Tech News

Yesterday, the team at Microsoft announced that Office 365 is available on the Mac App Store for the first time. Mac users can now download Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and the whole suite of Microsoft’s popular apps. It is also possible to purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps. With Office 365 on the Mac App Store, these apps can be easily distributed to the employees using Apple Business Manager, a central dashboard where IT can deploy devices, apps and licenses. Users can now work with their Office tools across Mac, iPad and iPhone. Also, few new features are designed specifically for Apple devices. Jared Spataro, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said, “We are excited to announce that today Office 365 is arriving in the Mac App Store. We have worked closely with Apple to provide Mac users with the very best productivity experience — one that offers everything they know and love about Office through an experience uniquely designed for the Mac.” Office 365 for Mac has been designed for supporting features such as Dark Mode and Continuity Camera in macOS and MacBook Pro Touch Bar and Mac’s industry-leading Trackpad. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said, “We are excited to welcome Microsoft Office 365 to the all-new Mac App Store in macOS Mojave. Apple and Microsoft have worked together to bring great Office productivity to Mac users from the very beginning. Now, with Office 365 on the Mac App Store, it's easier than ever to get the latest and best version of Office 365 for Mac, iPad and, iPhone.” Users have given mixed reactions to this news. Some of the users are happy with this news. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “I use both Office for Mac and Windows all the time and Office for Mac is pretty reliable IMO.” This also looks like a big move for both the companies. Users are now looking at this bigger picture where both Mac and iOS app stores will be integrated together. This could possibly be a step closer to a better UX (for Microsoft). Another comment reads, “Have you tried to download Office from their website? It's a horrible, braindead experience. You have to log in to your Live account, then go to a particular page to manage your existing Office installs that is super confusing.” There is also a discussion going on with regards to App store updates and Microsoft autoupdate. A comment on HackerNews reads, “If it uses the App Store update mechanism instead of Microsoft Autoupdate I would prefer it.”  Another comment reads, “Right now Microsoft's autoupdate UX is pretty terrible at keeping things up to date.  They have automated updates but it's hard to trust that process won't result in issues when documents are open, and it presents a lot of cognitive load to users on top of the OS & App Store updates.” Few of the users are wondering if Apple will get its share from the subscription fee of the Office 365. But on the whole, users are on the go that there is some mechanism via which both the companies will benefit. One of the users commented, “But this is a massive deal between two of the ecosystem's biggest fish, and I'm sure an arrangement has been made to give Apple a piece of the pie somehow.” Users’ biggest question is if Microsoft has changed Office 365 in order to get in the Mac App Store rules or has Apple changed its rules to get Office in? Or is it very well sandboxed? Well, only time will answer these questions! To know more about this news, check out the official announcement on Apple’s newsroom. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook calls for new federal privacy law while attacking the ‘shadow economy’ in an interview with TIME China blocks Microsoft’s Bing search engine Microsoft Edge mobile browser now shows warnings against fake news using NewsGuard

Apple announced Swift 5 for their Xcode 10.2 compiler. Swift in Xcode 10.2 beta brings a couple of new features like smaller app sizes when testing, new library, compiler features, and more. The application binary interface (ABI) is stable in Swift 5. Smaller app size App sizes on Swift 5 in Xcode 10.2 beta can be smaller now when deployed for testing. This is true when using TestFlight or when thinning an app for local distribution. Smaller app sizes are possible as Swift apps don’t include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library anymore. Moreover, Swift SDK overlays for devices running iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. Apple calls this concept ‘App thinning’. New features in Swift 5 A new attribute named @dynamicCallable allows dynamic language interoperability. Key paths support the identity keypath \.self. You can no longer write functions that take variadic arguments. Now you can change the enumeration case to ‘take an array explicitly and pass an array in.’ A try? block with an Optional type does not return a nested optional, instead of flattening the resulting option Literal types are modified so that expressions don’t overflow the default integer literal where the type is Int. String interpolation is now simpler, has better performance and efficiency. Changes in the Swift standard library The DictionaryLiteral type is now KeyValuePairs Swift strings bridged into Objective-C code can now return a non-nil value in certain cases The Sequence protocol is now disassociated from SubSequence. Native encoding in the string structure is now UTF-8 instead of UTF-16. What’s new in Swift package manager? When using Swift 5, targets can now declare commonly used build settings that are target-specific. In the Swift 5 Package.swift tools-version, packages can customize minimum deployment target settings. Top level packages can override dependency URLs The --enable-code-coverage flag helps other tools to use code coverage data generated by a tool Support for Swift 3 Package.swift tools-version has been dropped Larger packages are handled better by the package manager Package resolution for incompatible dependency versions are forced to fail A new --repl option in swift run launches the Swift REPL. This supports importing library targets of a package. Swift compiler Exclusive memory access is imposed at runtime by default. Swift 3 is removed. In Swift 5, switches on enumerations declared in Objective-C/system frameworks have to handle unknown cases For Swift modules, default arguments are printed in SourceKit-generated interfaces Support for Optional types is now added in unowned and unowned(unsafe) variables To know more details and bug fixes, visit the release notes. Swift is now available on Fedora 28 ABI stability may finally come in Swift 5.0 Swift 4.2 releases with language, library and package manager updates!

