At Amazon’s AWS re: Invent conference earlier this month, the company announced a new platform for mainframe migration and modernization called simply “AWS Mainframe Modernization,” which aims to help AWS customers get off their mainframes “as fast as they can” to take better advantage of the cloud.

Today, customers may take a couple of different paths to get off their mainframes—either they take a “lift and shift” approach and bring their application pretty much as is, or they may refactor and break the application down as microservices in the cloud. But neither path is all that easy, and the process can take months or even years to complete as customers must evaluate the complexity of the application’s source code, understand the dependencies on other systems, convert or re-compile the code, and then everything must be tested to make sure it all works.

“It can be a messy business and involves a lot of moving pieces. And it isn’t something that people really want to do on their own,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, speaking at the press event. “And while AWS Partners can help with the transition, it can still take a long time,” he added.

The new solution, AWS Mainframe Modernization, instead will make it faster to migrate, modernize and run mainframe applications on AWS. The company claims that it can cut the time to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by as much as two-thirds, using its set of development, test, and deployment tools and a mainframe-compatible runtime environment. The solution will also help customers assess and analyze their mainframe applications for readiness, then help them choose which path they want to take—re-platforming or refactoring—and then come up with a plan.

If the customer wants to re-platform, the Mainframe Modernization solution will offer compilers to convert code and testing services to make sure no functionality is lost during the translation. If the customer wants to refactor or decompose the application—if the components could be run in Amazon’s EC2 service, in containers, or in the Lambda service, for instance—then they can use the Mainframe Modernization solution to convert the COBOL code automatically over to Java. A Migration Hub lets customers track their migration progress across multiple AWS Partners and solutions from a single location.
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Amazon touts the system as being an agile and cost-efficient (with on-demand, pay-as-you-go resources) managed service that offers security and high availability, scalability, and elasticity.

Many readers of this newsletter know I spent four decades speaking to business, professional and academic audiences about the future of technology. In my research for material for Technology This Week, I found a marvelous lecture by former MIT professor Patrick Winston called "How to Speak." The lecture was posted on YouTube a few months after Winston's death in 2019 and has since been viewed just under 5 million times.

Winston, who taught at MIT for almost 50 years and was one of the school's most beloved professors, knew how to captivate an audience. His style wasn’t flashy, but it was extremely compelling—even more noteworthy when you consider he worked in the technical field of artificial intelligence.

If you invest an hour and watch the full lecture, and I highly recommend you do, you'll learn some invaluable tips that will make you not only a better speaker, but a better communicator. However, you'll also discover a priceless gem in the first five minutes of the talk, when Winston describes what he calls the "rule of engagement." It's a simple, non-negotiable policy, and it's only five words long. 

Winston's rule: When someone else is speaking:
                                                   "No laptops. No cell phones."

Although simple, this is a rule that almost no one today follows, and that makes it extremely valuable. Winston's rule of engagement is also a perfect example of emotional intelligence in real life: the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you.

Making a Better Listener. Winston explains the reasoning behind his rule of engagement. "Some people ask why [no laptops, no cell phones] is a rule of engagement," says Winston. "The answer is, we humans only have one language processor. And if your language processor is engaged, you're distracted. And worse yet, you distract the people around you—studies have shown that."

Back in the 1950s, psychologist Donald Broadbent proved a similar point by setting up subjects with headphones that were putting out two different messages at the same time, one to each ear. Afterwards, Broadbent tested the subjects on their ability to retain the information. 

What was Broadbent's conclusion? We can only listen to one voice at a time.

But how can the "no laptops, no cell phones" rule of engagement help you and your organization?

The Effect on Relationships. Nowadays, people are accustomed to respond to electronic messages immediately, and there's some good to that. When you respond quickly to others' messages, you provide information they need to move their work forward. Additionally, you show you value them.

However, in your efforts to respond quickly, you might also make a big mistake. By constantly checking your phone, even when you're in a meeting or conversation with others, you leave your conversation partner feeling that you aren't really "present"--and that you don’t care about them or the conversation. 

