Tech News

Yesterday, Vivaldi 2.0 was released with over 1,500 improvements, which includes features like Vivaldi Sync, Resizable Tab Tiling, and Floating Web Panels, among others. Vivaldi is a cross-platform web browser, which provides users many customization options to take control of what and how they browse the web. Sync your data with Vivaldi Sync Vivaldi Sync, as the name suggests, allows you to sync your data across computers using your Vivaldi account. You can choose what you want to sync, including your bookmarks, Speed Dials, saved password, history, extensions, and notes. To activate Vivaldi Sync go to the Settings menu or just click the cloud icon in the browser's status bar. Tab management got better Vivaldi comes with several unique features such as Tab Stacks and Quick Commands, to help you better manage your tabs. Vivaldi 2.0 provides features like Resizable Tab Tiling and a list style view to the Tab Cycler to make tab management a lot easier than before. Resizable Tab Tiling allows you to resize the tiles when viewing tabs in tile view. Also, the adjusted layout remains the same after restarts and loading of saved sessions. This version also comes with a list-style view to the Tab Cycler, which makes viewing and finding the tabs easier. Smarter browsing with Web Panels Web Panels allow you to simultaneously browse your favourite sites alongside the tabs in your main window. In Vivaldi 2.0 they have made checking messaging apps, social feeds, and news sites much easier with the addition of the following: Floating Web Panels: Instead of resizing the main window you can now use the floating web panels over the page. This feature can be activated through Tools | Settings | Panel | Panel Options. Web Panel Suggestions: When adding a new Web Panel you will see suggestions based on the sites that you regularly visit. More built-in tools You get more built-in tools to improve your productivity in the browser: Notes: With Notes you can annotate websites and add a description or screenshots to the notes while surfing the web. Capture: This tool allows you to capture either a full page screenshot or a selection of the screen that you define. Image Properties: You can view all the information you need about an image right in the browser and also copy it to the clipboard. History: It provides you a detailed overview of your browsing habits backed by statistics and makes it easier to find previously visited sites. Effortless navigation You can interact with the browser in various ways and get your job done faster: Keyboard Shortcuts: You can do almost everything you do on a computer in Vivaldi by setting keyboard shortcuts, such as creating windows, tabs, and Notes. Mouse Gestures: Speed up navigation and perform useful actions with quick movements of the mouse. You can also edit existing gestures and add your own to match your browsing style. Searching with assigned nicknames: Using Search Engine Nicknames, you can quickly switch between one search engine to another just by typing the nickname at the front of your search term. Speed Dials: Quickly access your favorite websites from the start page using the Speed Dials feature. You can customize your Speed Dials and folders to organize your content. Improved privacy with DuckDuckGo and Qwant To improve data privacy and protection, the browser is now integrated with DuckDuckGo as their default Private Search. Also, Qwant is added to the list of suggested search engines. To know more about the updates in Vivaldi 2.0 check out their official announcement. Firefox Reality 1.0, a browser for mixed reality, is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream Unity Benchmark report approves WebAssembly load times and performance in popular web browsers Tor Browser 8.0 powered by Firefox 60 ESR released

