Technology

While the financial services and shipping industries have been quick to deploy blockchain, the healthcare industry could soon follow their lead as it looks to increase efficiency and security, reduce costs and expand services with the distributed ledger technology.

Once upon a time, Microsoft symbolized all that was wrong with the tech world: greedy, monopolistic, single-mindedly focused on profits while caring little about the public good. In the heyday of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the company ran roughshod over competitors in its attempt to corral the worldwide market for both operating systems and application software.

But today, Microsoft has embraced the role of the tech worldbetter angel. And as events show in recent weeks, thatnot hype. The company has, to some extent, tried to act as the industryconscience as well as taking actions for the greater good.

One case in point: Microsoftrecent revelation that it had uncovered evidence that the Russian government had targeted three congressional campaigns in the upcoming midterm elections — and that it had helped thwart the plot. Microsoft discovered the attempts as part of its long-running battle against the Russian government&backed hacking cyber-espionage group called Fancy Bear. Microsoft, which has been playing whack-a-mole with the group for well over a year, targets the command-and-control servers that control malware that Fancy Bear plants on victims& computers, as well as associated websites that install malware on targets& computers when the victims visit them as a result of a spearphishing attack.

It's the early 1980s, and the corporate department where this pilot fish works decides to replace its aging minicomputers with the hottest thing in departmental IT: the IBM System/38.

"But the budget wouldn't support a brand new one, so we bought a used system from a Japanese company," says fish. "Several people in other departments were heard to jokingly wonder if the new system would speak Japanese.

"It was shipped over to us and then sat without power in the computer room for several months while the rest of the project -- terminals, twinax cables, modems, software and user training -- slowly ground forward.