Tech News

IBM research has released ‘Diversity in Faces’ (DiF) dataset which will help build better and diverse facial recognition systems by ensuring fairness. The DiF provides a dataset of annotations of 1 million human facial images. This dataset was built using publicly available images from the YFCC-100M Creative Commons data set. Building facial recognition systems that meet fairness expectations, has been a long-standing goal for AI researchers. Most AI systems learn through datasets. If not trained with robust and diverse data sets, accuracy and fairness are at risk. For that reason, AI developers and the research community need to be thoughtful about what data they use for training. With the new DiF dataset, IBM researchers are building a strong, fair, and diverse dataset. The DiF data set does not just measure different faces by age, gender, and skin tone. It also looks at other intrinsic facial features that include craniofacial distances, areas and ratios, facial symmetry and contrast, subjective annotations, and pose and resolution. IBM annotated the faces using 10 well-established and independent coding schemes from the scientific literature. These 10 coding schemes were selected based on their strong scientific basis, computational feasibility, numerical representation, and interpretability. Through thorough statistical analysis, IBM researchers found that the DiF dataset provided a more balanced distribution and broader coverage of facial images compared to previous datasets. Their analysis of the 10 initial coding schemes also provided them with an understanding of what is important for characterizing human faces. In the future, they plan to use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to possibly generate faces of any variety to synthesize training data as needed. They will also find ways (and encourage others as well) to improve on the initial ten coding schemes and add new ones. You can request access to the DiF dataset on IBM website. You can also read the research paper for more information. Admiring the many faces of Facial Recognition with Deep Learning Facebook introduces a fully convolutional speech recognition approach and open sources wav2letter++ and flashlight AWS updates the face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities in Amazon Rekognition

Nate Cardozo, former top legal counsel at  Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been hired to undertake a privacy role at Whatsapp. Cardoza, who until recently worked as a Senior Information Security Counsel with the EFF, is also known as a prominent Facebook critic. He has already worked with private companies on privacy policies that protect user rights; and now, hopping aboard along with the Facebook team he says that “the privacy team I’ll be joining knows me well, and knows exactly how I feel about tech policy, privacy, and encrypted messaging. And that’s who they want at managing privacy at WhatsApp. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity.” In a 2015, Cardozo wrote a blog post, questioning Facebook’s ethical morals. He alleged Facebook’s data models  “depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy” to execute its operations of tracking users through their behaviour on the social media site. This can also been seen as a strategic move by Facebook, who hired Cardozo immediately after the attention Facebook drew to its intention of integrating  WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. Security and privacy-minded personnel expressed their concerns about what else the integration could possibly mean to user security. The EEF has also been critical of Facebook, related to Whatsapp’s user privacy and criticism over secretly released Facebook documents that outlined illicit practices being performed at the company. While hiring such a top EEF personnel may put several privacy minded people at rest, users on HackerNews are speculating if the move was calculative by ‘removing a critic and making him an ally and have removed him from constantly stirring controversy.’ Alongside Nate, Facebook has also hired Robyn Greene from the Open Technology Institute to focus on law enforcement access and data protection at Facebook. She announced the news on Twitter yesterday. https://twitter.com/Robyn_Greene/status/1090343419237617664 You can head over to CNBC for more insights on this news. GDPR complaint claims Google and IAB leaked ‘highly intimate data’ of web users for behavioral advertising Biometric Information Privacy Act: It is now illegal for Amazon, Facebook or Apple to collect your biometric data without consent in Illinois Advocacy groups push FTC to fine Facebook and break it up for repeatedly violating the consent order and unfair business practices

