Tech News

Apple’s application for patenting some of the Swift features has successfully reached the “Grant” stage. Swift is the Objective-C based programming language that Apple introduced in 2014 and open sourced in 2015 under the Apache License 2.0. By licensing its contributions under the Apache license, Apple grants developers a perpetual, royalty-free license to use all of its patents that are necessary in order to use Swift. Apple submitted two patents 9,329,844 in 2016 and 9,952,841 in 2018. Under the 9,952,841 patent, the company has made 23 claims and 22 claims under the 9,329,844 patent. These patents are mainly about supporting multiple languages in the same compiler, with various specific limitations. These patents will be infringed if you are implementing a Swift compiler, assuming it included Objective-C compatibility and also if another language wanted to add a similar built-in compatibility layer. What could be the consequences of Apple’s patents? These patents caused a huge discussion among the Swift developers. They feel that software patents are silly and should not exist. They believe that we can find prior art for many of the features mentioned in these patents, for instance, optional chaining. One of the Swift developer discussing the consequences of these patents said, “The big problem here is not only ongoing lawsuits but projects that won't ever be started because of the risk of lawsuits. A great example here is that Clang and LLVM (and Swift probably too as directly based on Clang and LLVM) wouldn't be as easy to start or to develop at all if C and C++ were patented.” This could also lead to cases that we are seeing today, for instance, the ongoing Oracle’s copyright and patent claims on Google’s Android operating system, which is built on top of Oracle’s owned Java language. Another example is problems that Mono and other alternative implementations of .NET faced because of Microsoft’s patents. In the future, Apple could also transfer these patents to an independent non-profit organization similar to Linux. One of the developers mentioned his concern on the discussion forum, “But as a contributor to Swift's ecosystem, I feel unsafe now as we have a precedent of Oracle ruining Java's ecosystem 50 with its patents. Can we be sure that Apple never ever does this to any 3rd-party open-source project related to Swift as a "business decision"?”. While some developers are worried, some feel that it is just a countermeasure against patent trolls, “I wouldn’t worry. Apple uses patents as a way to fight trolls and counterclaims. It’s also full of prior art.” You can read the full discussion on Swift discussion forum. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta is here with stable ABI Swift is now available on Fedora 28 ABI stability may finally come in Swift 5.0

Last week, the team at Google asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review their copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of software interfaces. Unless the Supreme Court interferes, the industry will be stuck by the court’s decision, which states that the software interfaces used in creating new programs are not allowed under copyright law. Software interfaces let computer programs interact with each other and push innovations by letting developers build technologies for different platforms. This is going to have a great impact on innovation across the computer industry. Voices from business, technology, academia, and the nonprofit sector have spoken out about the devastating impacts of this case. The questions raised by Google to the Supreme Court are as follows: Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface? Whether, as the jury found, petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use? Google writes, “We support software developers’ ability to develop the applications we all have come to use every day, and we hope that the Supreme Court will give this case the serious and careful consideration it deserves.”   According to the petition, “the Federal Circuit concluded that the merger doctrine does not restrict copyright protection for computer code necessary for interoperability as long as the original author could have written the code in more than one way.” In 2008, Android was released and it helped developers overcome the challenges of limited memory, smaller processors, and short battery life. Android was built by following the practice of reusing software interfaces which provide sets of commands that make it easy to implement common functionality. Android came with a transformative platform while letting Java programmers use their existing skills to create new applications. The team at Sun Microsystems was happy with the release of Android and said, “It had strapped another set of rockets to the [Java] community’s momentum.” After acquiring Java in 2010, Oracle sued Google for using the software interfaces. Oracle’s lawsuit for the right to control software interfaces might affect the community of developers who have invested in learning the free and open Java language. Initially, a court ruled that the software interfaces, in this case, are not copyrightable, but that decision got overruled. A unanimous jury then pointed out that Google’s use of the interfaces was a legal fair use, but that decision got overruled. According to the official blog post by Google, the U.S. Constitution has authorized copyrights to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not to impede creativity or promote lock-in of software platforms. The petition reads, “Under Section 102(b), copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such [original] work.” Though according to a blog post by Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF is in the support of Google and will be supporting the company’s petition. Even in May 2013, EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of many computer scientists to Federal Circuit with the opinion that APIs should not be subject to copyright. This news has become a matter concern for many. In a statement to Ars, James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at Cornell University and former software developer, said, "The Federal Circuit's decision threatens the continued vitality of software innovation." It seems even CCIA (Computer and Communications Industry Association) is in support of Google. CCIA writes, "It is hard to see why programmers who have learned the Java APIs should remain captives of Oracle because of an investment in learning made by the programmers and not by Oracle." Users are agitated by this news and they are not welcoming the idea of restricting the use of interfaces. This news has created a lot of buzz in the developer communities and most of the developers are worried. One of the comments on HackerNews reads, “A reminder that what the law says, and what is a good idea, is not necessarily the same thing. The courts rule on the first point. Given that Oracle has prevailed in court on this before, one has to at least entertain the possibility that our law really allows for API to be copyrighted.” Another comment reads, “If companies can copyright an API and block competitors from implementing it, that would be very detrimental to the industry as a whole, for the sake of a few rent seekers profiting.” Few users are with this new move. A comment reads, “It was not ... intended to permit third party interoperability, since Google had made no substantial efforts to use them for the purpose of third party interoperability. (In fact it found that Google had tried to prevent interoperability with other Java and had previously been refused a license by Sun for that reason.) It was not transformative in the sense of a new platform either, since other Java smartphones predated Android.” Some of the users are with the court and think this battle is about what’s legal and illegal. Another comment reads, “What I'm saying is that all the people who are trying to make the "but it's bad!" argument are missing the point of the courts. Courts are not there to determine whether it's good or bad, only whether it's legal or illegal.” According to some users, Google could have called its resizable array as android.data.ResizableArray<E> but it named it java.util.ArrayList<E> and also copied the method signatures. But the matter of concern for the developers is what if other companies also end up filing such cases. And what if Google is the next one to do so? One of the users commented, “Does anyone believe Google will not be doing the exact same thing with its (moribund) technologies in, say, 5-10 years?” To know more, check out Google’s blog post. Why Google kills its own products Google and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from McKinsey & Company talk about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on circular economy Google is secretly urging National Labor Relations Board to overturn protection for activist workers, Bloomberg reports