Yesterday, Maël Nison, maintainer at Yarn, opened a GitHub thread on the Yarn repository describing the roadmap for the next major Yarn release. The roadmap (codenamed Berry) contains significant changes that are planned for Yarn's design. Nison reinstates that Yarn’s philosophy will continue to be the same based around three important principles. Developing Javascript projects in Yarn should have totally predictable and reproducible behavior. Developing Javascript projects should be easy. Contributing to the Yarn ecosystem should be simple. Long-term and Short-term goals for Yarn in 2019 Yarn will be rewritten in TypeScript. The entire codebase will be ported from Flow to TypeScript. This is done to help third-party contributors to help to maintain Yarn. Yarn will become a development-first tool. This means Package managers will no longer work as tools for running on your production servers. Yarn will become an API first and CLI second. Its internal components will be split into modular entities Yarn will be designed in a way that each component of Yarn’s pipeline can be switched to adapt to different install targets. Yarn will now be a package manager platform as much as a package manager. Overall compatibility will be preserved when possible. The caveat: installs will now use Plug'n'Play by default. Major changes and new features The lockfile format will become a strict subset of YAML. Yarn will drop support for both Node 4 and Node 6. The log system will be renovated with implementation of diagnostic error codes from Typescript. Some features currently in the core will be moved into contrib plugins. The cache file format will switch from Tar to Zip, which offer better features in terms of random access. Nested workspaces will be supported out of the box. Running Yarn ./packages/my-package add foo will run Yarn add foo into my-package. There will be a new resolution protocol, workspaces:, which allows developers to force the package manager to link one of the packages against a workspace. Yarn constraints is a new command which will allow developers to enforce constraints across workspaces. The Yarn link command will now persist its changes into the package.json files Berry will ship with a portable posix-like light shell that'll be used by default. Scripts will be able to put their arguments anywhere in the command-line (and repeat them if needed) using $@. Cache will become fully atomic, with multiple Yarn instances running concurrently on the same cache without risking corrupting the data. Developers are generally positive about this release specially pointing out the change of moving from Flow to Typescript. A hacker news user states, “Finally one of the biggest news is the switch from Flow to Typescript. I think it's now clear that Facebook is admitting defeat with Flow; it brought a lot of good in the scene but Typescript is a lot more popular and gets overall much better support. Uniting the JS ecosystem around Typescript will be such a big deal.” Another comment reads, “The codebase will be ported from Flow to TypeScript. We hope this will help our community ramp up on Yarn, and will help you build awesome new features on top of it. Another major project moving from flow to typescript.” A new repository will be set up in early February. Post which Berry will be accessible by running yarn policies set-version berry within a project. Hadoop 3.2.0 released with support for node attributes in YARN, Hadoop submarine and more Starting with YARN Basics Introducing ReX.js v1.0.0 a companion library for RegEx written in TypeScript