“I am part of a growing movement in the tech industry advocating for more transparency, oversight and accountability for the systems we build.” - Jack Poulson, former Google Scientist Project Dragonfly is making its rounds on the internet yet again. Jack Poulson, a former Google scientist who quit Google in September 2018, over its plan to build a censored search engine in China, has written a letter to the U.S. senators revealing new details of this project. The letter lists several details of Google's work on the Chinese search engine that had been reported but never officially confirmed by the company. He affirms that some company employees may have "actively subverted" an internal privacy review of the system. Poulson was strictly opposed to the idea of Google supporting China’s censorship on subjects by blacklisting keywords such as human rights, democracy, peaceful protest, and religion in its search engine. In protest to this project more than 1,000 employees had signed an open letter asking the company to be transparent. Many employees, including Poulson, took the drastic step of resigning from the company altogether. Now, in fear of Google’s role in violating human rights in China, Poulson has sent a letter to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The letter stated that there has been "a pattern of unethical and unaccountable decision making from company leadership" at Google. He has requested Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, to respond to concerns raised by 14 leading human rights groups, who said in late August that Dragonfly could result in Google "directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations." The letter highlights a major flaw in the process of developing the Chinese search platform. He says there was "a catastrophic failure of the internal privacy review process, which one of the reviewers characterized as [having been] actively subverted." Citing anonymous sources familiar to the project, the Intercept affirms that the "catastrophic failure" Poulson mentioned, relates to an internal dispute between Google employees- those who work on privacy issues and engineers who developed the censored search system. The privacy reviewers were led to believe that the code used for developing the engine did not involve user data. After The Intercept exposed the project in early August, the privacy reviewers reviewed the code and felt that their colleagues working on Dragonfly had seriously and purposely misled them. The engine did involve user data and was designed to link users’ search queries to their personal phone number, track their internet movements, IP addresses, and information about the devices they use and the links they clicked on. Poulson told the senators that he could "directly verify" that a prototype of Dragonfly would allow a Chinese partner company to "search for a given user’s search queries based on their phone number." The code incorporates an extensive censorship blacklist developed in accordance with the Chinese government. It censors words like the English term "human rights", the Mandarin terms for 'student protest' and 'Nobel prize', and very large numbers of phrases involving 'Xi Jinping' and other members of the CCP. The engine is explicitly coded to ensure only Chinese government-approved air quality data would be returned in response to Chinese users' search. This incident takes us back to August 2018, when in an Open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the US Senator for Florida Marco Rubio led by a bipartisan group of senators, expressed his concerns over the project being  "deeply troubling" and risks making “Google complicit in human rights abuses related to China’s rigorous censorship regime”. If Google does go ahead with this project, other non-democratic nations can follow suit to demand customization of the search engine as per their rules, even if they may violate human rights. Citizens will have to think twice before leaving any internet footprint that could be traced by the government. To gain deeper insights on this news, you can head over to The Intercept. 1k+ Google employees frustrated with continued betrayal, protest against Censored Search engine project for China Skepticism welcomes Germany’s DARPA-like cybersecurity agency – The federal agency tasked with creating cutting-edge defense technology Google’s ‘mistakenly deployed experiment’ covertly activated battery saving mode on multiple phones today  