Just think of all the lost time in meetings in which someone repeats something that's already been said or goes off on a tangent because they were distracted and missed a key point.

True listening and collaboration require complete attention. And if you're speaking with another person, that person thought you were important enough to give you their time and attention. Why not return the honor?
You'd be surprised at the positive benefits these actions reap—and the depth and quality it adds to your relationships.

So, if you'd like to increase the quality of your meetings, conversations, and even your relationships, take a page out of Patrick Winston's playbook:
                                                   "No laptops. No cell phones."

​Because you can only listen to one voice at a time.

AR has populated science fiction, specialized industries, and high-tech experiments for decades. But in the 2010s, major companies—and countless startups—began treating AR headsets as a potential mass-market platform.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicted in 2017 that televisions and phones would be replaced by holographic glasses. Apple CEO Tim Cook called AR “a big idea, like the smartphone.” Microsoft envisioned people watching the Super Bowl in its HoloLens headset. Google launched its ambitious Glass platform as a potential successor to phones, then helped propel the AR startup Magic Leap toward billions of dollars in investments. More recently, telecoms have partnered with AR companies like the Chinese startup Nreal, hoping high-bandwidth holograms will create a demand for 5G networks.

These companies’ products—as well as those of other major players, including Snap, Vuzix, and Niantic—often look very different. But most of them promise a uniquely powerful combination of three features.

• Their hardware is wearable, hands-free, and potentially always on—you don’t have to grab a device and put it away when you’re done using it
• Their images and audio can blend with or compensate for normal sensory perception of the world, rather than being confined to a discrete, self-contained screen
• Their sensors and software can collect and analyze huge amounts of information about their surroundings—through geolocation and depth sensing, computer vision programs, or intimate biometric technology like eye-tracking cameras

Over the past decade, nobody has managed to merge these capabilities into a mainstream consumer device. Most glasses are bulky, and the images they produce are shaky, transparent, or cut off by a limited field of view. Nobody has developed a surefire way to interact with them either, despite experiments with voice controls, finger tracking, and handheld hardware.

Despite this, we’ve gotten hints of the medium’s power and challenges—and even skeptics of the tech should pay attention to them.

In 2016, for instance, millions of people fell in love with the phone-based AR game Pokémon Go. When players logged on to catch virtual monsters, many discovered parts of their neighborhoods they’d never thought to visit. But they also found a world built on data that placed more gyms and PokéStops in white and affluent neighborhoods. They forged in-person connections by sharing virtual experiences, but those connections could also allow for real-world harassment.

The effects went beyond people who played the game. The owners of some homes near Pokémon Go gyms experienced a sudden influx of trespassers, leading a few to sue its developer Niantic and secure tweaks to the game’s design. Public memorials like the US Holocaust Museum asked players to respect the space by not chasing virtual monsters into it. Even this early foray into augmented reality exported some of the internet’s biggest flaws—like its ability to collapse context and overwhelm individuals with its sheer scale—into physical space.

Writer and researcher Erica Neely says that laws and social norms aren’t prepared for how AR could affect physical space. “I think we’re kind of frantically running behind the technology,” she says. In 2019, Neely wrote about the issues that Pokémon Go had exposed around augmented locations. Those issues mostly haven’t been settled, she says. And dedicated AR hardware will only intensify them.
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Smartphone cameras—along with digital touchup apps like FaceTune and sophisticated image searches like Snap Scan and Google Lens—have already complicated our relationships with the offline world. But AR glasses could add an ease and ubiquity that our phones can’t manage. “A phone-based app you have to actually go to,” says Neely. “You are making a conscious choice to engage with it.” Glasses remove even the light friction of unlocking your screen and deliberately looking through a camera lens.

If you're among the millions of people who use payment apps like PayPal, Venmo, Square, and other third-party electronic payment networks, you could be affected by a tax reporting change that goes into effect in January. 

Payment app providers will have to start reporting to the IRS a user's business transactions if, in aggregate, they total $600 or more for the year. A business transaction is defined as payment for a good or service.

