulates in the host's bloodstream. Supported by experimental evidence, these findings, published in Science on Dec. 12, demonstrate the vital importance of an increasingly appreciated defensive strategy called nutritional immunity.

"We've known about nutritional immunity for 40 years," says Matthew Barber, Ph.D., first author and postdoctoral fellow in human genetics at the University of Utah. "What this study shows us is that over the last 40 million years of primate evolution, this battle for iron between bacteria and primates has been a determining factor in our survival as a species." The study also models an approach for uncovering reservoirs of genetic resistance to bacterial infections, knowledge that could be used to confront emerging diseases.

Following infection, the familiar sneezing, runny nose, and inflammation are all part of the immune system's attempts to rid the body of hostile invaders. Lesser known is a separate defense against invasive microbes, called nutritional immunity, that quietly takes place under our skin. This defense mechanism starves infectious bacteria by hiding circulating iron, an essential nutrient it needs for survival. The protein that transports iron in the blood, transferrin, tucks the trace metal safely out of reach.

Clever as it sounds, the ploy is not enough to keep invaders at bay. Several bacterial pathogens -- including those that cause meningitis, gonorrhea, and sepsis -- have developed a weapon, transferrin binding protein (TbpA), that latches onto transferrin and steal its iron. Though scientists have known of the offensive strategy, they failed to realize how pivotal the battle over iron has been in the conflict between host and pathogen.

"Interactions between host and pathogen are transient and temporary," says senior author Nels Elde, Ph.D., assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Utah. "It took casting a wide net across all of primate genetic diversity to capture the significance."

Just as details of a struggle can be gleaned from battle scars, Barber and Elde reconstructed this evolutionary conflict by documenting when and where changes in transferrin and TbpA have occurred over millennia. They examined the DNA of transferrin in 21 species from the primate family tree, and of TbpA from dozens of bacterial strains. The majority of accumulated changes in transferrin and TbpA cluster around a single region of contact between the two proteins, highlighting it as a site of evolutionary conflict between host and pathogen. The authors then used these genetic observations as a guide to perform experiments, which showed changes in TbpA enable the protein to grasp hold of transferrin, and that recent changes in transferrin allow it to evade TbpA.

Up to 25 percent of people in the world's populations have a small alteration in the transferrin gene, which prevents recognition by several infectious bacteria, the most recent sign of this long battle. "Up until this study no one had come up with a functional explanation for why this variation occurs at an appreciable frequency in human populations," says Elde. "We now know that it is a consequence of the pathogens we and our ancestors faced over millions of years."

Understanding the strategies that underlie natural defense mechanisms, including nutritional immunity, could inform new approaches to combatting antibiotic-resistant bacteria and emerging diseases. "By examining the natural conflicts that have played out for millions of years, we can determine what has worked, and apply them in new situations," says Elde.

The work was supported by awards from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Institutes of Health

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Utah Health Sciences . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The Problem With Apple’s Papers, Please Censorship

nagi0330/Steam Community

The award-winning border agent simulator Papers, Please is coming to iOS, but not without a few changes. According to a tweet from creator Lucas Pope, the nudity in the game had to be removed because Apple deemed it “pornographic content.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Sure, Apple has a blanket ban on pornographic content. What’s the problem?” First off, Papers, Please‘s pixelated, low-res nudity—which is seen when you use a body-scanning X-ray machine on the citizens who wish to enter your country—is hardly pornography, neither titillating nor sensual. Second, Apple is happy to sell you movies on iTunes that have actual naked humans, so it has a double standard for games.

But the biggest issue is that removing Papers, Please‘s nudity defangs the game’s artistic impact. Papers, Please is about the degradation to which those crossing the border into a totalitarian nation are subjected, and the bleakness of working in that situation.

To be fair, the nudity in Papers, Please can be disabled in the original game. But in that case, it’s a choice that can be made by the player. Do you want to let entrants maintain the dignity of keeping their underwear on, or do you want your scanners to expose them fully?

The nudity exists to drive home the point of how dehumanizing and invasive the use of nude body scanners at checkpoints is—whether at the border of the glorious fictional nation of Arstotzka, or in the security line at JFK.

Delhi Cops May Get a Squadron of Night-Vision Spy Drones

Getty Images

Drones with night vision cameras may soon patrol the streets of India’s capital city.

The Delhi police plan to launch an ambitious drone-based surveillance project as early as next month, according to the Times of India.

