Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Ms. Sammet had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in computer science.The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wasn’t impressed.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) will join Foxconn’s (2317.TW) bid for Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) semiconductor business, the Nikkei business daily quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying on Monday.The two U.S. technology giants plan to ”chip in funds”, Gou said, according the interview with the newspaper. It was not immediately clear if this would take the form of a direct investment in the semiconductor unit or would be financing for the deal.Taiwan’s Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, has also partnered with its Japanese unit Sharp Corp (6753.T) in its bid.Representatives for Apple and Amazon were not immediately available for comment.Toshiba is depending on the sale of the unit, the world’s second-largest NAND chip maker, to cover billions of dollars in cost overruns at its now bankrupt U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse.

Facebook said it wanted to make its social media platform a ”hostile environment” for terrorists in a statement issued after attackers killed seven people in London and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to demand action from internet firms.Three attackers rammed a hired van into pedestrians on London Bridge and stabbed others nearby on Saturday night in Britain’s third major militant attack in recent months.May responded to the attack by calling for an overhaul of the strategy used to combat extremism, including a demand for greater international regulation of the internet, saying big internet companies were partly responsible for providing extreme ideology the space to develop.Facebook on Sunday said it condemned the London attacks.

Australia’s consumer watchdog carried out a sting operation against Apple whoch it says caught staff repeatedly misleading iPhone customers about their legal rights to a free repair or replacement after a so-called “error 53” malfunction, court documents reveal.Australian authorities lodged a high-profile case against Apple this year, after iPhone and iPad customers experienced a malfunction that rendered phones useless if it detects that a repair has been carried out by a non-Apple technician. The fault occurred between late 2014 until early last year.The case, set to go to trial in mid-December, accuses Apple of wrongly telling customers they were not entitled to free replacements or repair if they had taken their devices to an unauthorised third-party repairer.‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6 Read moreThat advice was allegedly given even where the repair – a screen replacement, for example – was not related to the fault.

US JUDGES have set two different precedents in cases where a suspect has refused to give the PIN to unlock their mobile phone when asked to do so by authorities.The Miami Herald reports that a Hollywood resident has been jailed for 180 days after the number he provided police with did not work.Christopher Wheeler, 41, was being investigated for child abuse and a judge found him in contempt of court, despite insisting he had given the right number.”I swear, under oath, I’ve given them the password,” said Wheeler, who is said to have ’hit and scratched’ his daughter. Wheeler has been told he will be let out on bond, pending an appeal, but only if he provides a working passcode.Meanwhile, elsewhere in Miami, Florida, a separate extortion allegation provided a similar dilemma, but in this case, a judge ruled that there was no way of proving that the accused, Wesley Victor could remember his PIN, a full ten months after his arrest. The accused’s girlfriend, reality TV star Hench Voigt, also implicated in the plot, has ”forgotten” her PIN too and will explain herself to the judge next week. The couple are accused of trying to blackmail a social media celebrity (an oxymoron, surely) called YesJulz (!) out of $18,000 over some alleged sex tapes they may or may not have.

IF YOU ARE AN UNLUCKY SORT OF PERSON YOU MAY HAVE caught a dose of some fresh Chinese malware called Fireball, that will have made you and just under 250 million other people into malware sponges with no control over their search browser.Check Point security is the firm with the warning, and it reckons that Fireball comes out of Rafotech, a large digital marketing agency based in Beijing and that it is being used to hijack browsers for nefarious purposes.The security firm says that once installed, the malware can do two things: allow for third party control and act as ”a prominent distributor” tap for any additional malware”Rafotech uses Fireball to manipulate the victims’ browsers and turn their default search engines and home pages into fake search engines. This redirects the queries to either yahoo.com or Google.com,” it said.”The fake search engines include tracking pixels used to collect the users’ private information. Fireball has the ability to  spy on victims, perform efficient malware dropping, and execute any malicious code in the infected machines, this creates a massive security flaw in targeted machines and networks.”