On 25th January, the Illinois Supreme Court passed a unanimous ruling which states that, when companies collect biometric data like fingerprints or face prints without informed opt-in consent, they can be sued. This can be done even without proof of concrete injuries- like identity fraud or physical harm. The law known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act, requires that companies explicitly inform a person about what biometric data they will collect, and also how the data will be stored and utilized by the company. The data includes information like fingerprints, facial scans, iris scans, or other biological information. Next, the company has to obtain prior consent from that person before capturing these details. A point to be noted here is that, while other states only allow attorneys general to sue companies, the Illinois BIPA law gives individuals the right to sue companies. Afterwhich, they can collect damages of $1,000 (the amount increases to $5,000, if the court finds a company deliberately or recklessly flouted the law). Six Flags v Rosenbach According to FastCompany, the decision was taken in a landmark lawsuit against the theme park Six Flags, who recorded the thumbprint of a 14-year-old boy without notice or written consent, while issuing him a season pass in 2014. Six Flags did not notify the boy or his mother, Stacy Rosenbach, about obtaining his fingerprints. She sued Six Flags for violation of the BIPA law and in its defense, Six Flags made the case that because Rosenbach couldn’t demonstrate that taking his fingerprints had done any “harm” to the boy (example: no data breach or security problem), the company wasn’t liable for damages. According to the Electronic Frontier foundation, “EFF, along with ACLU, CDT, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, PIRG, and Lucy Parsons Labs, filed an amicus curiae brief urging the Illinois Supreme Court to adopt a robust interpretation of BIPA. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed with us and soundly rejected the defendants’ argument that BIPA required a person to show an injury beyond loss of statutory privacy rights”.  On Friday the state’s Supreme Court ruled that Six Flags had, indeed, violated the law and would need to pay the boy damages, in spite of no “harm” shown. The ruling comes as an example in Illinois that if a company violates a citizen’s privacy without any prior notice or consent and the citizen sues, the plaintiff doesn’t need to demonstrate an additional harm for the law to protect the user. BIPA sets an example for similar lawsuits The Six Flags ruling builds a stronger case for other ongoing lawsuits, including one against Facebook in which consumers claimed that Facebook violated a state privacy law by using facial recognition technology on their uploaded photographs without their consent. Facebook is fighting back by saying consumers should have to show that the lawbreaking practice caused ‘additional harm’ beyond a mere violation. Google also faced a similar lawsuit on Thursday, where two Illinois residents allege that the company “failed to obtain consent from anyone when it introduced its facial recognition technology.” Just last month, Google won the dismissal of a lawsuit it has been facing since 2016 for allegedly scanning and saving the biometric data of a woman, captured unwillingly in 11 photos taken on Android by a Google Photos user. As per Bloomberg, the lawsuit was dismissed by a judge in Chicago, who found that the plaintiff didn’t suffer “concrete injuries”. Senior staff counsel Rebecca Glenberg of the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement that  “Your biometric information belongs to you and should not be left to corporate interests who want to collect detailed information about you for advertising and other commercial purposes.” What does this mean to the tech industry? According to Illinois.org, while facial recognition technology and biometric does have the potential to simplify life of citizens, the BIPA may affect technological innovation overall. The litigation may have the potential to drive up costs- on both ends of the spectrum. Businesses like Apple, who have demonstrated the importance of biometric technology, will have to take extra precautions to comply with the BIPA. In case the law is violated, there is the expense of class-action lawyers and litigants. They may simply decide against hiring people in Illinois because of the expense and hassle. It would be interesting to see companies coming up with a kind of framework that would safeguard them against violation of the BIPA as well as put citizens at rest about the way their data is handled/used. You can head over to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s official post for more insights on this news. ACLU files lawsuit against 11 federal criminal and immigration enforcement agencies for disclosure of information on government hacking The district of Columbia files a lawsuit against Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica scandal IBM faces age discrimination lawsuit after laying off thousands of older workers, Bloomberg reports

