America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

IBM is taking Airbnb to court over what it claims is the illegal use of four patents -- the latest in a string of suits against online companies involving historic and arguably broad innovations -- in a move that threatens to cast a shadow over the short-term rental company's road to a proposed IPO. From a report: The computing giant has accused Airbnb of "building its business" by using patents relating to functions such as "presenting advertising in an interactive service" and "improved navigation using bookmarks." "After almost six years of unsuccessful discussions with Airbnb to reach a fair and reasonable patent licence agreement, we had no alternative but to file legal action to protect our intellectual property rights," IBM said. "Airbnb has chosen to ignore our patents and use our technology without compensation."

"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015).

Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves." SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself. As a result, even someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves. This is intended to allow confidential, high-stakes data processing to be safely possible on shared systems -- such as cloud VM hosts. Enabling this kind of workload to move out of locally owned-and-operated data centers and into massive-scale public clouds allows for less expensive operation as well as potentially better uptime, scalability, and even lower power consumption.

Intel's SGX has several problems. The first and most obvious is that it is proprietary and vendor-specific -- if you design an application to utilize SGX to protect its memory, that application will only run on Intel processors... Finally, there are potentially severe performance impacts to utilization of SGX. IBM's Danny Harnik tested SGX performance fairly extensively in 2017, and he found that many common workloads could easily see a throughput decrease of 20 to 50 percent when executed inside SGX enclaves. Harnik's testing wasn't 100 percent perfect, as he himself made clear -- in particular, in some cases his compiler seemed to produce less-optimized code with SGX than it had without. Even if one decides to handwave those cases as "probably fixable," they serve to highlight an earlier complaint -- the need to carefully develop applications specifically for SGX use cases, not merely flip a hypothetical "yes, encrypt this please" switch....

After discussing real-world use of SGX, Rao moved on to future Intel technologies -- specifically, full-memory encryption. Intel refers to its version of full-memory encryption as TME (Total Memory Encryption) or MKTME (Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption). Unfortunately, those features are vaporware for the moment. Although Intel submitted an enormous Linux kernel patchset last May for enabling those features, there are still no real-world processors that offer them... This is probably a difficult time to give exciting presentations on Intel's security roadmap. Speculative prediction vulnerabilities have hurt Intel's processors considerably more than their competitors', and the company has been beaten significantly to market by faster, easier-to-use hardware memory encryption technologies as well. Rao and Woodgate put a brave face on things by talking up how SGX has been and is being used in Azure. But it seems apparent that the systemwide approach to memory encryption already implemented in AMD's Epyc CPUs -- and even in some of their desktop line -- will have a far greater lasting impact.

Intel's slides about their own upcoming full memory encryption are labeled "innovations," but they look a lot more like catching up to their already-established competition.

IBM and Microsoft have signed an "ethical resolution" with the Vatican to develop AI in a way that will protect the planet and the rights of all people [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The pledge, called the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," will be presented on Friday morning to Pope Francis by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and John Kelly, IBM's executive vice-president, as well as Vatican officials and Qu Dongyu, the Chinese director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The two US tech companies lead the world in AI development, measured by the number of patents they have amassed. The document calls for AI to safeguard the rights of all humankind, particularly the weak and underprivileged, and for new regulations in fields such as facial recognition. It said that there must be a "duty of explanation" that would show not only how AI algorithms come to their decisions but also what their purpose and objectives are.

The CEO of the RISC-V Foundation (a former IBM executive) touted the open-source CPU architecture at this year's HiPEAC conference, arguing there's "a growing demand for custom processors purpose-built to meet the power and performance requirements of specific applications..." As I've been travelling across the globe to promote the benefits of RISC-V at events and meet with our member companies, it's really stuck me how the level of commitment to drive the mainstream adoption of RISC-V is like nothing I've seen before. It's exhilarating to witness our community collaborate across industries and geographies with the shared goal of accelerating the RISC-V ecosystem...With more than 420 organizations, individuals and universities that are members of the RISC-V Foundation, there is a really vibrant community collaborating together to drive the progression of ratified specs, compliance suites and other technical deliverables for the RISC-V ecosystem.

