IFI Claims, a company that tracks patent activity in the US, reports that 2019 saw a new high-watermark of 333,530 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. From a report: The figures are notable for a few reasons. One is that this is the most patents ever granted in a single year; and the second that this represents a 15% jump on a year before. The high overall number speaks to the enduring interest in safeguarding IP, while the 15% jump has to do with the fact that patent numbers actually dipped last year (down 3.5%) while the number that were filed and still in application form (not granted) was bigger than ever. If we can draw something from that, it might be that filers and the USPTO were both taking a little more time to file and process, not a reduction in the use of patents altogether. But patents do not tell the whole story in another very important regard. Namely, the world's most valuable, and most high profile tech companies are not always the ones that rank the highest in patents filed. [...] As with previous years -- the last 27, to be exact -- IBM has continued to hold on to the top spot for patents granted, with 9,262 in total for the year. Samsung Electronics, at 6,469, is a distant second.

theodp writes: Dismissing questions of whether Ivanka Trump's Tuesday CES keynote appearance on The Path to the Future of Work should have gone to somebody else who's had more to do with tech in the administration, CES Chief Gary Shapiro informed the BBC: "Ivanka Trump actually co-chairs the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, whose members include companies like Apple, Walmart and IBM." On that point, it's worth noting that signed minutes and slides from a Sept. 2019 meeting of the Ivanka-led American Workforce Policy Advisory Board discussed plans for a possible January launch of a private sector-led "big" national ad campaign, including an "influencer marketing plan," that will target "Youth aged 16 to 20, and importantly, their parents" with the goal of realizing the untapped potential of what IBM calls "new collar" workers -- "people who don't have a 4-year degree [young people and mid-career], but who have built the skills and credentials to contribute to areas like the cloud and the cyber sector." The marketing campaign is the product of a working group co-chaired by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

In the slides, a screenshot from a "Landing Experience Prototype" for an accompanying website displays logos of some of America's biggest tech companies -- e.g. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM -- and encourages visitors to: "Find an employer who understands. America's biggest employers know there's a huge skill shortage. They also know that today's top talent doesn't always come from traditional four-year universities. That's why we've asked them to sign a pledge to de-prioritize college degrees in their hiring processes."

Meeting minutes show that the Board -- pressed by IBM's Rometty -- approved her working group's proposal to "develop a private sector-led national campaign to raise awareness of and promote multiple pathways to well-paying jobs for all Americans" through a voice vote. Prior to the vote, IBM VP of Corporate Marketing Ann Gould Rubin explained that "advertising can be a compelling way to change even deep-seated perceptions," adding that "it could both change perceptions and cause people to act." Rubin noted that -- on its own -- IBM has initiated some research to gain insights into how to reach the target audiences, looking at motivations, drivers, interests, barriers, and reactions to descriptions of pathways.

Hey, like voters, those poor 16-year-old kids won't even know what hit 'em!

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: CNBC Explores released a 14-minute documentary this month called "The Rise Of Open-Source Software." It's already racked up 558,802 views on YouTube, arguing that open-source software "has essentially taken over the world. Companies in every industry, from Walmart to Exxon Mobile to Verizon, have open-sourced their projects. Microsoft has completely changed its point of view, and is now seen as a leader in the space. And in 2016 the U.S. government even promised to open-source at least 20% of all its new custom-developed code."

The documentary does mention the 1990s, when Microsoft "even went so far as to call Open Source 'Unamerican' and bad for intellectual property rights." But two and a half minutes in, they also tell the famous story of that 1970s printer jam at MIT which led to the purchase of a proprietary printer that inspired Richard Stallman to quit his job to develop the GNU operating system and spearhead the free software movement. And at three and a half minutes in, they also describe how Linus Torvalds "unceremoniously released" Linux in 1991, and report that "By the turn of the century, NASA, Dell, and IBM were all using it." And at 4:18, they mention "other open source projects" gaining popularity, including MySQL, Perl, and Apache.

"But for the layperson at the turn of the century, the rise of these technologies could have gone unnoticed. After all, hardly anyone ran Linux on their personal computers. But then in 2008, Google released Android devices, which ran on a modified version of Linux. Suddenly the operating system blew up the smartphone market..." (Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering, cites 2.5 billion active Android devices.) The documentary then traces the open source movement up through our current decade, even mentioning Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, and various monetization models (including GitHub's new "Sponsors" program). And it ends with the narrator calling open source development "the new norm..."