An ex-employee filed a lawsuit against Facebook, last week, alleging that Facebook is not providing enough protection to the content moderators whose job involve reviewing disturbing content on the platform. Why is Selena Scola, a content moderator, suing Facebook? “Plaintiff Selena Scola seeks to protect herself and all others similarly situated from the dangers of psychological trauma resulting from Facebook's failure to provide a safe workplace for the thousands of contractors who are entrusted to provide the safest environment possible for Facebook users”, reads the lawsuit. Facebook receives millions of videos, images, and broadcast posts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide, and murder. In order to make Facebook a safe platform for users, it relies on machine learning augmented by content moderators. This ensures that any image that violates the corporation’s term of use is removed completely from the platform, as quickly as possible. “Facebook’s content moderators are asked to review more than 10 million potentially rule-breaking posts per week. Facebook aims to do this with an error rate of less than one percent, and seeks to review all user-reported content within 24 hours”, says the lawsuit. Although this safeguard helps with maintaining the safety on the platform, content moderators witness thousands of such extreme content every day. Because of this constant exposure to disturbing graphics, content moderators go through a lot of trauma, with many ending up developing Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), highlights the lawsuit. What does the law say about workplace safety? Facebook claims to have a workplace safety standards draft already in place, like many other tech giants, to protect content moderators. They say it includes providing moderators with mandatory counseling, mental health supports, altering the resolution, and audio, of traumatizing images. It also aimed to train its moderators to recognize the physical and psychological symptoms of PTSD. We have, however, found it difficult to locate the said document. However, as per the lawsuit, “Facebook ignores the workplace safety standards it helped create. Instead, the multibillion-dollar corporation affirmatively requires its content moderators to work under conditions known to cause and exacerbate psychological trauma”. This is against the California law which states, “Every employer shall do every other thing reasonably necessary to protect the life, safety, and health of Employees. This includes establishing, implementing, and maintaining an effective injury prevention program. Employers must provide and use safety devices and safeguards reasonably adequate to render the employment and place of employment safe”. Facebook hires content moderators on a contract basis Tech giants such as Facebook generally have a two-level workforce in place. The top level comprises Facebook’s official employees such as engineers, designers, and managers. These enjoy the majority of benefits such as high salary, and lavish perks among others. Employees such as Content moderators come under the lower level. Majority of these workers are not even permanent employees at Facebook, as they’re employed on a contract basis. Because of this, they often get paid low, miss out on the benefits that regular employees get, as well as have limited access to Facebook management. One of the employees, who wished to remain anonymous told the Guardian last year, “We were underpaid and undervalued”. He earned roughly $15 per hour. This was for removing terrorist related content from Facebook, after a two-week training period. They usually come from a poor financial background, with many having families to support. Taking up a job as opposed to being unemployed seems to be a better option for them. Selena Scola was employed by Pro Unlimited (a contingent labor management company in New York) as a Public Content Contractor from approximately June 19, 2017, until March 1, 2018, at Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park and Mountain View, California. During the entirety of this period, Scola was employed solely by Pro Unlimited, an independent contractor of Facebook. She had never been directly employed by Facebook in any capacity. Scola is also suing Pro Unlimited. “According to the Technology Coalition, if a company contracts with a third-party vendor to perform duties that may bring vendor employees in contact with graphic content, the company should clearly outline procedures to limit unnecessary exposure and should perform an initial audit of a contractor’s wellness procedures for its employees,” says the lawsuit. Scola is not the only one who has complained about the company. Over a hundred conservative Facebook employees formed an online group to protest against the company’s “intolerant” liberal culture, last month. The mass exodus of high profile executives is also indicative of a deeper people and a cultural problem at Facebook. Additionally, Facebook has been in many controversies regarding user’s data, fake news, and hate speech. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had filed a complaint against Facebook last month, for selling ads which discriminate against users on the basis of race, religion, and sexuality. Similarly, Facebook was found guilty of discriminatory advertisements. Apparently, Facebook provided the third-party advertisers with an option to exclude religious minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, and other protected groups from seeing their ads. Given the increasing number of controversial cases against Facebook, it's high time for the company to take the right measures towards solving these issues. The lawsuit is currently Scola v Facebook Inc and Pro Unlimited Inc, filed in Superior Court of the State of California. For more information, read the official lawsuit. How far will Facebook go to fix what it broke: Democracy, Trust, Reality Facebook COO, Sandberg’s Senate testimony: On combating foreign influence, fake news, and upholding election integrity Time for Facebook, Twitter and other social media to take responsibility or face regulation

Connecting two computers over the Internet is difficult. Software needs to negotiate NATs, firewalls, and limited IPv4 addresses. To overcome this issue, the Beaker browser team is releasing a new Kademlia DHT-based toolset for connecting peers called 'Hyperswarm'. Currently the team uses a tracker to get users connected. However, to move towards a more decentralized model, the team has been working on Hyperswarm to improve the reliability of the Dat project connections. What is Hyperswarm? Hyperswarm is a stack of networking modules that finds peers and creates reliable connections. Users join the swarm for a "topic". They periodically query other peers who are part of the topic. To establish a connection between peers, Hyperswarm creates a socket between them using either UTP or TCP. It uses a Kademlia DHT to track peers and arrange connections. The DHT itself includes mechanisms to establish a direct connection between two peers in which one or both are behind firewalls or behind routers that use network address translation (NAT). A few things about Hyperswarm that you should know Iterating on security DHTs have a number of denial-of-service vectors. There are some known mitigations for the same, but they have tradeoffs. The team is thinking through these tradeoffs and will iterate on this over time. Hyperswarm is not anonymous Hyperswarm does not hide users’ IPs. Devices join topics by listing their IP so that other devices can establish connections. The Dat protocol, however, takes steps to hide the topics’ contents. When downloading a dat, the protocol hashes the dat’s key to create the swarm topic. Only those who know the dat’s key can access the dat’s data or create new connections to people in the topic. The members of the topics are public. The deployment strategy The team will be updating the tracker server to make the deployment backward compatible. This will make it possible for old Dat clients to connect using the tracker, while new clients can connect using the DHT. Hyperswarm is MIT licensed open-source and can be found at the following repositories: Network, discovery, dht To know more about this preview release, head over to pfrazee.hasbase.io. Linkerd 2.0 is now generally available with a new service sidecar design Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta released with focus on security, cloud, and automation Android Studio 3.2 releases with Android App Bundle, Energy Profiler, and more!