The top tools and languages used in machine learning for 2018 were revealed in the GitHub The State of the Octoverse: Machine Learning. The general observation showed TensorFlow being one of the projects with the most number of contributions which is not surprising considering its age and popularity. Python was in the second place of the most popular languages on GitHub after JavaScript and Java. The data on contributions of whole of 2018 led to some insights. Contributions are pushing code, pull requests, opening an issue, commenting, or any other related activities. Data consists of all public repositories and any private repositories that have opted in for the dependency graph. Top languages used for machine learning on GitHub The primary language used in a repository tagged with machine-learning is considered to rank the languages. Python is at the top followed by C++. Java makes it to the top 5 with JavaScript. What’s interesting is the growth of Julia which has bagged the sixth spot considering that it is a relatively new language. R, popular for data analytics tasks also shows up thanks to its wide range of libraries for many tasks. Python C++ JavaScript Java C# Julia Shell R TypeScript Scala Top machine learning and data science packages Projects tagged with data science or machine learning that import Python packages were considered. NumPy, which is used for mathematical operations, is used in 74% of the projects. This is not surprising as it is a supporting package for scikit-learn among others. SciPy, pandas, and matplotlib are used in over 40% of the projects. scikit-learn is a collection of many algorithms and is used in 38% of the packages. TensorFlow is used in 24% of the projects, even though it is popular the use cases for it are narrow. numpy (74%) scipy (47%) pandas (41%) matplotlib (40%) scikit-learn (38%) six (31%) tensorflow (24%) requests (23%) python-dateutil (22%) pytz (21%) Machine learning projects with most contributions Tensorflow had the most contributions followed by scikit-learn. Julia again seems to have been garnering interest ranking fourth in this list. tensorflow/tensorflow scikit-learn/scikit-learn explosion/spaCy JuliaLang/julia CMU-Perceptual-Computing-Lab/openpose tensorflow/serving thtrieu/darkflow ageitgey/face-recognition RasaHQ/rasa_nlu tesseract-ocr/tesseract GitHub Octoverse: The top programming languages of 2018 What we learnt from the GitHub Octoverse 2018 Report Julia for machine learning. Will the new language pick up pace?

OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF), the world’s largest collaborative mapping community, saw some unusual rise in signups for their memberships, in November 2018. Guillaume Rischard, an MWG(Members of the Working Group) member (and then-board candidate), detected that a large group of OSMF membership applications arrived under suspicious circumstances just when the window for eligibility for voting in the 2018 board election was closing. He later reported this issue to the board on 20th November 2018. Rischard along with another  OSMF MWG member, Steve Friedl released an investigation report on this issue, on 26th December 2018. The report was released to other OSMF members exactly a month later, on 26th Jan 2019. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a non-profit company registered in England and Wales, “supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project”. The OSMF calls for an online general meeting once a year, where they elect new members for the board of directors. The board, however, did not pass a circular resolution that would have rejected these signups. The Membership Working Group (MWG), whose duties include the administration of OSMF memberships, undertook an investigation into the circumstances around this matter. According to the report, some of the observations that were brought to light include: All were Associate members; there’s usually a mix of membership types. All had @gmail.com addresses. Almost none provided OSM usernames; this is very unusual. Many were associated with the IP address of GlobalLogic, an outsourcing firm in India operating in the OSM/mapping world. All came in at the last minute in a very concentrated manner. Rischard in his email addressing his fellow OSMF members wrote, “We have uncovered evidence that the company behind the campaign, GlobalLogic, is not being truthful, and that the members did not sign up individually. GlobalLogic has provided versions of the event that are contradictory and not credible. We do not know the motivations for this campaign, but strongly suspect that this was an attempt, luckily unsuccessful, to influence the recent OSMF board election.” In their report, they have stated that “these new members were not eligible to vote in the 2018 AGM, and unless they renew again next year, probably won’t be able to vote in December 2019.” To know more about this news in detail, read the report, “Investigation into the Unusual Signups”. SEC’s EDGAR system hacked; allowing hackers to allegedly make a profit of $4.1 million via insider trading Hyatt Hotels launches public bug bounty program with HackerOne Black Hat hackers used IPMI cards to launch JungleSec Ransomware, affects most of the Linux servers.

