Regulators voted to let fast Wi-Fi devices use a broad swath of airwaves, delivering a win for tech companies such as Google and Facebook and a setback to utilities that use the frequencies to control pipelines and electric grids. From a report: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission decided to let the airwaves band known as 6 gigahertz be used by phones, tablets, wearables and other consumer electronics as well as industrial sensors for manufacturing. The agency said it anticipates new, high-speed uses will emerge that will help secure U.S. leadership in advanced 5G services. The agency approved the change in a 5-0 vote during its monthly meeting, which was held online. "This will be a huge benefit to consumers and innovators," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The agency under his leadership has pushed to rearrange airwaves uses, finding places on the spectrum where assignments made years ago can be modified to accommodate the booming demand for mobile signals. Wi-Fi, which routes signals to wired networks, already carries the bulk of mobile-phone traffic. The newly available airwaves will expand frequencies available to Wi-Fi six-fold, and uses will expand substantially, said Edgar Figueroa, president of the Wi-Fi Alliance, with members including chipmakers Intel Corp. and Qualcomm.

Apple is planning to start selling Mac computers with its own main processors by next year, relying on designs that helped popularize the iPhone and iPad, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on three of its own Mac processors, known as systems-on-a-chip, based on the A14 processor in the next iPhone. The first of these will be much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad, the people said. Apple is preparing to release at least one Mac with its own chip next year, according to the people. But the initiative to develop multiple chips, codenamed Kalamata, suggests the company will transition more of its Mac lineup away from current supplier Intel Corp. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Apple's partner for iPhone and iPad processors, will build the new Mac chips, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private product plans. The components will be based on a 5-nanometer production technique, the same size Apple will use in the next iPhones and iPad Pros, one of the people said.

To commemorate Earth Day, Intel -- in partnership with Accenture and Sulubaai Environmental Foundation, a Philippine-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting Palawan's natural resources -- detailed Project Corail, an AI-powered platform that monitors and analyzes the resiliency of coral reefs. From a report: Since its launch in May 2019, it's collected 40,000 images of the reef surrounding Pangatalan Island, which researchers have leveraged to gauge reef health in real time. If the pilot program in Palawan is successful, Project Corail could be used to monitor more of the world's at-risk reef population. (Stresses such as pollution, overfishing, and global climate change will kill an estimated 90% of reefs in the next century.) It's a worthwhile mission considering that reefs not only protect coastlines from tropical storms, but that they provide food and income for 1 billion people, generating $9.6 billion from tourism and recreation alone each year. Project Corail consists of a buoy equipped with marine-grade solar panels, batteries, and a transmitting device (either Wi-Fi or 4G), as well as a camera attached to the mooring line. An Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 plugged into a Raspberry Pi handles on-buoy computing, while an onshore PC processes images with an Intel Arria 10 FPGA.

Researchers from Google Brain, Intel, OpenAI, and top research labs in the U.S. and Europe joined forces this week to release what the group calls a toolbox for turning AI ethics principles into practice. From a report: The kit for organizations creating AI models includes the idea of paying developers for finding bias in AI, akin to the bug bounties offered in security software. This recommendation and other ideas for ensuring AI is made with public trust and societal well-being in mind were detailed in a preprint paper published this week. The bug bounty hunting community might be too small to create strong assurances, but developers could still unearth more bias than is revealed by measures in place today, the authors say.

"Bias and safety bounties would extend the bug bounty concept to AI and could complement existing efforts to better document data sets and models for their performance limitations and other properties," the paper reads. "We focus here on bounties for discovering bias and safety issues in AI systems as a starting point for analysis and experimentation but note that bounties for other properties (such as security, privacy protection, or interpretability) could also be explored."

MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled its NUC 9 Ghost Canyon platform back at CES earlier this year, but the company has just announced general availability and lifted the embargo on full product reviews. An array of NUC 9 systems are launching today, with the top-end Intel NUC9i9QNX featuring a Core i9-9980HK Comet Lake-H 8-core CPU. The NUC 9 is built around Intel's NUC Compute Element, which essentially places the CPU, chipset, IO, and cooler onto a removable add-in card in a chassis that measures only 9.37 x 8.5 x 3.78 (WxDxH) inches. The Intel NUC 9 Extreme is a different sort of animal than traditional small form factor PCs though, and the version of the system that was tested at HotHardware is quite powerful, thanks to the inclusion of 16GB of RAM, an Intel Optane 905P boot drive, a secondary Kingston SSD, and an ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 discrete GPU, though the NUC 9 does have integrated graphics as well. A barebones Intel NUC 9 Extreme (model NUC9i9QNX), without any components or accessories will sell for about $1,639, but fully configured like the one in the review will retail north of $2000. It's not cheap, but Intel's NUC 9 Extreme is a very compact, robust, reasonably quiet and capable little machine.