GraphicsFuzz, the online graphics testing framework quietly went open source on Monday. There is no official announcement as of now and they are still transitioning to being open source. GraphicsFuzz was acquired by Google earlier this August. GraphicsFuzz is a testing framework that automatically finds and simplifies bugs in graphics shader compilers. The tools currently manipulate GLSL shaders but other targets like SPIR-V, HLSL and Metal can also be tested directly. Google acquired GraphicsFuzz mainly for its mobile graphics card benchmarking GraphicsFuzz finds bugs in the graphics drivers of a device by rendering families of semantically similar shaders. It looks out for discrepancies in rendering and similarities, a process known as metamorphic testing. A total of 15 tests are run and for each bug the reducer saves a lot of debugging time. It this by producing a simpler minimal-difference test case that is still able to expose the bug. The testing process on an Android phone takes a couple of minutes and for some shades it asks the user if the two rendered images are similar. The GitHub repository is under an Apache 2.0 license and there is not Commons Clause attached right now. Note that the repository is a work-in-progress and not an officially supported Google product yet. You can check out the GitHub repository. Google buys GraphicsFuzz, bringing fuzzy logic and metamorphic testing to Android graphics drivers Google’s second innings in China: Exploring cloud partnerships with Tencent and others All new Android apps on Google Play must target API Level 26 (Android Oreo) or higher, to publish

Yesterday, Twitter announced a new policy, which aims to address the issue of using dehumanizing speech by its users. The members of Twitter Trust and Safety Council, Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey, stated in the announcement that this is an ongoing effort towards encouraging healthy public conversation. What is Twitter’s dehumanization policy? This new clause is an extension of their hateful conduct policy and we will see it soon added to the Twitter Rules book: "You may not dehumanize anyone based on membership in an identifiable group, as this speech can lead to offline harm." The biggest change when the new policy is implemented will be that it will also include non-targeted content. Unlike the hateful conduct policy, which considers a violation of policy if direct attacks or threats are made against an individual, this policy will also consider targeting ‘X group’ as a violation. What exactly is dehumanizing speech? If you are wondering what ‘dehumanizing’ means, it is making someone feel less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. Usage of such language can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. The announcement also gives a good definition of dehumanizing language: "Language that treats others as less than human. Dehumanization can occur when others are denied of human qualities (animalistic dehumanization) or when others are denied of human nature (mechanistic dehumanization). Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to their genitalia (mechanistic)." The classic example of dehumanizing language is using terms like “animals” and “vermin” for people. Referring to people as “illegals” is also dehumanizing. They are currently seeking feedback from users through a survey to get global perspectives and know how this policy may impact different communities and cultures. If rightly implemented, this can prove to be a good initiative towards mitigating the problem of hate and dangerous speech. Check out the official announcement by Twitter to get a better idea of the dehumanization policy. How Twitter is defending against the Silhouette attack that discovers user identity The much loved reverse chronological Twitter timeline is back as Twitter attempts to break the ‘filter bubble’ Building a Twitter news bot using Twitter API [Tutorial]

