[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

[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.