Blockchain euphoria is giving way to blockchain fatigue: Despite the hype, only 1% of executives in a survey reported deploying the technology at their firms. And while corporate management remains bullish about distributed ledgers, mentions of "blockchain" are on the decline during earnings conference calls. But IBM, which has roots going back more than 100 years, still thinks the technology that underpins bitcoin has untapped potential. From a report: Blockchain is a kind of tamper-proof database for keeping track of just about anything. IBM has around 1,600 employees working on such projects, and is leading other technology companies in terms of headcount and investment, according to Marie Wieck, general manager for IBM Blockchain. The Armonk, New York-based company thinks promising uses include supply chains and finance. And while the public's love affair with blockchain is showing signs of dissipating, Wieck still thinks the technology could be as transformative for businesses processes as the internet has been for personal ones.

Security flaws have been found in major city infrastructure such as flood defences, radiation detection and traffic monitoring systems. A team of researchers found 17 vulnerabilities, eight of which it described as "critical." From a report: The researchers warned of so-called "panic attacks," where an attacker could manipulate emergency systems to create chaos in communities. The specific flaws uncovered by the team have been patched. "If someone, supervillain or not, were to abuse vulnerabilities like the ones we documented in smart city systems, the effects could range from inconvenient to catastrophic," wrote Daniel Crowley, from IBM's cyber research division, X-Force Red. "While no evidence exists that such attacks have taken place, we have found vulnerable systems in major cities in the US, Europe and elsewhere." The team plans to explain the vulnerabilities at Black Hat -- a cyber-security conference -- on Thursday.

"Corporate America's love affair with all things blockchain may be cooling," reports Bloomberg. An anonymous reader quotes their report. [Alternate version here.] A number of software projects based on the distributed ledger technology will be wound down this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. And some companies pushing ahead with pilot tests are scaling back their ambitions and timelines. In 90 percent of cases, the experiments will never become part of a company's operations, the firm estimates. Even Nasdaq Inc., a high-profile champion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, hasn't moved as quickly as hoped. The exchange operator, which talked in 2016 about deploying blockchain for voting in shareholder meetings and private-company stock issuance, isn't using the technology in any widely deployed projects yet...

"The disconnect between the hype and the reality is significant -- I've never seen anything like it," said Rajesh Kandaswamy, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "In terms of actual production use, it's very rare...." Only 1 percent of chief information officers said they had any kind of blockchain adoption in their organizations, and only 8 percent said they were in short-term planning or active experimentation with the technology, according to a Gartner study. Nearly 80 percent of CIOs said they had no interest in the technology. Many companies that previously announced blockchain rollouts have changed plans
Problems include the fact that most blockchains "also can't yet handle a large volume of transactions," and worries about compatibility with other software -- which some hope to address next year with software certification testing. But at least two big tech companies are aggressively pushing blockchain.

"So far, IBM and Microsoft have grabbed 51 percent of the more than $700 million market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. estimated earlier this year,"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A U.S. jury awarded International Business Machines Corp. $83.5 million after finding that Groupon Inc. infringed four of its e-commerce patents. Friday's verdict cements the prowess of IBM's portfolio of more than 45,000 patents and is a boon to its intellectual-property licensing revenue, which brought in $1.19 billion in 2017. The jury in Wilmington, Delaware, sided with the argument of IBM's lawyers, who had said Groupon was trying to portray IBM as claiming to have patented the Internet and had called that effort "a smoke screen." As they began the trial, IBM's lawyers said Groupon built its online coupon business on the back of IBM's e-commerce inventions without permission.

[T]he patents at issue don't protect IBM's products or services, said David Hadden, Groupon's lawyer. IBM never used the patents and instead relies on its huge portfolio to extract money from other companies, he said. Two of the patents, one of which expired in 2015, came out of the Prodigy online service, which started in the late 1980s and predated the web. Another, which expired in 2016, is related to preserving information in a continuing conversation between clients and servers. The fourth patent is related to authentication and expires in 2025, the latest among the case's patents. IBM stressed throughout the trial that a range of companies have paid for licenses to use its patents. Tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have paid from $20 million to $50 million each in cross-licensing agreements, allowing them access to IBM's cadre of more than 45,000 patents.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Internal company documents from IBM show that medical experts working with the company's Watson supercomputer found "multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations" when using the software, according to a report from Stat News. According to Stat, those documents provided strong criticism of the Watson for Oncology system, and stated that the "often inaccurate" suggestions made by the product bring up "serious questions about the process for building content and the underlying technology." One example in the documents is the case of a 65-year-old man diagnosed with lung cancer, who also seemed to have severe bleeding. Watson reportedly suggested the man be administered both chemotherapy and the drug "Bevacizumab." But the drug can lead to "severe or fatal hemorrhage," according to a warning on the medication, and therefore shouldn't be given to people with severe bleeding, as Stat points out. A Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center spokesperson told Stat that they believed this recommendation was not given to a real patient, and was just a part of system testing.