Last week, Julia 1.1.0 was released with some new features, performance improvements, and small changes in behavior. The following is a list of some of the changes in this new version of Julia: Better exception handling and root cause analysis is now possible due to the exception stack maintained on each task. This can be accessed using the experimental function Base.catch_stack. Binary ~ can now be dotted, as in x .~ y. Previously, parser inputs ending with a comma were sometimes parsed as tuples depending on whitespace. Now, they are consistently treated as incomplete. Spaces in broadcast call syntax, e.g. f. (x).  are now disallowed. Using the same name for both a local variable and a static parameter is an error instead of a warning. When a script that runs in interactive mode (-i) throws an error, the REPL now starts after the error is displayed. This is a change to the REPL that previously only started if the script completed without error. 7zip  has been upgraded from version 16.04 to 18.05, OpenBLAS has been upgraded from 0.3.2 to 0.3.3. Busybox is no longer bundled with Julia on Windows. Support for LLVM < 6.0 has been dropped and LLVM has been upgraded to 6.0.1 Pkg upgraded to version 1.1. one(i::CartesianIndex) should be replaced with oneunit(i::CartesianIndex) The internal array Base.Grisu.DIGITS stands deprecated; to get an appropriate task-local buffer and pass it to grisu(), use Base.Grisu.getbuf().  Base._default_type(T) has been removed. Calls to it should be replaced with just the argument T. You can head over to GitHub for a complete list of the changes in Julia v1.1. Julia for machine learning. Will the new language pick up pace? Introducing Jupytext: Jupyter notebooks as Markdown documents, Julia, Python or R scripts Kata Containers 1.5 released with Firecracker support, integration improvements and IBM Z series support  

YouTube announced an update regarding YouTube recommendations last week. As per the new update, YouTube aims to reduce the recommendations of videos that promote misinformation ( eg; conspiracy videos, false claims about historical events, flat earth videos, etc) that affect users in harmful ways, to better the user experience on the platform. YouTube states that the new change is going to be gradual and will be applicable for less than 1% of the overall videos on YouTube as of now. “To be clear, this will only affect recommendations of what videos to watch, not whether a video is available on YouTube. As always, people can still access all videos that comply with our Community Guidelines”, states the YouTube team. YouTube is also working on eliminating the presence of content that “comes close” to violating its community guidelines. The new change makes use of machine learning along with human evaluators and experts from all over the United States to train these machine learning systems responsible for generating recommendations. Evaluators are trained using public guidelines and help offer their input on the quality of a video. Currently, the change is applied only to a small set of videos in the US as the machine learning systems are not very accurate currently. The new update will roll out in different countries once the systems become more efficient. YouTube is continually updating its system to improve the user experience on its platform. For instance, YouTube has taken steps against clickbait content in the past and keeps updating its system to put more focus on viewer satisfaction instead of views, while also making sure to not recommend clickbait videos as often. YouTube team also mentions that Youtube now presents recommendations from a wider set of topics (instead of many similar recommendations) to its users and hundreds of changes were made to optimize the quality of recommendations for users.   “It's just another step in an ongoing process, but it reflects our commitment and sense of responsibility to improve the recommendations experience on YouTube. We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users”, states the YouTube team. Public reaction to this news  is varied, with some calling YouTube’s new move as ‘censorship’ while others appreciating it: https://twitter.com/Purresnol/status/1089022759546601472 https://twitter.com/therealTTG/status/1088826997189591040 https://twitter.com/nomo_BS/status/1089007519706550272 https://twitter.com/Mattlennial/status/1089008644589604866 https://twitter.com/politic_sky/status/1089006646288941056 YouTube bans dangerous pranks and challenges YouTube’s CBO speaks out against Article 13 of EU’s controversial copyright law Is YouTube’s AI Algorithm evil?

