[elandybarr]

Shiva is a great guy. I strongly encourage readers to watch or listen to him actually speak, rather than get that third-hand.

I'm glad that he won against Gawker and am cheering for him to defeat Elizabeth Warren for Senate. He is the kind of smart, wise, and experienced technocrat that we could use in government, with an actual numerical sense and experience staffing teams and making payroll.

[uiri]

I'm not going to dispute your assertions regarding his character, politics, or technical competence.

However, it is clear that he did not invent email as we know it today. This claim has repeatedly been debunked. He wrote an interoffice memo system called EMAIL which is, to my knowledge, unrelated to the development of SMTP and the ARPANET systems that preceded it. Those ARPANET systems predated Ayyadurai's EMAIL program(s).

He did not win against Gawker. Gawker happened to go out of business due to a separate defamation lawsuit while Ayyadurai's lawsuit was still pending. Gawker decided to settle the lawsuit instead.

[baudehlo]

Correct, and those systems were even referred to as "email" before this date. Just not in published specifications.

[JumpCrisscross]

> [Ayyadurai] is a great guy

Great people don't sue news outlets to claim credit for things they say they did decades ago. They sue for royalties, or better yet, shut up and do things. This guy checks all the boxes for a sociopathic fraud.

[arkitaip]

He really comes off as a sociopath if you check his Twitter, where he calls someone a moron, keeps attacking Elizabeth Warren, and treats Alex Jones/Info Wars as a serious media outlet [0]. Also, it's hilarious that he considers himself the target of a racist conspiracy but goes to great lengths to deny that Trump's and Bannon's racist politics. And this is a guy who is running for senate.

[0] https://twitter.com/va_shiva

[aeleos]

Treating Alex Jones as a serious media outlet is honestly the worst offense here. This guy has stated on multiple occasions in great detail that he believes that the Newtown shooting was faked and everyone was hired actors, that there is some great deep state conspiracy and other fear mongering shit about how the various politicians are the devil and will destroy the world.

[voidz]

The thing that bugs me most about your comment is that it introduces fallacious groupthink (argument based on authority I guess) that makes it difficult for anyone with a different opinion to speak out: "if you trust such and so (i.c. Alex Jones), you're a moron a priori." This type of reasoning should be discouraged on HN in the same way that "did you even read"-type comments should be (and are) discouraged, because I think that both stifle civil and open discussion. And both of these things can be said in better, less excluding, and less hostile ways.

[danaliv]

> "if you trust such and so (i.c. Alex Jones), you're a moron a priori." This type of reasoning should be discouraged

A fine position on its face in the general case, but let's be real here: if you trust Alex Jones specifically, you really are a moron.

[colejohnson66]

This is getting off topic, but Popehat calls this the "Nazi Exception"[0]

> Yes, rights are important, and we must offer them generously. But surely we can agree that Nazis don't have rights?

[0]: https://www.popehat.com/2017/04/18/the-seductive-appeal-of-t...

[yongjik]

Well, in this particular case, it seems "Nazis" do have rights, because Alex Jones is apparently having a profitable business and nobody's throwing him into jail.

[michaelmrose]

We don't have time to dissect everyone's arguments on merit and perform deep analysis. It helps sometimes to filter based on obvious criteria. Like if someone is a young earth creationist or believes the moon landing was faked. This belief so clearly denotes a lack of critical thinking that dissecting the rest of their arguments that follow is not worth the effort.

The world is so massively full of such low hanging fruit that you can often save a massive amount of time this way as it turns out the majority of people aren't worth listening to outside of narrow areas of knowledge they directly interact with. Its a completely valid strategy. The danger of course is that you risk ignoring useful proof if what you assumed was obvious was incorrect.

[true_religion]

I suppose so, but I'm biased against Alex Jones now only because of hearing so that so many dubious people like him.

Yet, I don't know anything about Alex Jones himself. It'd be nice if that were included in the critique.

[chasing]

Given his history of incendiary garbage-spewing, if you trust Alex Jones, you're a moron.

If there's something you hear from Alex Jones that seems like it might be true, double-check it with knowledgeable sources before you adopt it as a fact.

Better yet, go find more reliable sources for your information.

[michaelmrose]

In fact the time required to vet anything he says against more objective sources is such that listening to him entirely wasted effort. I know no more after hearing him speak than I did before. If he says its raining outside I necessarily must spend just as much time opening a window and looking outside as if he hadn't spoken. To be clear I'm agreeing with you.

[PhasmaFelis]

Alex Jones literally thinks that alien Satanist lizardmen run the world. That's not hyperbolic mockery; he has actually expressed those opinions.

I absolutely agree that automatically dismissing anyone whose news sources don't completely agree with yours is a big problem. But I think intelligent people can agree that some people have proven themselves utterly unworthy of trust.