According to the report, the documents blame the training provided by IBM engineers and on doctors at MSK, which partnered with IBM in 2012 to train Watson to "think" more like a doctor. The documents state that -- instead of feeding real patient data into the software -- the doctors were reportedly feeding Watson hypothetical patients data, or "synthetic" case data. This would mean it's possible that when other hospitals used the MSK-trained Watson for Oncology, doctors were receiving treatment recommendations guided by MSK doctors' treatment preferences, instead of an AI interpretation of actual patient data. And the results seem to be less than desirable for some doctors.

Are virtual machines (VM) more secure than containers? You may think you know the answer, but IBM Research has found containers can be as secure, or more secure, than VMs. From a report: James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and top Linux kernel developer, writes: "One of the biggest problems with the current debate about Container vs Hypervisor security is that no-one has actually developed a way of measuring security, so the debate is all in qualitative terms (hypervisors 'feel' more secure than containers because of the interface breadth) but no-one actually has done a quantitative comparison." To meet this need, Bottomley created Horizontal Attack Profile (HAP), designed to describe system security in a way that it can be objectively measured. Bottomley has discovered that "a Docker container with a well crafted seccomp profile (which blocks unexpected system calls) provides roughly equivalent security to a hypervisor."

On Monday, IBM asked a jury to award the company $167 million in a lawsuit against deals site Groupon for using patented technology without authorization. The patents involve e-commerce technology that had already been licensed to Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet for between $20 million and $50 million per company. "Most big companies have taken licenses to these patents," IBM's lawyer, John Desmarais, said. "Groupon has not. The new kid on the block refuses to take responsibility for using these inventions." Reuters reports: Groupon lawyer J. David Hadden argued that IBM was overreading the scope of its patents and claiming ownership of building blocks of the internet. "A key question for you in this case is whether these patents cover the world wide web," Hadden told jurors. "They do not and that is because IBM did not invent the world wide web."

An IBM executive is expected to testify during the two-week trial about licensing deals with technology companies like Amazon and Google, providing a rare glimpse into IBM's efforts to derive revenue from its large patent portfolio. The Armonk, New York-based company invests heavily in research and development and has secured more U.S. patents than any other company for the past 25 years.

You asked questions, we've got the answers!

Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, but she also coined the term "Open Source software" for that famous promotion strategy meeting in 1998.

Christine took some time to answer questions from Slashdot readers.

Slashdot reader yeokm1 recently installed Linux on a 1993 PC. But in a new blog post he lists every keyboard he's owned over the last 12 years -- to explain why he's now typing on a 5.3-pound Model M keyboard from 1987 that's older than he is, "with its legendary buckling-spring switch." It'll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete... It is sad that with all the advancements in computing, the one piece of equipment that we use the most to interact with our computers has regressed technologically in the name of costs. We don't usually expect to be using 30-year-old hardware on a daily productive basis but the IBM Model M keyboard is that exception.

Today, I don't really care about fancy features like great aesthetics, RGB backlights, media keys and extra USB ports. I just need something that gives me great tactile feedback, be durable, enable me to easily swap keys to fit my Programmer Dvorak layout. The Model M fits my needs perfectly.
"Really can use this as a weapon," the blog post jokes. There's even a video "to show clicky sound difference" between two different versions of the Model M -- and in true geek fashion, he even removes the casing screws to see whether the inside had rivets or bolts.

The original submission drew a tip from long-time Slashdot reader Spazmania based on his own experiences with the Model M. "The thing I most like? There are little plastic caps on the keys. When they get dirty I can pop them off and run them through the dishwasher."

Any other Slashdot readers want to share their own experiences with Model M keyboards?

hackingbear writes: Researchers at the Chinese University of Science and Technology have demonstrated stable quantum entanglement with 18 qubits, surpassing the previous world record of 10, also held by the same team. This represents a step toward realizing large-scale quantum computing, according to a recent study published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Physicist Pan Jianwei and his colleagues achieved the new record by simultaneously exploiting three different degrees of freedom-paths, polarization and orbital angular momentum of six photons, the fundamental particle of light. The outcome combination resulted in a stable 18-qubit state. Full control over the number of entangled particles determines the fundamental ability for quantum information processing, according to the study. There are early-stage quantum computers out there that argue more qubits -- such as IBM's 50-qubit machine and Google's 72-qubit Bristlecone, but in those cases, the individual quantum states of the qubits aren't (fully) controllable. "The team's next step will be to realize a 50-qubit entanglement and manipulation," according to Wang Xilin, a member of the team. The same research team also held the world record on quantum communication distance as well as operating the world's first quantum communication satellite.

