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IPython team released version 7.0 of IPython, yesterday. IPython is a powerful Python interactive shell with features such as advanced tab completion, syntactic coloration, and more. IPython 7.0 explores new features such as AsyncIO integration, new Async libraries, and Async support in Notebooks. IPython (Interactive Python) provides a rich toolkit for interactive computing in multiple programming languages. It’s the Jupyter kernel for Python used by millions of users. Let’s discuss the key features in IPython 7.0 release. AsyncIO Integration IPython 7.0 comes with the integration of IPython and AsyncIO. This means that you don’t have to import or learn about asyncIO anymore. AsyncIO is a library which lets you write concurrent code using the async/await syntax. The asyncIO library is used as a foundation for multiple Python asynchronous frameworks providing high-performance network, web-servers, database connection libraries, distributed task queues, etc. Just remember that asyncIO is an async function, it won’t magically make your code faster but will make it easier to write. New Async Libraries (Curio and Trio integration) Python consists of keywords async and await. This helps simplify the use of asynchronous programming and the standardization around asyncIO. It also allows experimentation with the new paradigms for asynchronous libraries. Now, two new Async Libraries namely Curio and Trio, have been added in IPython 7.0. Both of these libraries explore ways to write asynchronous programs. They also explore how to use async, awaits, and coroutines when starting from a blank slate. Curio is a library which helps perform concurrent I/O and common system programming tasks. It makes use of the Python coroutines and the explicit async/await syntax. Trio is an async/await-native I/O library for Python. It lets you write programs that do multiple things at the same time with parallelized I/O. Async support in Notebooks Async code will now work in a notebook when using ipykernel for Jupyter users. With IPython 7.0, async will work with all the frontends that support the Jupyter Protocol, including the classic Notebook, JupyterLab, Hydrogen, nteract desktop, and nteract web. The default code will run in the existing asyncIO/tornado loop that runs the kernel. For more information, check out the official release notes. Make Your Presentation with IPython How to connect your Vim editor to IPython Increase your productivity with IPython

Ten Years ago, on September 15, 2008, Stack Overflow’s public beta went live. Yesterday, Stack Overflow put up a post to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of Stack Overflow. Back in 2008, Joel Spolsky got frustrated searching for a specific programming question into Google. This inspired him to start a programmer-specific Q&A portal, where developers can ask their programming related questions by combining the idea of a Q&A site with voting and editing. Since then, 9.3 million users have provided 25 million answers to 16 million questions and it has grown into a trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Per the stats posted on their website, “Every 5.1 seconds, someone takes time out of their day and posts an answer, to help a complete stranger on the internet. And since 2007, those answers have been found 12.3 billion times by developers in need. We estimate that’s saved developers roughly 3.1 billion hours.” Stack Overflow has always been providing new tools to ease the workload of developers. Most recently, it launched the Stack Overflow for Teams which provides unlimited private questions and answers for a single team hosted on Stack Overflow. It also partnered with IBM to bring learning and development to the Artificial Intelligence community. Earlier this month, it launched an update to the Salary Calculator. It is a tool that allows both developers and employers to find typical salaries for the software industry. Last month, it expanded its Code of Conduct which further builds of its previous “Being Nice” motto to include more virtues around kindness, collaboration, and mutual respect. Here’s a fun video where Stack Overflow engineers have shared their views for its 10th anniversary on their journey with the company, the community, and developing the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwS1r1mc888 4 surprising things from StackOverflow’s 2018 survey. StackOverflow just updated its developers' salary calculator; includes 8 new countries in 2018. StackOverflow Developer Survey 2018: A Quick Overview.

