New Zealand startup Montoux shut down after a lawsuit from $46B fintech giant FIS, which accused it of stealing trade secrets—claims Montoux denied. The company had gained traction as an alternative to FIS’s Prophet software, but instead of competing, FIS sued.
Filed in Delaware, the lawsuit alleged Montoux used FIS code and trained AI on proprietary data. With legal costs hitting $600K upfront, Montoux couldn't afford to fight and liquidated. This "lawfare" tactic highlights how corporations use litigation to stifle competition, raising serious questions about monopolistic practices and the barriers to innovation.
On the one hand, the US legal system is shockingly corrupt and openly pay-to-play.
On the other, if you can't raise $600k -- or $2M -- for a legal defense, you're not really a "promising AI startup." You're something more akin to a garage project.
The smart move for a small company (assuming they don't want to fold) would be to hire an out-of-work lawyer as "part-time in-house counsel" and have them start fighting the case on your company's behalf. File an aggressive response, a motion to dismiss, etc. That way, you've got a fighting chance, and it'll cost >10x less than $600k.
Even with a global lockdown, there will always be a reservoir of virus somewhere.
Some immunocompromised people can carry the virus for weeks.
Also, what about households where one person catches COVID the day before lockdown, incubates for a few days (asymptomatically), then transmits it to another person in the household, who also incubates for a few days...
At the end of the two week lockdowns, some people will still be contagious.
As a freelancer in Paris, I've been invoicing 625€ daily in 2018 and 2019, and 700€ in 2020, doing Big Data / Scala development with a sprinkle of devops, for the same customer.
I think I could get 800-900€ if I find a customer that pays better and focus on the Big Data / GCP sectors. Just need to find a contract through word of mouth, and not through a recruiter that takes a 100-150€ margin...
You get less as a salaried employee in France though...
Having servers offer scp instead of ssh is not the only problem.
What about this part of the article:
Finally, while the danger is remote, it is worth noting that a local file name containing `backticks` (a file named `touch you-lose`, for example) will be handled the same way on the other end; if a user can be convinced to perform a recursive copy of a directory tree containing a file with a malicious name, bad things can happen.
> In the face of this it's quite a bold move for France to go from zero to 28 days for the sake of benefiting gender norms and family relationships in the long-term.
We didn't go from zero to 28 days of paternity leave. We doubled it, from 14 to 28.
Filed in Delaware, the lawsuit alleged Montoux used FIS code and trained AI on proprietary data. With legal costs hitting $600K upfront, Montoux couldn't afford to fight and liquidated. This "lawfare" tactic highlights how corporations use litigation to stifle competition, raising serious questions about monopolistic practices and the barriers to innovation.
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