An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software "useful for surveillance" as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China's surveillance state. Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can "classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features," according to research grant documents obtained via public records request. "These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance," the document read.

Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor's research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha's lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha's research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha's research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha's team pledged to "work closely with Alibaba researchers" to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as "aggressive," "shy," "impulsive," and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software's "clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled," Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. "Given what we know now about China's architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it."

It's not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor's expertise. In January 2019 -- back when the Alibaba grant was still active -- Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled "large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds." Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into "efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds." Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises "serious questions about ethics in machine learning research," Fedasiuk said.

IoT Times brings an update on "the race to create a new set of encryption standards." Last month, it was announced that a specialized security algorithm co-authored by security experts of NXP, IBM, and Arm had been selected by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to become part of an industry global standard designed to counter quantum threats.
IoT Times interviews the cryptography expert who co-created the Crystals-Kyber lattice-based algorithm selected by NIST — Joppe W. Bos, a senior principal cryptographer at the Competence Center for Cryptography and Security at NXP Semiconductors.

And what worries his colleagues at the semiconductor company isn't the "imminent threat of quantum computers," Bos says, but an even closer and more practical deadline: "the timeline for these post-quantum crypto standards." "Two weeks ago, NIST announced the winners of these new public standards, the post-quantum crypto standards, and their timeline is that in 2024, so in roughly two years, the winners will be converted into standards. And as soon as the standards are released, our customers will expect NXP Semiconductors, as one of the leaders in crypto and security, to already have support for these standards, because we are, of course, at the start of the chain for many end products. Our secure elements, our secure platforms, SOCs, are one of the first things that need to be integrated into larger platforms that go into end products. Think about industrial IoT. Think about automotive applications. So, our customers already expect us to support post-quantum crypto standards in 2024, and not only support but, for many companies, being able to compute the functional requirements of the standard.

"It took over ten years to settle down on the best methods for RSA and ECC, and now we have a much shorter timeline to get ready for post-quantum crypto."
"When you ask the experts, it ranges from one to five decades until we can see quantum computers big enough to break our current crypto," Bos says in the interview. So he stresses that they're not driven by a few of quantum computers. "The right question to ask, at least for us at NXP is, when is this new post-quantum crypto standard available? Because then, our customers will ask for post-quantum support, and we need to be ready.

"The standard really drives our development and defines our roadmap."

But speaking of the standard's "functional requirements", in the original story submission Slashdot reader dkatana raised an interesting point. There's already billions of low-powered IoT devices in the world.

Will they all have the memory and processing power to use this new lattice-based encryption?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market -- and to do so, it's taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. Today, Godot claims some 1,500 contributors, and is considered one of the world's top open source projects by various metrics. Godot has been used in high-profile games such as the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster, published by Sega last year as the first major mainstream game powered by Godot. But Tesla, too, has apparently used Godot to power some of the more graphically intensive animations in its mobile app.

Among Godot's founding creators is Juan Linietsky, who has served as head of development for the Godot project for the past 13 years, and who will now serve as CEO of W4 Games, a new venture that's setting out to take Godot to the next level. W4 quietly exited stealth last week, but today the Ireland-headquartered company has divulged more details about its goals to grow Godot and make it accessible for a wider array of commercial use cases. On top of that, the company told TechCrunch that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to make its mission a reality, with backers including OSS Capital, Lux Capital, Sisu Game Ventures and -- somewhat notably -- Bob Young, the co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat, an enterprise-focused open source company that IBM went on to acquire for $34 billion in 2019.

[...] "Companies like Red Hat have proven that with the right commercial offerings on top, the appeal of using open source in enterprise environments is enormous," Linietsky said. "W4 intends to do this very same thing for the game industry." In truth, Godot is nowhere near having the kind of impact in gaming that Linux has had in the enterprise, but it's still early days -- and this is exactly where W4 could make a difference. [...] W4's core target market will be broad -- it's gunning for independent developers and small studios, as well as medium and large gaming companies. The problem that it's looking to solve, ultimately, is that while Godot is popular with hobbyists and indie developers, companies are hesitant to use the engine on commercial projects due to its inherent limitations -- currently, there is no easy way to garner technical support, discuss the product's development roadmap, or access any other kind of value-added service. [...]