While RISC-V has a BSD open source license, designers are welcome to develop proprietary implementations for commercial use as they see fit. RISC-V offers a variety of commercial benefits, enabling companies to accelerate development time while also reducing strategic risk and overall costs. Thanks to these design and cost benefits, I'm confident that members will continue to actively contribute to the RISC-V ecosystem to not only drive innovation forward, but also benefit their bottom line... I don't have a favorite project, but rather I love the amazing spectrum that RISC-V is engaged in — from a wearable health monitor to scaled out cloud data centres, from universities in Pakistan to the University of Bologna in Italy or Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, from design tools to foundries, from the most renowned global tech companies to entrepreneurs raising their first round of capital. Our community is broad, deep, growing and energized...

The RISC-V ecosystem is poised to significantly grow over the next five years. Semico Research predicts that the market will consume a total of 62.4 billion RISC-V central processing unit (CPU) cores by 2025! By that time I look forward to seeing many new types of RISC-V implementations including innovative consumer devices, industrial applications, high performance computing applications and much more... Unlike legacy instruction set architectures (ISAs) which are decades old and are not designed to handle the latest workloads, RISC-V has a variety of advantages including its openness, simplicity, clean-slate design, modularity, extensibility and stability. Thanks to these benefits, RISC-V is ushering in a new era of silicon design and processor innovation.
They also highlighted a major advantage. RISC-V "provides the flexibility to create thousands of possible custom processors. Since implementation is not defined at the ISA level, but rather by the composition of the system-on-chip and other design attributes, engineers can choose to go big, small, powerful or lightweight with their designs."

America's Justice Department "has filed a brief in support of Oracle in its Supreme Court battle against Google over whether Java should have copyright protection," reports ZDNet: The Justice Department filed its amicus brief to the Supreme Court this week, joining a mighty list of briefs from major tech companies and industry luminaries — including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun, which Oracle bought in 2010, acquiring Sun-built Java in the process. While Microsoft, IBM and others have backed Google's arguments in the decade-long battle, McNealy, like the Justice Department, is opposing Google. McNealy called Google's description of how it uses Java packages a "woeful mischaracterization of the artful design of the Java packages" and "an insult to the hard-working developers at Sun who made Java such a success...."

Joe Tucci, former CEO of now Dell-owned enterprise storage giant EMC, threw in his two cents against Google. "Accepting Google's invitation to upend that system by eliminating copyright protection for creative and original computer software code would not make the system better — it would instead have sweeping and harmful effects throughout the software industry," Tucci's brief reads.
Oracle is also questioning the motives of Google's allies, reports The Verge: After filing a Supreme Court statement last week, Oracle VP Ken Glueck posted a statement over the weekend assailing the motives of Microsoft, IBM, and the CCIA industry group, all of which have publicly supported Google. Glueck's post comes shortly after two groups — an interdisciplinary panel of academics and the American Conservative Union Foundation — submitted legal briefs supporting Oracle. Both groups argued that Google should be liable for copying code from the Java language for the Android operating system. The ACUF argued that protecting Oracle's code "is fundamental to a well-ordered system of private property rights and indeed the rule of law itself...."

Earlier this year, Google garnered around two dozen briefs supporting its position. But Oracle claims that in reality, "Google appears to be virtually alone — at least among the technology community." Glueck says Google's most prominent backers had ulterior motives or "parochial agendas"; either they were working closely with Google, or they had their own designs on Java...

Even if you accept Oracle's arguments wholeheartedly, there's a long list of other Google backers from the tech community. Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology signed on to amicus briefs last month, as did several prominent tech pioneers, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. The CCIA brief was signed by the Internet Association, a trade group representing many of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Patreon, Reddit, Etsy, the Mozilla Corporation, and other midsized tech companies also backed a brief raising "fundamental concerns" about Oracle's assertions.

Last week, Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, returned to the scene of his famous IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeat -- the ballroom of a New York hotel -- for a debate with AI experts organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He met with WIRED senior writer Will Knight there to discuss chess, AI, and a strategy for staying a step ahead of machines. From the report: WIRED: What was it like to return to the venue where you lost to Deep Blue?
Garry Kasparov: I've made my peace with it. At the end of the day, the match was not a curse but a blessing, because I was a part of something very important. Twenty-two years ago, I would have thought differently. But things happen. We all make mistakes. We lose. What's important is how we deal with our mistakes, with negative experience. 1997 was an unpleasant experience, but it helped me understand the future of human-machine collaboration. We thought we were unbeatable, at chess, Go, shogi. All these games, they have been gradually pushed to the side [by increasingly powerful AI programs]. But it doesn't mean that life is over. We have to find out how we can turn it to our advantage. I always say I was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by a machine. But that helps me to communicate a message back to the public. Because, you know, nobody can suspect me of being pro-computers.