It’s been just a month since the release of TensorFlow 1.10, and the TensorFlow community introduces the newer version 1.11 with few major additions, lots of bug fixes and numerous performance improvements. Major Features of TensorFlow 1.11.0: Prebuilt binaries built for Nvidia GPU Experimental tf.data integration for Keras Preview support for eager execution on Google Cloud TPUs Added multi-GPU DistributionStrategy support in tf.keras for model distribution Added multi-worker DistributionStrategy support in Estimator C, C++, and Python functions added for querying kernels Added simple Tensor and DataType classes to TensorFlow Lite Java Bug Fixes and Other Changes: Default values for tf.keras RandomUniform, RandomNormal, and TruncatedNormal initializers changed Added pruning mode for boosted trees Old checkpoints do not get deleted by default Total disk space for dumped tensor data limited to 100 GB. Added experimental IndexedDatasets Performance Improvements: Enhanced performance for StringSplitOp & StringSplitV2Op Regex replace operations improvised with max performance. Toco compilation/execution fixed for Windows Added GoogleZoneProvider class for detecting Google Cloud Engine zone tensorflow Import enabled for tensor.proto.h Added documentation clarifying the differences between tf.fill and tf.constant Added selective registration target using the lite proto runtime Support for bitcasting to and from uint32 and uint64 Estimator subclass added and can be created from a SavedModelEstimator Added argument leaf index modes Please see the full release notes for complete details on added features and changes. You can also check the GitHub repository to find various interesting use cases of TensorFlow. Top 5 Deep Learning Architectures A new Model optimization Toolkit for TensorFlow can make models 3x faster Intelligent mobile projects with TensorFlow: Build your first Reinforcement Learning model on Raspberry Pi

Earlier this week, the Nim team announced the release of Nim 0.19 with many language changes, async improvements, and support for the latest Nimble 0.9.0. Nim is a systems and applications programming language, which aims for better performance, portability, and expressiveness. It is a statically typed and compiled language which comes with unparalleled performance in an elegant package. Its common features include: High-performance garbage-collection Compiles to C, C++ or JavaScript Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux What’s new in Nim 0.19? Language changes and additions The nil state for strings/seqs is no more supported and their default value is changed to  "" / @[]. In the transition period you can use --nilseqs:on. It is now invalid to access the binary zero terminator in Nim’s native strings, but internally it can still have the trailing zero to support zero-copy interoperability with cstring. In the transition period you can compile your code using the new --laxStrings:on switch. Instead of being an all-or-nothing switch, experimental is now a pragma and a command line switch that can allow specific language extensions. You can make dot calls combined with explicit generic instantiations using the syntax x.y[:z], which is converted as y[z](x) by the parser. You can use func as an alias for proc {.noSideEffect.}. Nim now supports for-loop macros to make for loops and iterators more flexible to use. This feature enables a Python-like generic enumerate implementation. In order to implement pattern matching for certain types, case statements can be rewritten via macros. Keyword arguments after the comma are supported in the command syntax. Declaration of thread-local variables inside procs is now supported. This implies all the effects of the global pragma. Nim supports the except clause in the export statement. Async improvements Nim’s async macro now works completely with exception handling. The use of await in a try statement is also supported. Supports Nimble 0.9.0 This release comes with Nimble 0.9.0, which was released recently in August. This version contains a large number of fixes spread across 57 commits. One breaking change that you need to keep in mind is that any package that specifies a bin value in its .nimble file will no longer install any Nim source code files. Breaking changes The deprecated symbols in the standard library such as system.expr or the old type aliases starting with a T or P prefix have been removed. SystemError is now renamed to CatchableError and is the new base class for any exception that is guaranteed to be catchable. Read the full announcement on Nim’s official website. Rust as a Game Programming Language: Is it any good? Java 11 is here with TLS 1.3, Unicode 11, and more updates The 5 most popular programming languages in 2018