Facebook has blocked plugin tools from third-party websites, like ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me. These plugins let Facebook users see how they are being targeted by advertisers. This month Facebook inserted code that prevented these plugins to automatically pull ad targeting information. The ad monitoring tools collect data on the adverts a user sees and tells them why the users were targeted. This helps users know about the advertising tactics used by politicians for their benefit. Facebook’s move was heavily criticized by these companies. “Ten days ago, our software stopped working, and efforts to fix it have proved much harder than before,” said WhoTargetsMe co-founder Sam Jeffers. “Facebook is deliberately obfuscating their code. When we have made small changes, they’ve responded with further updates within hours.” “This is very concerning, Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. The Honest Ads Act is expected to be re-introduced in Congress this year and it would require Facebook to publish “a description of the audience targeted by the advertisement.” ProPublica writes that Facebook has also developed another tool that it says will allow researchers to analyze political ads more easily. That tool, called an API, is in “beta” and restricted to a few participants, including ProPublica, who had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the data provided. “We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said to ProPublica “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.” Facebook made it clear to ProPublica in a statement that the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. Twitterati has also condemned Facebook’s move calling it ‘hostile for journalists’. https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/1090297962146729985 https://twitter.com/mcwm/status/1090001769265016832 https://twitter.com/AASchapiro/status/1090281229096833024 https://twitter.com/alfonslopeztena/status/1090318416563580928 Facebook releases a draft charter introducing a new content review board that would filter what goes online. Facebook plans to integrate Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger amidst public pressure to regulation or break up Facebook. Advocacy groups push FTC to fine Facebook and break it up for repeatedly violating the consent order and unfair business practices.

Yesterday, Facebook released a draft charter that mentions the newly formed external board that will be a body of independent experts who will review Facebook's most challenging content decisions - focusing on important and disputed cases. It will share its decisions transparently and give reasons for them. This charter comes after Mark Zuckerberg wrote about his vision for how content should be governed and enforced on Facebook. The board will also be able to decide on what content goes online or what posts should be removed. Facebook would later accept and implement the board's decisions. This group will comprise of experts with experience in content, privacy, free expression, human rights, journalism, civil rights, safety, and other relevant disciplines. The list of members will always be public. The draft charter raises certain questions and considerations and also puts forth certain approaches giving a base model for the board’s structure, scope, and authority. “It is a starting point for discussion on how the board should be designed and formed. What the draft does not do is answer every proposed question completely or finally”, the draft states. Nick Clegg, VP of Global Affairs and Communications, in his post mentions, “We’ve also identified key decisions that still need to be made, like the number of members, length of terms and how cases are selected.” Facebook looks forward to attaining answers to these questions over the next six months in various workshops around the world including Singapore, Delhi, Nairobi, Berlin, New York, Mexico City, and many more cities. The workshops will bring together experts and organizations on different issues such as technology, democracy, human rights, and so on. Nick writes, “we don’t want to limit input or feedback to a hand-picked group of experts that we work with frequently. We’re interested in hearing from a wide range of organizations, think tanks, researchers and groups who might have proposals for how we should answer these critical questions.” Kate Klonick, Assistant Professor, St. John’s University School of Law, said, “This would be a rare and fascinating, if narrow, devolution of authority.” Visit the draft charter, to know more about this news. Facebook plans to integrate Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger amidst public pressure to regulation or break up Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Act: It is now illegal for Amazon, Facebook or Apple to collect your biometric data without consent in Illinois Advocacy groups push FTC to fine Facebook and break it up for repeatedly violating the consent order and unfair business practices  

Yesterday, the Linux Foundation announced that Mapzen, an open-source mapping platform is now a part of the Linux Foundation project. Mapzen focuses on the core components of map display such as search and navigation. It provides developers with an open software and data sets that are easy to access. It was launched in 2013 by mapping industry veterans in combination with urban planners, architects, movie makers, and video game developers. Randy Meech, former CEO of Mapzen and current CEO of StreetCred Labs, said, “Mapzen is excited to join the Linux Foundation and continue our open, collaborative approach to mapping software and data. Shared technology can be amazingly powerful, but also complex and challenging. The Linux Foundation knows how to enable collaboration across organizations and has a great reputation for hosting active, thriving software and data projects.” Mapzen’s open resources and projects are used to create applications or integrate them into other products and platforms. As Mapzen’s resources are all open source, developers can easily build platforms without the restrictions of data sets by other commercial providers. Mapzen is used by organizations such as Snapchat, Foursquare, Mapbox, Eventbrite, The World Bank, HERE Technologies, and Mapillary. With Mapzen, it is possible to take open data and build maps with search and routing services, upgrade their own libraries and process data in real-time. This is not possible with conventional mapping or geotracking services. Simon Willison, Engineering Director at Eventbrite said, “We’ve been using Who’s On First to help power Eventbrite’s new event discovery features since 2017. The gazetteer offers a unique geographical approach which allows us to innovate extensively with how our platform thinks about events and their locations. Mapzen is an amazing project and we’re delighted to see it joining The Linux Foundation.” Mapzen is operated in the cloud and on-premise by a wide range of organizations, including, Tangram, Valhalla and Pelias. Earlier this month, Hyundai joined Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and the Linux Foundation for innovation through open source. It was a cross-industry effort for bringing automakers, suppliers and technology companies together to accelerate the development and adoption of an open software stack. Last year, Uber announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member with an aim to support the open source community. Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation said, “Mapzen’s open approach to software and data has allowed developers and businesses to create innovative location-based applications that have changed our lives. We look forward to extending  Mapzen’s impact even further around the globe in areas like transportation and traffic management, entertainment, photography and more to create new value for companies and consumers.” According to the official press release, the Linux Foundation will align resources to advance Mapzen’s mission and it will further grow its ecosystem of users and developers. Newer Apple maps is greener and has more details Launching soon: My Business App on Google Maps that will let you chat with businesses, on the go Atlassian overhauls its Jira software with customizable workflows, new tech stack, and roadmaps tool

