An anonymous reader writes: For those of you who have traveled through U.S. airports in recent years, you may have noticed the Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right in the Pre-Check lane so they can't predict which lane each person is assigned to and can't figure out how to avoid the random checks. Developer Kevin Burke submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking for details about the app. The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59. That's $336,413.59 for an app, which is incredibly simple to make as most programming languages of choice have a randomizing function available to use. What may be even more intriguing is that the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million, but the cost is not broken down in Burke's documents. It's possible IBM supplied all the iPads and training in addition to the app itself.

mask.of.sanity writes: Thieves can hijack $28,000 professional drones used widely across the law enforcement, emergency, and private sectors using $40 worth of hardware. The quadcopters can be hijacked from up to two kilometers away thanks to a lack of encryption, which is not present due to latency overheads. Attackers can commandeer radio links to the drones from up to two kilometers away, and block operators from reconnecting to the craft. With the targeted Xbee chip being very common in drones, IBM security guy Nils Rodday says it is likely many more aircraft are open to compromise.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from THE INQUIRER: Now-defunct Unix vendor, which claimed that Linux infringed its intellectual property and sought as much as $5 billion in compensation from IBM, has filed notice of yet another appeal in the 13-year-old dispute. The appeal comes after a ruling at the end of February when SCO's arguments claiming intellectual property ownership over parts of Unix were rejected by a U.S. district court. That judgment noted that SCO had minimal resources to defend counter-claims filed by IBM due to SCO's bankruptcy. "It is ordered and adjudged that pursuant to the orders of the court entered on July 10, 2013, February 5, 2016, and February 8, 2016, judgement is entered in favor of the defendant and plaintiff's causes of action are dismissed with prejudice," stated the document. Now, though, SCO has filed yet again to appeal that judgement, although the precise grounds it is claiming haven't yet been disclosed.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced updates to its portfolio of machine learning tools at its Build conference in San Francisco. Previously, they had fallen under the Project Oxford name, but now they are being rebranded to Microsoft Cognitive Services. According to Microsoft senior program manager Cornelia Carapcea, there are now 22 APIs available in Cognitive Services. There are also prices for the new services, along with APIs made available from Microsoft's Bing search division. Developers can try out these services for free.

skywire writes: We've all followed the recent story of AlphaGo beating a top Go master. Now IBM researchers Tayfun Gokmen and Yurii Vlasov have described what could be a game changer for machine learning — an array of resistive processing units that would use stochastic techniques to dramatically accelerate the backpropagation algorithm, speeding up neural network training by a factor of 30,000. They argue that such an array would be reliable, low in power use, and buildable with current CMOS fabrication technology. "Even Google's AlphaGo still needed thousands of chips to achieve its level of intelligence," adds Tom's Hardware. "IBM researchers are now working to power that level of intelligence with a single chip, which means thousands of them put together could lead to even more breakthroughs in AI capabilities in the future."

mmoorebz writes: Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a nonprofit organization, announced that it is adopting the IBM Cloud to improve access and analysis of canine data. Some people rely on their service dogs to help them with everyday life, and as a way to continue its mission to serving the blind, Guiding Eyes migrated more than half a million health records and more than 65,000 temperament records on thousands of dogs to the IBM Cloud. President and CEO of Guiding Eyes, Thomas Panek, said, "People don't typically think about an organization like ours as a Big Data company but we cannot succeed or grow without it."
"Guiding Eyes is a great example of how IBM Cloud can help organizations innovate new business models and processes that were heretofore unthinkable," said William Karpovich, General Manager, IBM Cloud Platform. "Through the IBM Cloud, Guiding Eyes is now able to advance even further its critical work in breeding, raising and training service dogs for those in need."

jones_supa writes: The GNU free software project is introducing a new neural network computation package called Gneural Network. The GNU project has been impressed by the work of Google, IBM, AlphaGo and Watson on the field of artificial intelligence. However, the GNU project sees that the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat: "First of all, we cannot know how money driven companies are going to use this novel technology. Second, this monopoly slows down Progress and Technology." This is why the author, Jean Michel Sellier, decided to create Gneural Network and release it under the GNU GPL license. In the current release (version number humbly set to 0.0.1), it is a very simple feedforward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting, but the development team plans to deliver more advanced features very soon. They are already spending efforts to implement a network of LSTM (long short term memory) neurons for recurrent networks and deep learning. Learning reinforcement techniques are also planned.