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it has acquired Citus Data- a startup that specializes in big data and analytics.Citus  is an extension to the open source database management system PostgreSQL, which transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database. The start-up was founded in 2011 and apart from their Citus extension, 'Citus Cloud' database as a service powers billions of transactions every day giving rise to the world’s first horizontally scalable relational database which can be run on premises, and as a fully-managed service on the cloud. Citus has varied applications ranging from SaaS companies who run their core applications on Citus Cloud scaling their business on-demand to businesses using Citus to power their real-time analytics dashboards. Citus also states that they have been able to help many Fortune 100 companies migrate to an open, horizontally scalable Postgres ecosystem and have improved developer performance while providing them with scalability to power their workloads without re-architecting their applications. In a blog post, Umur Cubukcu, Ozgun Erdogan, and Sumedh Pathak; co-founders of Citus Data said that as part of Microsoft, “we will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives our users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need.” Adding to this point, Microsoft admits that “Both Citus and Microsoft share a mission of openness, empowering developers, and choice. And we both love PostgreSQL. We are excited about joining forces, and the value that doing so will create: Delivering to our community and our customers the world’s best PostgreSQL experience.” Acquiring Citus is a step towards Microsoft’s commitment to Open Source technologies as well as enhancing Azure PostgreSQL performance and scalability as customer workloads keep expanding. Earlier this month, DB-Engines conferred the title of DBMS of the Year on PostgreSQL. Microsoft and Citus Data have committed themselves to enable customers in scaling complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over huge amounts of data, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools. Developers have received this news well. Twitter saw many users commenting on the decision being a smart once, since PostgreSQL is well used among developers. https://twitter.com/izotov/status/1088563182006923264 https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1088578781663571975 The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. To know more about this announcement, head over to Microsoft's official blog. NYT says Facebook has been disclosing personal data to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants; Facebook denies claims with obfuscating press release Microsoft urgently releases Out-of-Band patch for an active Internet Explorer remote code execution zero-day vulnerability Citus Data to donate 1% of its equity to non-profit PostgreSQL organizations    

Starting from yesterday, AWS Network Load Balancers (NLB) supports TLS/SSL. This new feature simplifies the process of building secure web applications by allowing users to make use of TLS connections that terminate at an NLB. This support is fully integrated with AWS PrivateLink and is also supported by AWS CloudFormation. https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1088510453767000064 Here are some features and benefits it comes with: Simplified management Using TLS at scale requires you to do extra management work like distributing the server certificate to each backend server. Additionally, it also increases the attack surface due to the presence of multiple copies of the certificate. This TLS/SSL support comes with a central management point for your certificates by integrating with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and Identity Access Manager (IAM). Improved compliance This new feature provides the flexibility of predefined security policies. Developers can use these built-in security policies to specify the cipher suites and protocol versions that are acceptable to their application. This will help you if you are going for PCI and FedRAMP compliance and also allow you to achieve a perfect TLS score. Classic upgrade Users who are currently using a Classic Load Balancer for TLS termination can switch to NLB, which will help them to scale quickly in case of an increased load. Users will also be able to make use a static IP address for their NLB and log the source IP address for requests. Access logs This support allows users to enable access logs for their NLBs and direct them to the S3 bucket of their choice. These logs will document information about the TLS protocol version, cipher suite, connection time, handshake time, and more. To read more in detail, check out Amazon’s announcement. Amazon is reportedly building a video game streaming service, says Information Amazon’s Ring gave access to its employees to watch live footage of the customers, The Intercept reports AWS introduces Amazon DocumentDB featuring compatibility with MongoDB, scalability and much more

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced of its search engine, Bing, being blocked in China. However, they were unsure if it was due to China’s great wall censorship or due to a technical glitch. However, the search engine is back online after being shut down for two consecutive days. The site may have been blocked by government censors. Many users also posted on Weibo, one of the popular social networks in China, commenting that “Bing is back” and “Bing returns to normal.” ZDNet also pointed out a notable fact that, “The temporary block of Microsoft's Bing comes at a time when tensions between the US and China are running high, with the introduction of a bipartisan Bill in the US earlier this month to ban the sale of tech to Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE, and the US stating on Wednesday its intention to extradite Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.” Though Bing is not widely used in China, it has been one of the few remaining portals to the broader internet as the Chinese government isolates China’s internet from the rest of the world. Bing remains the only US-based search engine because “Microsoft has worked to follow the government’s censorship practices around political topics”, the New York Times reported. In an interview with Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said “There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government, and we’re still waiting to find out what this situation is about.” What the US-China tech and AI arms race means for the world – Frederick Kempe at Davos 2019 Packt helped raise almost $1 million for charity with Humble Bundle in 2018 Sweden is at a crossroads with its nearly cashless society: To Swish or e-krona?