"W4 will offer console ports to developers under very accessible terms," Linietsky said. "Independent developers won't need to pay upfront to publish, while for larger companies there will be commercial packages that include support." Elsewhere, W4 is developing a range of products and services which it's currently keeping under wraps, with Linietsky noting that they will most likely be announced at Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next March. "The aim of W4 is to help developers overcome any problem developers may stumble upon while trying to use Godot commercially," Linietsky added. It's worth noting that there are a handful of commercial companies out there already, such as Lone Wolf Technology and Pineapple Works, that help developers get the most out of Godot -- including console porting. But Linietsky was keen to highlight one core difference between W4 and these incumbents: its expertise. "The main distinctive feature of W4 is that it has been created by the Godot project leadership, which are the individuals with the most understanding and insight about Godot and its community," he said.

Google has been challenged by an algorithm that could solve a problem faster than its Sycamore quantum computer, which it used in 2019 to claim the first example of "quantum supremacy" -- the point at which a quantum computer can complete a task that would be impossible for ordinary computers. Google concedes that its 2019 record won't stand, but says that quantum computers will win out in the end. From a report: Sycamore achieved quantum supremacy in a task that involves verifying that a sample of numbers output by a quantum circuit have a truly random distribution, which it was able to complete in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. The Google team said that even the world's most powerful supercomputer at the time, IBM's Summit, would take 10,000 years to achieve the same result. Now, Pan Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues have created an improved algorithm for a non-quantum computer that can solve the random sampling problem much faster, challenging Google's claim that a quantum computer is the only practical way to do it. The researchers found that they could skip some of the calculations without affecting the final output, which dramatically reduces the computational requirements compared with the previous best algorithms. The researchers ran their algorithm on a cluster of 512 GPUs, completing the task in around 15 hours. While this is significantly longer than Sycamore, they say it shows that a classical computer approach remains practical.

"Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste," reports Reuters, "which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry.

Apple has more than 165,000 full-time employees, the article points out, and "The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism." The update came after the tech sector — which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers — received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.... Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation — and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism....

Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.
Meta, Amazon, and Google do not mention caste in internal polices, the article points out — but they all told Reuters it's already prohibited by their current policies against discrimination.

And yet, "Over 1,600 Google workers demanded the addition of caste to the main workplace code of conduct worldwide in a petition, seen by Reuters, which they emailed to CEO Sundar Pichai last month and re-sent last week after no response."

ZDNet's Stephanie Condon spoke with Red Hat's new CEO, Matt Hicks, a veteran of the company that's been working there for over 14 years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from their discussion: Matt Hicks, Red Hat's new CEO, doesn't have the background of your typical chief executive. He studied computer hardware engineering in college. He began his career as an IT consultant at IBM. His on-the-ground experience, however, is one of his core assets as the company's new leader, Hicks says. "The markets are changing really quickly," he tells ZDNet. "And just having that intuition -- of where hardware is going, having spent time in the field with what enterprise IT shops struggle with and what they do well, and then having a lot of years in Red Hat engineering -- I know that's intuition that I'll lean on... Around that, there's a really good team at Red Hat, and I get to lean on their expertise of how to best deliver, but that I love having that core intuition."

Hicks believes his core knowledge helps him to guide the company's strategic bets. While his experience is an asset, Hicks says it's not a given that a good developer will make a good leader. You also need to know how to communicate your ideas persuasively. "You can't just be the best coder in the room," he says. "Especially in STEM and engineering, the softer skills of learning how to present, learning how to influence a group and show up really well in a leadership presentation or at a conference -- they really start to define people's careers."

Hicks says that focus on influence is an important part of his role now that he didn't relish earlier in his career. "I think a lot of people don't love that," he says. "And yet, you can be the best engineer on the planet and work hard, but if you can't be heard, if you can't influence, it's harder to deliver on those opportunities." Hicks embraced the art of persuasion to advance his career. And as an open-source developer, he learned to embrace enterprise products to advance Red Hat's mission. He joined Red Hat just a few years after Paul Cormier -- then Red Hat's VP of engineering, and later Hicks' predecessor as CEO -- moved the company from its early distribution, Red Hat Linux, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was a move that not everyone liked. [...] "As he settles into his new role as CEO, the main challenge ahead of Hicks will be picking the right industries and partners to pursue at the edge," writes Condon. "Red Hat is already working at the edge, in a range of different industries. It's working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and it's partnering with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's also working with Verizon on hybrid mobile edge computing. Even so, the opportunity is vast. Red Hat expects to see around $250 billion in spending at the edge by 2025."