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Google, with research and analytical support provided by McKinsey & Company have released an interesting paper talking about the intersection of two emerging megatrends: artificial intelligence and circular economy. This paper is based on the insights from over 40 interviews with experts, taking a closer look at how Artificial Intelligence can accelerate the transition to a circular economy. The paper also highlights how artificial intelligence is being used in the food and consumer electronics industries. What is Circular Economy? Circular economy is based on creating value from consuming finite resources. It is based around three principles: Design out waste and pollution Keep products and materials at their highest value Regenerate natural systems A circular economy approach encourages manufacturers to extend the usability of products, by designing products for durability, repair or refurbishment. Figure: Circular economy diagram Why AI for circular economy? The paper highlights three circular economic opportunities where AI can potentially help. These are: “Design circular products, components, and materials. AI can enhance and accelerate the development of new products, components, and materials fit for a circular economy through iterative machine-learning-assisted design processes that allow for rapid prototyping and testing. Operate circular business models. AI can magnify the competitive strength of circular economy business models, such as product-as-a-service and leasing. By combining real-time and historical data from products and users, AI can help increase product circulation and asset utilization through pricing and demand prediction, predictive maintenance, and smart inventory management. Optimize circular infrastructure. AI can help build and improve the reverse logistics infrastructure required to “close the loop” on products and materials, by improving the processes to sort and disassemble products, re-manufacture components, and recycle materials.” For each of the three use cases, the paper also highlights three case studies where Artificial Intelligence was used to create circular value within current business models. First, project ‘Accelerated Metallurgy’, funded by the European Space Agency which used AI algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data on existing materials and their properties to design and test new alloy formulations. The second case study talks about software company ZenRobotics was the first company which uses an AI software ZenBrain to recover recyclables from waste. The paper also talks about two other case studies where AI was used to grow food regeneratively and make better use of its by-products. The paper points that “the potential value unlocked by AI in helping design out waste in a circular economy for food is up to $127 billion a year in 2030.”  In another case study, AI helped in circulating consumer electronics products, components, and materials. “The equivalent AI opportunity in accelerating the transition towards a circular economy for consumer electronics is up to $90 billion a year in 2030.” The paper urges stakeholders and industrialists to take inspiration from the use cases and case studies explored in the paper to create and define new opportunities for circular economy applications of AI. It suggests three ways: “Creating greater awareness and understanding of how AI can support a circular economy is essential to encourage applications in design, business models, and infrastructure Exploring new ways to increase data accessibility and sharing will require new approaches and active collaboration between stakeholders As with all AI development efforts, those that accelerate the transition to a circular economy should be fair and inclusive, and safeguard individuals’ privacy and data security” Circular economy coupled with AI is still in its early stages. The true impact of AI in creating sustainable economy can only be realized with proper funding, investment, and awareness. Reports like these do help in creating awareness among the VCs, stakeholders, software engineers, and tech companies, but it’s up to them, how they actually translate it to implementation. You can view the full report here. Do you need artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise in house? How is Artificial Intelligence changing the mobile developer role? The ethical dilemmas developers working on Artificial Intelligence products must consider

Last week, Western Digital made Verilog sources for its open source RISC-V core publically available on GitHub under Apache 2.0. What is SweRV Core? ‘SweRV Core’ was made by Western Digital for internal use which they decided to contribute to the open source community. The SweRV Core is a 32-bit, nine stage pipeline core which is two-way superscalar. It is small in size and has a simulation performance of up to 4.9 CoreMarks/Mhz. SweRV Core comes supports data-intensive applications like storage controllers, industrial IoT devices, real-time analytics in surveillance systems etc., Running on a 28mm CMOS battery, the power-efficient design has clock speeds up to 1.8Ghz. This core will be seen in future and upcoming WD products. Martin Fink, CTO of Western Digital, says to the Business Wire: “As Big Data and Fast Data continues to proliferate, purpose-built technologies are essential for unlocking the true value of data across today’s wide-ranging data-centric applications. Our SweRV Core and the new cache coherency fabric initiative demonstrate the significant possibilities that can be realized by bringing data closer to processing power.” What do you need for SweRV Core? Verilator 3.926 or newer Espresso needs to be installed if you want to add or remove instructions To start using it, Core clone the GitHub repo, setup RV_ROOT pointing to the path of your system, and run make with tools/Makefile. Last year Western Digital had also open-sourced SweRV Instruction Set Simulator (ISS). It is a program for designers to simulate code on SweRV core. Optionally, you can determine your config before running make. To get started, you can check out the GitHub repository. The Linux and RISC-V foundations team up to drive open source development and adoption of RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) A libre GPU effort based on RISC-V, Rust, LLVM and Vulkan by the developer of an earth-friendly computer LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN

Adding to the list of several fantasy consoles/computers is the newly-introduced SCRIPT-8, written by Gabriel Florit, a graphics reporter at the Washington Post who also likes working with augmented reality. https://twitter.com/gabrielflorit/status/986716413254610944 SCRIPT-8 is a JavaScript-based fantasy computer to make, play, and, share tiny retro-looking games. Based on Bret Victor’s Inventing on principle and Learnable programming, it provides programmers live-coding experience, which means the program’s output updates as they code. The games built using SCRIPT-8 are called cassettes. These cassettes are recorded at a URL which you can share with anyone and play with a keyboard or gamepad. You can also make your own version of an existing cassette by changing its code, art, or music, and record it to a different cassette. What are SCRIPT-8’s features? A code editor which provides you with immediate feedback. A slider using which you can easily update numbers without typing. A time-traveling tool for pausing and rewinding the game. You can see a character’s past and future paths with provided buttons. A sprite editor where the changes are reflected in the game instantly. A map editor to create new paths. A music editor using which you can create phrases, group them into chains, and turn those into songs. You can read more about SCRIPT-8 on its website. Google DeepMind’s AI AlphaStar beats StarCraft II pros TLO and MaNa; wins 10-1 against the gamers Fortnite server suffered a minor outage, Epic Games was quick to address the issue Deepmind’s AlphaZero shows unprecedented growth in AI, masters 3 different games

Amazon announced last week that it’s making Amazon SageMaker Neo, a new machine learning feature in Amazon Sagemaker, available as open source. Amazon has released the code as Neo-AI project under the Apache software license. Neo-AI’s open source release will help processor vendors, device makers, and AI developers to bring and extend the latest machine learning innovations to a wide variety of hardware platforms. “with the Neo-AI project, processor vendors can quickly integrate their custom code into the compiler..and.. enables device makers to customize the Neo-AI runtime for the particular software and hardware configuration of their devices”, states the AWS team. Amazon SageMaker Neo was announced at AWS re:Invent 2018 as a newly added capability to Amazon SageMaker, its popular Machine learning Platform as a service. Neo-AI offers developers with a capability to train their machine learning models once and to run it anywhere in the cloud. It can deploy the machine learning models on multiple platforms by automatically optimizing TensorFlow, MXNet, PyTorch, ONNX, and XGBoost models. Moreover, it can also convert the machine learning models into a common format to get rid of the software compatibility problems. It currently supports platforms from Intel, NVIDIA, and ARM. There’ll also be an added support for Xilinx, Cadence, and Qualcomm in the near future in Neo-AI. Amazon states that Neo-AI is a machine learning compiler and runtime at its core, built on traditional compiler technologies like LLVM and Halide. It also uses TVM (to compile deep learning models) and Treelite (to compile decision tree models), which had started off as open source research projects at the University of Washington. Other than these, it also performs platform-specific optimizations from different contributors. The Neo-AI project will receive contributions from several organizations such as AWS, ARM, Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx, Cadence, and others. Also, the Neo-AI runtime is deployed currently on devices such as ADLINK, Lenovo, Leopard Imaging, Panasonic, and others. “Xilinx provides the FPGA hardware and software capabilities that accelerate machine learning inference applications in the cloud..we are pleased to support developers using Neo to optimize models for deployment on Xilinx FPGAs”, said Sudip Nag, Corporate Vice President at Xilinx. For more information, check out the official Neo-AI GitHub repository. Amazon unveils Sagemaker: An end-to-end machine learning service AWS introduces Amazon DocumentDB featuring compatibility with MongoDB, scalability and much more AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon announces a variety of AWS IoT releases