Last September, a complaint was filed against Google and other ad auction companies about a data breach that “affects virtually every user on the web”. This complaint was made by a host of privacy activists and browser makers, alleging that tech companies broadcasted people’s personal data to dozens of companies, without proper security through a mechanism of “behavioural ads”. The complaint stated that every time a person visits a website and is shown a “behavioural” ad on a website; intimate personal data describing each visitor and what they are watching online is captured and broadcast to tens or hundreds of companies. This was done in order to request potential advertisers’ bids for the attention of the specific individual visiting the website. The complaints were lodged by Jim Killock of the U.K.’s Open Rights Group, tech policy researcher Michael Veale of University College London, and Johnny Ryan of the pro-privacy browser firm Brave. They claimed that Google and other ad-tech firms were breaking the EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by unlawfully recording people’s sensitive characteristics. Now, new evidence has been released by the very same organizations that filed last September's complaint, showing the data broadcasted includes information about people’s ethnicity, disabilities, sexual orientation and more. This sensitive information allows advertisers to specifically target incest, abuse victims, or those with eating disorders. The irony of it being, yesterday was ‘International Data Protection Day”. What is Behavioral advertising? Yahoo finance has explained the concept of behavioral advertising very simply. The online ad industry tracks a person's movements around the internet and builds a profile based on what the individual looks at/ sites the user visits. On visiting a webpage that runs behavioral ads, an automated auction takes place between ad agencies with the winner allowed being to show the user an ad that supposedly matches their profile. This ultimately means that for the real-time bidding system to work, personal details of the users have to be broadcasted to the advertisers in so-called “bid requests”. Evidence against Google and IAB Joining the list of complainants is Poland’s Panoptykon Foundation, another rights group, that has complained to its local data protection authority about organizations including Google and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which is the industry body that sets the rules for ad auctions. The evidence submitted by the complainants comprises category lists from Google and IAB, including topics such as being an incest victim, having cancer, having a substance-abuse problem, being into a certain kind of politics or adhering to a certain religion or sect. Special needs kids, endocrine and metabolic diseases, birth control, infertility, diabetes, Islam, Judaism, disabled sports, bankruptcy- these serve as supplementary evidence for the two original complaints filed with the UK’s ICO and the Irish DPC last year. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company has “strict policies that prohibit advertisers on our platforms from targeting individuals on the basis of sensitive categories” and that if they did find such ads violating said policies, they would take immediate action”. The original IAB lists can be downloaded as a spreadsheet. The PDF versions of the IAB lists with special category and sensitive data highlighted by the complainants can be viewed here (v1) and here (v2). You can go ahead and download Google’s original document for more insights on this news. French data regulator, CNIL imposes a fine of 50M euros against Google for failing to comply with GDPR European Consumer groups accuse Google of tracking its users’ location, calls it a breach of GDPR Twitter on the GDPR radar for refusing to provide a user his data due to ‘disproportionate effort’ involved