"After all, the success of Open Source reveals that collaboration and knowledge-sharing are more than just feel-good buzzwords. They're an effective business strategy. And if we're going to solve some of the world's biggest problems, many believe that we can't afford to hoard our resources and learnings."
Here's a list (in order of appearance) of the people interviewed:

• Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub
• Devon Zuegel, Open-Source Product Manager, GitHub
• Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat
• Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation
• Feross Aboukhadijeh, Open-Source Maintainer
• Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, even tells CNBC that 10,000 lines of code are added to Linux every day. "It is by far the highest-velocity, the most effective software development process in the history of computing... As the idea of sharing technology and collaborating collectively expands, we're moving into open hardware initiatives, data-sharing initiatives. And that's really going to be the future...

"The complexity of building these technologies isn't going down, it's only going up. We can get that technology out there faster when everybody works together."

Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve."

An anonymous reader quotes Kotaku: Rick Brewster is a programmer and the author of Paint.NET, a free replacement for Microsoft Paint that's expanded to have features similar to image creation programs like Photoshop and GIMP. In 1994, at the age of 12, Brewster made The Golden Flute IV: The Flute of Immortality, a DOS-based roleplaying game inspired by a text adventure from a 1984 instructional book on how to write adventure games. He wrote The Golden Flute IV on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an IBM clone computer...

"I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it," Brewster explained in a Twitter thread. That copy was seemingly lost, with no playable copy surviving.

Apparently, that's not what happened. Somehow, a version of that game found its way into the hands of a streamer name Macaw, who specializes in old and obscure games. He played The Golden Flute IV on December 23rd, exploring it for a short time before moving on to other games.
"Apparently breaking & entering is a 'serious felony' and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe," Brewster remembered on Twitter on Christmas Day.

He believes that back in 1994 his cousin must've uploaded the videogame to a BBS, since it's now ended up in the old game collection "Frostbyte" at the Internet Archive. Which means that you, too, can now play 12-year-old Rick Brewster's long-lost amateur videogame using Archive.org's online DOSbox emulator.

Randy Suess, a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin board, anticipating the rise of the internet, messaging apps and social media, died on Dec. 10 in Chicago. He was 74. From a report: His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Karrie. In late January 1978, Mr. Suess (rhymes with "loose") was part of an early home computer club called the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange, or CACHE. He and another club member, an IBM engineer named Ward Christensen, had been discussing an idea for a new kind of computer messaging system, but hadn't had the time to explore it. Then a blizzard hit the Great Lakes region, covering Chicago in more than 40 inches of snow. As the city shut down, Mr. Christensen phoned Mr. Suess to say that they finally had enough time to build their new system. Mr. Christensen suggested that they get help from the other members of the club, but, as he recalled in an interview, Mr. Suess told him that that would be a mistake because others would just slow the project down.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [S]cientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining. The problems with the design of current battery technologies like lithium-ion are well known, we just tend to turn a blind eye when it means our smartphones can run for a full day without a charge. In addition to lithium, they require heavy metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel which come from giant mines that present hazards to the environment, and often to those doing the actual mining. These metals are also a finite resource, and as more and more devices and vehicles switch to battery power, their availability is going to decrease at a staggering pace.

As a potential solution, scientists at IBM Research's Battery Lab came up with a new design that replaces the need for cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and also uses a new liquid electrolyte (the material in a battery that helps ions move from one end to the other) with a high flash point. The combination of the new cathode and the electrolyte materials was also found to limit the creation of lithium dendrites which are spiky structures that often develop in lithium-ion batteries that can lead to short circuits. So not only would this new battery have less of an impact on the environment to manufacture, but it would also be considerably safer to use, with a drastically reduced risk of fire or explosions. The researchers believe the new battery would have a larger capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, could potentially charge to about 80 percent of its full capacity in just five minutes, would be more energy-efficient, and, on top of it all, it would be cheaper to manufacture which in turn means they could help reduce the cost of gadgets and electric vehicles. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the group has revealed precious little technical information about their battery's chemistry, configuration, or design -- so those in the field are unsure if IBM has created something truly remarkable, or if they're exaggerating their claims.