Advanced Micro Devices said it is adding three new 2nd-Gen AMD Epyc server processors that can deliver up to 50% lower cost of ownership than rival Intel Xeon processors. From a report: The chips are part of AMD's attempt to grab technology leadership away from Intel, which has long dominated the server chip market. AMD has had an advantage lately with its high-performance Zen 2 cores designed to handle database, high-performance computing, and hyper-converged infrastructure workloads, Dan McNamara, senior vice president at AMD's server business unit, said in a press briefing. The three new processors are the AMD Epyc 7F32 (with 8 computing cores), Epyc 7F52 (16 cores) and EPYC 7F72 (24 cores). They have up to 500MHz of additional base frequency and large amounts of cache memory. AMD said the design gives Epyc the world's highest per-core performance x86 server central-processing unit. The previous chips in the second generation of Epyc processors debuted in the third quarter of 2019. [...] The 7F32 is priced at $2,100, the 7F52 at $3,100, and the 7F72 at $2,450.

Paul Cormier became Red Hat's new CEO this week -- while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper: In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It's been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. "Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don't care where they are."

That doesn't mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn't give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, "We have cases around the globe -- people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered."

Cormier said he's committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether "you're 140% productive or 40% productive."
Cormier also emphasized he's committed to keeping Red Hat a "totally, totally separate company" from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM's new CEO Arvind Krishna. "If we're not independent, then the other cloud guys won't feel safe working with us... Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features...." He also noted that Red Hat's finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. "IBM doesn't set our road map. We set our road map," he said.

Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.

Python knocked C++ out of the top 3 on TIOBE's index of the most popular programming languages this month, while C# rose into the #5 position, overtaking Visual Basic.

But the biggest surprise was when last month's #26 most popular programming language suddenly jumped six spots into the #20 position, writes the CEO of TIOBE Software. "At first sight this might seem a bit strange for a programming language that is designed to teach children how to program." But if you take into account that there are in total more than 50 million projects "written" in Scratch and each month 1 million new Scratch projects are added, it can't be denied any more that Scratch is popular...

Since computers are getting more and more an integral part of life, it is actually quite logical that languages to teach children programming are getting popular.
TIOBE notes that Scratch is sponsored by major tech companies like Google and Intel (as well as the Cartoon Network and LEGO Foundation). But Jaxenter also applauds how the Scratch interface lets users remix or comment on existing projects in addition to sharing their own: The community not only introduces children to teamwork, creative problem solving, logical thinking, and collaboration, but it also introduces concepts such as open source communities and code review. They will learn concepts that might later become useful in Agile software development and DevOps.
TIOBE bases its rankings on the number of search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and programmers -- making the programming news site DevClass wonders if the spike came from "school aged children...stuck at home while schools are closed."

TIOBE still shows Java as the #1 most popular programming language (followed by C, Python, and C++). And this month's index also shows PHP rising into the #9 position -- overtaking SQL.

And COBOL is now #26 on the list, making it more popular than Rust.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A global group of scientists and lawyers announced their efforts to make their intellectual property free for use by others working on coronavirus pandemic relief efforts -- and urged others to do the same -- as part of the "Open Covid Pledge." Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Intel are among the founding members of this effort; Intel contributed to the pledge by opening up its portfolio of over 72,000 patents, according to a press release. Participants are asked to publicly take the pledge by announcing it on their own websites and issuing a press release.

"Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected," the pledge states. "It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease." From there, people and companies are asked to adopt a license detailing the terms and conditions their intellectual property will be available; while pledgers are permitted to write their own license based on their needs, the organizers wrote "Open COVID License 1.0" as a template for immediate use, which grants usage rights to anyone working toward "minimizing the impact of the disease, including without limitation the diagnosis, prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The license is effective until one year after the World Health Organization declares the pandemic to be over. Other participants include Berkeley and UCSF's Innovative Genomics Institute, Fabricatorz Foundation, and United Patents.