As promised by the Kubernetes team earlier this month, Kubernetes 1.12 now stands released! With a focus on internal improvements,  the release includes two highly-anticipated features- general availability of Kubelet TLS Bootstrap and Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). This promises to provide better security, availability, resiliency, and ease of use for faster delivery of production based applications. Let’s dive into the features of Kubernetes 1.12 #1 General Availability of Kubelet TLS Bootstrap The team has made the Kubelet TLS Bootstrap generally available. This feature significantly streamlines Kubernetes’ ability to add and remove nodes to the cluster. Cluster operators are responsible for ensuring the TLS assets they manage remain up-to-date and can be rotated in the face of security events. Kubelet server certificate bootstrap and rotation (beta) will introduce a process for generating a key locally and then issuing a Certificate Signing Request to the cluster API server to get an associated certificate signed by the cluster’s root certificate authority. As certificates approach expiration, the same mechanism will be used to request an updated certificate. #2 Stable Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and Cluster-Autoscaler Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) allows users to create and manage a homogenous VM pool. This pool can automatically increase or decrease based on demand or a set schedule. Users can easily manage, scale, and load balance multiple VMs to provide high availability and application resiliency which will be ideal for large-scale applications that can run as Kubernetes workloads. The stable support will allow Kubernetes to manage the scaling of containerized applications with Azure VMSS. Users will have the ability to integrate the applications with cluster-autoscaler to automatically adjust the size of the Kubernetes clusters. #3 Other additional Feature Updates Encryption at rest via KMS is now in beta. It adds multiple encryption providers, including Google Cloud KMS, Azure Key Vault, AWS KMS, and Hashicorp Vault. These providers will encrypt data as it is stored to etcd. RuntimeClass is a new cluster-scoped resource that surfaces container runtime properties to the control plane. Topology aware dynamic provisioning is now in beta. Storage resources can now understand where they live. Configurable pod process namespace sharing enables users to configure containers within a pod to share a common PID namespace by setting an option in the PodSpec. Vertical Scaling of Pods will help vary the resource limits on a pod over its lifetime. Snapshot / restore functionality for Kubernetes and CSI will provide standardized APIs design and add PV snapshot/restore support for CSI volume drivers To explore these features in depth, the team will be hosting a  5 Days of Kubernetes series next week. Users will be given a walkthrough of the following features: Day 1 - Kubelet TLS Bootstrap Day 2 - Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and Cluster-Autoscaler Day 3 - Snapshots Functionality Day 4 - RuntimeClass Day 5 - Topology Resources Additionally, users can join the members of the release team on November 6th at 10 am PDT in a webinar that will cover major features in this release. You can check out the release on GitHub. Additionally, if you would like to know more about this release, head over to Kubernetes official blog. Google Cloud hands over Kubernetes project operations to CNCF, grants $9M in GCP credits VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE) launched to offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service Nvidia GPUs offer Kubernetes for accelerated deployments of Artificial Intelligence workloads  

Coinbase announced yesterday that they would increase the number of digital assets significantly in the coming months. There are also plans to list these digital assets by segregating them by jurisdictions. This would mean that the tokens used for digital transactions in one country may not be valid in some other country by virtue of the security laws specified in that country. Coinbase Consumer VP and General Manager Dan Romero explained this decision as a move to attract diverse customers. It will also strengthen their position as a digital foreign exchanges, he said. In this announcement, Coinbase also specified the criteria for approving or rejecting a digital asset application while ensuring the process is unbiased, efficient and error-free: The digital asset should be legally compliant in the said jurisdiction The asset is technically secure There is a clear need of the asset amongst the customers Many crypto experts see this move as a bit tricky, as regulation of laws across different jurisdictions can be expensive and time-consuming. With more than 1800 Coinbase tokens in existence currently and a lot more to launch in the near future, the process could become even more tedious. However, they also estimate Coinbase’s revenue to shoot tenfold within the next year, from approximately $1 billion in 2017 to more than $10 billion. This move by Coinbase replicates Facebook’s platform strategy of building a two-sided marketplace, mainly between content creators and the consumers. For instance, Facebook empowered developers with the tools needed to create and monetize their own