Russia has launched an effort to build a working quantum computer, in a bid to catch up to other countries in the race for practical quantum technologies. From a report: The government will inject around 50 billion roubles (US$790 million) over the next 5 years into basic and applied quantum research carried out at leading Russian laboratories, the country's deputy prime minister, Maxim Akimov, announced on 6 December at a technology forum in Sochi. The windfall is part of a 258-billion-rouble programme for research and development in digital technologies, which the Kremlin has deemed vital for modernizing and diversifying the Russian economy. "This is a real boost," says Aleksey Fedorov, a quantum physicist at the Russian Quantum Center (RQC), a private research facility in Skolkovo near Moscow. "If things work out as planned, this initiative will be a major step towards bringing Russian quantum science to a world-class standard."

[...] The race is on to create quantum computers that outperform classical machines in specific tasks. Prototypes developed by Google and IBM, headquartered in Mountain View, California, and Armonk, New York, respectively, are approaching the limit of classical computer simulation. In October, scientists at Google announced that a quantum processor working on a specific calculation had achieved such a quantum advantage. Russia is far from this milestone. "We're 5 to 10 years behind," says Fedorov. "But there's a lot of potential here, and we follow very closely what's happening abroad." Poor funding has excluded Russian quantum scientists from competing with Google, says Ilya Besedin, an engineer at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow.

Cade Metz from The New York Times pays tribute to Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world's first commercial computer. Brooker died on Nov. 20 at the age of 94. From the report: Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its computer lab, which was among the first of its kind. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab's deputy director. When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, "Well, we can always employ someone like you." Soon they were colleagues.

Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 "usable." Mr. Turing had written a user's manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them. It was "extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly," Mr. Brooker said. In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine -- not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware. This marked the beginning of what were later called "high-level" programming languages -- languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: George Laurer, the U.S. engineer who helped develop the barcode, has died at the age of 94. Barcodes, which are made up of black stripes of varying thickness and a 12-digit number, help identify products and transformed the world of retail. They are now found on products all over the world. The idea was pioneered by a fellow IBM employee, but it was not until Laurer developed a scanner that could read codes digitally that it took off. Laurer died last Thursday at his home in Wendell, North Carolina, and his funeral was held on Monday.

It was while working as an electrical engineer with IBM that George Laurer fully developed the Universal Product Code (UPC), or barcode. He developed a scanner that could read codes digitally. He also used stripes rather than circles that were not practical to print. The UPC went on to revolutionize "virtually every industry in the world", IBM said in a tribute on its website.

"One of the more unique future uses for blockchain may be thwarting fake news," writes Computerworld's senior reporter, citing a recent report from Gartner: By 2023, up to 30% of world news and video content will be authenticated as real by blockchain ledgers, countering "Deep Fake technology," according to Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president of research and co-author of the "Predicts 2020: Blockchain Technology" report... "Tracking assets and proving provenance are two key successful use cases for permissioned blockchain and can be readily applied to tracking the provenance of news content...."

The New York Times is one of the first major news publications to test blockchain to authenticate news photographs and video content, according to Gartner. The newspaper's Research and Development team and IBM have partnered on the News Provenance Project, which uses Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain to store "contextual metadata." That metadata includes when and where a photo or video was shot, who took it and how and when it was edited and published...

Blockchain could also change how corporate public offerings are done. Many private companies forgo a public offering because of the complexity of the process. With blockchain ledgers, securities linked to digital tokens could move more easily between financial institutions by simply bypassing a central clearance organization.
The article also envisions a world with encrypted digital online credentials on a blockchain ledger that are linked back to the bank, employer, or government agency that created them.

Ken Elefant, managing director of investment firm Sorenson Capital, sees this technology creating a world of super-secure profiles where "only the individuals or companies authorized have access to that data -- unlike the internet today where you and I can be marketed to by anybody,"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in a destructive attack against companies in the Middle East. The sample was discovered in a response to an attack on what an IBM spokesperson described as "a new environment in the [Middle East] -- not in Saudi Arabia, but another regional rival of Iran." Dubbed ZeroCleare, the malware is "a likely collaboration between Iranian state-sponsored groups," according to a report by IBM X-Force researchers. The attacks were targeted against specific organizations and used brute-force password attacks to gain access to network resources. The initial phase of the attacks was launched from Amsterdam IP addresses owned by a group tied to what IBM refers to as the "ITG13 Group" -- also known as "Oilrig" and APT34. Another Iranian threat group may have used the same addresses to access accounts prior to the wiper campaign.

