The nerds at DOGE wrestling with COBOL are not going to win – the programming language is deeply embedded in government. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Savetz on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Business-oriented. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it? • ZDNet
Steven Vaughan-Nichols:
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In the coming weeks and months, we might see DOGE reporting finding “fraud” in government agencies where the real crime is out-of-date, badly-maintained software, and not any criminal intent.
COBOL, you see, may be old, but it’s far from dead. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), numerous vital government systems still rely on legacy software and hardware. Some of these systems are more than 50 years old.
These archaic systems include ones for the Department of Education for tracking students; the Department of Health and Human Services’ clinical and patient administration; and Medicare & Medicaid Services still uses COBOL-based systems for critical operations.
Last but not least, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) still uses COBOL for some of its critical systems. Altogether, the IRS still relies on approximately 160 COBOL applications. At the IRS’s heart is every taxpayer’s Individual Master File (IMF). This is written not just in COBOL but in IBM Assembler as well. This is, in no way, shape, or form, easy code to work with. Complicating matters further, the IRS uses multiple versions of COBOL, including IBM COBOL for OS/390 & VM, IBM Enterprise COBOL for zOS, and Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Eclipse.
You might think that IMF, which dates back to the early 1960s, is the oldest computer system. You’d be wrong. The Department of Defense’s computerized contract-management system, Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), is still with us after almost 67 years of service. That’s even older than the official release of COBOL itself. MOCAS was written in beta COBOL.
In theory, the IMF was to be replaced by 2028. That was before DOGE cut 6,000 IRS employees out of the government agency’s approximately 82,990 employees.
This problem isn’t limited to just the Federal government. Forty-five of the 50 states and the District of Columbia still run COBOL systems. Many of you may remember when Covid first hit, and you couldn’t get unemployment checks. More than likely, your money was delayed because of over-burdened COBOL-based unemployment programs.
None of this is COBOL’s fault. It may be old, but COBOL is still useful. Indeed, when you get cash from an ATM, 95% of the time you’re interacting with a COBOL program. Behind them, 43% of banking systems are written in COBOL, and 90% of banks still use some COBOL. It’s not just banks. Insurance companies also rely on COBOL. This old programming language will not be leaving us this decade, maybe not this century.
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Cockroaches and COBOL, the two great survivors.
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Trump manufacturing win: Apple to spend $500bn in U.S., hire 20,000 • Axios
Mike Allen and Ben Berkowitz:
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Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the announcement: “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our longstanding U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future.”
“From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund [from $5 billion to $10 billion], to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing,” Cook added. “And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”
Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while meeting with governors that Cook is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope he’s announced it — I hope I didn’t announce it, but what the hell? All I do is tell the truth — that’s what he told me. Now he has to do it, right?”
“He is investing hundreds of billions of dollars and others, too,” Trump continued. “We will have a lot of chipmakers coming in, a lot of automakers coming in. They stopped two plants in Mexico that were … starting construction. They just stopped them — they’re going to build them here instead, because they don’t want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”
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Axios gets a prize for most credulous reporting, and Trump for most credulous president. Apple announced much the same thing in 2021 (that’s ongoing – maybe this is part of it?). The Mexico stuff is perhaps two ancient ones which made keyboards. It’s the Potemkin investment, but Trump is happy.
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Perplexity wants to reinvent the web browser with AI—but there’s fierce competition • Ars Technica
Samuel Axon:
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Natural-language search engine Perplexity will launch a web browser, joining a competitive and crowded space that has for years been dominated by Google.
The browser will be called Comet, but we know nothing at all about its features or intended positioning within the browser market at this stage. Comet was announced in an X post with a flashy animation but no details.
Perplexity followed up the X post with a link and an invitation to sign up for beta access to the browser. Those who follow the link will find a barebones website (again with no details) and a simple form for entering an email address.
When we entered an address, we received a brief email saying that Perplexity will add new users to the beta every week and that people can get in faster by sharing Comet on social media and tagging Perplexity’s account.
Perplexity was founded in 2022 by a group of engineers with backgrounds in machine learning. Its primary product is a large language model-based search engine wherein users can type queries to get information from the web and various databases. Perplexity gathers the information, summarizes it, presents it, and takes follow-up questions to dig deeper.
It has recently been expanding its offerings—for example, it recently launched a deep research tool competing with similar ones provided by OpenAI and Google, as well as Sonar, an API for generative AI-powered search.