Deloitte launched their tenth annual “Tech Trends 2019: Beyond the digital frontier” report earlier this month. The report covers predictions related to Artificial intelligence, digital future, cloud, networking, and cybersecurity. Let’s have a look at these key predictions made in the report. More companies to transform into AI-fueled organizations Deloitte 2019 report states that there’ll be an increase in the number of companies following the transformation to fully autonomous AI-fueled firms in the next 18 to 24 months, making AI a major part of their corporate strategy. AI, machine learning, and other cognitive technologies run at the center of business and IT operations in an AI-fueled firm to harness data driven-insights. As per the two consecutive Deloitte global surveys (2016–17 and 2018), cognitive technologies/AI were at the top in a list of emerging technologies in which CIOs plan to invest. AI ambitions of these CIOs is more about using AI to increase productivity, and strengthen regulatory compliance using automation. Companies to make the transition from traditional to serverless environments (NoOps) The report states many CIOs will be looking at creating a NoOps IT environment that is automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure. It requires small teams to manage it and will thereby allow the CIOs to invest larger human capacity in developing new capabilities that can improve the overall operational efficiency. In NoOps environments, traditional operations like the code deployment and patching schedules are internal responsibilities and are mainly automated. This shift from traditional to serverless computing will allow the cloud vendors to dynamically and automatically allocate the compute, storage, and memory depending on the request for a higher-order service. Traditional cloud service models required organizations to manually design and provision such allocations. Serverless computing offers limitless scalability, high availability, NoOps, along with zero idle time costs. More companies are expected to take advantage of advanced connectivity to configure and operate enterprise networks As per the Deloitte report, many companies will opt for advanced networking to drive the development of new products and to transform inefficient operating models. CIOs are going to be virtualizing parts of the connectivity stack with the help of network management techniques like Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). SDN is primarily used in data centers but its use is now being extended for wide area networking to connect data centers. NFV replaces network functions such as routing, switching, encryption, firewalling, WAN acceleration, etc, and can scale horizontally or vertically on demand. The report states that enterprises will be able to better optimize or “spin up” the network capabilities on demand to fulfill the needs of a specific application or meet the end-user requirements. Growth in interfaces like computer vision, gesture control devices, etc, will transform how humans, machines, and data interact with each other The report states that although conversational technologies are currently dominating the intelligent interfaces arena, other new additions in interfaces such as computer vision, gesture control devices, embedded eye-tracking platforms, bioacoustic sensing, and emotion detection/recognition technology, are gaining ground. Intelligent interfaces help track customers’ offline habits, similar to how search engines and social media companies track their customers’ digital habits. These interfaces also help understand the customers at a personal, and more detailed level, making it possible to “micro-personalize” the products and services. We will see more of these new interfaces combined with leading-edge technologies in the future (such as machine learning, robotics, IoT, contextual awareness, advanced augmented reality, and virtual reality) to transform the way we engage with machines, data, and each other. CMOs and CIOs will partner up to elevate the human experience by moving beyond marketing The report states that channel-focused services such as websites, social and mobile platforms, content management tools, search engine optimization are slowly becoming a thing of the past.  Many organizations will be moving beyond marketing by adopting a new generation of Martech systems and approach to data gathering, decision-making (determining how and when to provide an experience), and delivery (consistent delivery of dynamic content across channels). This, in turn, helps companies create personalized and dynamic end-to-end experiences for users and builds deep emotional connections among users to products and brands. Also, CMOs are required to own the delivery of the entire customer experience, and they often find themselves almost playing the CIO’s traditional role. At the same time, CIOs are required to transform the legacy systems and come out with new infrastructure to support the next-generation data management and customer engagement systems. This is why CIOs and CMOs will collaborate more closely to deliver on their company’s new marketing strategies as well as on the established digital agendas. Organizations to embed DevSecOps to improve cybersecurity As per the report, many organizations have started to use a method called DevSecOps that includes embedding security culture, practices, and tools into different phases of their DevOps pipelines. DevSecOps help improves the security and maturity levels of a company’s DevOps pipeline. DevSecOps is not a security trend but it's a new approach that offers companies a different way of thinking about security. DevSecOps has multiple benefits. It helps the security architects, developers, and operators share their metrics aligning to security and put a focus on business priorities. Organizations embedding DevSecOps into their development pipelines can use operational insights and threat intelligence. It also helps with proactive monitoring that involves automated, and continuous testing to identify problems. The report recommends that DevSecOps should tie in your broader IT strategy, which should be further driven by your business strategy. “If you can be deliberate about sensing and evaluating emerging technologies..you can make the unknown knowable..creating the confidence and construct to embrace digital while setting the stage to move beyond the digital frontier”, reads the report. For more information, check out the official Deloitte’s 2019 tech trends. IEEE Computer Society predicts top ten tech trends for 2019: assisted transportation, chatbots, and deep learning accelerators among others We discuss the key trends for web and app developers in 2019 [Podcast] We discuss the key trends for web and app developers in 2019 [Podcast]

