New submitter IBMResearch shares a report from ZDNet: IBM's new toolkit aims to give developers easier access to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a nascent technology with significant promise for a number of security use cases. "Today, files are often encrypted in transit and at rest but decrypted while in use, creating a security vulnerability," reports ZDNet. "This often compels organizations to make trade-offs and go through long vetting processes in order to ensure they can keep their valuable data protected while still gaining some value out of it. FHE aims to resolve that issue."

"While the technology holds great potential, it does require a significant shift in the security paradigm," the report adds. "Typically, inside the business logic of an application, data remains decrypted, [Flavio Bergamaschi, FHE pioneer and IBM Researcher] explained. But with the implementation of FHE, that's no longer the case -- meaning some functions and operations will change."

The toolkit is available today in GitHub for MacOS and iOS, and it will soon be available for Linux and Android.

Slack is partnering with Amazon in a multi-year agreement that means all Amazon employees will start to use Slack. The Verge reports: The deal comes just as Slack faces increased competition from Microsoft Teams, and it will also see Slack migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon's Chime platform alongside a broader adoption of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon's roll out of Slack to all of its employees is a big part of the deal, thanks to an enterprise-wide agreement. It's not immediately clear how many of Amazon's 840,000 employees will be using Slack, though. Up until today, Slack's biggest customer has been IBM, which is rolling out Slack to its 350,000 employees.

While Slack has long used AWS to power parts of its chat app, it's now committing to using Amazon's cloud services as its preferred partner for storage, compute, database, security, analytics, machine learning, and future collaboration features. The deal means it's unlikely we'll see Slack turn to Microsoft's Azure cloud services or Google Cloud to power parts of its service in the foreseeable future. [...] Slack and Amazon are also promising better product integration and interoperability for features like AWS Chatbot, a service that pushes out Slack channel alerts for AWS instances. In the coming months, Slack and AWS will improve its Amazon AppFlow integration to support bi-directional transfer of data between AWS services and Slack channels.

May 23rd marks the 25th anniversary of the day Sun Microsystems introduced Java to the world, notes InfoWorld.

Looking at both the present and the future, they write that currently Java remains popular "with enterprises even as a slew of rival languages, such as Python and Go, now compete for the hearts and minds of software developers." Java continues to rank among the top three programming languages in the most prominent language popularity indexes — Tiobe, RedMonk, and PyPL. Java had enjoyed a five-year stint as the top language in the Tiobe index until this month, when it was overtaken by the C language, thanks perhaps to the combination of C's wide use in medical equipment and the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, Java represents a huge ecosystem and source of jobs. There were an estimated nine million Java developers worldwide in 2017, according to Oracle. A recent search of jobs site Dice.com found nearly 12,000 Java-related jobs in the USA, compared to roughly 9,000 jobs in JavaScript and 7,600 in Python. Plus, Java has spawned an enormous ecosystem of tools ranging from the Spring Framework to application servers from companies such as IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle to the JavaFX rich media platform.

The developers behind Java — including Oracle and the broader OpenJDK community — have kept the platform moving forward. Released two months ago, Java 14, or Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, added capabilities including switch expressions, to simplify coding, and JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) Event Streaming, for continuous consumption of JFR data. Up next for Java is JDK 15, set to arrive as a production release in September 2020, with capabilities still being lined up for it. So far, the features expected include a preview of sealed classes, which provide more-granular control over code, and records, which provide classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Also under consideration for Java is a plan dubbed Project Leyden, which would address "longterm pain points" in Java including resource footprint, startup time, and performance issues by introducing static images to the platform.

"Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter," reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC "can trace its roots back to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's implementation of Microsoft's first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer."

"Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code for the original 1983 GW-BASIC...?" writes Slashdot reader sonofusion82, adding "there are not Makefiles or build scripts, just a bunch of 8088 ASM files."

Or as Hackaday jokes, "Microsoft releases the source code you wanted almost 30 years ago." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic... Now you can get the once-coveted Microsoft Basic source code...

They put up a read only GW-BASIC repository, presumably to stop a flood of feature requests for GPU acceleration...