The 2019 Game Developers Conference published the results of their seventh annual state of the industry survey two days ago. The report added two new questions this time, should the games industry unionize? and will the games industry unionize?. Almost 4000 developers participated in the survey and nearly 50% of them believed that game industry workers should unionize. GDC 2019 is scheduled to take place March 18-22 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. 47 percent gamers said yes when asked whether they thought game industry workers should unionize; 26 percent said maybe, 16 percent said no, and 11 percent said they didn’t know. However, figures fell when it came to actual implementation. When asked whether they think video game workers actually will unionize, only 21 percent said yes. 39 percent said “maybe.” 24 percent of respondents said they don’t think it will happen, and 15 percent said that they don’t know. One developer responded saying, “There is too much supply: too many people want into the industry. Those who unionize will be shoved out of the way as companies hire those with fewer demands." The gaming industry has been abuzz with talks of unionization for quite some time now. Game Workers Unite, is a democratic organization fighting for union rights and gathering support for unionization in the gaming industry. Last year, in December, a UK chapter of Game Workers Unite became a legal trade union. Developers were also asked what PC/Mac game storefronts they sell their games on. The most popular answer was Steam, with roughly 47 percent saying that they sell games on Valve’s storefront. However, when asked if Steam still justifies its 30 percent cut, only 6 percent said yes, and 17 percent said maybe. On asking developers (both indie and professionals) how many hours they work per week on average, 44 percent of developers worked more than 40 hours per week. Almost 6 percent worked 76 to 80 hours, "suggesting that deadline-related crunch can go far beyond normal working hours," according to the survey. Other questions were based on what game platforms developers are creating for, iOS Android etc. The entire survey is available to be downloaded for free. Electronic Arts (EA) announces Project Atlas, a futuristic cloud-based AI-powered game development platform Packt partners with Humble Bundle to bring readers a stash of game development content Best game engines for Artificial Intelligence game development

Yesterday, Microsoft announced in a statement, that their popular Bing search engine was banned in China. This would be Microsoft’s second setback since November 2017, after its Skype internet phone call and messaging service were discontinued from Apple and Android app stores. When users within China’s mainland tried performing a search on Bing’s China website--cn.bing.com--they were redirected to a page which read, the server cannot be reached. Chinese authorities have a firewall that blocks most of the US-based tech platforms including Facebook and Twitter. However, Microsoft has not reported if this outage could be because of the censorship or simply a technical problem. A Microsoft spokesperson said, "We've confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps.” Microsoft’s Bing was the only major foreign search engine accessible from within China-built Great Firewall. Bing’s biggest rival, Google shut down its search engine in China in 2010, after rows with the authorities over censorship and hacking. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said that it has no plans to relaunch a search engine in China. Microsoft, however, has censored search results on sensitive topics, in accordance with government policy. Citing a source, The Financial Times, yesterday, reported that China Unicom, a major state-owned telecommunication company, had confirmed the government order to block the search engine. Also, Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a government watchdog, did not respond to faxed questions about Bing’s blocked website. CAC also said that it has also deleted more than 7 million pieces of online information and 9,382 mobile apps. “President Xi Jinping has accelerated control of the internet in China since 2016, as the ruling Communist Party seeks to crack down on dissent in the social media landscape”, the Reuters reported. China Telecom misdirected internet traffic, says Oracle report Bo Weaver on Cloud security, skills gap, and software development in 2019 Microsoft Edge mobile browser now shows warnings against fake news using NewsGuard