The Pentagon is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to combat hacks designed to mess with the automated systems we'll rely on in the near future. From a report: In February, DARPA issued a call for proposals for a new program. Like most DARPA projects, it had a fantastic acronym: Guaranteeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robustness against Deception (GARD). It's a multimillion-dollar, four-year initiative that's aiming to create defenses for sensor-based artificial intelligence -- think facial recognition programs, voice recognition tools, self-driving cars, weapon-detection software and more. Today, Protocol can report that DARPA has selected 17 organizations to work on the GARD project, including Johns Hopkins University, Intel, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International and IBM's Almaden Research Center. Intel will be leading one part of the project with Georgia Tech, focusing on defending against physical adversarial attacks. Sensors that use AI computer vision algorithms can be fooled by what researchers refer to as adversarial attacks. These are basically any hack to the physical world that tricks a system into seeing something other than what's there.

The major tech companies are scrambling to craft digital options for this year's summer intern class, as businesses remain shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. These companies said they're moving their programs online: Google said it will pay its interns the full rate.
Twitter said its intern class may shrink this year.
Microsoft said it will have its biggest ever intern class -- more than 4,000.
Lyft, which will have the same number of interns as originally planned, limit them to just two start dates to provide students with more of a common experience.
Salesforce, which also plans a similar size intern class as intended. These companies are still hoping have at least some interns on-site for at least part of the summer: Apple said it plans to hire more than 1,000 people for a mix of online and in-person internships and pledged in a statement to "extend to our interns the same precautions and care that we're extending to all our other personnel as a part of the ongoing COVID-19 response."
Amazon said it expects its biggest-ever class of interns globally, though it said the vast majority of internships will be virtual.
Intel, which does plan to have its interns work remotely but hopes to move them on-site should the situation and health authority guidelines make that possible.
Uber, which has made plans for online on-boarding and will keep the program online if their offices remain closed, but will aim to have its interns work in the office if that is possible.
Doordash said, for now, it "plans to stay the course" with its summer internship program, but is exploring options for conducting the program remotely and will "continue to re-evaluate as the situation progresses."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Devices with Wi-Fi 6 started rolling out at the end of 2019, but now, a new vote proposed by the FCC could open up the 6Ghz band to unlicensed wifi and add a massive speed boost to wireless gadgets. Backed by Chairman Pai, the FCC vote is scheduled to take place on April 23rd, and if passed would add 1200MHz of available bandwidth to the usable wifi spectrum which the FCC says would "effectively increase the amount of spectrum available for Wi-Fi almost by a factor of five."

Not only would this improve things like latency and download and uploads speeds, because the 6Ghz band was previously mostly used to support things like wireless backhaul, microwave services, and a limited number of public safety services, new 6GHz wifi devices wouldn't really have to compete with other gadgets for spectrum, unlike the existing 2.4Ghz wifi band which often suffers from interference caused by household appliances. The move is also seeing widespread industry support from a number of groups including the Wi-Fi Alliance, which earlier this year announced the creation of the Wi-Fi 6E which incorporates the 6Ghz band into current wireless standards. A number of tech companies also approve of the proposal, including Qualcomm, Intel, Facebook, Cisco and Apple.

Just like Intel said at CES, it's crossed the 5GHz barrier with its new H-series 10th generation notebook CPUs. And you won't need to shell out for the top-of-the-line Core i9 to do it: The new six and eight-core i7 processors reach up to 5.1Ghz (boost speed) on a single core. From a report: But if you want to go all out, the octa-core i9-10980HK hits 5.3GHz -- and it's fully unlocked for overclocking, to boot. As usual, these H-series chips are meant for gaming and workhorse machines, not laptops where battery efficiency is key. You can expect around 44 percent better performance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey in 1080p with high settings, compared to the three-year-old Core i7-7700HQ.

And the new top-of-the-line Core i9 is 54 percent faster in Red Dead Redemption 2, compared to the i7-7820HK (there weren't any mobile Core i9 chips three years ago). Reaching beyond 5GHz is a notable achievement, and it's a nice deflect away from Intel's reliance on its 14nm "Comet Lake" architecture, just like its last batch of powerful ultraportable CPUs. Intel is competing directly with AMD's new 4000 series Ryzen mobile processors, which also offer up to eight cores, but with a lower 4.4GHz maximum clock speed. AMD is using a refined 7nm architecture, which makes them more efficient power-wise. And AMD's new chips also include up to 8 cores of Radeon Vega graphics, which can easily trounce Intel's aging UHD graphics. But really, all of these processors are best suited for notebooks with dedicated GPUs, so it makes sense for Intel to skimp on that for now.

