Today’s topics include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces days of testimony in two Senate hearings on data security and IBM unveils new skinny mainframes for the cloud.
Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg faced 44 senators and just about every media outlet in Washington, D.C., on April 10 and 11 to answer questions about the data scandal at his company.
Facebook is being called on the carpet because personal information collected from as many as an estimated 87 million of its American users was improperly accessed to create and target ads, post videos and falsify news stories that became influential in the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016.
Facebook is accused of not doing enough to stop the malevolent use of personal data that had been hijacked and resold to the Trump campaign and other Republicans by a research firm based in the U.K.
To his credit, Zuckerberg admitted from the beginning that he is ultimately responsible for such a lapse in data security—even though the consulting firm, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, lied about whether it had deleted all the personal information after Facebook told it to cease and desist two years ago.
IBM has new, thinner mainframe systems that company officials say better fit cloud computing environments.
The z14 Model ZR1 and LinuxONE Rockhopper II put the capabilities of IBM’s Z14 mainframe systems announced last year into an industry-standard 19-inch, single-frame design, giving organizations systems designed for such modern tasks as data analytics, machine learning, containers and blockchaining and that fit better into their public or private cloud environments.
These “skinny” mainframes—which are take up 40 percent less space than typical mainframes—also will expand the reach of IBM’s stalwart systems to an “even broader center of clients seeking robust security with pervasive encryption, machine learning, cloud capabilities and powerful analytics,” Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM Z, said in a statement.