Last week, Cisco announced of a severe vulnerability in the web-based management interface of its Small Business RV320 and RV325 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN Routers. This vulnerability could easily allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to retrieve sensitive information. Cisco in their report, mention that this vulnerability is due to the improper access controls for URLs. An attacker could easily exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the affected device via HTTP or HTTPS and requesting specific URLs. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to download the router configuration or detailed diagnostic information. Cisco routers vulnerable to CVE-2019-1653 According to Bad packets report, they scanned around 15,309 unique IPv4 hosts and determined 9,657 Cisco RV320/RV325 routers are vulnerable to CVE-2019-1653. Their report states, 6,247 out of 9,852 Cisco RV320 routers scanned are vulnerable (1,650 are not vulnerable and 1,955 did not respond to our scans) 3,410 out of 5,457 Cisco RV325 routers scanned are vulnerable (1,027 are not vulnerable and 1,020 did not respond to our scans) Source: Bad packets report This vulnerability also affects Cisco Small Business RV320 and RV325 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN Routers running Firmware Releases 1.4.2.15 and 1.4.2.17. Cisco has also released firmware updates to address this vulnerability. However, they mention, there are no workarounds that address this vulnerability. To know about this news in detail, visit Cisco’s official website. Cisco and Huawei Routers hacked via backdoor attacks and botnets Dropbox purchases workflow and eSignature startup ‘HelloSign’ for $250M Per the new GDC 2019 report, nearly 50% of game developers think game industry workers should unionize  

Last week, German Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection, Katarina Barley, stated that when users begin receiving hostile messages or threats through Facebook, a platform meant to merely simplify contact with friends, things take a problematic turn. She said, “It may be that it isn't in Facebook's interest to report such content, but when the company merely blames hostility on human error or on an algorithm that hasn't yet been fully developed, it isn't particularly convincing, nor does it measure up to the company's responsibility.” Barley also highlighted on the handling of user’s personal data. If users’ data is leaked during the course of sharing it with the ad companies, she says “Facebook doesn't just bear a responsibility to refrain from intentionally sharing data. It must also actively protect that data from third-party access.” Integrating the Big 3: Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to integrate the three popular social messaging platforms, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. These services would continue to operate independently; however, their underlying technical infrastructure would be unified. This is a crucial development at a point where Facebook’s business has been subject to a lot of scandals that includes misuse of user data, fake news, and hate-filled posts. The three messaging platforms have more than 2.6 billion users, who can actually communicate across easily once the platform is unified. According to the New York Times, “The move has the potential to redefine how billions of people use the apps to connect with one another while strengthening Facebook’s grip on users, raising antitrust, privacy and security questions. It also underscores how Mr. Zuckerberg is imposing his authority over units he once vowed to leave alone.” By integrating the three apps, “Zuckerberg hopes to increase Facebook’s utility and keep users highly engaged inside the company’s ecosystem. That could reduce people’s appetite for rival messaging services, like those offered by Apple and Google. If users can interact more frequently with Facebook’s apps, the company might also be able to increase its advertising business or add new revenue-generating services, the people said”, the NY Times reports. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former Chief Security Officer said that he hoped, “Facebook would get public input from terrorism experts, child safety officers, privacy advocates and others and be transparent in its reasoning when it makes decisions on the details.” “It should be an open process because you can’t have it all”, he added. To know more about this news head over to the New York Times post. “This isn't accessible privacy it's inaccessible surveillance”, says Sarah Jamie Lewis Sarah Jamie Lewis, from Open Privacy, says, Facebook “will build the largest surveillance system ever conceived and will sell it under the banner of consumer encryption. They will say that this delivers on the dream of secure usable communication that balances privacy, security and law enforcement.” With this, she says that Open Privacy is building Cwtch, a metadata resistant communication tool, that can be used to build metadata resistant applications. https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1088914192847917056 She says, “Facebook isn't a public utility, they are a corporation that needs to make money, and the way they make money is through surveillance.” To know more about this, read Sarah’s blog post. Biometric Information Privacy Act: It is now illegal for Amazon, Facebook or Apple to collect your biometric data without consent in Illinois Advocacy groups push FTC to fine Facebook and break it up for repeatedly violating the consent order and unfair business practices Facebook AI research introduces enhanced LASER library that allows zero-shot transfer across 93 languages