applications and games on Facebook. This strategy worked as it allowed Facebook to benefit from each of game, app, or advertising content created on its platform, leading to their faster growth and profitability. Interestingly, it is also worth remembering that Facebook’s Blockchain head David Marcus stepped down from his position in the Coinbase board to avoid any conflict of interest. There have also been talks of Facebook looking to acquire Coinbase, in the past. With Coinbase looking to scale quickly in the near future, this new platform strategy seems to be a great initiative to branch out and establish themselves as the best Bitcoin exchange there is. So far, they have already served more than 20 million customers, and traded more than $220 million in cryptocurrency since 2012. They currently operate in 33 countries with more than 500 employees across offices in the United States, U.K. and Japan. Read more Coinbase Commerce API launches Bitcoin Core escapes a collapse from a Denial-of-Service vulnerability Top 15 Cryptocurrency Trading Bots

Yesterday, the Rust and WebAssembly team introduced a new crate called web-sys, which provides raw bindings to all the Web APIs. The web-sys crate enables the interaction with all the standard web platform methods. Why use web-sys crate? Web includes many APIs and adding support for all of them manually can prove to be a very hectic task. These APIs are standardized with the same interface definition language (Web IDL). The developers came up with a new Web IDL frontend to wasm-bindgen. When the frontend was ready, they took the interface definitions for all the Web APIs from all their standards to automatically generate a -sys crate from them, known as web-sys. Bringing all these APIs at one place will make it easy for people to write neat libraries and other utility crates for the Web. The wasm-bindgen architecture The new wasm-bindgen architecture is shown below: Source: GitHub A frontend named wasm-bindgen-webidl is added to wasm-bindgen, which takes in Web IDL interface definitions and emits the internal Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of wasm-bindgen. Once we have the AST, emitting zero-overhead Rust and JavaScript glue code to do type conversion and shepherding of function parameters is the same as normal #[wasm_bindgen] annotations. Using this architecture makes wasm-bindgen future-compatible with the host bindings proposal. This proposal focuses on making WebAssembly to directly call into native DOM methods without going through a JavaScript shim. This will provide better performance since calls from wasm can be statically validated to type check once at compilation time, rather than dynamically on every single call. To know more about the web-sys crate, check out the official announcement at GitHub. Introducing Wasmjit: A kernel mode WebAssembly runtime for Linux Why is everyone going crazy over WebAssembly? Next.js 7, a framework for server-rendered React applications, releases with support for React context API and Webassembly

On Tuesday, LLVM announced that starting from LLVM 7, the packages libc++, libc++abi, and OpenMP are integrated into llvm-toolchain. Integration of these libraries was a project proposed in the Google Summer of Code 2018. Warnings and usage of the libc++* and OpenMP packages libc++* packages The libc++ and libc++abi packages that are currently present in Debian and Ubuntu repositories will not be affected, but they will be removed in the later versions. Also, the newly integrated libcxx* packages are not co-installable with them. To keep the library usage same as before, symlinks are provided from the original locations. For example, from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc++.so.1.0 to /usr/lib/llvm-7/lib/libc++.so.1.0. The usage of libc++ is as follows: $ clang++-7 -std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++ foo.cpp $ ldd ./a.out|grep libc++   libc++.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc++.so.1 (0x00007f62a1a90000)   libc++abi.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc++abi.so.1 (0x00007f62a1a59000) OpenMP packages Though OpenMP has been a part of Debian and Ubuntu archives, only one version was supported on the system. To address this, OpenMP is integrated with the llvm-toolchain. Similar to libc++, to keep the current usage same, the newly integrated package creates a symlink from /usr/lib/libomp.so.5 to /usr/lib/llvm-7/lib/libomp.so.5. It can be used with clang through -fopenmp flag: $ clang -fopenmp foo.c The dependency packages that provide the default libc++* and OpenMP package are also integrated into llvm-defaults. Using the following command you will able to install the current version of all these packages: $ apt-get install libc++-dev libc++abi-dev libomp-dev To get more clarity on the integration of libc++* and OpenMP in llvm-toolchain, check out their announcement on LLVM’s site. LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring Boost 1.68.0, a set of C++ source libraries, is released, debuting YAP! Will Rust Replace C++?