A group of researchers from the University of Southern California published a paper titled “Combating Fake News: A Survey on Identification and Mitigation Techniques” that discusses existing methods and techniques applicable to identification and mitigation of fake news. The paper has categorised different existing work on fake news detection and mitigation methods into three types: fake news identification using content-based methods (classifies news based on the content of the information to be verified) identification using feedback-based methods (classifies news based on the user responses it receives over social media) intervention based solutions (offers computational solutions for identifying the spread of false information along with methods to mitigate the impact of fake news) These existing methods are further categorized as follows: Categorization of existing methods “The scope of the methods discussed in content-based and feedback based identification is limited to classifying news from a snapshot of features extracted from social media. For practical applications, we need techniques that can dynamically interpret and update the choice of actions for combating fake news based on real-time content propagation dynamics”, reads the paper. These techniques that provide such computational methods and algorithms are discussed extensively in the paper. Let’s have a look at some of these strategies. Mitigation strategies: decontamination, competing cascades, and multi-stage intervention The paper presents three different mitigation strategies aimed at reversing the effect of fake news by introducing true news on social media platforms. This ensures that users are exposed to the truth and the impact of fake news on user opinions are mitigated. The Computational methods designed for this purpose first needs to consider information diffusion models widely-used in social networks such as the Independent Cascade (IC), linear Threshold (LT) model, as well as the point process models such as Hawkes Process model. Decontamination The paper mentions the strategy introduced by Nam P Nguyen, in his paper “Containment of misinformation spread in online social networks”. The strategy includes decontaminating the users exposed to fake news. It makes use of the diffusion process (estimates the spread of information over the population) modelled with the help of Independent Cascade (IC) or Linear Threshold model (LT). A simple greedy algorithm is then designed that selects the best set of users. Then starts the diffusion process for true news so that at least a fraction of the selected users can be decontaminated. The algorithm iteratively selects the next best user to include into the set depending on the marginal gains obtained by the inclusion of that user (i.e. the number of users activated or reached by the true news in expectation, if the set did additionally include the chosen user). Competing cascades The paper mentions an intervention strategy based on competing cascades. The method of competing cascades involves introducing a true news cascade to make it compete with the fake news cascade, while the fake news is propagating through the network. The paper discusses an “influence blocking maximization objective” by Xinran He, as an optimal strategy to spread true news in the presence of fake news cascade. The process selects a set of “k” users strategically with the objective of minimizing the number of users who get activated by fake news at the end of the diffusion. According to the paper, this model assumes that once a user gets activated by either the fake or true cascade, that user will remain activated under that cascade. Multi-stage intervention Another strategy discussed in the paper is the “multi-stage intervention strategy” proposed by Mehrdad Farajtabar, in the paper “Fake News Mitigation via Point Process Based Intervention”.  This strategy allows “external interventions to adapt as necessary to the observed propagation dynamics of fake news”, states the paper. The purpose of the external interventions in the process is to incentivize certain users to enable increased sharing of true news that can counteract the fake news process over the network. At each step of the intervention, there are certain budget and user activity constraints that are imposed. This allows you to track the optimal amount of external incentivization, needed to achieve the desired objective i.e. minimizing the difference between fake and true news exposures. This strategy makes use of a reinforcement learning based policy iteration framework that helps derive the optimal amount of external incentivization. Identification strategies: Network Monitoring and crowd-sourcing The paper discusses different identification mechanisms that help actively detect and prevent the spread of misinformation due to fake news on social media platforms. Network Monitoring The paper presents a strategy based on network monitoring that involves intercepting information from a list of suspected fake news sources using computer-aided social media accounts or real paid user accounts. These accounts help filter out the information they receive and block fake news. The strategy used a “network monitor placement” that is determined by finding a part of the network with the highest probability of fakes news transmission. Another network monitoring placement solution involves a Stackelberg game between leader (attacker) and follower( defender) nodes. The paper also mentions an idea implemented by various network monitoring sites. This includes having multiple human or machine classifiers to improve the detection robustness as something that might get missed by one fact-checker might get captured by another. Crowd-sourcing Another identification strategy mentioned in the paper makes use of the crowd-sourced user feedback on social media platforms that helps users report or flag fake news articles. These crowd-sourced signals used to prioritize the fact-checking of news articles involves capturing “the trade-off between a collection of evidence v/s the harm caused from more users being exposed to fake news (exposures) to determine when the news needs to be verified”, states the paper. The fact-checking process and events are represented using point process models. This process helps to derive the optimal intensity of fact-checking that is proportional to the rate of exposure to misinformation and collected evidence as flags. The paper mentions an online learning algorithm to more accurately leverage user flags. This algorithm jointly infers the flagging accuracies of users while also identifying fake news. “The literature surveyed here has demonstrated significant advances in addressing the identification and mitigation of fake news. Nevertheless, there remain many challenges to overcome in practice,” states the researchers. For more information, check out the official research paper. Fake news is a danger to democracy. These researchers are using deep learning to model fake news to understand its impact on the elections Four 2018 Facebook patents to battle fake news and improve news feed Facebook patents its news feed filter tool to provide more relevant news to its users