Fedora 29 Beta was made available yesterday. It is the next big step towards a stable release of the Linux distribution. The stable version will be available late October. This beta brings features like modularity for all, support for GNOME 3.30 and some other changes. Modularity Modular repositories were introduced in Fedora 28 for the Fedora Server Edition. In Fedora 29 beta, modularity is available in all the editions, spins and labs. Modularity makes multiple versions of important packages available in parallel. It will work with the familiar Dandified YUM (DNF) package. With modularity, users can update their OS to the latest version while maintaining the required version of an application for proper functionality. GNOME 3.30 Fedora 29 Workstation Beta comes with the latest version of GNOME. GNOME 3.30 streamlines performance and adds a new application for Podcasts. It also automatically updates Flatpaks in Software Center. Other changes There are also many other updates included in the Fedora 29. Fedora Atomic Workstation is now rebranded as Fedora Silverblue. The GRUB menu will be hidden where only a single OS is installed as it does not provide any useful functionality in those cases. The latest version of Fedora also brings updates to many popular packages including MySQL, GNU C Library, Python, and Perl. Some architecture changes include dropping as an alternative architecture, initial support for field programming gate array (FPGAs), and packages are now built with SSE2 support. Many projects including Eclipse have dropped support for the big endian ppc64 architecture. So now Fedora will have to discontinue producing any ppc64 content. Fedora Scientific will now be shipped as vagrant boxes which were previously delivered as ISO files. Vagrant boxes will give potential users a friendlier option to try Fedora Scientific while keeping the current operating system. For a full list of changes, visit the Fedora website. GIMP gets $100K of the $400K donation made to GNOME GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more Linus Torvalds is sorry for his ‘hurtful behavior’, is taking ‘a break (from the Linux community) to get help’

After the first release candidate last month, Java 11 is now generally available. The GA version is the first release with long-term support (LTS). Some of the new features include nest-based access control, a new garbage collector, support for Unicode 11 and TLS 1.3. New features in Java 11 Some of the new features in Java 11 include nest-based access control, dynamic class-file constants, a no-op garbage collector called Epsilon and more. Let’s look at these features in detail. Nest-based access control ‘Nests’ are introduced as an access control context that aligns with the existing nested types in Java. Classes that are logically part of the same code but are compiled to distinct files can access private members with nests. It eliminates the need for compilers to insert bridge methods. Two members in a nest are described as ‘nestmates’. Nests do not apply to large scales of access control like modules. Dynamic class-file constants The existing Java class-file format is extended to support a new constant-pool form called CONSTANT_Dynamic. Loading this new form will delegate its creation to a bootstrap method in the same way linking an invokedynamic call site delegates linkage to a bootstrap method. The aim is to reduce the cost and disruption of creating new forms of materializable class-file constants giving broader options to language designers and compiler implementors. Epsilon, a no-op garbage collector Epsilon is a new experimental garbage collector in Java 11 that handles memory allocation but does not actually reclaim any memory. It works by implementing linear allocation in a single contiguous chunk memory. The JVM will shut down when the available Java heap is exhausted. Added support for Unicode 11 Java 11 brings Unicode 11 support to existing platform APIs. The following Java classes are mainly supported with Unicode 10: In the java.lang package: Character and String In the java.awt.font package: NumericShaper In the java.text package: Bidi, BreakIterator, and Normalizer This upgrade includes Unicode 9 changes and adds a total of 16,018 characters and ten new scripts. Flight recorder The flight recorder in Java 11 is a data collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM. It has a low overhead. TLS  1.3 TLS 1.3 was recently standardized and is the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. TLS 1.3 is not directly compatible with the previous versions. The goal here is not to support every feature of TLS 1.3. Features deprecated Some of the features are also removed from Java 11. Applications depending on Java EE and COBRA modules need to explicitly call these modules. The Nashorn JavaScript Engine, Pack200 Tools and API have all been deprecated. For a complete list of features and deprecations, visit the JDK website. Oracle releases open source and commercial licenses for Java 11 and later JEP 325: Revamped switch statements that can also be expressions proposed for Java 12 No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019