In addition to brute force attacks on network accounts, the attackers exploited a SharePoint vulnerability to drop web shells on a SharePoint server. These included China Chopper, Tunna, and another Active Server Pages-based webshell named "extensions.aspx," which "shared similarities with the ITG13 tool known as TWOFACE/SEASHARPEE," the IBM researchers reported. They also attempted to install TeamViewer remote access software and used a modified version of the Mimikatz credential-stealing tool -- obfuscated to hide its intent -- to steal more network credentials off the compromised servers. From there, they moved out across the network to spread the ZeroCleare malware. "While X-Force IRIS cannot attribute the activity observed during the destructive phase of the ZeroCleare campaign," the researchers noted, "we assess that high-level similarities with other Iranian threat actors, including the reliance on ASPX web shells and compromised VPN accounts, the link to ITG13 activity, and the attack aligning with Iranian objectives in the region, make it likely this attack was executed by one or more Iranian threat groups."

An anonymous reader shares a report: elementary OS has long been viewed by many as the future of Linux on the PC thanks to its beautiful desktop environment and overall polished experience. Development of the Ubuntu-based operating system has been frustratingly slow, however. This shouldn't be surprising, really, as the team of developers is rather small, and its resources are likely much less than those of larger distributions such as the IBM-backed Fedora or Canonical's Ubuntu. And that is what makes elementary OS so remarkable -- its developers can make magic on a smaller budget. Today, the latest version of the operating system is released. Code-named "Hera," elementary OS 5.1 is now available for download. Support for Flatpak is now baked in -- this is significant, as the developers explain it is "the first non-deb packaging format we've supported out of the box." The Linux kernel now sits at a very modern 5.0. One of the most important aspects of elementary OS, the AppCenter, is now an insane 10 times faster than its predecessor.

In April Slashdot reader Adam Bradley won an eBay auction for an IBM 360 mainframe computer. Then he began blogging "the saga that unfurled" in transporting it from an abandoned building in Germany to the U.K. (where Adam volunteers at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.)

"The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible," he writes today. "We definitely got Slashdotted. I was up until the early hours migrating servers!" Yet he's daring to send us another update. "We have now successfully got it back to the UK and to it's new home at a former Top Secret Mi6 base! "

Their blog post credits the discounted service they received from a "bespoke IT infrastructure solutions" company called Sunspeed: They confirmed that they'd be able to help, and because they recognized the importance of the project and how much they liked it, they were kindly willing to do it at a significant discount which was covered completely by the crowd funding donations... "Upon reading about the issues being experienced trying to find a large enough vehicle with a tail-lift capable of handling the weight, I knew we could help. We're really pleased we could help out and be a part of this amazing story to recover such a rare piece of IT history... I think we'll now have to change our marketing to: Whether you need to move a single server, an entire Data Centre or recover an extremely rare and sensitive IBM 360 Machine from Germany before Brexit, then Sunspeed is here to help....!"

They had tons of bubble wrap and pallet wrap, along with these fantastic cardboard corner pieces for the machines. They also had this fantastic plastic sheeting to go down on the difficult and uneven surfaces which made life a lot easier. Their plan was to wrap every machine in bubble wrap, and then wrap it in pallet wrap to keep everything safe before strapping it into the truck. This was much more than we were expecting so we were thoroughly impressed!
It's a tale of machine cables, loose panels, and a pallet of punch cards, with lots of fun photos from the move, as well as video of the vintage mainframe's triumphant arrival and unwrapping at its new home. "At that point, we were pretty tired and so we called it a day. We'll be heading back soon to start cleaning and cataloguing the machines to determine exactly what the specifications and state of them are. Needless to say, we're all terribly excited to get our teeth stuck into the project!"

"We can't thank everybody enough for all their help on this project."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In the latest Top 500 supercomputer ratings, the average speed of these Linux-powered racers is now an astonishing 1.14 petaflops. The fastest of the fast machines haven't changed since the June 2019 Top 500 supercomputer list. Leading the way is Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Summit system, which holds top honors with an HPL result of 148.6 petaflops. This is an IBM-built supercomputer using Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. In a rather distant second place is another IBM machine: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sierra system. It uses the same chips, but it "only" hit a speed of 94.6 petaflops.

Close behind at No. 3 is the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, with an HPL mark of 93.0 petaflops. TaihuLight was developed by China's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC) and is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. It is powered exclusively by Sunway's SW26010 processors. Sunway's followed by the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A). This is a system developed by China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). It's deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in China. Powered by Intel Xeon CPUs and Matrix-2000 accelerators, it has a top speed of 61.4 petaflops. Coming at No. 5, the Dell-built, Frontera, a Dell C6420 system is powered by Intel Xeon Platinum processors. It speeds along at 23.5 petaflops. It lives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas. The most powerful new supercomputer on the list is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI)'s AiMOS. It made the list in the 25th position with 8.0 petaflops. The IBM-built system, like Summit and Sierra, is powered by Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. In closing, ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes: "Regardless of the hardware, all 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers have one thing in common: They all run Linux."