"There'll be a tremendous growth of applications that are written to be able to deliver to that," Hicks says. "And so our goals in the short term are to pick the industries and build impactful partnerships in those industries -- because it's newer, and it's evolving."

With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, on Monday the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums issued a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortium's assets being transferred to the CXL consortium. From a report: With this integration, CXL is set to become the dominant CPU-to-device interconnect standard, as virtually all major manufacturers are now backing the standard, and competing standards have bowed out of the race and been absorbed by CXL. Pre-dating CXL by a few years, OpenCAPI was one of the earlier standards for a cache-coherent CPU interconnect. The standard, backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM, among others, was an extension of IBM's existing Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology, opening it up to the rest of the industry and placing its control under an industry consortium. In the last six years, OpenCAPI has seen a modest amount of use, most notably being implemented in IBM's POWER9 processor family. Like similar CPU-to-device interconnect standards, OpenCAPI was essentially an application extension on top of existing high speed I/O standards, adding things like cache-coherency and faster (lower latency) access modes so that CPUs and accelerators could work together more closely despite their physical disaggregation.

The average cost of a data breach rose to an all-time high of $4.4 million this year, according to the IBM Security report released Wednesday. That marked a 2.6% increase from a year ago and a 13% jump since 2020. CNET reports: More than half of the organizations surveyed acknowledged they had passed on those costs to their customers in the form of higher prices for their products and services, IBM said. The annual report is based on an analysis of data breaches experienced by 550 organizations around the world between March 2021 and March 2022. The research, which was sponsored and analyzed by IBM, was conducted by the Ponemon Institute.

The cost estimates are based on both immediate and longer-term expenses. While some costs like the payment of ransoms and those related to investigating and containing the breach tend to be accounted for right away, others such as regulatory fines and lost sales can show up years later. On average, those polled said they accrued just under half of the costs related to a given breach more than a year after it occurred.

Microsoft is rallying other big-name cloud-computing providers such as Alphabet's Google and Oracle to press the U.S. government into spreading its spending on such services more widely, taking aim at Amazon's dominance in such contracts. From a report: The software giant has issued talking points to other cloud companies aimed at jointly lobbying Washington to require major government projects to use more than one cloud service, according to people familiar with the effort and a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft also approached VMware, Dell, IBM and HP said the people familiar with the effort. It hasn't yet asked Amazon to join the loose alliance, the people said.

Amazon dominates the cloud-infrastructure industry with a 39% share of the 2021 global market ahead of Microsoft at No. 2 with a 21% share, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Amazon looms even larger in the business of selling cloud services to governments. Amazon's cloud had a 47% share of the 2021 U.S. and Canada public-sector market orders, ahead of 28% for Microsoft, according to Gartner. The National Security Agency last year picked Amazon as the sole vendor for a cloud contract that could be worth potentially as much as $10 billion over the next decade, renewing an existing business relationship.

Michael Alan Stollery, the CEO of blockchain company Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services (TBIS), has pleaded guilty to securities fraud over a $21 million cryptocurrency scam. From a report:The California man admitted to falsifying details around the BAR coin, a crowdfunding token that should have -- but wasn't -- registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The TBIS scam was one of many dodgy initial coin offerings, or ICOs, in the late '10s. According to the complaint, between 2017 and 2018, Stollery introduced TBIS as a new company and hyped its coin with a string of elaborate false claims. TBIS touted nonexistent links with companies like Apple, Boeing, and IBM. Some of the "partners" complained, to which Stollery apparently replied, "I did not know that a procedure would need to have been followed, etc." The company also offered a variety of supposedly trademarked services for which it had not registered trademarks. (Perhaps more importantly, the services appear to have not existed, and the business affiliated with TBIS was apparently an IT contractor and equipment reseller.)

"In what's being hailed as an important first for chemistry, an international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule," reports New Atlas. "The breakthrough allows for an unprecedented level of control over chemical bonds within these structures, and could open up some exciting possibilities in what's known as molecular machinery."

"Selective chemistry — the ability to steer reactions at will and to form exactly the chemical bonds you want and no others — is a long-standing quest in chemistry," adds the announcement from IBM Research. "Our team has been able to achieve this level of selectivity in tip-induced redox reactions using scanning probe microscopy." Our technique consisted in using the tip of a scanning probe microscope to apply voltage pulses to single molecules. We were able to target specific chemical bonds in those molecules, breaking those bonds and forging new, different ones to switch back and forth at will among three different molecular structures.