What message do you want to give people about the impact of AI?
I think it's important that people recognize the element of inevitability. When I hear outcry that AI is rushing in and destroying our lives, that it's so fast, I say no, no, it's too slow. Every technology destroys jobs before creating jobs. When you look at the statistics, only 4 percent of jobs in the US require human creativity. That means 96 percent of jobs, I call them zombie jobs. They're dead, they just don't know it. For several decades we have been training people to act like computers, and now we are complaining that these jobs are in danger. Of course they are. We have to look for opportunities to create jobs that will emphasize our strengths. Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology. It's a coin with two sides. I think it's important that, instead of complaining, we look at how we can move forward faster. When these jobs start disappearing, we need new industries, we need to build foundations that will help. Maybe it's universal basic income, but we need to create a financial cushion for those who are left behind. Right now it's a very defensive reaction, whether it comes from the general public or from big CEOs who are looking at AI and saying it can improve the bottom line but it's a black box. I think it's we still struggling to understand how AI will fit in. Further reading: Fast-and-Loose Culture of Esports is Upending Once Staid World of Chess; and Kramnik and AlphaZero: How To Rethink Chess.

Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who created the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste," has passed away at the age of 74. Gizmodo reports: Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study computer science at Stanford University, and after graduation he dabbled in artificial intelligence research (long before it became a deeply concerning tool) and became involved in the anti-war and anti-corporate monopoly movements, with companies like IBM as one of his deserving targets. In 1973 Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface we now all take for granted, and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste" when it comes to commands for removing, duplicating, or repositioning chunks of text.

Xerox PARC is also well known for not capitalizing on the groundbreaking research it did in terms of personal computing, so in 1980 Tesler transitioned to Apple Computer where he worked until 1997. Over the years he held countless positions at the company including Vice President of AppleNet (Apple's in-house local area networking system that was eventually canceled), and even served as Apple's Chief Scientist, a position that at one time was held by Steve Wozniak, before eventually leaving the company.

In addition to his contributions to some of Apple's most famous hardware, Tesler was also known for his efforts to make software and user interfaces more accessible. In addition to the now ubiquitous "cut," "copy," and "paste" terminologies, Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing, which is reflected in his personal website. In essence, it ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system's various functions and apps. When they've opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor's insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.

Samsung Electronics semiconductor manufacturing division has won a contract to make new Qualcomm 5G chips using its most advanced chip-making technology, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter said, boosting the Korean firm's efforts to gain market share against rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. From the report: Samsung will fabricate at least some of Qualcomm's X60 modem chips, which will connect devices such as smart phones to 5G wireless data networks. The X60 will be made on Samsung's 5-nanometer process, the sources said, which makes the chips smaller and more power-efficient than previous generations. One of the sources said TSMC is also expected to fabricate 5-nanometer modems for Qualcomm. Samsung and Qualcomm declined to comment, and TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Best known among consumers for its phones and other electronic devices, Samsung is the world's second-biggest chip manufacturer through its foundry division, self-supplying many of its own mobile phone parts and also fabricating chips for outside customers such as IBM and Nvidia, among others.

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl writes: Michael Larabel, of Phoronix, writes that the OpenPower Foundation has released a license agreement for Hardware Vendors to implement the Power ISA RISC instruction set in their processors. Hugh Blemings, the Director of OpenPower, was responsible for ensuring that the EULA is favourable and friendly towards Libre and Open Hardware projects and businesses.

Of particular interest is that IBM's massive patent portfolio is automatically granted, royalty-free as long as two conditions apply: firstly, the hardware must be fully and properly Power ISA compliant, and secondly, the implementor must not "try it on" as a patent troll.

Innovation in the RISC space just got a little more interesting.
"Amidst the fully free and open RISC-V ISA making headway into the computing market, and ARM feeling pressured to loosen up its licensing, it seems they figured that it's best to join the party early," argues Hackaday.