And now, for some personal news: our friends at Humble Bundle, with whom we have been working for the past year or so, recently got in touch to tell us that in 2018 we raised $972,177.93 for some incredible causes. The list of organizations we have helped is long. They include Make a Wish Foundation, International Rescue Committee, the American Cancer Society, and Water - each is very different, and often operating in different parts of the world, but they're all doing important work in making the planet a little bit better. We're delighted to have played a part, but really it's all down to the Humble Bundle community, who have embraced Humble Bundle's smart and innovative platform. It's exciting to see digital publishers and communities of gamers and software developers come together to support social good around the world. What is Humble Bundle? For those readers unfamiliar with Humble Bundle, it's an organization that partners with game, book, and video publishers (like Packt) to pull together a set of content for which users can 'pay what they want'. To take a recent example, at the end of November we put together a cybersecurity bundle with Humble Bundle offering users the chance to get hold of 25 of our eBooks and videos for as little as $15. Although $15 was the minimum required to 'unlock' the complete bundle, users could pay whatever they wanted in order to access the content - this means that the money that goes to great organizations like those listed above is ultimately down to the generosity of the wider Humble Bundle community. What's next for Packt and Humble Bundle? This is just the beginning for Packt and Humble Bundle. We'll be working together on numerous bundle campaigns as the year progresses and hoping to help raise even more money for the awesome organizations associated with Humble Bundle. Keep your eyes peeled and watch this space - the next Humble Bundle could be coming very soon...

The team at Apache Hadoop released Apache Hadoop 3.2.0, an open source software platform for distributed storage and for processing of large data sets. This version is the first in the 3.2 release line and is not generally available or production ready, yet. What’s new in Hadoop 3.2.0? Node attributes support in YARN This release features Node Attributes that help in tagging multiple labels on the nodes based on their attributes. It further helps in placing the containers based on the expression of these labels. It is not associated with any queue and hence there is no need to queue resource planning and authorization for attributes. Hadoop submarine on YARN This release comes with Hadoop Submarine that enables data engineers for developing, training and deploying deep learning models in TensorFlow on the same Hadoop YARN cluster where data resides. It also allows jobs for accessing data/models in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and other storages. It supports user-specified Docker images and customized DNS name for roles such as tensorboard.$user.$domain:6006. Storage policy satisfier Storage policy satisfier supports HDFS applications to move the blocks between storage types as they set the storage policies on files/directories. It is also a solution for decoupling storage capacity from compute capacity. Enhanced S3A connector This release comes with support for an enhanced S3A connector, including better resilience to throttled AWS S3 and DynamoDB IO. ABFS filesystem connector It supports the latest Azure Datalake Gen2 Storage. Major improvements jdk1.7 profile has been removed from hadoop-annotations module. Redundant logging related to tags have been removed from configuration. ADLS connector has been updated to use the current SDK version (2.2.7). This release includes LocalizedResource size information in the NM download log for localization. This version of Apache Hadoop comes with ability to configure auxiliary services from HDFS-based JAR files. This release comes with the ability to specify user environment variables, individually. The debug messages in MetricsConfig.java have been improved. Capacity scheduler performance metrics have been added. This release comes with added support for node labels in opportunistic scheduling. Major bug fixes The issue with logging for split-dns multihome has been resolved. The snapshotted encryption zone information in this release is immutable. A shutdown routine has been added in HadoopExecutor for ensuring clean shutdown. Registry entries have been deleted from ZK on ServiceClient. The javadoc of package-info.java has been improved. NPE in AbstractSchedulerPlanFollower has been fixed. To know more about this release, check out the release notes on Hadoop’s official website. Why did Uber created Hudi, an open source incremental processing framework on Apache Hadoop? Uber’s Marmaray, an Open Source Data Ingestion and Dispersal Framework for Apache Hadoop Setting up Apache Druid in Hadoop for Data visualizations [Tutorial]

