IBM

A pension and relief fund that sued IBM for failing to warn investors of loss of business in China because of its alleged involvement with spying by the U.S. National Security Agency has voluntarily withdrawn the lawsuit in a New York court.

The Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension and Relief Fund has decided to voluntarily dismiss the action after additional investigation into the matters alleged, which included investigations in the U.S. and China and discussions with the defense counsel, John C. Browne, lawyer for the fund, wrote to the court in a letter disclosed Monday.

IBM scientists have invented a tiny “chisel” with a nano-sized heatable silicon tip that creates patterns and structures on a microscopic scale.

The tip, similar to the kind used in atomic force microscopes, is attached to a bendable cantilever that scans the surface of the substrate material with the accuracy of one nanometer.

Oracle has overtaken rival IBM as the world's second-largest software vendor by pulling in $29.6 billion in software revenue during 2013, according to analyst firm Gartner.

"Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth," Gartner research vice president Chad Eschinger said in a statement.

Earlier today, IBM announced that it would be using Watson, the system that famously wiped the floor with human Jeopardy champions, to tackle a somewhat more significant problem: choosing treatments for cancer. In the process, the company hopes to help usher in the promised era of personalized medicine.

IBM has not relinquished its customers' data to the US government and would challenge any orders to do so, the company said in a blog post over the weekend.

The post by the world's largest technology service provider is the latest backlash by a tech company against US electronic surveillance practices, following reports alleging the government spread malware to break into computers.

A pension investment group has sued IBM, claiming that the company failed to warn investors that sales in China would slow dramatically following revelations that IBM was helping the U.S. National Security Agency spy on the Chinese.

Tire company Bridgestone has slapped IBM with a huge lawsuit over a custom-built computer system that performed so poorly, it threw Bridgestone’s "entire business operation into chaos," the suit alleges, as reported by the Tennessean.

The system cost over $75 million and went live in January, 2012. It immediately experienced "system-wide failures" for three months, Bridgestone alleges:

ARM officials are seeing growing interest in their low-power SoC designs for use in networking and communications systems.

IBM is licensing a range of ARM Cortex processor designs to build custom chips for clients for wired and wireless networking systems.

IBM, the world's biggest technology services company, is buying Israeli security firm Trusteer, in an effort to strengthen its security offerings.

A person familiar with the matter said IBM was paying close to $US1 billion for Trusteer, making it the company's second-largest acquisition of a security company after its 2006 purchase of Internet Security Systems for about $US1.3 billion.

IBM has teamed with more than 1,000 universities worldwide with the intent of building a future "pipeline" of data scientists.

The IBM Academic Initiative has a number of different elements ranging from access to IBM's big data and analytics software to specialized coursework and tracks to trotting in data scientists to guest lecture at these universities.