Prior to this change, app providers only had to send the IRS a Form 1099-K if an individual account had at least 200 business transactions in a year and if those transactions combined resulted in gross payments of at least $20,000.

The expansion of the reporting rule results from a provision in the American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law earlier this year. The aim of the provision is to clamp down on unreported, taxable income. 

Keep in mind, the new reporting threshold does not change your basic tax responsibilities. Income you receive for a good or service—including tips—has always been reportable and, most times, taxable. 

And you've always been responsible for reporting it on your tax return, regardless of whether a third party sends the information to the IRS.

The rule change also does not make other transactions suddenly taxable. For instance, your friend sending you money on Venmo to reimburse you for their half of last night's dinner tab will not become taxable.

The biggest change is the increased visibility the IRS will have into business income transactions, both those that have always been reported by the income recipient and those that haven't been. 

In theory, the only people who should be worried about the rule change are those who weren't reporting all their business income. "Those who are tax evaders, who violated the self-reporting rules and used the old thresholds to avoid paying taxes," said Scott Talbott, spokesperson for the Electronic Transaction Association.
But, tax experts say, the threshold change could mean some administrative hassles for many tax filers who use payment apps, whether or not they're engaged in business transactions.

"These third-party settlement entities may not know for sure if they are dealing with a business or an individual or if they are dealing with a payment for goods or services, or a non-taxable transaction. It is going to be up to the taxpayer, if they receive a 1099 in any form for a nontaxable event, such as splitting rent among roommates, splitting a dinner bill, or even selling something on eBay for less than you paid for it, to explain to the IRS that the 1099 was received for a non-taxable transaction," said Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for tax publisher Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting.

Also, Luscombe noted, there's a fair chance your business transactions may be reported in duplicate—for instance, if you're a freelancer or independent contractor, you might get a 1099-K from your payment app provider, as well as a 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC from your client for the same transaction.

"Again, the taxpayer will have to explain to the IRS that the two 1099s are for the same transaction," he said.

Each app provider must decide which procedures it will use to accommodate the rule change and will need to alert their customers about what will be required of them to better identify the nature of their transactions.

For instance, PayPal, which now owns Venmo, recently put out an initial Q&A for users of both apps. It noted that "In the coming months, we may ask you to provide tax information like your Employer Identification Number (EIN), Individual Tax ID Number (ITIN) or Social Security Number (SSN), if you haven't provided it to us already."
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The net effect of the new reporting requirements for users of payment apps may be that some will ask customers to pay them in cash—at least for smaller amounts, like tips. Or, as Luscombe noted, they may decide to only use an app for taxable business transactions and keep their other, non-taxable transactions separate.

The first two prototype satellites from Project Kuiper, the internet-from-space venture from the e-commerce giant, are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon announced on earlier this month. That will formally kick off its competition with SpaceX, the space company owned by Elon Musk, and OneWeb, among other rivals, for beaming high-speed internet connections to customers from low-Earth orbit. It will also be a crucial test of the satellites’ design before the company launches thousands more devices into orbit.

Amazon first announced its goal of deploying a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit in 2019. This was the second pursuit in space by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and former chief executive who also owns Blue Origin, the rocket company. A handful of other firms are also racing to offer high-speed internet to governments, other companies and consumers whose access is hampered by the digital divide in remote locations.

Like SpaceX, Amazon plans to spend $10 billion on the project, which sits within its device’s unit. But the company has been slower to start than SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets have lofted nearly 2,000 internet-beaming satellites into orbit for its own venture, Starlink. Thousands of customers are testing the SpaceX service for $99 a month with $499 antenna kits.

Amazon unveiled a customer antenna concept in 2020 and has been testing prototype satellites on the ground for years.

“You can test all the stuff you want in your labs, which we do,” Rajeev Badyal, a vice president at Amazon overseeing the Kuiper project, said in an interview. “But the ultimate test is in space.”