Yesterday, Adobe announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic. Allegorithmic is the creator of Substance, and other 3D editing and authoring tools for gaming, entertainment, and post-production. Allegorithmic’s customer base is diverse ranging across gaming, film and television, e-commerce, retail, automotive, architecture, design and advertising industries. Popular Algorithmic users include Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Ikea, BMW, Louis Vuitton, Foster + Partners among others. Allegorithmic’s Substance tools are used in games, such as Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Forza. Allegorithmic’s tools have been used for visual effects and animation for some of the popular movies like Blade Runner 2049, Pacific Rim Uprising, and Tomb Raider. Adobe will help in accelerating Allegorithmic’s product roadmap and go-to-market strategy and further extend its reach among enterprise, SMB, and individual customers. Sebastien Deguy, CEO and founder at Allegorithmic will take up a leadership role as the vice president and handle Adobe’s broader 3D and immersive designs. With this acquisition, Adobe also wants to make Creative Cloud (a set of applications and services from Adobe Systems that gives users access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing and more) the home to 3D design tools. How will Creative Cloud benefit from Allegorithmic Adobe and Allegorithmic previously worked together three years ago. As the result of their work, Adobe introduced a standard PBR material for its Project Aero, Adobe Dimension, Adobe Capture, and every 3D element in Adobe Stock. Now, Adobe will empower video game creators, VFX artists, designers, and marketers by combining Allegorithmic’s Substance 3D design tools with Creative Cloud’s imaging, video and motion graphics tools. Creative Cloud can benefit from Allegorithmic’s tools in gaming, entertainment, retail and even for designing textures and materials that give 3D content detail and realism. Creative Cloud tools such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Dimension, and After Effects are already in use and are of great significance for content creators, the addition of Allegorithmic’s Substance tools to Creative Cloud would turn out to be more powerful. In a blog post, Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president at Creative Cloud, said, “Our goal with Creative Cloud is to provide creators with all the tools they need for whatever story they choose to tell. Increasingly, stories are being told with 3D content. That’s why I’m excited to announce that today Adobe has acquired Allegorithmic, the industry standard in tools for 3D material and texture creation for gaming and entertainment.” Sebastien Deguy, said, “Allegorithmic and Adobe share the same passion for bringing inspiring technologies to creators. We are excited to join the team, bring together the strength of Allegorithmic’s industry-leading tools with the Creative Cloud platform and transform the way businesses create powerful, interactive content and experiences.” In future, Adobe might focus on making Allegorithmic tools available via subscription. Some users are concerned about the termination of the perpetual license and are unhappy about this news. It would be interesting to see the next set of updates from the team at Adobe. https://twitter.com/sudokuloco/status/1088101391871107073 https://twitter.com/2017_nonsense/status/1088181496710479872 Adobe set to acquire Marketo putting Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing Adobe glides into Augmented Reality with Adobe Aero Adobe to spot fake images using Artificial Intelligence

Yesterday, PrimeTek announced the release of PrimeReact 3.0.0, a UI component library for React. This updated version comes with few accessibility enhancements, the all-new Babylon create-react-app template, and more. Here are some of the changes PrimeReact 3.0.0 comes with: Enhanced accessibility and quality After reviewing the entire suite, the team has enhanced various components for keyboard and screen reader compatibility. They have also addressed the user feedback resulting in improved overall quality of PrimeReact. Babylon template Babylon is the newly introduced create-react-app template for PrimeReact. It comes with over 800 UI Variations with different menu options, 50+ PrimeReact themes, ready to use pages, and more. There are four flavors of Babylon menu: static, overlay, slim, and horizontal with dar/light color schemes. Additionally, a new grouped menu mode is also introduced in which submenus of the first level menu items are expanded for easier navigation. The template supports 51 built-in themes each of which offers accent, light, and dark options. You can also create your own theme by just defining a couple of SaSS variables. In the future releases, the team will be working towards adding support for more premium templates like Ultima, Serenity, Avalon, and Apollo in PrimeReact 3.0.0. They will also be improving PrimeReact core with features such as TableState, Carousel Component, Filtering for Tree/TreeTable, and more. You can read the full list of changes on PrimeTek’s website. npm JavaScript predictions for 2019: React, GraphQL, and TypeScript are three technologies to learn Introducing Cycle.js, a functional and reactive JavaScript framework JavaScript mobile frameworks comparison: React Native vs Ionic vs NativeScript