Yesterday, U.S. Senator, John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation summoned a hearing titled ‘Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy’. Executives from AT&T, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Charter Communications provided their testimonies to the Committee. The hearing took place to, examine privacy policies of top technology and communications firms, review the current state of consumer data privacy, and offer members the opportunity to discuss possible approaches to safeguarding privacy more effectively. John Thune opened the meeting by saying, “This hearing will provide leading technology companies and internet service providers an opportunity to explain their approaches to privacy, how they plan to address new requirements from the European Union and California, and what Congress can do to promote clear privacy expectations without hurting innovation.” The two biggest issues surrounding the hearing included questions of jurisdiction and enforcement. The other issues discussed were, whether privacy policies should be legally mandated as opt-in or opt-out the ability to download data, and withdraw consent for data collection whether ad-based business models can truly protect customer's information how privacy policies translate to companies' work overseas (particularly in China) Tech industries choose Federal law over state laws A few months back, Europe and California passed strong laws governing online privacy and data, which the experts say are the most stringent and comprehensive protections. Due to these stringent laws, the tech industry is leaning towards having a common federal law that overrides state rules instead of multiple state laws. The hearing included a good argument between the two parties on how online privacy at the federal level is better than the state level. Federal commerce laws address inter-state commerce, and online information and business flows between states. The tech companies expressed interest in having the opportunity to weigh in on the contents of the federal law, should be considered. Many tech companies expressed their concern that having a state legislation could result in a patchwork of laws. However, AT&T's representative did not actually express why a federal law would be beneficial. The representative said that, if state law prevailed over federal law, the industry will be forced to comply with the most restrictive aspects of each state’s law. As a reply to the tech industries, Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) said, "Your holy grail is 'preemption’ and we’re not going to replace a strong California law with a weaker federal one." Regarding the second biggest issue, which is enforcement, multiple senators asked the tech companies whether they believed enforcement for consumer data protection should rest with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). They also questioned whether FTC's power to enforce laws should be expanded. At present, the FTC levies fine based on a complex order of operations, that involves tech companies agreeing that they have done something wrong before the FTC can enforce anything. To this, the tech companies had a mixed reaction. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said, "Voluntary rules have proved insufficient to protect privacy.” The Congressional hearing reenforced the idea that the tech industry has accepted the fact that privacy regulation is coming. Once this happens, these companies would rather have a say in the regulation than oppose it. To know about the hearing in detail watch the complete video on the U.S. Senate Committee website. Google’s Senate testimony, “Combating disinformation campaigns requires efforts from across the industry.” Facebook COO, Sandberg’s Senate testimony: On combating foreign influence, fake news, and upholding election integrity Google CEO Sundar Pichai won’t be testifying to Senate on election interference

Cloudflare, a content delivery network service provider, formed a new group yesterday called as the Bandwidth Alliance to reduce bandwidth cost of many cloud users. Cloudflare will provide heavy discounts or free services on bandwidth charges to organizations who are both Cloudflare customers and cloud providers part of this alliance. Current bandwidth charges Hosting on most cloud providers includes data transfer charges, known as bandwidth or egress charges. These charges include the cost of delivering traffic from the cloud to the consumer. However, while using a CDN like Cloudflare, the cost of data transfer is additional over the content delivery cost. This extra charge makes sense if the data has to cross thousands of miles where an infrastructure needs to be maintained across this distance. To do all this, there is a costing involved, which further gets added to customer’s final bill. The Bandwidth Alliance aims to eliminate these additional charges and provide more affordable cloud services. What is the bandwidth alliance? Traffic that is delivered to users through Cloudflare passes across a Private Network Interface (PNI). The PNI usually is within the same facility formed with a fiber optic cable between routers for the two networks. If there’s no transit provider, nor a middleman for maintaining infrastructure, there is no additional cost for Cloudflare or the cloud provider. Cloud service providers use the PNI’s to deeply interconnect with third party networks and Cloudflare. Cloudflare carries the traffic automatically from the user’s location to the Cloudflare data center nearest to the cloud provider then over the PNIs. Cloudflare