Apple announced that it has finished acquiring Shazam, a widely popular and highly rated music app, earlier this week. Shazam is a music discovery app which currently has more than 100 million monthly active users and has been downloaded over 1 billion times around the world. It allows users to discover and identify songs with just a few clicks. “Apple and Shazam have a long history together. Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and it has become a favorite app for music fans everywhere,” mentioned Oliver Schusser, Vice President, Apple Music, in the press release. The price of this acquisition hasn’t been specified anywhere, but as per Recode, it is estimated to be around $400 million. The news of this acquisition comes three weeks after the EU regulators gave a go-ahead signal to Apple. When Apple mentioned about its plans to buy Shazam for $400 million back in December 2017, EU regulators started an investigation into this acquisition. This was over the concern that Apple’s acquisition of Shazam would potentially give Apple an unfair advantage over its rivals such as Spotify. “At this stage, the Commission is concerned that, following the takeover of Shazam, Apple would obtain access to commercially sensitive data about customers of its competitors. Access to such data could allow Apple to directly target its competitors' customers and encourage them to switch to Apple Music. As a result, the competing music streaming services could be put at a competitive disadvantage”, reads the EU  press release. Users all around the world identify songs using the Shazam app over 20 million times every day. Additionally, it helps people share video, audio or printed content across different devices and mediums. It also helps music fans follow their favorite artists. Whether Apple has plans of integrating the Shazam app with Apple music or not requires another official announcement. For now, Apple aims to make Shazam ad-free. This will ensure that users are able to enjoy music, without any form of interruption. “With a shared love of music and innovation, we are thrilled to bring our teams together to provide users even more great ways to discover, experience and enjoy music”, mentions Schusser. For more information, check out Apple’s official announcement. Apple stocks soar just shy of $1 Trillion market cap as revenue hits $53.3 Billion in Q3 earnings 2018 Apple releases iOS 12 beta 2 with screen time and battery usage updates among others Apple announces a Special Event to reportedly launch new products including “iPhone XS” and OS updates

Google's Stories is exploring ways to bring more immersive visual content with ‘stories’. They will start curating stories using artificial intelligence algorithms to construct AMP stories and surface them in Search. They will provide a glimpse of facts and important moments of notable people in a rich and visual format. The format will help you to easily tap to gather more information and discover unique content from the web. What are Stories and why they matter? Snapchat was the first major vendor who created the photo and video montages to create a tool called Stories in October 2013. People liked the idea of getting a quick gist of all the day-to-day references which led to its increased popularity. Facebook further popularized it after copying the feature into all of its major popular apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. It have become the latest social media marketing tool which is extensively used for personal use and by businesses/startups. Its extensive use on various social media channels has left many confused for good reason. A key question of everyone’s mind is: Is it worth putting in the time and effort to create something that will just disappear in the next 24 hours? Google plays catch up with SnapChat and Instagram Google is now in the race pushing themselves deeper into Stories. Since February, they have already allowed some publishers to create AMP visual storytelling for delivering news and latest updates using tap-through stories. The Google team will start using artificial intelligence techniques to create stories that will appear in Google searches and image results. According to the company’s blog post, they will create them first around well-renowned people--like celebrities, and athletes. Later scaling and expanding it to other categories. Google's stories will be curated using artificial intelligence techniques, but will still require human moderators to review them to ensure there aren’t any severe mistakes or issues. They will be doubling their efforts to bring Stories into the search engine. More updates and announcements will be made in the next few months, said Cathy Edwards, Google’s head of engineering for image search. What's next for Stories? Google’s big step and positive confidence in the Stories tool is yet another signal that this new format is here to stay. With all major vendors adopting the tool within their channels, it will be interesting to see what new techniques and features will be added to this format. Stories no-doubt has become incredibly popular on Snapchat and Facebook-owned apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. If we look at the current usage, more than 400 million people use Instagram stories and 450 million use WhatsApp’s version of stories daily. We will start seeing more companies start advertising in Stories in order to turn all the user interest into actual revenue. If we look at the current scenario, they are more popular with users than advertisers. The key reason for it is because most of the ads are vertical video ads which are relatively a new format and takes a considerable amount of time for companies to create them. We can expect Google to start putting ads in the stories at some point down the line. Read more Facebook’s AI algorithm finds 20 Myanmar Military Officials guilty of spreading hate and misinformation, leads to their ban Apple bans Facebook’s VPN app from the App Store for violating its data collection rules Snapchat is losing users – but revenue is up