Competition among the companies is fierce, and their plans have drawn interest from investors and analysts who foresee tens of billions of dollars in revenue once the constellations become fully operational. But those same plans have also drawn criticism from space safety advocates who fear collisions of satellites adding to pollution in orbit; astronomers, whose ground-based telescope observations of the night sky could be disrupted by the satellites; and dark skies advocates who fear light pollution from sunlight reflecting from the constellations.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates satellite communications to the ground, approved Amazon’s network in 2020 and gave the company a deadline to launch half of its 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. Amazon bought nine launches from the rocket company United Launch Alliance in a deal likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Amazon has been talking to other launch companies, Mr. Badyal said, including its competitor, SpaceX, whose rapid Starlink deployment is partially because of its ability to use its own reusable rocket boosters for launches.

The first two prototype satellites, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat- 2, will launch separately on rockets from ABL Space Systems, one of a handful of start-ups building smaller launch vehicles to sate demand from satellite companies. The market for smaller rockets, designed to deliver payloads to space quickly and affordably, is packed with competitors, making ABL’s Amazon contract — good for up to five launches on ABL’s RS1 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. — a boost for the company.
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The pair of Amazon prototype satellites will test internet connections between space and the company’s flat, square antennas for consumers on the ground for the first time in Amazon’s Kuiper program. Regions for the test include parts of South America, the Asia-Pacific region and Central Texas. Past experiments involved flying drones with satellite hardware over antennas on the ground and connecting ground antennas to other companies’ satellites already in space, drawing internet speeds fast enough to stream high-definition video.

Using high-speed lasers, researchers have created "5D" data storage technology that could allow 500 TB of data to be written to a CD-sized glass disc, according to The Optical Society. The technique uses higher writing speeds that might finally make it feasible to use the technology for archival and other purposes. 

With 5D optical storage, each file uses three layers of nanoscale dots. The dots' size, orientation, and position within the three standard dimensions, make up the five "dimensions." The dots change the polarization of light travelling through the disc, which is read using a microscope and polarizer.

We've seen 5D optical storage before, but there were several problems—particularly the slow writing speeds that made the technology impractical. It has huge upsides for (extremely) long-term storage, though. It's been estimated that the storage medium could withstand temperatures up to 1,000 degrees C and last 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading. 

To overcome the speed problem, researchers used a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. Rather than writing directly in the glass, they used the laser to produce a phenomenon called near-field enhancement, that creates tiny structures using a few weak light pulses. Those can enhance the circular voids generated by a more powerful, single-pulse "micro-explosion." This technique "minimized the thermal damage that has been problematic for other approaches that use high-repetition-rate lasers," according to the paper.

Using the new technique, the team could write 5GB of text data onto a silica glass disc the size of a conventional CD with nearly 100 percent readout accuracy. "With the writing density available from the method, the disc could hold 500 terabytes of data," the researchers said. They could also write at speeds of a million voxels per second, or about 230 KB per second. 
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That might sound slow, but by introducing parallel writing, you could feasibly fill a 500TB disc in about 60 days. That could provide a way to back up reams of valuable data, essentially forever. "With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person’s DNA," said research team leader Peter G. Kazansky.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced last week plans for the State Department to create a new bureau of cyberspace and digital policy.

Why it Matters. The establishment of the bureau and plans for a new envoy to oversee critical and emerging technology come after a series of significant hack attacks and other online crimes, notably ransomware assaults on U.S. infrastructure.

Details. Blinken said in a memo to staff that following congressional approval, the new envoy and the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy "provide us with greater leadership and accountability to drive the diplomatic agenda within the interagency and abroad," per AFP. 

• State Department spokesperson Ned Price said at a briefing later Monday that the new Senate-confirmed ambassador-at-large would "lead the immediate technology diplomacy agenda with our allies, partners, and across the range of multilateral fora."
• The envoy would focus on "three key areas: international cyberspace security, international digital policy and digital freedom."

The Big Picture: President Biden signed an executive order in May in response to the cyberattacks in the public and private sectors — from the hacking of the Colonial Pipeline to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange attack.
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• Some $590 million had been paid by victims of ransomware attacks in the first six months of this year amid a surge in cybercrime, according to a Treasury Department report released earlier this month.