A laid-off IBM cloud sales ace is suing the IT giant for age discrimination, alleging he was forced out for being too old. From a report: Jonathan Langley joined Big Blue in 1993, and worked his way up the ranks over the next 24 years. Then, in 2017, as worldwide program director and sales lead of the Bluemix software-as-a-service, he was let go. According to his lawsuit paperwork, Langley, 60, "was a successful employee and his performance met or exceeded IBM's expectations." Had he "been younger, and especially if he had been a millennial, IBM would not have fired him," his filing claimed.

Langley, of Texas, USA, was seemingly doing very well for himself within Big Blue. For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June. Langley was unable to get a role elsewhere within IBM, and its HR system marked him as having "resigned," it is claimed. In early July, days after he left the business, Langley got a letter congratulating him on his "retirement." IBM management told the US government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations, according to the lawsuit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Seattle Times: A robot with true artificial intelligence is about to invade space. The large, round, plastic robot head is part of SpaceX's latest supply delivery to the International Space Station. Friday's pre-dawn liftoff also includes two sets of genetically identical female mice, 20 mousestronauts that will pick up where NASA's identical twin brother astronauts left off a few years ago. Super-caffeinated coffee is also flying up for the space station's java-craving crew.

As intriguing as identical space siblings and turbo-charged space coffee may be, it's the German robot -- named Cimon, pronounced Simon, after a genius doctor in science fiction's "Captain Future" -- that's stealing the show. Like HAL, the autonomous Cimon is an acronym: it stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Its AI brain is courtesy of IBM. German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who arrived at the orbiting lab a month ago, will introduce Cimon to space life during three one-hour sessions. Already savvy about Gerst's science experiments, the self-propelling Cimon will float at the astronaut's side and help, when asked, with research procedures. To get Cimon's attention, Gerst will need only to call its name. Their common language will be English, the official language of the space station.

Beeftopia writes: From ZDNet: "The latest TOP500 Supercomputer list is out. What's not surprising is that Linux runs on every last one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Linux has dominated supercomputing for years. But, Linux only took over supercomputing lock, stock, and barrel in November 2017. That was the first time all of the TOP500 machines were running Linux. Before that IBM AIX, a Unix variant, was hanging on for dear life low on the list."

An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."

Last month IBM, which has staked much of its future on its flagship AI Watson, announced a major round of layoffs in the division. Now the engineers who had been let go allege that the move shows that difficulties IBM is facing in turning its AI into a profitable business. A report on IEEE Spectrum says: "IBM Watson has great AI," one engineer said, who asked to remain anonymous so he wouldn't lose his severance package. "It's like having great shoes, but not knowing how to walk -- they have to figure out how to use it." The layoffs at the end of May cut a swath through the Watson Health division. According to anonymous accounts submitted to the site Watching IBM, the cuts primarily affecting workers from three acquired companies: Phytel, Explorys, and Truven. These companies, acquired between 2015 and 2016, brought with them hefty troves of healthcare data, proprietary analytics systems to mine the data for insights, as well as their customers. The report adds: Two laid-off engineers from Phytel spoke to IEEE Spectrum in depth. They allege that IBM's leadership mismanaged their company since its acquisition, and say the problems at Phytel are emblematic of IBM's struggles to make Watson profitable. Several other Phytel employees corroborated the basic facts of their accounts. Both engineers worked for Phytel since before its 2015 acquisition, and say they were excited to become part of Big Blue. "Everyone expected that we would join IBM and be propelled by their support, that it would be the beginning of great things," says the first engineer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Privacy and government affairs officers from a number of the largest tech companies plan to convene in San Francisco on Wednesday to discuss how to tackle growing questions and concerns about consumer privacy online. The Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington trade group that represents major tech companies, organized an all-day meeting to jump-start the conversations. Members include Facebook, Google, Apple, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, Dropbox, and others. ITI expects the meeting to be attended by companies across the industry's sectors, including hardware, software and device makers -- but declined to say which companies would be there.