Yesterday, social media was all abuzz about a bug in Apple’s Group FaceTime video calling service. This bug allowed callers to listen in on people they were calling and also send a video to the caller, even if they haven’t picked up their phone. Apple said this issue will be addressed in a software update later this week. Currently, they have disabled Group FaceTime in iOS and MacOS. In a statement to news reporting sites, an Apple spokesperson said, "We are aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week." According to 9To5Mac, this bug affects iOS devices which are running on iOS 12.1 or later. In their report published yesterday, 9To5Mac shared how this bug works: Initiate a FaceTime Video call with an iPhone contact. Add another person to the call, while the call is still dialing. Then add your own phone number in the Add Person screen. This will start a group FaceTime call including yourself and the audio of the person you originally called, even if they haven’t accepted the call yet. This is not the first time a bug has been reported regarding Group FaceTime, which was first introduced in October last year. In November, a lock screen security flaw was discovered that provided access to all contact information and allows activating a FaceTime call. You can read the full story on 9To5Mac’s website. Apple is patenting Swift features like optional chaining Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook calls for new federal privacy law while attacking the ‘shadow economy’ in an interview with TIME Project Erasmus: Former Apple engineer builds a user interface that responds to environment light

Unity has announced a video game challenge, the Obstacle tower challenge which will test the vision, control, planning, and generalization capabilities of AI software. The Obstacle Tower Challenge will use a game-like environment of platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems inside a tower setting maneuvering almost 100 floors. The challenge will examine how an AI software performs in computer vision, locomotion skills, and high-level planning. The challenge will begin on Monday, February 11 and will run through Friday, May 24. As the challenge opens, participants can review all the rules and regulations, download the Starter Kit and begin training their agents. Round 1, which will run from February 11 to March 31, will have participants playing up to Floor 25 of the Obstacle Tower. The winners will proceed to round 2 which will have 100 floors, post which the winners will be announced June 14. The participants will have the opportunity to win prizes in the form of cash, travel vouchers, and Google Cloud Platform credits, valued at over $100,000. “Each of the Tower floors are procedurally-generated, which means an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the Tower but any arbitrary version as well. In this way, we’re testing the generalization ability of agents, a key capability that has not often been analyzed by benchmarks in the past.” said Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, Unity Technologies. The end goal of this challenge is to bring up new AI research and solve new problems in reinforcement learning.” AI has been making great progress in conquering high-profile games. Recently, Google DeepMind’s AI AlphaStar defeated StarCraft II pros TLO and MaNa and won 10-1 against the gamers. Unity updates its TOS, developers can now use any third party service that integrate into Unity. Improbable says Unity blocked SpatialOS; Unity responds saying it has shut down Improbable and not SpatialOS. Unity and Baidu collaborate for simulating the development of autonomous vehicles

Dropbox has purchased HelloSign, a San Francisco based private company that provides lightweight document workflow and eSignature services. Dropbox has paid $230 million for this deal which is expected to close in Quarter 1. Dropbox co-founder and CEO, Drew Houston, said in a statement “HelloSign has built a thriving business focused on eSignature and document workflow products that their users love. Together, we can deliver an even better experience to Dropbox users, simplify their workflows, and expand the market we serve”. Dropbox’ SVP of engineering, Quentin Clark told TechCrunch that, HelloSign’s workflow capabilities added in 2017 were key to the purchase. He calls their investment in APIs as ‘unique’ and that their workflow products are aligned with Dropbox’ long-term direction that Dropbox will pursue ‘a broader vision’. This could possibly mean extending Dropbox Storage capabilities in the long run. This deal comes as an extension to a partnership that Dropbox established with HelloSign last year, to use two of HelloSign technologies-  to offer eSignature and electronic fax solutions to Dropbox users. HelloSign CEO, Joseph Walla says being part of Dropbox would give HelloSign the access to resources of a much larger public company, thereby allowing them to reach a broader market than it could on a standalone basis. He stated, “Together with Dropbox, we can bring more seamless document workflows to even more customers and dramatically accelerate our impact.” COO of HelloSign, Whitney Bouck, said that the company will remain an independent entity and will continue to operate with its current management structure as part of the Dropbox family. She also added that all of the HelloSign employees will be offered employment at Dropbox as part of the deal. You can head over to TechCrunch to know more about this announcement. How Dropbox uses automated data center operations to reduce server outage and downtime NGINX Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform improves API management, manages microservices and much more! Microsoft acquires Citus Data with plans to create a ‘Best Postgres Experience’  