A judge ordered Thursday a temporary block on the JEDI cloud contract in response to a suit filed by Amazon. From a report: A court notice announcing the injunction was filed on Thursday, but wasn't public. It's unclear why the documents were sealed. In April, the Defense Department announced that Amazon and Microsoft were the two finalists to provide the contract, ruling out other contenders like IBM and Oracle. Then in July, President Donald Trump said he was looking into the contract after IBM and other companies protested the bidding process. Microsoft was awarded the contract on Oct. 25. Amazon has been protesting the move, saying that it was driven in part by President Trump's bias against the company. Trump often criticizes Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, claiming the newspaper unfairly covers his administration. Last month, Amazon's cloud-computing arm AWS filed a formal motion asking the court to pause Microsoft's work on the JEDI cloud contract, claiming the evaluation process included "clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias." The court granted that motion on Thursday.

According to Business Insider, IBM has chosen Slack over rival Microsoft Teams for its more than 350,000 employees. From a report: It's a big test for Slack, but it has been one the pair has been working toward in recent years. Internal teams at IBM reportedly started using the chat app as far back as 2014, and this has grown over time. "Going wall to wall in IBM -- it's basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world," says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield in an interview with Business Insider.

While this new rollout makes IBM Slack's biggest customer to date, it has been the company's biggest customer for years according to Slack. "IBM has been Slack's largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time," reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.

Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely has been sharing technology predictions every January for over two decades -- and he made another big one on Friday: IBM has three divisions — Global Technology Services (GTS), Global Business Services (GBS), and Red Hat. GTS is the legacy IT business, GBS is the professional services business invented by Lou Gerstner to save IBM the last time it was in huge trouble, and Red Hat is Linux. GTS — that part of IBM most of us still think of as IBM — will probably be sold by summer. Either it will go to private equity (depends on the total debt load) or it will be sold to HPE or maybe to Oracle. Either way, it's not a likely success story, but [current CEO Ginni] Rometty has no real choice. IBM is, at this point, smoke, mirrors, and buybacks. The GTS windfall will land in Ginni's final quarter, juicing her payout, which might be the major point of the deal...

IBM's new CEO is Arvind Krishna, formerly head of the Cognitive Computing unit — IBM's cloud guy. Except Cognitive Computing was never really cloud. Cognitive has been a mishmash of cloud, supported by revenue streams that are anything but cloud. It's cloud in name only and will be the part that goes next summer, possibly with Mr. Krishna still at its head.

The next chairman of IBM after Rometty will be current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. If Whitehurst is as smart as I think he is, he started yesterday looking for a new job. It's not that he really intends to leave, but as the next savior of IBM, Ginni et al will pay anything to keep him. Cut your new deal now, Jim, while demand is greatest....Whitehurst will turn IBM into Red Hat, which will take HQ to North Carolina and mean most of the remaining GBS staff will be gone in a year...

It still won't save IBM. They'll go down in the coming year or two along with the rest of the industry we used to call IT...

Let's just say that IBM's loss is AWS's gain.

Slashdot reader SpaceForceCommander shared Dice's new annual report on America's tech industry salaries based on a survey of over 12,800 "technologists": Columbus and St. Louis enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth in salaries (14.2 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively), and other cities such as Denver [7 percent] and Atlanta [10 percent] also experienced an ideal mix of growth and high salaries. These up-and-comers benefitted from the presence of key employers such as Amazon and IBM; in addition, a lower cost of living and plentiful amenities have made them increasingly attractive to technologists, even those coming from well-established tech hubs such as Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley remains a world of high salaries — but the cost of living in the Bay Area remains extraordinarily high, which chews into that higher-than-average paycheck. And that's before we factor in issues such as grinding commutes. In Seattle, New York City (also known as "Silicon Alley"), and other well-established tech hubs, costs are similarly high, which only makes up-and-coming tech hubs more potentially attractive to technologists.
Silicon Valley is still #1 on Dice's ranking of average annual salaries (at $123,826), followed by Seattle, San Diego, Boston, Baltimore, Portland, Denver, and then New York. (And while St. Louis ranks #9, Columbus is #17.)

But the average annual tech-industry salary rose just 1.3 percent last year, according to the survey, with Dice arguing that what made salaries vary was supply and demand. They then ranked the highest-paying skills, starting with Apache Kafka (with average reported salaries of $134,557), followed by HANA (High performance ANalytic Appliance), Cloudera, and MapReduce: Newer skills don't necessarily draw higher salaries; with many older skills, the number of proficient technologists is relatively low, which means employers are willing to pay more in order to secure their services. (That's a key reason why the handful of technologists who still know their way around an ancient mainframe can score six-figure salaries from companies that haven't given up decades-old hardware....) In the case of programming languages such as Swift, which enjoyed significant year-over-year growth and high salaries, a large number of technologists might have mastered it — but the market is huge and white-hot, ensuring that compensation will only rise.

