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.

IBM, one of several big tech companies selling facial recognition programs, is calling on Congress to regulate the technology -- but not too much. From a report: China has built a repressive surveillance apparatus with facial recognition; now, some U.S. cities are rolling it out for law enforcement. But tech companies worry that opponents will react to these developments by kiboshing the technology completely. IBM's proposal joins calls for federal facial recognition regulations from Microsoft, Amazon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Big Tech is threatened by a yearlong groundswell of bans and proposed restrictions on facial recognition bubbling up in cities like San Francisco and states like Massachusetts. The companies say these moves would cut off beneficial uses of the technology, like speeding up airport security or finding missing children.

In a white paper, IBM is calling for what it calls "precision regulation." That means limiting potentially harmful uses rather than forbidding use of the technology entirely. IBM proposes treating various kinds of facial recognition differently. Face detection software, which simply counts the number of faces in the scene, is less prone to abuse than face matching, which can pick specific people out of a crowd. "There will always be usecases that will be off limits," IBM Chief Privacy Officer Christina Montgomery tells Axios. "That includes mass surveillance and racial profiling."

Amazon must decide soon if it will protest the Pentagon's awarding of a $10 billion cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft, with one possible grievance being the unusual attention given the project by President Donald Trump. From a report: Amazon was long thought to be the front-runner in the competition for the huge military contract. Its Amazon Web Services division is far ahead of second-place Microsoft in cloud computing, and Amazon has experience handling highly classified government data. It survived earlier legal challenges after the Defense Department eliminated rival bidders Oracle and IBM and whittled the competition down to the two Seattle area tech giants before choosing Microsoft last week. And what else distinguishes the losing bidder? Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, have been frequent targets of Trump's criticism. The Pentagon was preparing to make its final decision when Trump publicly waded into the fray in July, saying he had heard complaints about the process and that the administration would "take a very long look." He said other companies told him that the contract "wasn't competitively bid." Oracle, in particular, had argued that Pentagon officials unfairly favored Amazon for the winner-take-all contract.

AI is likely to change how every job is performed, eliminating work related to repetitive tasks but increasing the need for creative thinkers, according to a new study. From a report: These findings are contained in a report released this week by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab called "The Future of Work: How New Technologies Are Transforming Tasks." The study found signs that AI is beginning to slowly redefine the nature of tasks performed in certain jobs as automation gains ground. "As new technologies continue to scale within businesses and across industries, it is our responsibility as innovators to understand not only the business process implications, but also the societal impact," said Martin Fleming, vice president and chief economist of IBM, in a statement. "To that end, this empirical research from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab sheds new light on how tasks are reorganizing between people and machines as a result of AI and new technologies."

With the rise of AI and automation, there has been growing debate and anxiety about how these trends will disrupt current job markets. While some have argued AI and automation will be job killers, others have said the emerging technology will be a net creator of new jobs. The IBM-MIT study offers a bit of nuance to that discussion. The researchers used machine learning to analyze 170 million U.S. job postings between 2010 and 2017. They found that out of 18,500 possible tasks employees might be asked to do on average, the number had fallen by 3.7 over seven years. A drop, though hardly radical.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The U.S. government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, the Department of Defense has confirmed. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads. It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, and for a while it was up in the air as to whether Microsoft or Amazon would win this particular one. IBM and Oracle were both eliminated for the bidding back in April, leaving just Microsoft and Amazon as the only companies that could meet the requirements. The contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and Oracle lost a legal challenge after it claimed the contract has conflicts of interest. The contract will last for 10 years and is likely to be resisted by employees, who have in the past have called on the company to drop its HoloLens U.S. Army contract and stop its work with ICE.

IBM is disputing the much-vaunted claim that Google has hit a new milestone. From a report: A month ago, news broke that Google had reportedly achieved "quantum supremacy": it had gotten a quantum computer to run a calculation that would take a classical computer an unfeasibly long time. While the calculation itself -- essentially, a very specific technique for outputting random numbers -- is about as useful as the Wright brothers' 12-second first flight, it would be a milestone of similar significance, marking the dawn of an entirely new era of computing. But in a blog post published this week, IBM disputes Google's claim. The task that Google says might take the world's fastest classical supercomputer 10,000 years can actually, says IBM, be done in just days.

As John Preskill, the CalTech physicist who coined the term "quantum supremacy," wrote in an article for Quanta magazine, Google specifically chose a very narrow task that a quantum computer would be good at and a classical computer is bad at. "This quantum computation has very little structure, which makes it harder for the classical computer to keep up, but also means that the answer is not very informative," he wrote. Google's research paper hasn't been published, but a draft was leaked online last month. In it, researchers say they got a machine with 53 quantum bits, or qubits, to do the calculation in 200 seconds. They also estimated that it would take the world's most powerful supercomputer, the Summit machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 10,000 years to repeat it with equal "fidelity," or the same level of uncertainty as the inherently uncertain quantum system.