dcblogs writes: About 300 Hertz IT employees, most located in Oklahoma City, are being impacted [by] a decision to expand its outsourcing to IBM. About 75 will be hired by IBM and those workers [are expected] to receive offers this week while others are facing layoffs. The news was a shock for IT employees. There was "anger, resentment," especially by employees who "sacrificed that work/life balance to keep things going here," said one employee. Hertz took precautions. On the day that IT employees learned that their work was shifting to IBM, employees noticed Oklahoma sheriff patrol vehicles in the building's parking lot. They believed plainclothes officers were inside the building.
"We consider the safety and security of our people whenever there are circumstances or events that could increase the risk of a disturbance or some form of workplace violence," said Bill Masterson, a Hertz spokesman. "Knowing that this was a difficult announcement, we had additional security on hand," said Masterson. "Going forward, Hertz IT resources will be focused on development of future products and services for customers," he said. The majority of services will be cloud-based. According to the Computerworld article, along with severance pay, benefits also include three months of outplacement assistance. IT employees can receive up to $4,000 toward retraining or skill certification, said Masterson. IBM India Private Limited, a IBM subsidiary, has filed paper for H-1B visa workers for Hertz Technology offices.

An anonymous reader writes: Apparently, during the past months it has started coming to the surface the fact that most top-tier Android malware was actually related, coming from a common malware variant called GM Bot, and sold for only $5,000 on underground hacking forums. Taking advantage of his new found glory, the coder behind that malware has now released a second version, three times the price of the first, complete with 3 exploits that can guarantee root access on older versions of Android (which are plenty thanks to [ignorant] OEMs and carriers). Some of the malware that originated from GM Bot includes: SimpleLocker (first crypto-ransomware for Android), AceCard (considered the most sophisticated Android malware to date), Bankosy and SlemBunk (banking trojan and backdoor), and Mazar Bot (banking trojan, backdoor and ransomware). To make things worse, GM Bot v1's source code also got leaked online, making it available to any halfwit developer that wants a crack at a cybercrime career.

An anonymous reader writes: IBM is pushing big internet companies to pay patent licensing fees in part because IBM invented the Prodigy service, a precursor to the modern web. Yesterday, Big Blue filed a lawsuit against Groupon, saying the company has infringed four IBM patents, including patents 5,796,967 and 7,072,849. IBM inventors working on Prodigy "developed novel methods for presenting applications and advertisements," and "the technological innovations embodied in these patents are fundamental to the efficient communication of internet content," according to the company. The Prodigy patents were filed in 1993 and 1996, but they have "priority dates" stretching back to 1988. "Despite IBM's repeated attempts to negotiate, Groupon refuses to take a license but continues to use IBM's property," IBM lawyers write. IBM says it informed Groupon that it was infringing the '967, '849, and '346 patents as early as 2011. As for the '601 patent, IBM says that Groupon should have been on notice of that once Priceline got sued last year.

Tekla Perry writes: Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions. Today reports are coming in that massive layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off-IBMer. In addition, a recent change in IBM's severance policy may leave workers with less cash than anticipated. IBM maintains that things are just business as usual, but this appears to be the day IBM Watchers have long warned about.