has heavily peered networks allowing traffic to be carried over the free interconnected links. Thus, Cloudflare came up with Bandwidth Alliance to provide the mutual customers with lower costs. They teamed up with some cloud providers to see if they can make use of their huge interconnects to benefit the end customers. Some of the current members include Automattic, Backblaze, DigitalOcean, DreamHost, IBM Cloud, linode, Microsoft Azure, Packet, Scaleway, and Vapor. The alliance is open for inclusion of more cloud providers. You can read more in the official Cloudflare Blog. Cloudflare’s decentralized vision of the web: InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) Gateway to create distributed websites Microsoft Ignite 2018: New Azure announcements you need to know Google introduces Cloud HSM beta hardware security module for crypto key security

Yesterday, the Scikit Learn community released the version 0.20.0 of Scikit-learn, a popular machine learning library for Python. Scikit learn 0.20.0 explores new features and enhancements for the Scikit-learn library. Scikit-learn is one of the most popular open source machine learning libraries for Python. It provides algorithms for machine learning tasks such as classification, regression, dimensionality reduction, and clustering. It also offers modules for extracting features, processing data, and evaluating models. Major features in Scikit Learn 0.20.0. New Features There’s a new impute module in Scikit Learn 0.20.0 that offers estimators for learning despite missing data. String or pandas Categorical Columns in Scikit Learn 0.20.0 can now be encoded with OneHotEncoder or OrdinalEncoder. PowerTransformer and KBinsDiscretizer join QuantileTransformer now as non-linear transformations. A sample_weight support has been added to several estimators (which includes KMeans, BayesianRidge and KernelDensity). This is the first release that comprises Glossary of Common Terms and API Elements developed by Joel Nothman. Other changes There are a lot of changes made in sklearn.cluster, sklearn.compose, sklearn.covariance, sklearn.datasets, sklearn.decomposition, etc., in Scikit Learn 0.20.0. Let’s have a look at them in detail. sklearn.cluster The cluster.AgglomerativeClustering feature now supports Single Linkage clustering via linkage='single'. The cluster.KMeans and cluster.MiniBatchKMeans features support sample weights through new parameter sample_weight in fit function. The cluster.KMeans, cluster.MiniBatchKMeans and cluster.k_means passed with algorithm='full' will now be enforcing row-major ordering, and improve runtime. sklearn.compose A compose.ColumnTransformer is a new feature that applies different transformers to different columns of arrays or pandas DataFrames. The compose.TransformedTargetRegressor has been added in this Scikit Learn version, which transforms the target y before fitting a regression model. sklearn.covariance The covariance.graph_lasso, covariance.GraphLasso and covariance.GraphLassoCV have now been renamed to covariance.graphical_lasso, covariance.GraphicalLasso and covariance.GraphicalLassoCV. It will be finally be removed in version 0.22. sklearn.datasets The datasets.fetch_openml has been added to fetch datasets from OpenML,a free, open data sharing platform. In datasets.make_blobs, you can now pass a list to the n_samples parameter. This helps indicate the number of samples to generate per cluster. The filename attribute has been added to datasets that have a CSV file. Another new feature return_X_y parameter has also been added to several dataset loaders. sklearn.decomposition The decomposition.dict_learning functions and models now offer support for positivity constraints. This applies to the dictionary and sparse code. Another decomposition.SparsePCA feature now exposes normalize_components. For more information, check out the official release notes. Machine Learning in IPython with scikit-learn Why you should learn Scikit-learn? Implementing 3 Naive Bayes classifiers in scikit-learn

Facebook Oculus' annual virtual reality developer conference, ‘The Oculus Connect 5 2018’ started yesterday on the 26th of September, in San Jose, California. It is a two-day event that ends today. This conference brings together VR developers from all around the world having an expertise in a variety of platforms and mediums. This is to push collaboration and share ideas that can bring the VR industry forward. Day 1 of Oculus Connect 5 was full of exciting news and announcements including the launch of Oculus Quest VR headset, Oculus platform updates, Oculus Go getting youtube VR, a three-part Vader Immortal Star Wars VR experience, and much more! Let’s have a look at some of these exciting announcements from Oculus Connect 5 2018. Oculus Quest VR headset revealed Oculus Quest is the first all-in-one VR gaming system by Oculus. It will be launched in Spring 2019. It comes with six degrees of freedom (6DOF), and touch controllers. The best thing is that it doesn’t come with an additional baggage of a PC, wires, and external sensors.  