Yesterday, the team behind D3.js rolled out D3.js 5.8.0. Data-Driven Documents or D3 is a JavaScript library using which you can create dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. Updates are introduced in the following modules: d3-force The iterations argument is added to simulation.tick. A bug is fixed when initializing nodes with fixed positions. d3-scale The following new features are added: The domain and range convenience constructors for all scale types Default constructors for sequential and diverging scales The d3.tickFormatReturns function, a number format function for displaying a tick value The d3.scaleSymlog function, which constructs a new continuous scale with the specified domain and range Transformed sequential scales, for example, d3.scaleSquentialLog Transformed diverging scales, for example, d3.scaleDivergingLog d3.scaleSequentialQuantile for p-quantiles scale.unknown for all scale types Unlimited band.paddingOuter and point.padding d3-selection The selection.join method is added, a convenient alternative to the more explicit selection.enter, selection.exit, selection.append, and selection.remove. selection.order is updated to enforce relative position, rather than exact siblings. Vendor fallback for element.matches in selection.filter and d3.matcher is removed. d3-transition The transition.end is added, which returns a promise that resolves when every selected element finishes transitioning. A cancel event is added to transition.on. Performance of transition.style and transition.attr is improved To read the full list of updates on the GitHub repository of D3.js. Introducing Cycle.js, a functional and reactive JavaScript framework Introducing Howler.js, a Javascript audio library with full cross-browser support 16 JavaScript frameworks developers should learn in 2019

Kite is a python based, AI-powered code completion tool which helps developers avoid repetitive work like copying and pasting or fixing simple errors. Recently, they secured a new $10 million round of funding led by Dan Scholnick from Trinity Ventures. This takes Kite to $17 million in total funding. The CEOs of GitHub, Dropbox, and Twitch also joined Trinity Ventures in this funding. Kite is only available locally Kite is going completely cloudless. It will now perform all processing locally on users' computers, instead of in the cloud. Users don't even have to sign up for a Kite account The decision to go cloudless was based on two major reasons. First, it hampered the latency. It was impossible to provide low-latency completions when the intelligence lived in the cloud. Running locally, Kite works extremely fast regardless of the internet connection. Security and privacy are major concerns when working on the cloud. Users are often uncomfortable with code leaving their computer and worried about data breaches. Going local allowed them to keep their codebases on their own computers. Kite has also optimized its Python analysis engine and AI models to work with the resource constraints of users' computers. For existing Kite users, Kite has been auto-updated to work locally. If a user has previously uploaded code to their servers, they can remove data via Kite’s web portal. Line-of-Code completions Apart from this new funding and local computation, Kite also comes with Line-of-Code completions which make Kite predict several “words” of code at a time. The AI software generally predicts the next several code elements a user is likely to type. At times, it can also predict full lines of code. Some developers also wanted Kite to support Linux and other programming languages. However, the team at Kite has clarified that it is not yet available. “It's taken us longer to work on these than we originally hoped. Because we're a small team of about 15 people, we decided (with real regret) that it didn't make sense to expand our addressable market when our core product still needed work.” reads their blog post. Kite is also updating its privacy policy. Here’s a snapshot from Hacker News. "We collect a variety of usage analytics that helps us understand how you use Kite and how we can improve the product. These include: Which editors you are using Kite with Number of requests that the Kite Engine has handled for you How often you use specific Kite features e.g. how many completions from Kite did you use Size (in number of files) of codebases that you work with Names of 3rd party Python packages that you use Kite application resource usage (CPU and RAM) You can opt-out of sending this analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics). Additionally, we collect anonymized "heartbeats" that are used to make sure the Kite app is functioning properly and not crashing unexpectedly. These analytics are just simple pings with no metadata, and as mentioned, they're anonymized so that there's no way for us to trace which users they came from. We also use third party libraries (Rollbar and Crashlytics) to report errors or bugs that occur during the usage of the product. What we don't collect Contents (partial or full) of any source code file that resides on your hard drive Information (i.e. file paths) about your file system hierarchy Any indices of your code produced by the Kite Engine to power our features - these all stay local to your hard drive" Read the full information on Kite’s blog. Best practices for C# code optimization [Tutorial] A new Model optimization Toolkit for TensorFlow can make models 3x faster 6 JavaScript micro optimizations you need to know