From what we understand, GW-Basic was identical to IBM's BASICA, but didn't require certain IBM PC ROMs to operate. Of course, BASICA, itself, came from MBASIC, Microsoft's CP/M language that originated with Altair Basic... We did enjoy the 1975 copyright message, though:

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975

BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).
Bill Gates was 19 years old, Paul Allen was 22.

IBM cut an unspecified number of jobs across the U.S., eliminating employees in at least five states. The company declined to comment on the total number, but the workforce reductions appear far-reaching. From a report: "IBM's work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly add high-value skills to our workforce. While we always consider the current environment, IBM's workforce decisions are in the interest of the long-term health of our business," company spokesman Ed Barbini said Thursday in a statement. "Recognizing the unique and difficult situation this business decision may create for some of our employees, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021." Based on a review of IBM internal communications on the Slack corporate messaging service, the number of affected employees is likely to be in the thousands, said a North Carolina-based worker who lost his job along with his entire team of 12. "This was far ranging -- and historical employment ratings, age and seniority did not seem to matter," he said. The person asked not to be identified on concern that speaking publicly may impact his severance package.

Lots of developers really want to learn Go, a programming language for large systems created by Google, meanwhile most developers are sick of attending meetings, and most of those working at multinational corporations aren't happy there. From a report: That's according to the results of a survey of over 16,655 developers from 76 countries carried out by HackerEarth, a company with offices in India and San Francisco that provides tools for recruiters to remotely assess developer coding skills. Go comes out top of the languages most developers want to know. The survey finds that 32% of experienced developers pick Go as the programming language they want to learn, well ahead of Python, which 24% say they want to learn. The desire for learning Go lines up with the results of a similar survey by remote developer hiring firm HackerRank. Go is used at Google, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, IBM, Target, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, and Dropbox.

Steve Denning was director of knowledge management at the World Bank from 1996 to 2000, and now consults with organizations around the world on management and innovation. And in 2018 he wrote the book The Age of Agile. Now he's arguing in Forbes that "As the global coronavirus crisis is forcing many organizations to act with unaccustomed speed, organizational agility has suddenly become a necessity.

"The crisis is also making obvious that institutional agility means much more than having lots of agile teams scattered around the organization." "To create a truly agile enterprise," as the article, "The Agile C-Suite", by Bain consultants Darrell K. Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez in the May-June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out, "the top officers — most, if not all, of the C-suite — must embrace agile principles too." Agility of course isn't new. What's new is to see the C-suite embracing it.

The contrast in stock market performance between firms that have been embracing Agile principles at the senior level for a number of years — such as Microsoft and Amazon — and two firms that have spurned Agile principles at the senior level — such as GE and IBM — is dramatic...

It is important that Harvard Business Review is highlighting the role of the C-suite in business agility. Wall Street has already got the message. Although the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8% annual rate in the first quarter and suffered from 30 million unemployment claims, the stock market finished its best month in years. Why? The answer to the paradox is simple. After a devastating collapse the previous month, investors poured into the "chosen few." Firms that have demonstrated business agility by taking advantage of technological possibility — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — have become the largest and fastest growing organizations in the world, while many others struggle.

"Two research groups say they've independently built quantum devices that can operate at temperatures above 1 Kelvin — 15 times hotter than rival technologies can withstand," reports IEEE Spectrum. (In an article shared by Slashdot reader Wave723.)

"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...

"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.

"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."

Paul Cormier became Red Hat's new CEO this week -- while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper: In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It's been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. "Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don't care where they are."

That doesn't mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn't give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, "We have cases around the globe -- people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered."

Cormier said he's committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether "you're 140% productive or 40% productive."
Cormier also emphasized he's committed to keeping Red Hat a "totally, totally separate company" from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM's new CEO Arvind Krishna. "If we're not independent, then the other cloud guys won't feel safe working with us... Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features...." He also noted that Red Hat's finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. "IBM doesn't set our road map. We set our road map," he said.

Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.