The molecules in our experiment all consisted of the same atoms, but differed in the way those atoms were bonded together and arranged in space... Our findings were published today and featured on the cover of Science.

Our demonstration of selective and reversible formation of intramolecular covalent bonds is unprecedented. It advances our understanding of chemical reactions and opens a route towards advanced artificial molecular machines.... Imagine one could rearrange bonds inside a molecule at will, transforming one structural isomer into various other ones in a controlled manner. In this paper, we describe a system and a method to make exactly that possible — including the control of the direction of the atomic rearrangements by means of an external driving voltage, and without the use of reagents.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Grokew for sharing the story!

IBM saw its hybrid-cloud revenue jump 18% to $5.9 billion in the last three months, reports ZDNet — while also experiencing "its highest sales growth in a decade.

"Much of that is due to its stand-alone Red Hat division." True, Red Hat sales increased by "only" 12%, which is low by Red Hat standards but darn good by any other standard. So what will Red Hat do now that it has a new CEO, Matt Hicks, and chairman, Paul Cormier?

The answer: Stay the course.

In an interview, Hicks, who's been with Red Hat since 2006, said, "[We'll keep using] the same core fundamentals that we built 20-plus years ago." Why? Because the combination of Linux, open-source software, and top support, "continues to play in new markets, whether that's the shift to cloud and cloud services or to edge computing. In the next couple of quarters. we'll just focus on executing. There's great momentum right now around the open hybrid cloud."

It's not just the cloud, though. Hicks continued, "We have a lot of opportunities. We're also working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and two days ago, we announced a partnership with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's pretty cool to see Linux and open source technologies being pulled into these totally new markets in the industry. So my job is not to change anything but keep us executing and capturing the opportunities ahead...."

Moving to the technical side, I asked about Red Hat and CentOS. Hicks replied, "I think it was a necessary shift and change. I'm a big believer in what makes open source work is the contribution cycle, and that wasn't happening with CentOS."
Cormier adds that going forward Linux's biggest contribution to the world may be innovation (and not accessbility), "and that needs contributions. Without it driving open source and Linux, the cloud wouldn't be here."

"A growing number of cities and towns all over the U.S. are handing out cash grants and other perks aimed at drawing skilled employees of faraway companies to live there and work remotely," reports the Wall Street Journal: A handful of such programs have existed for years, but they have started gaining traction during the pandemic — and have really taken off in just the past year or so. Back in October there were at least 24 such programs in the U.S. Today there are 71, according to the Indianapolis-based company MakeMyMove, which is contracted by cities and towns to set up such programs.

Because these programs specifically target remote workers who have high wages, a disproportionate share of those who are taking advantage of them work in tech — and especially for big tech companies. Companies whose employees have participated in one remote worker incentive program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, include Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Lyft, Netflix, Oracle and Siemens, according to a spokeswoman for the organization.

Local governments are offering people willing to move up to $12,000 in cash, along with subsidized gym memberships, free babysitting and office space....

A skeptic might ask why local economic development programs are spending funds to subsidize the lives of people who work for some of the most valuable companies in the world. On the other hand, because these remote workers aren't coming to town seeking local jobs, an argument can be made that they constitute a novel kind of stimulus program for parts of the country that have been left out of the tech boom — courtesy of big tech companies... Every remote worker these places successfully attract and retain is like gaining a fraction of a new factory or corporate office, with much less expenditure and risk, argues Mark Muro, who studies cities and labor at the Brookings Institution.
The reporter interviewed an Amazon engineer who moved to Greensburg, Indiana (population: 12,193), and Meta worker David Gora, who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and praises its relocation program's sense of mission, possibility, and community. "Even with the pay cuts that Meta has imposed on workers who relocate to areas with a lower cost of living, Mr. Gora is saving a lot more money and has a much higher quality of life than before, he adds."

Tulsa's program is unique in that it's funded by a philanthropic organization rather than a local economic-development budget, the article points out. But it adds that "a study conducted by the Economic Innovation Group and commissioned by Tulsa Remote concluded that for every two people the program brings to the city, one new job is created." By contrast, when an office moves to a town, every new high-wage tech job creates an estimated five more jobs in sectors including healthcare, education and service, according to research by economist Enrico Moretti. That's because those deals involve not only people but the money that goes into building and maintaining facilities, paying commercial property taxes and more.

Still, for towns that don't have the budget to attract a whole office or factory, the modest impact of bringing in a handful of remote tech workers can be balanced by the much smaller investment required to attract them.