On Saturday, the team at Bison announced the stable release of Bison 3.3, a general-purpose parser generator. Bison 3.3 comes with yyrhs and yyphrs tables, major bug fixes, parsers and much more. What’s new in Bison 3.3 DJGPP support This release comes with support for DJGPP (DJ’s GNU Programming Platform) in Bison, which was unmaintained and untested since a few years. Generation of fix-its for IDEs/Editors Bison 3.3 features a new option called ‘ffixit’ which helps Bison in generating machine-readable editing instructions to fix issues. It helps in updating deprecated directives and removing duplicates. Symbol declaration The symbol declaration syntax was overhauled in previous releases. In Bison 3.3, the symbol ‘%nterm’, is now an officially supported feature. Bison is now relocatable Users can now make Bison relocatable by passing '--enable-relocatable' to ‘configure’. Users can move or copy the relocatable program to a different location on the file system which can also be used through mount points for network sharing. With this release, it is now possible to make symbolic links to the installed and moved programs and invoke them through the symbolic link. Renaming variable names In Bison 3.3, few variables, mostly related to parsers in Java, have been renamed for consistency. Following is a list of such variables:   Abstract -> api.parser.abstract Annotations -> api.parser.annotations Extends -> api.parser.extends Final -> api.parser.final Implements -> api.parser.implements Parser_class_name -> api.parser.class Public -> api.parser.public Strictfp -> api.parser.strictfp %expect and %expect-rr modifiers on individual rules Users can now document and check which rules participate in shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts. Users can use %expect-rr in a rule for reduce/reduce conflicts in GLR parsers. C++ Parsers This release comes with C++ parsers that feature symbol constructors and use noexcept/constexpr. This release also features GLR parsers in C++ that support the syntax_error exceptions. C++ token constructors Variants and token constructors are enabled in this release. In addition to the type-safe named token constructors (make_ID, make_INT, etc.), this release features constructors for symbol_type. C++: Syntax error exceptions in GLR In this version of Bison, the glr.cc skeleton now supports syntax_error exceptions thrown from user actions or from the scanner. More POSIX Yacc compatibility warnings With this release, directives are now reported with -y or -Wyacc.   yyrhs and yyphrs tables Since none of the Bison skeletons used the ‘yyrhs’ and ‘yyphrs’ tables, they were removed in 2008.  But these tables are back again as some users expressed interest in being able to use them in their own skeletons. Deprecated directives The %error-verbose directive is deprecated in favor of '%define parse.error verbose' with warnings issued.The '%name-prefix "xx"' directive is deprecated in favor of '%define api.prefix {xx}' with warnings issued. Deprecated features The new release replaces deprecated features with their modern spelling. The grammar files have been updated. Option -u/--updates results in a cleaner grammar file. Major bug fixes The previous versions of Bison used to report a single RR conflict instead of two. This bug was the oldest one in Bison, it is at least 31 years old, but it has been fixed now. Earlier, passing invalid arguments to %nterm, for instance, character literals, used to result in unclear error messages. This release highlights clear error messages. Users are skeptical about the fact that a bug can live on for so long and gets addressed after years. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “In a thousand years time will archeologists study us through the bugs left behind in Linux 1300.05 and windows (30)95?” Some of the users don’t seem to be happy with the UX of Bison. A comment on HackerNews reads, “A big part of why tools move away from Bison and ANTLR isn’t performance, but UX (especially error reporting).” Others are happy with this news and think that Bison makes parsing easy. One of the comments read, “Congrats though! I love it when these tried-and-true tools continue to perform and improve!” To know more about this Bison 3.3, check out the release notes. GNU Bison 3.2 got rolled out GNU ed 1.15 released! Bash 5.0 is here with new features and improvements