Slashdot reader hackingbear shared this article from Scientific American: In the race to create a quantum computer that can outperform a classical one, a method using particles of light (photons) has taken a promising step forward. Jian-Wei Pan and Chao-Yang Lu, both at the University of Science and Technology of China, and their colleagues improved a quantum computing technique called boson sampling to achieve a record 14 detected photons in its final results. Previous experiments were capped at only five detected photons. The increase in the number of the particles is small, but it amounts to a 6.5-billion-fold gain in "state space," or the number of ways in which a computer system can be configured. The larger the state space, the less likely a classical computer can perform the same calculation.

The result was reported in a paper posted at the preprint server arXiv.org on October 22 and has yet to be peer-reviewed. But if it is confirmed, it would be an important milestone in the race for quantum-computational supremacy -- a fuzzy goalpost defined as the point where quantum computers outpace their best classical counterparts.... Pan and Lu argue in their paper that their technique is another possible route toward quantum supremacy... Part of the trouble is its limited utility. "A universal computer can solve any different type of problem," says Jonathan Dowling, a theoretical physicist at Louisiana State University, who was not involved with the research. "This can only solve one." But solving just one problem faster than a classical computer would count as a demonstration of quantum-computational supremacy...

Over the past few weeks, the race for quantum computational supremacy has reached a breakneck pace. Google's quantum computer performed an operation that its scientists claim would take a classical computer 10,000 years in just 200 seconds. IBM researchers, who are also working on a quantum computer, have expressed doubts, suggesting a classical computer could solve that problem in under three days... "Quantum supremacy is like a horse race where you don't know how fast your horse is, you don't know how fast anybody else's horse is, and some of the horses are goats," Jonathan Dowling, a theoretical physicist at Louisiana State University, says. But this result, he clarifies, is not a goat.

ThousandEyes, a cloud analysis company, in its second annual Cloud Performance Benchmark, has succeeded in measuring a major performance factor objectively: Public cloud providers' global network performance. ZDNet reports: In this study, ThousandEyes looked at the five major public cloud providers: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It did by analyzing over 320 million data points from 98 global metro locations over 30 days. This included measuring network performance from within the U.S. using multiple ISPs and global network measurements and by checking out speeds between availability zones (AZ)s and connectivity patterns between the cloud providers. Besides measuring raw speed, the company also looked at latency, jitter, and data loss.

First, ThousandEyes found some cloud providers rely heavily on the public internet to transport traffic instead of their backbones. This, needless to say, impacts performance predictability. During the evening Netflix internet traffic jam, if your cloud provider relies on the internet, you will see slowdowns in the evening. So, while Google Cloud and Azure rely heavily on their private backbone networks to transport their customer traffic, AWS and Alibaba Cloud rely heavily on the public internet for the majority of transport, IBM takes a hybrid approach that varies regionally.

What about AWS Global Accelerator? If you pay for this service, which puts your traffic on the AWS private backbone network, will you always see a better performance? Surprisingly, the answer's no. AWS doesn't always out-perform the internet. ThousandEyes found several cases, where the internet performs faster and more reliably than Global Accelerator -- or the results were negligible. For example, ThousandEyes discovered that from your headquarters in Seoul, you'd see a major latency improvement when accessing AWS US-East-1. That's great. But your office in San Francisco wouldn't see any improvement, while your group in Bangalore India would see a performance decrease. Generally speaking, Latin America and Asia have the highest performance variations across all clouds, whereas, in North America, cloud performance is generally comparable. You need to look at ThousandEye's detailed findings to pick out the best cloud provider on a per-region basis to ensure optimal performance. Regional performance differences can make a huge impact. Additionally, the ISP you use and whether or not you're moving traffic in or out of China also affects cloud performance.

For more on the report, see ThousandEyes' website.

Researchers at Intezer and IBM X-Force have detected an unconventional form of ransomware that's being deployed in targeted attacks against enterprise servers. They're calling it PureLocker because it's written in the PureBasic programming language. ZDNet reports: It's unusual for ransomware to be written in PureBasic, but it provides benefits to attackers because sometimes security vendors struggle to generate reliable detection signatures for malicious software written in this language. PureBasic is also transferable between Windows, Linux, and OS-X, meaning attackers can more easily target different platforms. "Targeting servers means the attackers are trying to hit their victims where it really hurts, especially databases which store the most critical information of the organization," Michael Kajiloti, security researcher at Intezer told ZDNet.