It will face fierce competition in the browser market, though. Google’s Chrome accounts for the majority of web browser use around the world, and despite its position at the forefront of AI search, Perplexity isn’t the first to introduce a browser with heavy use of generative AI features. For example, The Browser Company showed off its Dia browser in December.
Dia will allow users to type natural language commands into the search bar, like finding a document or webpage or creating a calendar event. It’s possible that Comet will do similar things, but again, we don’t know.
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Control people’s browsing, and you control their internet and their life – the scammers who would hack your browser to redirect your searches to their chosen search engine have known this for years. You really have to trust the maker of a browser, and it has to do something special. Chrome was special at first: really, really fast. Perplexity is going to have to do something remarkable to justify handing over your digital life to it.
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Latest calculations conclude Asteroid 2024 YR4 now poses no significant threat to Earth in 2032 and beyond • Planetary Defense
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NASA has significantly lowered the risk of near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 as an impact threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. When first discovered, asteroid 2024 YR4 had a very small, but notable chance of impacting our planet in 2032.
As observations of the asteroid continued to be submitted to the Minor Planet Center, experts at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL’s) Center for Near-Earth Object Studies were able to calculate more precise models of the asteroid’s trajectory and now have found there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century. The latest observations have further reduced the uncertainty of its future trajectory, and the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on Dec. 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth.
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Those 15 minutes of fame were really famous, though. Hang on though what’s this on the Nasa page?
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There still remains a very small chance for asteroid 2024 YR4 to impact the Moon on Dec. 22, 2032. That probability is currently 1.7%.
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I think that wouldn’t be good for the Moon, and hence for us because we rely a lot on tides (and also the Moon not being knocked out of orbit either onto us or away)? Great to know there’s still something to worry about for the next seven years.
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Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked • Our World in Data
Hannah Ritchie:
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To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars and towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.
This transition has already started. In fact, global sales of combustion engine cars are well past the peak and are now falling.
As you can see in the chart [in the story], global sales peaked in 2018. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates this peak occurred one year earlier, in 2017.
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There’s plenty more about the worldwide trends. Of course, sales peaking still leaves a ton of old internal combustion cars on the road, being replaced only very slowly, being sold on and on to second and third buyers.
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Ukrainian drones to dodge Russian jamming with GPS alternative • The Next Web
Thomas Macaulay:
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A Ukrainian drone tech firm has unveiled an alternative to GPS navigation.
Sine.Engineering built the system to counter Russia’s electronic warfare, which has wreaked havoc on GPS signals.
To dodge the interference, Sine invented a satellite-free replacement. The approach is inspired by time-of-flight (ToF) methods, which began tracking aircraft long before the advent of GPS. Unlike GPS, ToF systems don’t rely on satellites. Instead, they measure the time it takes a signal to travel between a transmitter and a target.
In Sine’s framework, the calculations come from a communication module for drones.
Smaller than a playing card, the module shares signals with a ground station and two beacons. It then measures how long the signals take to travel. As the beacons and ground station have known, static coordinates, the software can precisely determine a drone’s coordinates. And because the module runs on multiple bandwidths, the aircraft can elude jamming that targets specific frequencies.
Crucially, the system is also relatively cheap. By providing affordable accuracy, Sine plans to accelerate Ukraine’s transition to autonomous drones.
The country’s armed forces have backed the plans. Already, they have deployed Sine’s module in military operations.
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Cheap to make, resistant to jamming: all they need is the explosives. Though of course Russia can deploy the same system. Logical next step: the new target becomes the ground stations.
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Artificial Intelligence: the asymptote pt. III • Radio Free Mobile
Richard Windsor has been a technology analyst for a few decades now; this is from his daily newsletter:
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At some point, investors are going to start asking where the returns are on the investments that they have made [in the big AI companies] and with a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, the returns are likely to be lower than expected.
This will be exacerbated to some degree by DeepSeek’s methodologies which may make it much cheaper to create these sorts of services meaning that even more players can enter the market.
Without the creation of a super-intelligent machine that can replace 90% of human economic tasks, the valuations of all of these companies look much too high to me.
RFM Research [Windsor’s boutique research outfit] has long concluded that there is no super-intelligent machine on the horizon with the only alternative being a correction when reality finally reappears.
This correction is unlikely to be anything like as bad as the Internet Bubble as even without a super-intelligent machine, generative AI has many use cases where there is plenty of money to be made.
When this happens, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and so on are likely to run out of money and be acquired by much bigger players with deep pockets.
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It’s that last line which piqued my interest, because it makes a lot of sense: when everyone’s got an AI in the palm of their hand, what’s the distinguishing feature of one or the other?