An anonymous reader writes: IBM named Arvind Krishna as chief executive officer, replacing longtime CEO Virginia Rometty. Krishna, 57, is currently the head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software unit and was a principal architect of the company's purchase of Red Hat, which was completed last year. Rometty, 62, will continue as executive chairman and serve through the end of the year, when she will retire after almost 40 years with the company, IBM said in a statement Thursday. The shares rose about 5% in extended trading.

Since becoming IBM's first female CEO in 2012, Rometty had bet the company's future on the market for hybrid cloud, which allows businesses to store data on both private and public cloud networks run by rivals such as AmazonWebServices and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure. By then Big Blue, once the world leader in technology, had lagged behind competitors for years after largely missing the initial cloud revolution under her predecessor, Sam Palmisano. The announcement comes as a "welcome and overdue leadership change," said Wedbush Securities analyst Moshe Katri. "At least that's how we're looking at it -- and obviously the market seems to agree." "Krishna, her successor, was the mastermind behind the Red Hat deal. He proposed the acquisition to Rometty and the board, suggesting hybrid cloud is the company's best bet for future growth," adds Bloomberg. "He has led the development of many of IBM's newer technologies like artificial intelligence, cloud and quantum computing."

"Prior to IBM adopting its hybrid multi-cloud strategy, the company had a walled-garden approach to cloud computing, largely focusing on its own services. Krishna spearheaded IBM's shift toward hybrid, prompting the company to work with rival providers rather than compete against them."

Slashdot reader celest adds: In case there were still any doubts that IBM is turning into Red Hat, not the other way around, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just been named President of IBM. (Full disclosure: I'm the open-source strategy guy at IBM Canada).
While he was CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, debuting the new computer equipped with a 9-inch black and white display, an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 128KB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a price tag of $2,495. The now iconic machine weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds and was advertised as offering a word processing program, a graphics package, and a mouse. At the time it was introduced, the Macintosh was seen as Apple's last chance to overcome IBM's domination of the personal computer market and remain a major player in the personal computer industry. Despite the high price at the time, which was equivalent to around $6,000 today, the Macintosh sold well, with Apple hitting 70,000 units sold by May 1984. The now iconic "1984" Super Bowl ad that Apple invested in and debuted days before the Macintosh was unveiled may have helped bolster sales.

We make decisions by weighing pros and cons. Artificial intelligence has the potential to help us with that by sifting through ever-increasing mounds of data. But to be truly useful, it needs to reason more like a human. An artificial intelligence technique known as argument mining could help. From a report: IBM has just taken a big step in that direction. The company's Project Debater team has spent several years developing an AI that can build arguments. Last year IBM demonstrated its work-in-progress technology in a live debate against a world-champion human debater, the equivalent of Watson's Jeopardy! showdown. Such stunts are fun, and it provided a proof of concept. Now IBM is turning its toy into a genuinely useful tool. The version of Project Debater used in the live debates included the seeds of the latest system, such as the capability to search hundreds of millions of new articles. But in the months since, the team has extensively tweaked the neural networks it uses, improving the quality of the evidence the system can unearth. One important addition is BERT, a neural network Google built for natural-language processing, which can answer queries. The work will be presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York next month.

To train their AI, lead researcher Noam Slonim and his colleagues at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, drew on 400 million documents taken from the LexisNexis database of newspaper and journal articles. This gave them some 10 billion sentences, a natural-language corpus around 50 times larger than Wikipedia. They paired this vast evidence pool with claims about several hundred different topics, such as "Blood donation should be mandatory" or "We should abandon Valentine's Day." They then asked crowd workers on the Figure Eight platform to label sentences according to whether or not they provided evidence for or against particular claims. The labeled data was fed to a supervised learning algorithm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Hospitals have granted Microsoft, IBM and Amazon the ability to access identifiable patient information under deals to crunch millions of health records, the latest examples of hospitals' growing influence in the data economy. This breadth of access wasn't always spelled out by hospitals and tech giants when the deals were struck. The scope of data sharing in these and other recently reported agreements reveals a powerful new role that hospitals play -- as brokers to technology companies racing into the $3 trillion health-care sector. Rapid digitization of health records in recent years and privacy laws enabling companies to swap patient data have positioned hospitals as a primary arbiter of how such sensitive data is shared.