[voidz]

Wright Brothers thought they could fly.

[elandybarr]

Have you ever looked into his claims or reasons why he believes that?

[elandybarr]

I have spoken to him at length myself.

If you don't think Infowars is a serious news outlet, maybe you haven't watched them? In about 20 years they have had I think 3 retractions, which a propaganda rag like CNN or the Washington Post has to do weekly.

I would wish that HN would have more people who care about primary sources - that is what my academic training taught me. Perhaps if you listened to any of Bannon's speeches rather than malicious rumor and hearsay, you would have a different opinion.

[moonman272]

They don't have retractions because they don't care about accuracy, whereas places like CNN will issue retractions or corrections for anything as simple as a spelling error. Your argument is like saying a football team is the best team in baseball because they've never lost a baseball game.

[icelancer]

>I would wish that HN would have more people who care about primary sources

>If you don't think Infowars is a serious news outlet, maybe you haven't watched them

Sometimes the comments write themselves.

[mcphage]

They had to do one a month or so ago because they were peddling an insane theory involving yogurt.

[bcg1]

And pizzagate

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/26/521545788/...

[PhasmaFelis]

Again, Alex Jones has literally claimed that the world is controlled by Satanists and lizard men from space. It is not to his credit that he hasn't retracted those claims.

[chrismcb]

He isn't sueing for something he did, he is sueing for what they said about him. He is claiming that they are running his reputation.

[jcranmer]

The problem here is that when a reporter accidentally gave him more credit than was warranted and subsequently retracted that statement, he seems to have gone on a crusade to reobtain that credit. Rather like a certain unnamed political figure, he seems to be obsessed with seeking vindication, even when the facts do not match up with his story.

The basic fact is this: RFC 821 and 822 are the current email infrastructure (the most fundamental changes to the infrastructure are MIME and DNS routing, neither of which his system I suspect had any equivalent to). If I were to write you an email, my client would box it up in an RFC 822 formatted message and send it over a protocol described in RFC 821 to make sure that you receive it. Any definition of email that precludes this system is therefore fundamentally dishonest.

The second major issue is that Ayyaduri's invention has had no demonstrable influence on the development of email. This makes it hard to stomach the fine parsing of definitions. By contrast, for example, I consider the B&O railroad to be the first railroad in the US, a claim which does require a bit of contorting (it's the first one that opened for business on a common carrier principle). However, the B&O railroad undoubtedly had a major impact on US railroading history, even if you want to define the Mohawk & Hudson or the Granite Railway or somebody else as the first railroad.

Rather than merely be content to be known as a precocious inventor of an email program, he's trying his damnedest try to be known of the inventor of email in general even when the facts don't really support such a claim.

[chrismcb]

One thing I don't get... He keeps claiming that X isn't real email, because it doesn't mimic the inner office system... OK, so what did his software do that software at the time didn't?

[dsr_]

He's the kind of person who wrote a program called EMAIL in 1978 and claims that means he invented email. Meanwhile:

a) email already existed b) inter-computer email already existed c) there were hundreds or thousands of ARPANET email users by 1978

So he might be very smart, but he also appears to be thoroughly dishonest.

[Frenchgeek]

His explanation for that is the definition of "email" by wikipedia is wrong, and only him know the right one.

I'm not sure what seem worse : He using trolling tactics and expecting people to buy it, or him being so caught up in his own redefinition of reality he now believe it...

[wellboy]

If he claims to have invented email after it has been invented, he does not seem very smart.

No other claims can make him win the case if this condition does not stand, can he?

[bobosha]

I interacted with Shiva at MIT multiple times while he was pursuing his PhD. He was just a dick of a guy, arrogant , prickly etc. But the most telling was his neediness and need to have his ego massaged. Several of his colleagues at MIT and other spots all loathed the guy.

[icelancer]

> I strongly encourage readers to watch or listen to him actually speak

I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went to his various social media outlets. He openly attacks Elizabeth Warren and constantly retweets and comments about how great InfoWars is.

So yeah, nah.

[mcphage]

> Shiva is a great guy.

There's not much evidence this is true and plenty of evidence it is not.

[michaelmrose]

But promoting a fictitious claim to wrongly acquire money from victims is only one step up from mugging people on the street. How can you promote a bad person with such questionable ethics. How on earth does being a bad person not undermine is credibility or qualifications.

Do you believe what I've said is incorrect? Do you believe that ethics aren't a requirement for public service? Do you think its OK to mug people so long as you only mug people you don't like?

[qyv]

Why are glad he won against Gawker? Can you point to any evidence to support his claims?

[TwoBit]

He didn't win against Gawker. Gawker settled because they were going under and being sold.