IBM Puts Executive on Leave After Charges

By Dena Cassella Published October 19, 2009

IBM Corp. has placed a top executive on leave after he was charged in an insider trading scandal for allegedly leaking secrets about IBM’s earnings and financial dealings with corporate partners.

The company says Robert Moffat, a senior vice president and cost-cutting maven who was considered a top candidate to succeed CEO Sam Palmisano, no longer serves as an officer of the company. A woman who answered the phone at Moffat’s home in Connecticut said he would not comment.

Recommended Videos

Rodney Adkins, who has been senior vice president in charge of development and manufacturing, was tapped to assume Moffat’s position on an acting basis. That gives him oversight over IBM’s mainframes and computer servers.

Adkins is the highest-ranking black executive IBM has ever had.

Dena Cassella

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Haole built. O'ahu grown

Topics

QuickCharge: This Week in EV

Computing

Researchers develop a new forensic tool that can recover deleted AI chats from your phone’s memory

Pressing delete on your AI chat doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. ORISA can recover deleted conversations from your local AI apps.

Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.

How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?

Computing

Apple’s “Pro and Tell” October 28 event: Everything we expect from touchscreen MacBooks to a new iMac

Prepare for a touchscreen MacBook that costs around $3,000.

Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.

The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).

Computing

Those cute delivery robots could be the new Flock surveillance menace

Dinner is served, but who asked for a biometric scan?

Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?

According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.