Apple released the next major iOS update, iOS 12.2 beta 1 to developers on January 24, 2019. This update boasts of features like custom downtime scheduling, as well as major updates to PWA. Custom screen time scheduling According to a report by 9to5Mac, iOS users will be offered a custom downtime scheduler in the latest iOS update. Users will now be able to adjust the Screen Time feature per the days of the week. Although previous iOS versions had a similar downtime scheduler, it was limited to be applied every day. With iOS 12.2 beta 1, users can either choose to use the same schedule everyday, or customize it depending on which day of that week it is. You can use it by navigating to Settings > Screen Time > Downtime. https://twitter.com/Mr_SamSpencer/status/1089161676983844865 PWA improvements Apple has made major improvements to Progressive web apps by introducing new features for developers. Mike Hartington, developer advocate for Ionic framework gives us a glimpse of new improvements in a tweet. New experimental features include Web Auth, Web Animations, WebMeta, pointer events, intersection observer etc. Service workers are removed from the experiments list and are enabled by default. External sites are loaded via SFViewController. This means authentication flows and still work without leaving the PWA. The current state of any app is maintained, even if the app goes in the background. You can view the native app as well as the PWA of the same app in the search. Users are generally excited for Apple making improvements to its PWA. A comment on Hacker news reads, “This is great for user rights and moves the needle more towards a decentralized and open ecosystem, while maintaining strong security guarantees to the end-user.” However, users also want Apple to consider supporting Push Notifications for PWAs. Other UI features 9to5Mac notes the following new UI updates made to Apple iOS 12.2 beta 1. New Screen Mirroring icon in Control Center New full screen Apple TV Remote Control Center interface New “Speakers & TVS” in Home app settings More detailed Apple Wallet UI for Recent Transactions Updated details button in Wallet card UI Tap a transaction for more detail Card details feature bubbly inset rectangles rows Motion & Orientation Data is new Safari toggle in iOS Settings Air Quality Index reading in Maps Safari warns about websites not supporting HTTPS Fill in a search suggestion without submitting the search Keyboard color picker Inline Safari music playback Album name full song search results in Music app iOS 12.2 will bring Apple News to Canada Developers can head to Settings > General > Software Updates to start downloading iOS 12.2 beta 1, if they have a previous iOS 12 beta installed. Non-developers can enter the public beta program by visiting beta.apple.com on the device they wish to enroll in the beta.  Currently, there is no public beta release. Apple has introduced Shortcuts for iOS 12 to automate your everyday tasks Microsoft Office 365 now available on the Mac App Store Tim Cook cites supply constraints and economic deceleration as the major reason for Apple missing it’s earnings target

Recently, Confiant and Malwarebytes analyzed a steganography based payload which was utilized by a "malvertizer" dubbed "VeryMal" by the two firms, to infect Macs. According to the firms, the attempted attack ad was viewed on as many as 5 million Macs. This campaign was active from 11th January 2019 until 13th January 2019. Confiant detected and blocked 191,970 impressions across their publisher customers. They said that only the US visitors were targeted in this campaign. According to Confiant, the Mac users who saw the ad, the attack displayed notices that the Adobe Flash Player needed to be updated and made the users to open a file that would attempt to download in their browsers. The download, when accepted and run, ended up infecting the user’s Mac with the Shlayer trojan. The image could be viewed without harm despite containing the payload. It is harmful only when the code is run on the file, followed by the browser being redirected to a link included in the payload. Eliya Stein, Security Engineering and research at Confiant, writes, “As malvertizing detection continues to mature, sophisticated attackers are starting to learn that obvious methods of obfuscation are no longer getting the job done. Techniques like steganography are useful for smuggling payloads without relying on hex encoded strings or bulky lookup tables.” The same malicious actor VeryMal had performed a similar attack at the end December 2018: 437,819 Impressions detected and blocked by Confiant across two December campaigns. US targeting split between Mac OS and iOS. However, this attack includes a method, which was difficult to detect. Malware “is not only limited to advertising-based attacks, with reports in September noting even some apps in the Mac App Store were performing malicious actions, such as extracting a user's data”, according to an Apple Insider report. To know more about how Confiant and Malwarebytes carried out this analysis, visit Eliya Stein’s blog post on Medium. Twitter memes are being used to hide malware Privilege escalation: Entry point for malware via program errors Bo Weaver on Cloud security, skills gap, and software development in 2019  