Yesterday, Kata Containers 1.5 was released with a host of updates like preliminary support for the Firecracker hypervisor, s390x architecture support, and significant integration improvements! Kata Containers is an open source project and community building a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that perform like containers and provide the workload isolation and security advantages of Virtual machines. The project is managed by The OpenStack Foundation and combines the technology from Intel® Clear Containers and Hyper runV. Features of Kata Containers 1.5 #1 Firecracker support Eric Ernest, an architecture committee member for Kata Containers project, states that the Kata Containers project was designed “to support multiple hypervisor solutions.” The new Firecracker support introduced in this update aims to do just that. At the Amazon re:Invent conference 2018, the AWS team released ‘Firecracker’ that they explained to be a new Virtualization Technology and Open Source Project for Running Multi-Tenant Container Workloads. Firecracker enables service owners to operate secure multi-tenant container-based services while combining the speed, resource efficiency, and performance enabled by containers with the security and isolation offered by traditional VMs. Firecracker can be used in Kata Containers 1.5 for feature constrained workloads, while using the QEMU when working with more advanced workloads. The blog also mentions a small limitation of the Kubernetes functionality when using Kata+Firecracker. The inability to dynamically adjust memory and CPU definitions for a pod and Firecrackers support for only block-based storage drivers and volumes gives rise to the requirement of devicemapper. This is available in Kubernetes + CRI-O and Docker version 18.06. Users can expect more storage driver options soon. Check out this screencast for an example of Kata configured in CRIO+K8S, utilizing both QEMU and Firecracker. You can head over to GitHub to understand how to get started quickly with Kata + runtimeClass in Kubernetes. #2 s390x architecture support Kata Containers 1.5 adds IBM Z-Series support. According to CIO, IBM Z platform includes notable security features. It has a proprietary ASIC on-chip hardware dedicated specifically for cryptographic processes, enabling all-encompassing encryption. This keeps data always encrypted except when that data is being processed. Data is only decrypted during computations before it is encrypted again. #3 containerd integration The 1.5 release simplifies how Kata Containers integrate with containerd. Following the discussion last year to add a shim API to containerd, the 1.5 release includes an initial implementation meeting this shim API. Eric Ernest , an architecture committee member for Kata Containers project, says the API  will result in a better interface to Kata Containers and provide the ability to directly access container level statistics from the Kata runtime. TheKata team plans to have several presentations on this topic at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, April 29- May 1, 2019. You can head over to Eric’s blog for more insights on this announcement or head over to AWS blog to know more about the Firecracker support for Kata 1.5. CNCF releases 9 security best practices for Kubernetes, to protect a customer’s infrastructure Tumblr open sources its Kubernetes tools for better workflow integration Implementing Azure-Managed Kubernetes and Azure Container Service [Tutorial]  

The popular open source continuous integration service Travis CI solution, has been acquired by Idera. Idera offers a number of B2B software solutions ranging from database administration to application development to test management. Travis CI will be joining Idera’s Testing Tools division, which also includes TestRail, Ranorex, and Kiuwan. Travis CI assured its users that the company will continue to be open source and a stand-alone solution under an MIT license. “We will continue to offer the same services to our hosted and on-premises users. With the support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and improving our core product”, said Konstantin Haase, a founder of Travis CI in a blog post. Idera will also keep the Travis Foundation running which runs projects like Rails Girls Summer of Code, Diversity Tickets, Speakerinnen, and Prompt. It’s not just a happy day for Travis CI. Travis CI will also bring it’s 700,000 users to Idera, and it’s high profile customers like IBM and Zendesk. Users are quick to note that this acquisition comes at a time when Tavis CI’s competitors like Circle CI, seem to be taking market share away from Travis CI. A comment on hacker news reads, “In a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering. Probably a good time to sell Travis CI, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.” Another user says, “Honestly, for enterprise users that is a good thing. In the hands of a company like Idera we can be reasonably confident that Travis will not disappear anytime soon” Announcing Cloud Build, Google’s new continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform Creating a Continuous Integration commit pipeline using Docker [Tutorial] How to master Continuous Integration: Tools and Strategies