TECH NEWS

Can AI help solve the COBOL code crisis?

What do the IRS, banks, airlines, and government infrastructure around the world have in common? They’re all running on systems propped up by antique computer code that nobody dares touch, lest everything come crashing down.

OpenAI thinks it may have a solution. On Monday, the company touted “substantial improvements” in its latest AI models’ ability to migrate aging software written in older programming languages into modern code, which it claims could help organizations with “maintaining and modernizing older systems.”

That’s a potentially massive deal. COBOL, one of the languages highlighted by OpenAI, remains stubbornly embedded in vast portions of the world’s critical infrastructure. And despite decades of efforts to banish it to history, the language has limped on, simply refusing to die.

“Nobody in their right mind would use COBOL for a new development project.”

It is hard to overstate COBOL’s ubiquity. Short for “common business-oriented language,” COBOL came into...

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The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans

Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant. Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters

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Sources: Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of November 16 and could raise ~$100B at a $1.5T to $2T valuation, after initially preparing for October

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Matiks raises $10M to expand its math and puzzle gaming platform

Over the past decade, head-to-head brain games like QuizUp rocketed in popularity, reaching at one point millions of users. After that, battle royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds had their moment in the spotlight. Lately, growth of mobile games has slowed down amid a barrage of AI content

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WIRED Ghost Stories

The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans

Sources: Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of November 16 and could raise ~$100B at a $1.5T to $2T valuation, after initially preparing for October

Matiks raises $10M to expand its math and puzzle gaming platform