Though Google has done a few changes to its policies after various massive protests by its employees and shows that they understand and support their employees, but the recent Bloomberg’s report says something else. According to Bloomberg, they are quietly requesting National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to undo a 2014 Act that allows employees to organize over workplace email without the fear of punishment. Last year in August, the Board issued a notice inviting the public to file briefs on whether the Board should overrule its 2014 decision in favor of Purple Communications, Inc. According to this decision, employees have the right to use their employer’s e-mail system during the non-working time for union organizing and other activities listed under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. Bloomberg obtained the filings that were submitted in May 2017 and November 2018 under the Freedom of Information Act request, which shows that Alphabet Inc.’s Google has urged the Board to overturn that precedent. As a reply to Bloomberg, a Google spokeswoman stated in an emailed statement that, "We're not lobbying for changes to any rules. This was a legal defense that we included as one of many possible defenses in the response to a charge. This case is without merit and we are defending the claim vigorously." Company emails come in handy as employees are spread across the globe and don’t have most co-workers’ personal emails. A Google employee activist, Colin McMillen, who was also one of the participants in the November’s Google Walkout told Bloomberg that if NLRB actually ends up overturning the rule “it would have a huge chilling effect.” One of the critical ways of communicating and organizing the Google Walkout event was Google’s mailing lists. In a talk held earlier this month by the Logic Magazine, Liz Fong-Jones shared that most of the communication for protesting against Google real name policy was done on Google Docs. McMillen also added, "It demonstrates that Google leadership is not operating in good faith. They can have a town hall and try to say soothing words and get people to not want to quit, but then if in the background they’re not just rejecting carrying out most of the demands of the walkout, but also trying to tamp down our ability to even coordinate and talk to each other about these issues, that’s extremely concerning." As a response to this, Google Walkout for Real Change tweeted that instead of Google checking its “unethical and selfish decision making”, they are focusing on changing the national labor law. They warned that the outcome of this move will not only impact Google employees but all employees across the nation. With so many scandals against the company, some users feel that the root cause lies in its leadership. One of the Reddit users said, “It seems like since Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no longer leading Google but its parent company, Google has really started going downhill ethically.” Another user on Hacker News said, “There’s something very rotten at the top levels at Google. The “Don’t be evil” motto has long disappeared and has been replaced by apathy and/or hostility on different fronts. Maybe this move by Google is actually good...to help more employees and others realize how the company has morphed into something that’s no longer doing as much good for humanity as it used to boast about.” You can read the full report at Bloomberg’s website. Google may pull out Google news from Europe: Bloomberg Report Google faces pressure from Chinese, Tibetan, and human rights groups to cancel its censored search engine, Project DragonFly Google partners with WordPress and invests $1.2 million on “an opinionated CMS” called Newspack

Lately, Facebook has been in news for its data breaches and issues related to its illegal data sharing. To add to its sorrows, yesterday, advocacy groups such as Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center among others, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission, requesting the government to intervene into how Facebook operates. The letter had a list of actions that the FTC could take which includes a multibillion-dollar fine, changing the company’s hiring practices, and breaking up Facebook for abusing its market position. Last week, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials were planning to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook according to a report by Washington Post. As per the revelations made last year, over 87 million users’ data was given to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, without users’ consent. As a result of which, Facebook was fined £500,000, last October. This time Facebook might have to pay more than $22.5 million, the fine which was imposed on Google for tracking users of Apple’s Safari web browser in 2012. As per FTC, Facebook may have violated a legally binding agreement with the government to protect the privacy of users’ personal data. As a result of its Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the subsequent issues with data and privacy, advocacy groups are now calling for Facebook to be broken up because of the privacy violations and repeated consumer data breaches. The letter written to FTC by the advocacy group reads, “The record of repeated violations of the consent order can no longer be ignored. The company’s business practices have imposed enormous costs on the privacy and security of Americans, children and communities of color, and the health of democratic institutions in the United States and around the world.” According to the groups, it has been almost ten years since many organizations first brought the commission’s attention to Facebook’s unfair business practices that threatened the privacy of the consumers. The letter reads, “Facebook has violated the consent order on numerous occasions, involving the personal data of millions, possibly billions, of users of its services. Based on the duration of the violations, the scope of the violations, and the number of users impacted by the violations, we would expect that the fine in this case would be at least two orders of magnitude greater than any previous fine.” According to organizations like Open Market Institute and Color of Change, Facebook should be required to give up $2 billion as fine and divest ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp for failing to protect user data on those platforms as well.The groups have urged the FTC to require Facebook to comply with Fair Information Practices for all future uses of personal data across all services for all companies. The letter reads, “Given that Facebook’s violations are so numerous in scale, severe in nature, impactful for such a large portion of the American public and central to the company’s business model, and given the company’s massive size and influence over American consumers, penalties and remedies that go far beyond the Commission’s recent actions are called for.” According to the letter, Facebook breached its commitments to the Commission regarding the protection of WhatsApp user data. The letter further reads, “Facebook has operated for too long with too little democratic accountability. That should now end. At issue are not only the rights of consumers but also those of citizens. It should be for users of the services and for democratic institutions to determine the future of Facebook.” According to The Verge, lawmakers have been quiet on breaking up Facebook. In an interview with The Verge, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), one of the senators at the forefront, said that breaking up the company was more of a “last resort.” According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings reviewed by The Hill, the largest five tech companies Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter lobbied on a variety of issues, including trade, data privacy, immigration and copyright issues. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, even got testified before Congress last year. Facebook lobbied $12.6 million. It seems that the data privacy issues made Facebook get into lobbying. Facebook AI research introduces enhanced LASER library that allows zero-shot transfer across 93 languages Russia opens civil cases against Facebook and Twitter over local data laws Trick or Treat – New Facebook Community Actions for users to create petitions and connect with public officials