HPE announced on Tuesday it's working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites. From a report: The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology. HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.

Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8...

Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020.

Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.

In celebration of Windows 10 hitting 1 billion users, Microsoft's chief product officer Panos Panay teased Windows 10's next UI refresh. Gizmodo reports: In the video posted to Instagram, Microsoft starts by showing the evolution of its OS throughout the years going as far back as Windows 1.01 all the way to Windows 10. However, where things start to get interesting is around 12 seconds in when Microsoft shows off a new set of updated icons followed by a redesigned look for Windows 10's Start Menu and Live Tiles. Instead of a bunch of brightly color rectangles, Microsoft is implementing a more unified color scheme that can adjust automatically to match your desktop background and potentially other UI elements.

Additionally, Microsoft also showed off a wide variety of accessibility options including a range of pointers in various sizes and colors, what looks like improved support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a tease for a new built-in snipping tool, and more. Then Microsoft capped everything off by showing light and dark themes for Windows 10 along with a bunch of windows resizing and snapping options, all designed to making multi-tasking just a bit faster and easier. Microsoft also made a point to mention support for both x86-based systems powered by chips from Intel and AMD and ARM-based systems like the Surface Pro X.

Researchers from Intel and Cornell University trained a neuromorphic chip to learn and recognize the scents of 10 hazardous chemicals. Engadget reports: Using Intel's Loihi, a neuromorphic chip, the team designed an algorithm based on the brain's olfactory circuit. When you take a whiff of something, molecules stimulate olfactory cells in your nose. Those cells send signals to the brain's olfactory system, which then fires off electrical pulses. The researchers were able to mimic that circuitry in Loihi's silicon circuits. According to Intel, the chip can identify 10 smells, including acetone, ammonia and methane, even when other strong smells are present. And, Loihi learned each odor with just a single sample. That's especially impressive, the researchers say, because other deep learning techniques can require 3,000 times more training samples to reach the same level of accuracy. The work has been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, said it's maintaining above 90% on-time delivery of its products from factories worldwide. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan told customers in a letter posted on the company's website that he is "inspired by the deep commitment of our teams to sustain our manufacturing, assembly, test and supply chain operations in Oregon, New Mexico, California and Arizona, as well as Israel, Ireland, China, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Intel and partner locations around the world." "They are working hard to make sure you can continue to be successful," he added. Intel's products are essential components of personal computers and the server machines that run corporate networks and the internet. Continued output from its factories is a vital part of the global supply chain as the technology industry scrambles to deal with the effects of the pandemic. Semiconductor plants are some of the most automated facilities in the world and require very little human involvement directly in the manufacturing process. The electronic components take as long as three months to get through the multistep process. That means chips coming out of Intel's plants now would have been started before the Covid-19 virus kicked in and caused a lockdown of big chunks of the world's population.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you'll ever see. They are representing "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you'll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos -- the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle. However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right? So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, "Labrador Diagnostics," which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.

MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil on additional details and the architectural enhancements that make Ryzen 4000 Series AMD's strongest mobile processor line-up to date. AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs are based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to the current Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors. AMD is touting an approximate 25% IPC increase versus Zen 1-based mobile parts, but there are additional benefits that boost performance and efficiency throughout the chips as well. These are monolithic SoCs, with up to 8-cores / 16-threads, that are manufactured on TSMC's 7nm node. AMD is claiming 20% lower SoC power, 2X the perf-per-watt, 5X faster state switching, and an approximate 3.4X improvement in relative power efficiency, in comparison to its mobile platform from 2015. AMD is claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current-generation Intel mobile processors and significantly better multi-threaded and graphics performance versus Intel, thanks to the increased core / thread counts and integrated Vega-based GPU of its Ryzen 4000 series. Battery life performance is claimed be strong as well, due to architectural enhancements for power optimization throughout the Ryzen 4000 design. AMD Ryzen 4000 Series laptops should be shipping in market sometime in the next month or so.