Oculus Quest The Oculus team also presented ‘Oculus Insight’ that uses four ultra wide-angle sensors along with computer vision algorithms. This helps track your exact position in real time without requiring any external sensors. Oculus Quest includes similar optics as Oculus Go along with a display resolution of 1600x1440 per eye. It also incorporates a lens spacing adjustment for enhanced visual comfort. The built-in audio system has been improved with bass up for higher quality sound effects. After its launch in Spring 2019, Oculus Quest will also launch a library with 50 VR apps including popular games like Robo Recall, The Climb, and Moss. Oculus Go getting YouTube VR Another exciting announcement made at the Oculus Connect 5 event was Oculus bringing YouTube VR to its Oculus Go VR headset. Oculus Go VR headset will now have access to more than 800,000 360-degree videos as a result of a partnership with Google’s YouTube service. This YouTube VR service will launch on the headset soon, as announced by Oculus Go product manager, Sean Liu at the Oculus Connect 5 conference. Oculus Venues adding NBA pro basketball games Now Oculus Venue, a concert and sports events app by Oculus has added the world’s most popular sports to the platform, NBA pro basketball games. As per the announcement at the Oculus Connect 5 conference,  NBA games will be available in Oculus Venues later this year. Also, viewers accessing NBA game in VR will be getting a custom virtual jersey of their favorite team which their avatar will be able to wear for the rest of the game season. Apart from that, Oculus Venues is planning on adding a lot more live music, movie marathons, and stand up comedy. Also, everyone who will be attending an NBA game in VR will get a special jersey for their avatar. Oculus Go cast support Another announcement made at the Oculus Connect 5 conference was cast support being added to Oculus Go. This will enable the Go users with the capability to stream their gameplay experience to other screens. As of now, the main focus is on enabling the users to cast Go screen to mobile devices. However, casting Go screen will be available for TV screens too in the near future, as mentioned by Sean Liu, Oculus Go product manager. A three-part Star Wars series - Vader Immortal Another super exciting announcement made at Oculus Connect 5 was the arrival of the first episode of a three-part VR series, called VR immortal. The series is based on Darth Vader and would be premiering with the upcoming Oculus Quest headsets. Vader Immortal  Vader Immortal is being created with David S. Goyer, who is the screenwriter behind films like The Dark Knight trilogy. Vader Immortal explores the events that take place in Secrets of the Empire and between the Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. It will also explore the Darth Vader's castle as seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Gaming Announcements Apart from 50 titles for the Oculus Quest at the launch, there are a bunch of other Game Announcements that were made at Oculus Connect 5 2018. Insomniac Games’ Stormland, an action-adventure game which lets you play as a robot, will be launched in 2019. First look at Ready At Dawn’s Lone Echo II, the sequel to Lone Echo I, one of the most critically acclaimed games. Vox Machinae out, the mech simulator game had a surprise launch yesterday for Oculus Rift at the Oculus Connect 5 2018 conference. Fans of giant robots and elaborate cockpits would love this game! Other Oculus platform Announcements Work in ongoing on Avatars. Expressive Avatars with better eye and mouth movements expected later this year. The Oculus mobile app has now added support for Rift. This will enable you to have access to events, friends, and the Oculus store directly from your phone. For more information on Oculus Quest, visit the official Oculus Quest website. What’s new in VR Haptics? Game developers say Virtual Reality is here to stay Why mobile VR sucks

Yesterday, the GNU Daemon Shepherd community announced the release of GNU Shepherd 0.5.0. GNU Shepherd, formerly known as GNU dmd, is a service manager written in Guile and looks after the herd of system services. It provides a replacement for the service-managing capabilities of SysV-init (or any other init) with both a powerful and beautiful dependency-based system and a convenient interface. The GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 contains new features and bug fixes and was bootstrapped with tools including: Autoconf 2.69 Automake 1.16.1 Makeinfo 6.5 Help2man 1.47.6 Changes in GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 Services now have a ‘replacement’ slot In this version, restarting a service will also restart its dependent services When running as PID 1 on GNU/Linux, halt upon ctrl-alt-del Actions can now be invoked on services which are not in the current running state This version supports Guile 3.0 and users need to have Guile version>= 2.0.13 Unused runlevel code has been removed Some of the updated translations in this version include, es, fr, pt_BR, sv To know more about this release in detail, visit GNU official website. GNU nano 3.0 released with faster file reads, new shortcuts and usability improvements Network programming 101 with GAWK (GNU AWK) GNU Octave: data analysis examples  

Unity has announced its collaboration with Deepmind to develop virtual environments for advancing Artificial Intelligence. They will be creating virtual environments for developing and testing experimental algorithms. This announcement is basically a broad agreement between the two companies with not much information disclosed about their actual intentions at this point. Unity is the most widely-used real-time development platform, powering 60% of all AR/VR content and 50% of all mobile games worldwide. With this partnership, they are taking the initial steps toward becoming the general platform for the development of intelligent agents and creating simulation environments. These virtual environments will be used to generate and capture synthetic data for different automotive and industrial verticals. Unity has been exploring Artificial Intelligence for quite some time now. Earlier this month, they released a new version of their ML-Agents toolkit to more easily integrate ML-Agents environments into their training workflows among other things. They also have a TensorFlow based algorithm to allow game developers to easily train intelligent agents for 2D, 3D, and VR/ AR games. These trained agents are then used for controlling the NPC behavior within games. DeepMind is also not new to games. Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, says “Games and simulations have been a core part of DeepMind’s research programme from the very beginning and this approach has already led to significant breakthroughs in AI research.” In 2016, Deepmind’s AlphaGo emerged as the victor in a Go match scoring 4-1 after defeating South Korean Go champion, Lee Sedol. Another one of their programs, AlphaGo Zero perfected its Go and Chess skills simply by playing against itself iteratively. Alongside its work to train AI agents for playing games, DeepMind has also developed AI for spotting over 50 sight-threatening eye diseases and has recently developed Dopamine, a Tensorflow-based framework for Reinforcement Learning. Why DeepMind made Sonnet open source Key Takeaways from the Unity Game Studio Report 2018 Best game engines for Artificial Intelligence game development

There are privacy concerns with Chrome 69, the latest release of the popular browser. The concerns revolve around signing into Chrome and the storage of cookies which have been changed in the new release. What are the privacy concerns with Chrome 69? The Google Chrome 69 update brought a new interface, UI changes and a feature that would automatically sign you into Chrome if you signed into any of Google’s services. This was met with heavy criticism from privacy conscious users. This is not the first time Google has been in question regarding user privacy and the data they collect. Google changed their privacy policy to circumvent GDPR fines in the scale of billions of dollars. Previously, users had an option to signin too Chrome with their Google credentials, but the Chrome 69 update changes it. Signing into any Google service would automatically sign you into Chrome. But Google noted that this would not turn on the sync feature by default. Another concern with Chrome 69 is that on clearing all browsing history and cookies, everything gets cleared excluding Google sites. So, on clearing all browsing history and data, you’re still left with Google cookies and data in your desktop if you’re using Chrome. Source: Google Blog What are people saying? In a blog, John Hopkins professor Matthew Green stated: “Google has transformed the question of consenting to data upload from something affirmative that I actually had to put effort into — entering my Google credentials and signing into Chrome — into something I can now do with a single accidental click. This is a dark pattern.” Christoph Tavan, CTO & Co-Founder of @contentpass tweeted that cookies from Google sites remain in your machine even after clearing all browser data. https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088 John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare CTO tweeted that he won’t be using Chrome anymore: https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1044123160243826688 A comment on reddit reads: “This is actually ok. It's not incredibly invasive, and it just creates a chrome user profile when you sign in. They say that it will solve the confusion of the two separate sign ins.” What does Google have to say about this? Chrome 70 to be released in mid October will rollback this move. In a blog Zach Koch, Chrome Product Manager states: “While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users, we’re adding a control that allows users to turn off linking web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in—that way users have more control over their experience. For users that disable this feature, signing into a Google website will not sign them into Chrome.” ‏Google Chrome engineer Adrienne Porter Felt replied with an explanation as to why automatic sign in was turned on by default in Chrome 69. Porter stated that the intent is to prevent a ‘common’ confusion where the login state of the browser ends up being different from the login state of the content area. The reply from a Google engineer is not sufficient, notes Green. In the Chrome blog post they also addressed the concerns with cookies by stating: “We’re also going to change the way we handle the clearing of auth cookies. In the current version of Chrome, we keep the Google auth cookies to allow you to stay signed in after cookies are cleared. We will change this behavior so that all cookies are deleted and you will be signed out.” Ending thoughts It is concerning that singing into any Google product automatically signs you into Chrome. Moreover, syncing is just an accidental click away, many people wouldn’t want their data to be synced like that. If sync is not turned on by default then why are they signing you in by default in the first place? Makes sense where multiple accounts are in play, but in any case there should be a prompt for signing into Chrome that makes users consciously choose to sign in. The next step might have been auto sync on login, had not the user backlash happened. This design choice has definitely eroded trust and goodwill among many Chrome users, some of whom are now seriously looking for viable alternatives. Google Chrome’s 10th birthday brings in a new Chrome 69 Microsoft Cloud Services get GDPR Enhancements Google’s new Privacy Chief officer proposes a new framework for Security Regulation