As millions file for unemployment benefits in the United States every week, states' aging computer systems simply cannot keep up. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have said they are desperate for programmers who are still familiar with COBOL, a programming language that debuted in 1960 and is still used in critical computer systems like unemployment databases and banks. But there aren't many who know COBOL programming anymore. IBM, the leading provider of mainframes typically used to compile and run COBOL code, is trying to help bridge that gap. From a report: On Friday, IBM announced it was launching a free training program to teach coders COBOL as well as new forums to match those who know the language with those who need help maintaining their critical systems. The COBOL course will teach coders how to use the language in Microsoft's popular VSCode software and will be available next week. Next month, IBM says it will release a more fully fledged video COBOL course on online learning platforms like Coursera. The two forums that IBM has launched live on the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project website. One of the forums, Calling all COBOL Programmers, has had dozens of engineers sign up in the last 24 hours from around the world. The other forum is more technical in nature, where coders can pose specific COBOL questions and work through projects with experts.

The Pentagon is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to combat hacks designed to mess with the automated systems we'll rely on in the near future. From a report: In February, DARPA issued a call for proposals for a new program. Like most DARPA projects, it had a fantastic acronym: Guaranteeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robustness against Deception (GARD). It's a multimillion-dollar, four-year initiative that's aiming to create defenses for sensor-based artificial intelligence -- think facial recognition programs, voice recognition tools, self-driving cars, weapon-detection software and more. Today, Protocol can report that DARPA has selected 17 organizations to work on the GARD project, including Johns Hopkins University, Intel, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International and IBM's Almaden Research Center. Intel will be leading one part of the project with Georgia Tech, focusing on defending against physical adversarial attacks. Sensors that use AI computer vision algorithms can be fooled by what researchers refer to as adversarial attacks. These are basically any hack to the physical world that tricks a system into seeing something other than what's there.

Digital Trends reports: IBM's question-answering Watson A.I. is most famous for whooping the butt of human champions on quiz show Jeopardy. Now, IBM has repurposed its famous creation to help government agencies, health care organizations, and academic institutions around the world cope with the massive overload of questions that citizens have about the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the first time that Watson has been used to help in a pandemic scenario.

A coronavirus-focused version of the Watson A.I. has been called into service as a virtual agent in places including Arkansas, California, Georgia, New York, and Texas in the United States, as well as the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Spain and U.K. It is capable of answering locally relevant questions, ranging from those about coronavirus symptoms and testing specifics to queries on things like social distancing. These consistent and accurate responses can be provided to citizens via voice calls or text chat...

Watson Assistant for Citizens pulls data from a range of external sources — local, national, and international.
Digital Trends got an interesting response from one consultant at IBM Watson Health who's an expert on digital health for the World Health Organization. "Our team is currently adding responses to psychological questions, by which a virtual nurse can help people to deal with their fears and emotional problems and provide comfort to them in these times."

"The Eclipse Foundation just released version 1.0 of an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code called Eclipse Theia," reports SD Times: Theia is an extensible platform that allows developers to create multi-language cloud and desktop IDEs, allowing them to create entirely new developer experiences.

According to the Eclipse Foundation, the differences between Theia and Visual Studio Code are that Theia has a more modular architecture, Theia was designed from the ground to run on desktop and cloud, and Theia was developed under community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation. The Theia project was started by Ericsson and TypeFox in 2016, and since then it has become an integral part of cloud solutions globally. The project approached the Eclipse Foundation about becoming a potential host in 2019.

Early contributors to the project include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.
"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," announced Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

InfoWorld points out that "thus far Theia is intended to be fitted into third-party products. An end-user version is on the roadmap for release later this year."

But programming columnist Mike Melanson notes that "Chances are, you've already run into Theia without even realizing it, as it already serves as the basis for Red Hat's CodeReady Workspaces, the Eclipse Foundation's own Eclipse Che, and Google Cloud Shell."

Last week long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely predicted "the death of IT" in 2020 due to the widespread adoption of SD-WAN and SASE.

Now he's predicting "an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever," including IT consultants and contractors. My IT labor death scenario now extends to process experts (generally consultants) being replaced with automation. In a software-defined network, whether that's SD-WAN or SASE, so much of what used to be getting discreet boxes to talk with one another over the network becomes a simple database adjustment. The objective, in case anyone forgets (as IT, itself, often does) is the improvement of the end-user experience, in this case through an automated process. With SD-WAN, for example, there are over 3,000 available Quality of Service metrics. You can say that Office 365 is a critical metric as just one example. Write a script to that effect into the SD-WAN database, deploy it globally with a keyclick and you are done...