An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, IBM and SCO filed an agreement with the US district court in Utah to accept a ruling of dismissal of the last remaining claims by SCO against IBM. Says the linked article, in line with our most recent other mentions of the long-due death spiral: This agreement wasn't unexpected, and in fact, came down right on deadline. On February 10, I reported that Judge David Nuffer with the U.S. District Court in Utah had ruled to dismiss a couple of interference claims SCO had filed against IBM, and had ordered both parties to reach an agreement on whether to accept the dismissal by February 26, which was Friday. In all likelihood this is the last we'll ever hear from SCO as its current owner, the California based software company Xinuos which now owns and markets many of SCO's old products, will probably remove what's left of SCO from life support.

walterbyrd writes: IBM is very particular in hiring for the hot new skills where IBM is expanding like machine learning, big data, mobile, and security. However, even with adding 70,000 people to their payroll in 2015, IBM actually ended the year with a slightly lower headcount than when it started, according to a SEC filing. IBM is always very careful when talking about its global headcount, which has been going through major shifts for years. It won't say how many people it lays off each year, or how old they are or in what areas they work. It only talks only about "resource actions" or "workforce rebalancing" in terms of the total amount of money it spends on them. It spent $587 million on such things in 2015 (and nearly $1.5 billion in 2014), it said.

The X Prize Foundation and IBM have just announced a global X Prize competition focusing on artificial intelligence. Teams will take part in the "IBM Watson A.I. X Prize: A Cognitive Computing Competition" in hopes of taking home the $5 million prize. Registration will open at the end of May, and the competition will end at the end of the 2020 TED conference.

New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago.

campuscodi writes: The Node.js Foundation has taken the Express Node.js framework under its wing. Express will be a new incubation project for the Foundation. IBM, which purchased Express maintainer StrongLoop last September, is contributing the code. Part of the reason for allowing the foundation to oversee Express is to build a diverse contributor base, which is important given the framework's popularity.

JG0LD writes with this news from Network World: A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.
Here's the decision itself (PDF). Also at The Register.

jones_supa writes: These days, the motivation to use open source software for many people is to avoid backdoors placed by intelligence organizations and to avoid software that has hidden privacy-intruding characteristics. For the operating system and userspace software, open choices are already available. The last remaining island has been the firmware included in various ROM chips in a computer. Libreboot has introduced an open BIOS, but it is not available for newer systems featuring the Intel ME or AMD PSP management features. Talos' Secure Workstation fills this need, providing a modern system with 8-core POWER8 CPU, 132 GB RAM, and open firmware. The product is currently in a pre-release phase where Raptor Engineering is trying to understand if it's possible to do a production run of the machine. If you are interested, it's worth visiting the official website. Adds an anonymous reader about the new system, which rings in at a steep $3100: "While the engineers found solace in the POWER8 architecture with being more open than AMD/Intel CPUs, they still are searching for a graphics card that is open enough to receive the FSF Respect Your Freedom certification." Update: 02/08 18:44 GMT by T : See also Linux hacker and IBM employee Stewart Smith's talk from the just-completed linux.conf.au on, in which he walks through "all of the firmware components and what they do, including the boot sequence from power being applied up to booting an operating system." Update: 02/08 23:30 GMT by T :FSF Licensing & Compliance Manager Joshua Gay wrote to correct the headline originally appeared with this story, which said that the Talos workstation described was "FSF Certified"; that claim was an error I introduced. "The FSF has not certified this hardware," says Gay, "nor is it currently reviewing the hardware for FSF certification." Sorry for the confusion.

coondoggie writes: Many consumers expect self-driving cars to become common in the not-too-distant future -- cars that diagnose problems without human intervention, cars that adapt to a particular driver's behaviors and react to its environment. Those are some of the conclusions from IBM's 'Auto 2025: A New Relationship – People and Cars' research involving 16,000 global consumers who were asked how they expect to use vehicles in the next ten years. IBM found consumers have the expectation that cars will soon communicate with other vehicles and infrastructure around them, integrating easily into a broader collection of traffic. More than a third of consumers said they'd be likely to allow collection of their driving data to support these services -- a notable figure, given that IBM is partnering with Ford to do exactly that.

dcblogs writes: A 16-year effort by the Communication Workers of America to organize IBM employees into a union is ending. The union's local, the Alliance@IBM, is suspending 'organizing' efforts, and says its membership has been worn down by IBM's ongoing decline of its U.S. work force as it grows overseas. The union never got many dues-paying members, but its Website, a source of reports from employees on layoffs, benefit changes and restructuring, was popular with employees, a source of information for the news media, and a continuing thorn in the side of IBM.