Chinese tech giant Tencent has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member. From a report: Tencent is one of a few companies to offer the highest level of support to the Linux Foundation. Other tech companies in this stable include IBM, Microsoft, and Intel, as well as fellow Chinese titan Huawei. As part of the deal, Tencent will take a chair on the Foundation's board of directors. It has also promised to offer "further support and resources" to the Foundation's efforts. So far, this has taken the form of Tencent donating several pieces of its software. Already, it's bequeathed TSeer, its service discovery tool, as well as TARS, which is the company's microservices platform. Valued at nearly $500 billion, Tencent is a behemoth of a company. It holds a massive sway over the Chinese tech market, and is spreading its cash (and influence) overseas with strategic investments in companies like Epic Games and Riot Games.

Engineers at the University of Michigan have created the world's smallest computer -- again. From a report: The University held the record for the smallest computer after it created its 2x2x4mm Michigan Micro Mote in 2014. The Micro Mote (or M3) is fully functional and able to retain its programming and data even when it loses power. But after IBM debuted an even tinier "computer" in February, a 1mm x 1mm chip with "several hundred thousand" transistors.

Engineers at the University of Michigan were not about to be one-upped, and quickly created an even smaller computer, so small it could fit on the tip of a grain of rice. However, the engineers quibbled over whether IBM's machine and the new Michigan design could really be called computers, since the data gets wiped as soon as it's turned off. You can find more details on the university's website.

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report: The human brain may be the ultimate super computer, but artificial intelligence is catching up so fast, it can now hold a substantive debate with a human, according to audience feedback. IBM's Project Debater made its public debut in San Francisco Monday afternoon, where it squared off against Noa Ovadia, the 2016 Israeli debate champion and in a second debate, Dan Zafrir, a nationally renowned debater in Israel. The AI is the latest grand challenge from IBM, which previously created Deep Blue, technology that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov and Watson, which bested humans on the game show Jeopardy.

In its first public outing, Project Debater turned out to be a formidable opponent, scanning the hundreds of millions of newspaper and journal articles in its memory to quickly synthesize an argument on a topic and position it was assigned on the spot. "Project Debater could be the ultimate fact-based sounding board without the bias that often comes from humans," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research. An audience survey taken before and after each debate found that Project Debater better enriched the audience's knowledge as it argued in favor of subsidies for space exploration and in favor of telemedicine, but that the human debaters did a better job delivering their speeches.

The AI isn't trained on topics -- it's trained on the art of debate. For the most part, Project Debater spoke in natural language, choosing the same words and sentence structures as a native English speaker. It even dropped the odd joke, but with the expected robotic delivery. IBM's engineers know the AI isn't perfect. Just like humans, it makes mistakes and at times, repeats itself. However, the company believes it could have a broad impact in the future as people now have to be more skeptical as they sort out fact and fiction. "Project Debater must adapt to human rationale and propose lines of argument that people can follow," Krishna said in a blog post. "In debate, AI must learn to navigate our messy, unstructured human world as it is -- not by using a pre-defined set of rules, as in a board game."

The US Department of Energy on Friday unveiled Summit, a supercomputer capable of performing 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or 200 petaflops. Its performance should put it at the top of the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, which is currently dominated by China. From a report (thanks to reader cb_abq for the tip): Summit, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), was built for AI. IBM designed a new heterogeneous architecture for Summit, which combines IBM POWER9 CPUs with Nvidia GPUs. It has approximately 4,600 nodes, with six Nvidia Volta Tensor Core GPUs per node -- that's more than 27,000. The last US supercomputer to top the list of the world's fastest was Titan, in 2012. ORNL, which houses Titan as well, says Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan's 18,688 nodes.

At OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada this week, Canonical CEO and Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth came out firing at two of his major enterprise OpenStack competitors: Red Hat and VMware. He claimed that Canonical OpenStack is a better deal than either Red Hat or VMware's OpenStack offerings. From a report: Shuttleworth opened quietly enough, saying, "Mission is to remove all the friction from deploying OpenStack. We can deliver OpenStack deployments with two people in less two weeks anywhere in the world." So far, so typical for a keynote speech. But, then Shuttleworth started to heat things up: "Amazon increased efficiency, so now everyone is driving down cost of infrastructure. Everyone engages with Ubuntu, not Red Hat or VMware. Google, IBM, Microsoft are investing and innovating to drive down the cost of infrastructure. Every single one of those companies works with Canonical to deliver public services."

Then, Shuttleworth got down to brass tacks: "Not one of them engages with VMware to offer those public services. They can't afford to. Clearly, they have the cash, but they have to compete on efficiencies, and so does your private cloud." So, Canonical is rolling rolling out a migration service to help users shift from VMware to a "fully managed" version of Canonical's Ubuntu OpenStack distribution. Customers want this, Shuttleworth said, because, "When we take out VMware we are regularly told that our fully managed OpenStack solution costs half of the equivalent VMware service."