It's slowly dawning on IBM [and its competitors] that they have to get rid of all those process experts and replace them with a few subject matter experts. Here's the big lesson: with SD-WAN and SASE the process no longer matters, so knowing the process (beyond a few silverbacks kept on just in case the world really does end) isn't good for business.
Cringely predicts the downgrading of corporate bonds will also put pressure on IBM and its competitors, perhaps ultimately leading to a sale or spin-off at IBM. "Either they sell the parts that don't make money, which is to say everything except Red Hat and mainframes, or they sell the whole darned thing, which is what I expect to happen."

With that he predicts thousands of layoffs or furloughs — and while the bond market puts IBM in a bigger bind, "this could apply in varying degrees to any IBM competitors."

HPE announced on Tuesday it's working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites. From a report: The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology. HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.

The state of New York hopes to "amplify" its response to COVID-19 by launching tech-driven products with top companies, and it's looking for professional volunteers with experience in software development, hardware deployment/end-user support, and data science (as well as areas like product management, design, operations management).

Meanwhile, IBM's 2020 "Call for Code Global Challenge" is a virtual hackathon with a $200,000 prize, and they've now "expanded its focus" to include the effects of COVID-19.

Tech columnist Mike Melanson writes: But this is just the beginning of the COVID-19 hackathon boom, which now includes efforts organized by tech giants, state governments, and grassroots initiatives alike. For example, the World Health Organization got together with technology companies and platforms such as AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Salesforce, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat to launch the COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0, which is running as we speak with a deadline for submissions of March 30th at 9 AM PST. If you're too late, fret not, for there are many more, such as the CODEVID-19 hackathon we mentioned last week that has a weekly rolling deadline. And deadlines aside, the U.S. Digital Response for COVID-19 is working to pair technology, data, and government professionals with those who need them, in a form of nationwide, technological mutual aid...

[T]he COVID-19 open-source help desk is "a fast-track 'stack overflow' where you can get answers from the very people who wrote the software that you use or who are experts in its use." And if you happen to be either an open source author or expert, feel free to pitch in on answering questions...

On the open data side of things, for example, GitHub offers a guide on open collaboration on COVID-19, while StackOverflow looks at the myriad ways to help the fight against COVID-19 from home. ProgrammableWeb has a list of developer hackathons to combat COVID-19, and even the Golang team offers some guidance for Go, the Go community, and the pandemic, with Erlang also joining in.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Speech recognition systems from five of the world's biggest tech companies -- Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft -- make far fewer errors with users who are white than with users who are black, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The systems misidentified words about 19 percent of the time with white people. With black people, mistakes jumped to 35 percent. About 2 percent of audio snippets from white people were considered unreadable by these systems, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University. That rose to 20 percent with black people.

The study, which took an unusually comprehensive approach to measuring bias in speech recognition systems, offers another cautionary sign for A.I. technologies rapidly moving into everyday life. The Stanford study indicated that leading speech recognition systems could be flawed because companies are training the technology on data that is not as diverse as it could be -- learning their task mostly from white people, and relatively few black people. [...] The best performing system, from Microsoft, misidentified about 15 percent of words from white people and 27 percent from black people. Apple's system, the lowest performer, failed 23 percent of the time with whites and 45 percent of the time with black people.

Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely: Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."

Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever.
Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..."

And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.

Slashdot reader Willy English quotes CNBC: AT&T is asking all of its employees who have the ability to work remotely to do so until further notice, as the coronavirus spreads across the globe.

The company will be announcing new procedures and safeguards for employees who can't work from home, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a note sent to employees Friday. AT&T is one of the largest employers in the United States, and has 245,000 global employees.
Meanwhile, a local U.S. news station reports: IBM is encouraging all employees in the United States to work from home through the end of March, if possible.

In an email sent to employees and provided to KIMT, the technology company says the recommendation is in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.