Last year a hacker group used a bit of malicious code it hid in a software update by the company SolarWinds to launch an immense cyberattack against U.S. government agencies and corporations—see Issues 7-27, 7-36, and 7-38.

The group behind the attack, Nobelium, is reportedly being directed by the Russian intelligence service. And they're at it again.

According to Microsoft, one victim of the SolarWinds hack, the group is targeting technology companies that resell and provide cloud services for customers.

"Nobelium has been attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global IT supply chain," Tom Burt, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Customer Security & Trust, said in a blog post on the company's website.

"We believe Nobelium ultimately hopes to piggyback on any direct access that resellers may have to their customers' IT systems and more easily impersonate an organization's trusted technology partner to gain access to their downstream customers," he added.
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The hacker group hasn't tried to ferret out vulnerabilities in software, Burt said, but has been using techniques like phishing and password spray to gain entry to the targeted networks.

With recent murmurings of chip shortages easing in 2022, one could be forgiven for imagining some sort of promised land where prices return to the lower levels once remembered.

Unfortunately, that idea will have to be consigned to the land of rainbows, pixie dust, and affordable housing in major cities, because while the situation may ease, that doesn't mean it will stop growing.

For Gartner senior analyst Ben Lee, the relief slated to arrive in the middle of 2022 is not a lowering of absolute prices, but a slowing in the rate of growth.

The semiconductor chip shortage that is hamstringing the production of products ranging from cars and computers to appliances and toothbrushes will extend into 2022 and potentially beyond that, according to Matt Murphy, CEO of Marvell Technology.

“We’ve always gone through cycles of ups and downs, where demand has exceeded supply or vice versa,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the recent Code Conference in Beverly Hills. “This time, it’s different.”
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Su said that while she expects the first half of 2022 to be “likely tight,” the second half will be less severe as manufacturing capacity opens.

If you have an old phone, an alarm system or an ankle monitor, your tech could stop working properly next year.

In 2022, everything from your old phone to your alarm system could stop working as service providers turn off 3G networks in the United States.

Kami Griffiths has a perfectly fine phone. It’s your standard Samsung Galaxy smartphone with all the important apps, a decent camera, and a screen big enough to watch videos. It’s so fine, in fact, she’s had it since 2016 without ever feeling the need to drop hundreds of dollars on an upgrade.

Come next year, though, Griffiths won’t have a choice. That’s the current deadline for when the only cellular network her phone can use will shut down forever.

All the major cellphone carriers—AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile—are planning to shut their older 3G networks in 2022. Like millions of people in the United States who use 3G phones and other 3G devices, she will have to buy a new device if she wants to text, make calls, or even reach 911.

When these deadlines roll around, Griffith’s own phone could be the least of her problems. Griffiths, who is an executive director and co-founder of Community Tech Network—a nonprofit that focuses on digital literacy in San Francisco—is worried that the group’s clients, a mix of mostly older adults and low-income residents, will find themselves either without a working phone, or could struggle to figure out how to use a new device.

“It’s going to be very difficult for them. They will not be happy,” said Griffiths, who notes older tech users have a harder time figuring out new devices. “If it works fine, they don’t want to change a thing.”

Why Is This Happening? 3G network technology has been around in the United States for two decades. Verizon launched the first 3G network in the nation in 2002, and 4G has been around since 2010. In 2019, carriers started slowly rolling out 5G networks and soon the big companies were launching 5G smartphones. Now they need to focus their resources on building out those newer networks, while saving money on maintaining the older ones.
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“The reason the carriers would like to get rid of old legacy tech is to free up that wireless spectrum,” said Ian Fogg, vice president of analysis at mobile analytics firm Opensignal. “If you switch off older tech in most markets, most countries, your spectrum license allows you to use that with newer networks like 4G and 5G.”
When Do the Networks Shut Down? The shutdown dates start in January 2022 and are spread out throughout the year. At this time, the dates are all confirmed, and the carriers are proceeding as if they are set in stone. However, the Federal Communications Commission recently accepted comments from groups and people concerned about the shutdown, which could lead to a delay.