Microsoft and Providence, a Renton, Wash., hospital system with data for about 20 million patient visits a year, are developing cancer algorithms by using doctor's notes in patient medical records. The notes haven't been stripped of personally identifiable information, according to Providence. And an agreement between IBM and Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, to jointly develop artificial intelligence allows the hospital to share personally identifiable data for specific requests, people involved in the agreement said -- though so far the hospital hasn't done so and has no current plans to do so, according to hospital and IBM officials. Microsoft executive Peter Lee in July described how his company would use Providence patient data without identifying information for algorithm development. In a December statement, he said patients' personal health data remains in Providence's control and declined to comment further. As for Amazon, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, granted certain AWS employees access to health information that identifies individual patients. "The Hutch, a research institution with ties to hospitals, trained and tested Amazon Web Services software designed to read medical notes," the report says. "An AWS spokeswoman said it doesn't use personally identifiable data protected under federal privacy laws to develop or improve its services."

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

"That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike."

An anonymous reader quotes Red Hat's announcement of the brief: "The Federal Circuit's unduly narrow construction of 17 U.S.C. 102(b) is harmful to progress, competition, and innovation in the field of software development," Red Hat stated in the brief. "IBM and Red Hat urge the Court to reverse the decision below on the basis that 17 U.S.C. 102(b) excludes software interfaces from copyright protection...."

The lower court incorrectly extended copyright protection to software interfaces. If left uncorrected, the lower court rulings could harm software compatibility and interoperability and have a chilling effect on the innovation represented by the open source community... Red Hat's significant involvement with Java development over the last 20 years has included extensive contributions to OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java platform, and the development of Red Hat Middleware, a suite of Java-based middleware solutions to build, integrate, automate and deploy enterprise applications. As an open source leader, Red Hat has a stake in the consistent and correct determination of the scope of copyright protection that applies to interfaces of computer programs, including the Java platform interface at stake in this case.

Open source software development relies on the availability of and unencumbered access to software interfaces, including products that are compatible with or interoperate with other computer products, platforms, and services...

"I've grown quite fond of the docker container runtime. It's easy to install and use, and many of the technologies I write about depend upon this software," writes TechRepublic/Linux.com contributor Jack Wallen.

"But Red Hat has other plans." The company decided -- seemingly out of the blue -- to drop support for the docker runtime engine. In place of docker came Podman. When trying to ascertain why Red Hat split with Docker, nothing came clear. Sure, I could easily draw the conclusion that Red Hat had grown tired of the security issues surrounding Docker and wanted to take matters in their own hands. There was also Red Hat's issue with "no big fat daemons." If that's the case, how do they justify their stance on systemd?

Here's where my tinfoil hat comes into play. Understand this is pure conjecture here and I have zero facts to back these claims up... Red Hat is now owned by IBM. IBM was desperate to gain serious traction within the cloud. To do that, IBM needed Red Hat, so they purchased the company. Next, IBM had to score a bit of vendor lock-in. Using a tool like docker wouldn't give them that lock-in. However, if Red Hat developed and depended on their own container runtime, vendor lock-in was attainable....

Red Hat has jettisoned a mature, known commodity for a less-mature, relatively unknown piece of software -- without offering justification for the migration.... Until Red Hat offers up a sound justification for migrating from the docker container engine to Podman, there's going to be a lot of people sporting tinfoil hats. It comes with the territory of an always-connected world. And if it does turn out to be an IBM grab for vendor lock-in, there'll be a lot of admins migrating away from RHEL/CentOS to the likes of Ubuntu Server, SUSE/openSUSE, Debian, and more.
Red Hat's product manager of containers later touted Podman's ability to deploy containers without root access privileges in an interview with eWeek. "We felt the sum total of its features, as well as the project's performance, security and stability, made it reasonable to move to 1.0. Since Podman is set to be the default container engine for the single-node use case in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we wanted to make some pledges about its supportability."

And a Red Hat spokesperson also shared their position with The New Stack. "We saw our customer base wanting the container runtime lifecycle baked-in to the OS or in delivered tandem with OpenShift."