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Britain’s net zero economy is booming, CBI says • The Guardian
Damian Carrington:
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The net zero economy grew by 10% in 2024 and generated £83bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.
The analysis, by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), found that 22,000 net zero businesses, from renewable energy to green finance, employ almost a million people in full-time jobs. The average annual wage in the businesses – £43,000 – was also £5,600 higher than the national average.
The analysis showed economic growth and climate action go together, said the report’s authors, and improve lives and livelihoods. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was criticised in January for suggesting economic growth was more important than net zero, but said more recently: “There is no tradeoff between economic growth and net zero. Quite the opposite. Net zero is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century.”
The figures contradict claims by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that “net zero is crippling our economy”. It has promised to “scrap net stupid zero”. The Conservative party, which put the 2050 net zero emissions target into law in 2019, now says it “leaves us economically worse off” and its new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has called it a “mistake”.
The CBI’s chief economist, Louise Hellem, said: “It is clear, you can’t have growth without green – 2025 is the year when the rubber really hits the road, where inaction is indisputably costlier than action.”
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The U.S.’s chipmaking sector is ringing the alarm about Washington’s chip war with China • Fortune Asia
Lionel Lim:
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For years, the U.S. chip sector complained that Washington’s chip controls would hurt their business and spur the creation of a Chinese competitor—yet these warnings rang hollow as revenue kept hitting records thanks to the AI boom.
But recent earnings reports from equipment manufacturers like Applied Materials and Lam Research show the U.S.’s broadside against China’s chip sector may be starting to bite.
Applied Materials, the largest U.S. chip equipment manufacturer, issued a lukewarm revenue forecast last week, citing the risk of new export controls from Washington. Revenue from China, the company’s largest market, dropped 25% in the most recent quarter to reach $2.2bn, out of a total $7.2bn.
China’s contribution to Applied Materials’ revenue has dropped from 45% a year ago to 31% today.
And the company thinks it’ll drop even further. “For Q2, we expect that China as a percentage of total revenue will be about five percentage points lower than in Q1,” CFO Brice Hill told analysts last week.
Equipment manufacturers, for now, are still reporting an increase in overall revenue, as the tech industry piles into the AI boom. But analysts warn these companies will sorely miss what China has: a lot of semiconductor manufacturing, and a consumer market eager to snap up the products that use those chips.
“China is not just a semiconductor manufacturing hub,” says Moonsup Shin, head of hardware, semiconductor, and data centers for Asia-Pacific at Bain & Company. “Around or more than 50% of the semiconductors manufactured by Chinese manufacturers are consumed in China.”
And worse, there’s no ready-made alternative waiting. Regions like Southeast Asia are investing in local manufacturing to position themselves as neutral territory in a chip war. Yet in practice, these up-and-comers lack both China’s manufacturing and consumer demand.
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Sanctions by the US on chip exports to China are biting.. but they’re biting the American companies.
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What we know about the $49.5M Infini exploit so far • CoinJournal
Charles Thuo:
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Infini, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin neobank blending crypto and traditional finance, has become the latest hack victim, resulting in the loss of $49.5 million in USD Coin (USDC).
The hack, which was reported earlier today, was first flagged by blockchain security firm CertiK at 3:18 AM UTC. The result of the exploit has sent shockwaves through the decentralized finance (DeFi) community, underscoring persistent vulnerabilities in the crypto space, especially following the $1.4bn Bybit hack on February 21, 2025.
The Infini attack targeted an Infini-related smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, specifically the address 0x9A79f4105A4e1A050Ba0b42F25351D394fA7E1DC.
According to security analysts from CertiK, Cyvers, Blocksec, and PeckShield, a hacker gained unauthorized access by exploiting retained administrative privileges within the contract. The attacker, operating from the address 0xc49b5e5b9da66b9126c1a62e9761e6b2147de3e1, had initially developed the smart contract for Infini but retained control, unbeknownst to the project.
This insider access allowed the hacker to manipulate the contract’s settings, draining $49.5m in USDC from what is believed to be the Morpho MEV Capital Usual USDC Vault.
Following the theft, the hacker swiftly converted the stolen USDC into Dai (DAI) and then purchased 17,696 Ethereum (ETH), valued at around $49m at the time.
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What with that ByBit hack – said to be the biggest crypto heist ever (but look, it’s early in the week) – crypto is behaving like it’s 2014 again. Maybe 2015. Or 2016? Actually, it’s just being like a day of the week ending in “y”.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 