A senior systems administrator at the Free Software Foundation points out that they're running free software in two data centers and over a hundred virtual machine — each and every one with "a freedom-respecting BIOS."

But the "how" is surprisingly intricate: [E]arlier this week, we replaced "Columbia", the last of any FSF-run machines running a nonfree BIOS....

At FSF, our current standard is ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards with AMD CPUs 6200 series CPUs released in 2012. For the BIOS, we install Libreboot, the easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs, or a version of Coreboot that is carefully built to avoid including any nonfree blobs. They are fast enough for our needs, and we expect this to be the case for many more years to come. They are also very affordable systems. We are also working toward supporting Raptor Computer Systems' newer and more powerful Talos II, as well as Blackbird motherboards that use IBM POWER9 CPUs. The POWER9 CPU architecture is called "PowerPC 64-bit little endian," abbreviated "ppc64el...." The Raptor motherboards come with entirely free firmware — and even have free hardware designs!

However, this type of migration has its challenges. For example, the first thing we needed to address before using these motherboards is that the main operating system we use, Trisquel GNU/Linux, didn't previously run on pp64el. So, earlier this year, we set up a Raptor POWER9 computer running Debian (without using any nonfree parts of Debian repositories) and loaned it to the maintainers of Trisquel for as long as needed. And now, we are proud to say that the upcoming Trisquel 11 release will support POWER9...!

Before I decommissioned Columbia, I ran a dmidecode, which told me that the BIOS program fit within a single megabyte of space. Often, very simplistic firmware becomes more complicated in later models, and that also usually means it has a growing significance for a user's software freedom. Some newer nonfree BIOSes have grown into operating systems in their own right, sometimes with large programs such as a full Web browser.

There is no fully-free BIOS available for x86 Intel and AMD CPUs released after about 2013. The key blocking factor is that those CPUs require certain firmware in the BIOS, like Intel Management Engine. Those CPUs will also refuse to run firmware that hasn't been cryptographically signed by private keys controlled by AMD and Intel, and AMD and Intel will only sign their own nonfree firmware. At the FSF, we refuse to run that nonfree firmware, and we applaud the many people who also avoid it. For those people who do run those Intel or AMD systems, running Coreboot or Osboot is still a step up the Freedom Ladder for the software freedom of your BIOS.

The road to freedom is a long road. We hope our dedication to achieve milestones like these can inspire the free software movement.

Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO. ZDNet reports: It had been rumored at May 2022's Red Hat Summit that Cormier, who had been with Red Hat for over 14 years, might retire soon. That rumor wasn't true, but he is moving to a "somewhat" less demanding position. That said, as Stephanie Wonderlick, Red Hat's VP of Brand Experience + Communication, said, "I don't think Red Hat would have become Red Hat without Paul Cormier." [...]

As for Hicks, he's a popular figure in the company. He's known as a hands-on leader. Hicks joined Red Hat in 2006 as a developer working on porting Perl applications to Java. That is not the start one thinks of for a future CEO! Hicks knows it. He said in a note to Red Hat employees that he'd "never imagined that my career would lead me to this moment. If I had followed my initial path, not raised my hand for certain projects, or shied away from contributing ideas and asking questions, I might not be here. That is what I love about Red Hat, and it's something that differentiates us from other companies: nothing is predetermined; we're only limited by our passion and drive to contribute and make an impact." So it was that he quickly rose to leadership positions. In particular, thanks to his work with Red Hat OpenShift, he saw Red Hat move from being primarily a Linux powerhouse to a hybrid cloud technology leader as well.

Hicks, now in charge, said in a statement, "When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that. I am humbled and energized to be stepping into this role at this moment. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry, and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast. I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open-source technology truly can unlock the world's potential." He also said, Together, [IBM and Red Hat] can really lead a new era of hybrid computing. Red Hat has the technology expertise and open-source model -- IBM has the reach."

Cormier's new role will focus on "moving forward to help customers drive innovation forward with a hybrid cloud platform built on open-source technology. Open-source technology has won the innovation debates, and whatever the future looks like, it's going to be built on open-source technology, and Red Hat will be there. Moving ahead, Cormier will continue to work alongside IBM chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. Both Cormier and Hicks will report to Krishna. As for day-to-day work, Hicks said, "I'm here to do the work with you. Let's roll up our sleeves together, embrace these values and earn the opportunity ahead of us."

Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month. The Register reports: The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees." Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.

"The emails contained within Exhibit 10 evidence an interest at the then CEO-level to change the profile of IBM employees so that it reflected a younger workforce," said New Jersey Superior Court Judge Alberto Rivas in his order. On June 14 the judge dismissed the case because IBM agreed to settle. That will prevent the messages in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former HR SVP Diane Gherson are said to discuss what the judge described as "the push to increase the number of millennial employees and decrease the number of older employees" from being made public. "The facts of the matter have not changed: there was and is no systemic age discrimination at IBM and the data back that up," IBM's spokesperson said. "Further, with regards to the Schenfeld case, age played no role whatsoever in this individual's departure."

At Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the senior curator just announced the results of a multi-year recovery and restoration process: making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of a legendary 1976 conference: For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing's top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Among the speakers:

- A young Donald Knuth on the early history of programming languages

- FORTRAN designer John Backus on programming in America in the 1950s — some personal perspectives

- Harvard's Richard Milton Bloch (who worked with Grace Hopper in 1944)

- Mathematician/nuclear physicist Stanislaw M. Ulam on the interaction of mathematics and computing

- Edsger W. Dijkstra on "a programmer's early memories."


The Computer History Museum teases some highlights: Typical of computers of this generation, the 1946 ENIAC, the earliest American large-scale electronic computer, had to be left powered up 24 hours a day to keep its 18,000 vacuum tubes healthy. Turning them on and off, like a light bulb, shortened their life dramatically. ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly discusses this serious issue....

The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II. Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell's lecture was — excuse me — a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM's Bob Bemer, "On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus — that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before."

Publishing these original primary sources for the first time is part of CHM's mission to not only preserve computing history but to make it come alive. We hope you will enjoy seeing and hearing from these early pioneers of computing.

The Associated Press reports on "a crewless robotic boat that had tried to retrace the 1620 sea voyage of the Mayflower" from the U.K. to Massachusetts' Plymouth Rock. And after five weeks it finally did reach North America.

Halifax, Canada.

"The technology that makes up the autonomous system worked perfectly, flawlessly," an IBM computing executive involved in the project told the Associated Press. But "Mechanically, we did run into problems."

It's especially disappointing because they'd tried the same voyage last year. (Slashdot had noted that "Unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger 'had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem,' reports the Associated Press...")

So what happened this year? A new article from the Associated Press reports: It set off again from England nearly a year later on April 27, bound for Virginia — but a generator problem diverted it to Portugal's Azores islands, where a team member flew in to perform emergency repairs. More troubles on the open sea came in late May when the U.S.-bound boat developed a problem with the charging circuit for the generator's starter batteries.

AI software is getting better at helping self-driving machines understand their surroundings and pilot themselves, but most robots can't heal themselves when the hardware goes awry.

Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the ship, switched to a back-up navigation computer on May 30 and charted a course to Halifax — which was closer than any U.S. destination.
And unlike the real Mayflower, "the boat's webcam on Sunday morning showed it being towed by a larger boat as the Halifax skyline neared — a safety requirement under international maritime rules, IBM said."

IBM must pay $1.6 billion to BMC Software for swapping in its own software while servicing their mutual client, a Houston federal judge ruled. From a report: US District Judge Gray Miller, after a seven-day non-jury trial, rejected IBM's claim that their mutual client AT&T opted to switch software products on its own and ruled that IBM's role in the decision to dump BMC "smacked of intentional wrongdoing." For more than a decade, IBM serviced AT&T's mainframe computers, which ran on rival BMC's software products. IBM and BMC have long operated under a carefully negotiated agreement that forbids IBM from encouraging mutual clients, like AT&T, to switch to IBM's competing software product line. BMC sued IBM in 2017 claiming its rival intended to breach their agreement and poach AT&T's software business when the two companies renewed their power-sharing deal in 2015. IBM countered that AT&T dumped BMC's products and jumped to IBM for its own reasons, which IBM claims is fair game under its BMC agreement.

Lotus-1-2-3, an ancient spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (and later IBM), has been ported to a new operating system. drewsup writes: As reported by The Register, a Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast called Tavis Ormandy (who is also a bug-hunter for Google Project Zero), managed to successfully port the program onto Linux, which seems to be quite the feat of reverse engineering. It's important to stress that this isn't an emulated program, but rather the original 1990 Lotus 1-2 -- for x86 Unix running natively on modern x86 Linux.