There's currently no figures on the number PureLocker victims, but Intezer and IBM X-Force have confirmed the ransomware campaign is active with the ransomware being offered to attackers 'as-a-service.' However, it's also believed than rather than being offered to anyone who wants it, the service is offered as a bespoke tool, only available to cyber criminal operations which can afford to pay a significant sum in the first place. The source code of PureLocker ransomware offers clues to its exclusive nature, as it contains strings from the 'more_eggs' backdoor malware. This malware is sold on the dark web by what researchers describe as a 'veteran' provider of malicious services. These tools have been used by some of the most prolific cyber criminal groups operating today, including Cobalt Gang and FIN6 -- and the ransomware shares code with previous campaigns by these hacking gangs. It indicates the PureLocker is designed for criminals who know what they're doing and know how to hit a large organization where it hurts.

sbinning shares a report from AppleInsider: IBM has published its latest study focusing on the benefits of Apple products in enterprise, and has found that a fleet of over 200,000 Macs leads to far lower support costs, smaller numbers of support staff, and happier employees versus a Windows deployment. In the study presented on Tuesday, IBM says that employees that used Mac machines were 22 percent more likely to exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. Mac-using employees generating sales deals have 16% larger proceeds as well.

Turning to employee satisfaction, the first-of-its-kind study shows that Mac users were 17 percent less likely to leave IBM compared to their Windows counterparts. Mac users also were happier with the software available, with 5 percent asking for additional software compared to 11 percent of Windows users. A team of seven engineers is needed to maintain 200,000 Macs whereas a team of 20 is needed for that number of Windows PCs. During setup, the migration process was simple for 98 percent of Mac users versus only 86 percent of those moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Windows users were also five times as likely to need on-site support.

The share of cryptocurrency jobs per million has risen 1,457% over the past four years, according to a study by job site Indeed.com. VentureBeat reports: Indeed analyzed millions of job postings on Indeed.com to unpack how Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain trends have affected the job market. Searches for Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency roles are going down -- yet employer demand has skyrocketed. According to Indeed, in the four-year period between September 2015 and September 2019, the share of these jobs per million grew by 1,457%. In that same time period, the share of searches per million increased by 469%.

In the past year, the share of cryptocurrency job postings per million on Indeed.com has increased by 26%, while the share of searches per million for jobs has decreased by 53%. Bitcoin's volatility seems to correlate with job seeker interest, and the change in Bitcoin price this year might be why job searches have declined. Employers, however, are doubling down on the technology, which uses decentralized ledgers to produce secure and transparent transactions. The report says that if you want a better chance at getting a job in this field you should be a programmer familiar with basic cryptography, P2P networks, and a language like C++, Java, Python, or JavaScript (along with certain soft crypto skills). To stand out, you should learn new blockchain development languages, like Hyperledger, Bitcoin Script, Ethereum's Solidity, the Ripple protocol, or even languages currently in development -- like Rholang.

The top hirers are as follows: Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Collins Aerospace, Ernst & Young, Coinbase, Overstock, Ripple, Verizon, Circle, Kraken, ConsenSys, JP Morgan Chase, and Signature Bank.

In modern cities, we're constantly surveilled through CCTV cameras in both public and private spaces, and by companies trying to sell us shit based on everything we do. We are always being watched. But what if a simple T-shirt could make you invisible to commercial AIs trying to spot humans? Motherboard reports: A team of researchers from Northeastern University, IBM, and MIT developed a T-shirt design that hides the wearer from image recognition systems by confusing the algorithms trying to spot people into thinking they're invisible. Adversarial designs, as this kind of anti-AI tech is known, are meant to "trick" object detection algorithms into seeing something different from what's there, or not seeing anything at all. In some cases, these designs are made by tweaking parts of a whole image just enough so that the AI can't read it correctly. The change might be imperceptible to a human, but to a machine vision algorithm it can be very effective: In 2017, researchers fooled computers into thinking a turtle was a rifle. A T-shirt is a low-barrier way to move around the world unnoticed by AI watchers. Previously, researchers have tried to create adversarial fashion using patches attached to stiff cardboard, so that the design doesn't distort on soft fabric while the wearer moves. If the design is warped or part of it isn't visible, it becomes ineffective.