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Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89

“I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with,” Ms. Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000. Continue reading the main story Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards, which were then fed into a computer. “To my utter astonishment,” she said, “I loved it.” In the early 1950s, the computer industry was in its infancy,…

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In Computer Attacks, Clues Point to Frequent Culprit: North Korea

The computer code used in the ransomware bore some striking similarities to the code used in those three attacks. That code has not been widely used, and has been seen only in attacks by North Korean-linked hackers. Researchers at Google and Kaspersky, a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm, confirmed the coding similarities. Continue reading the main story Those clues alone are not definitive, however. Hackers often borrow and retrofit one another’s attack methods, and government agencies are known to plant “false flags” in their code to throw off forensic investigators. “At this…

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