Citing an unnamed source at the police department, the paper reports that the each drone will fly about 200 feet above the ground and cover an area of three to four kilometers. Quick Response Teams, or QRT, will monitor the video streams in real-time and the source told the paper.

The move follows a high profile accusation that an Uber driver raped a woman in Delhi last week. But the safety of women in India has been a matter of concern for quite some time, and received international attention thanks to mass protests following the gang-rape of a 23-year-old women in Delhi in 2012.

Still, the city’s drone surveillance program will likely raise major privacy concerns, not to mention questions about the safety of having large numbers of drones circling the skies.

The police will begin by deploying drones in the north district area, the same part of town that the Uber incident occurred occurred, the Times reports. “With this project, north Delhi will become the first district with complete camera surveillance in Delhi,” the source told the paper. “This would be achieved with the combined range of with CCTVs and drones.”

If successful in Delhi, the project could be expanded to other cities the paper’s source says. But for now, the police department is still in the process of procuring the equipment.

An Interface for Tracking Botnets That’s Fit for a Sci-Fi Starship

“Specimen Box” is an experimental interface for tracking botnets. Screenshot: WIRED/Source

What do you get when you ask a bunch of digital artists to dream up a state-of-the-art tool for fighting cybercrime? A touchscreen interface, fit for a sci-fi starship, that lets researchers examine botnets in the same way biologists might study their own natural specimens.

The project was commissioned by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, whose investigators are tasked with fighting the internet’s bad guys. Earlier this year, it tapped The Office for Creative Research, a multidisciplinary digital design group based in New York, to come up with new ways of looking at one particular threat: botnets, the global networks of infected computers that cyber criminals enlist to do their bidding.

OCR came up with a prototype tool called Specimen Box. It has three different views, with bright, geometric graphics inspired in part by the interfaces of the movie War Games. The main view shows the activity of 15 botnets at a glance. Each is displayed as a sphere, like an organism in a petri dish; dots streaming in represent messages sent from infected computers. With the tool, researchers don’t just see the activity but hear it, too: Each botnet has its own unique audio signature, so the soundscape at any given moment reflects the balance of activity across the 15 specimens.

Wish You Were Here: The WIRED Store 2014 Opening Party

WIRED kicks off its 10th annual WIRED Store, celebrating the best gear, gadgets, and gifts of the year in NYC’s Meatpacking District. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

WIRED kicks off its 10th annual WIRED Store, celebrating the best gear, gadgets, and gifts of the year in NYC’s Meatpacking District.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Love Hultén R-Kaid-R is an exclusive toy in solid wood for the dedicated gamer – a link between the present and the past. R-Kaid-R lets you enjoy classic games such as Pac-Man and Asteroids in first class. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Love Hultén R-Kaid-R is an exclusive toy in solid wood for the dedicated gamer – a link between the present and the past. R-Kaid-R lets you enjoy classic games such as Pac-Man and Asteroids in first class.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Hood Internet performs at the WIRED Store opening in NYC. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Hood Internet performs at the WIRED Store opening in NYC.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Zara Terez Candy Crush chevron leggings. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Zara Terez Candy Crush chevron leggings.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

New York Giant Rashad Jennings tests out Ring, a wearable cloud control device: You put it on your finger and make a gesture to control almost anything, including home appliances. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

New York Giant Rashad Jennings tests out Ring, a wearable cloud control device: You put it on your finger and make a gesture to control almost anything, including home appliances.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Milkman Sound Creamer: This 20W vacuum tube guitar amplifier is made in San Francisco with the highest-quality components available. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

The Milkman Sound Creamer: This 20W vacuum tube guitar amplifier is made in San Francisco with the highest-quality components available.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Photo booth at the WIRED Store opening. Bryan Derballa

Photo booth at the WIRED Store opening.

Bryan Derballa

A look inside the BMWi 3. Bryan Derballa/WIRED

A look inside the BMWi 3.

Bryan Derballa/WIRED

Guests at the WIRED Store opening in NYC. Bryan Derballa

Guests at the WIRED Store opening in NYC.

Bryan Derballa

We can hardly believe this year marks the 10th anniversary of our annual Holiday pop-up, the WIRED Store—and there are so many ways to check it out. Starting tomorrow and running through December 21, our Manhattan brick-and-mortar will be open from 11:00AM to 7:00PM daily; you can visit us online; and you can check out our opening party right here. Click through the post to see all the action as we break the place in for you.