Five years after CBS publicized the fact that the Air Force still used eight-inch floppy disks to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, the aerial and space warfare service branch decided it was time to officially retire them. Ars Technica reports: The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution." The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. And it's not clear whether other upgrades to "modernize" the system have been completed. Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

"Red Hat Inc.'s finance chief Eric Shander has been dismissed from the company, forfeiting a $4 million retention award that was agreed to ahead of Red Hat's acquisition by IBM," reports the Wall Street Journal: The Raleigh, N.C.-based software company confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Shander was no longer working at Red Hat. "Eric was dismissed without pay in connection with Red Hat's workplace standards," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. The company, which said that its accounting and control functions remain healthy, on Friday declined to provide specifics about what led to Mr. Shander's dismissal. Mr. Shander didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Shander was named Red Hat's permanent chief financial officer in April 2017 after a stint as acting CFO, according to the spokeswoman. He had served in various finance roles at IBM and Lenovo Group Ltd. before joining Red Hat in 2015...

His departure puts Red Hat in a difficult spot, said Ivan Feinseth, director of research at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, an investment banking firm. "The fallout for companies in these situations is not only the dismissal of an executive but also the litigation risk," Mr. Feinseth said. "Companies could be held responsible for not creating and maintaining a proper workplace environment."

IBM said it supports Red Hat's decision to dismiss Mr. Shander. "Our values are fully aligned in this area," a spokesman said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, I talked to Linus Torvalds and several other of the Linux kernel's top programmers. They universally agreed Microsoft wants to control Linux, but they're not worried about it. That's because Linux, by its very nature and its GPL2 open-source licensing, can't be controlled by any single third-party. Torvalds said: "The whole anti-Microsoft thing was sometimes funny as a joke, but not really. Today, they're actually much friendlier. I talk to Microsoft engineers at various conferences, and I feel like, yes, they have changed, and the engineers are happy. And they're like really happy working on Linux. So I completely dismissed all the anti-Microsoft stuff."

But that doesn't mean the Microsoft leopard can't change its spots. Sure, he hears, "This is the old Microsoft, and they're just biding their time." But, Torvalds said, "I don't think that's true. I mean, there will be tension. But that's true with any company that comes into Linux; they have their own objectives. And they want to do things their way because they have a reason for it." So, with Linux, "Microsoft tends to be mainly about Azure and doing all the stuff to make Linux work well for them," he explained. Torvalds emphasized this is normal: "I mean, that's just being part of the community." James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and top Linux kernel developer, sees Microsoft as going through the same process as all other corporate Linux supporters: "This is a thread that runs through Linux. You can't work on the kernel to your own proprietary advantage. A lot of companies, as they came in with the proprietary business model, assumed they could. They have to be persuaded that, if you want something in Linux, that will assist your business -- absolutely fine. But it has to go through an open development process. And if someone else finds it useful, you end up cooperating or collaborating with them to produce this feature." That means, to get things done, even Microsoft is "eventually forced to collaborate with others."

Bottomley concluded: "So it doesn't matter if Microsoft has a competing agenda to Red Hat or IBM or anybody else. Developers are still expected to work together in the Linux kernel with a transparent agenda."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's cloud business alone is now worth $225 billion, Deutsche Bank analysts led by Lloyd Walmsley wrote in a note. The unit could report compound annual growth of 55% between 2018 and 2022, and reach annual sales of about $38 billion by 2025, the analysts wrote. The value ascribed by Deutsche Bank to Google Cloud is nearly twice the market value of IBM, which reported cloud revenue of $19.2 billion in 2018, at the close of trading on Wednesday, Bloomberg data show.

VC fund A16z's Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups -- there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration. Then, we have another new wave of productivity company that addresses a particular profession and bundles all of the tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into some new structured flow.

[...] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There's clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I'd suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.

First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won't be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important -- everyone is online now. The reason we're looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

Security researchers at IBM have found evidence that hackers have been working on creating malicious scripts they can deploy on commercial-grade "Layer 7" routers to steal payment card details. From a report: This discovery is a game-changer in what researchers call Magecart attacks, also known as web skimming. These are attacks where hackers plant malicious code on an online store that records and steals payment card details. Until now, Magecart-specific code was only delivered at the website level, hidden inside JavaScript or PHP files. However, this new discovery is an escalation of Magecart attacks to a new level, where the malicious code is injected at the router level, rather than being added by hackers on outdated websites.

Layer 7, or L7, routers are a type of commercial, heavy-duty router that's usually installed on large networks, such as hotels, malls, airports, casinos, government networks, public spaces, and others. They work like any other router, except with the added benefit of being able to manipulate traffic at the seventh layer (application level) of the OSI networking model -- meaning they can react to traffic based on more than just IP addresses, such as cookies, domain names, browser types, and more. In a report published today, researchers with the IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team said they found evidence that a well-known hacker group has been testing Magecart scripts to deploy on L7 routers.