Written in C90, Wasmjit is a small embeddable WebAssembly runtime. It is portable to most environments but it primarily targets a Linux kernel module that can host Emscripten-generated WebAssembly modules. What are the benefits of Wasmjit? Improved performance: Using Wasmjit you will be able to run WebAssembly modules in kernel-space (ring 0). This will provide access to system calls as normal function calls, which eliminates the user-kernel transition overhead. This also avoids the scheduling overheads from swapping page tables. This provides a boost in performance for syscall-bound programs like web servers or FUSE file systems. No need to run an entire browser: It also comes with a host environment for running in user-space on POSIX systems. This will allow running WebAssembly modules without having to run an entire browser. What tools do you need to get started? The following are the tools you require to get started with Wasmjit: A standard POSIX C development environment with cc and make Emscripten SDK Optionally, you can install kernel headers on Linux, the linux-headers-amd64 package on Debian, kernel-devel on Fedora What’s in the future? Wasmjit currently supports x86_64 and can run a subset of Emscripten-generated WebAssembly on Linux, macOS, and within the Linux kernel as a kernel module. In coming releases we will see more implementations and improvements along the following lines: Enough Emscripten host-bindings to run nginx.wasm Introduction of an interpreter Rust-runtime for Rust-generated wasm files Go-runtime for Go-generated wasm files Optimized x86_64 JIT arm64 JIT macOS kernel module What to consider when using this runtime? Wasmjit uses vmalloc(), a function for allocating a contiguous memory region in the virtual address space, for code and data section allocations. This prevents those pages from ever being swapped to disk resulting in indiscriminate access to the /dev/wasm device. This can make a system vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. To mitigate this risk, in future, a system-wide limit on the amount of memory used by the /dev/wasm device will be provided. To get started with Wasmjit, check out its GitHub repository. Why is everyone going crazy over WebAssembly? Unity Benchmark report approves WebAssembly load times and performance in popular web browsers Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates

Yesterday, MissingLink.ai launched as a platform with a purpose to accelerate deep learning progress. Machine learning has shown immense promise across many use cases, from helping to diagnose diseases to powering autonomous vehicles, for a long time, but the actual process of delivering business outcomes currently takes too long and it is too expensive. MissingLink.ai was born out of a desire to fix that, say the MissingLink team. It enables data scientists to spend less time on the grunt work by automating and streamlining the entire deep learning cycle, including data, code, experiments, and resources. It automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks, shortening model training times, and accelerating learning cycles. This way data scientists can get more time to apply the actionable insights the data provides. Here are it’s top features: The system uses version-aware data management eliminating the need to copy files and only syncs changes to data. It offers real-time monitoring and tracking of experiments via visual dashboards. It also automatically tracks data, experiments, and code, so engineers can easily reproduce any experiment at any time. Users can run experiments on a training machine without the need to copy or move data. Once the data is integrated, MissingLink can manage it on a machine on premise. MissingLink.ai allows teams to manage both local and public cloud resources as a single environment, allowing them to grow and shrink compute resources elastically as needed. MissingLink.ai provides data management at scale, allowing companies to keep their data onsite and adjust experiment usage as needs change. MissingLink comes with support for popular frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, Caffe, and Keras. Aidoc is a AI-powered healthcare company which uses deep learning for medical imaging. With MissingLink, they’ve been able to help radiologists prioritize life-threatening cases and expedite patient care. Another MissingLink customer, Nanit, has developed a smart baby camera that uses deep learning and computer vision to monitor children. For more information, visit the MissingLink website. You may also read the blog from founder Yosi Taguri if you’d like to learn more. Facebook’s Glow, a machine learning compiler, to be supported by Intel, Qualcomm and others. Baidu releases EZDL – a platform that lets you build AI and machine learning models without any coding knowledge. Hortonworks Data Platform 3.0 is now generally available

Microsoft Ignite 2018 got started yesterday on the 24th of September 2018 in, Orlando, Florida. The event will run until the 28th of September 2018 and will host more than 26,000 Microsoft developers from more than 100 countries. Day 1 of Microsoft Ignite was full of exciting news and announcements including Microsoft Authenticator, AI-enabled updates to Microsoft 365, and much more! Let’s take a look at some of the most important announcements from Orlando. Microsoft puts an end to passwords via its Microsoft Authenticator app Microsoft security helps protect hundreds of thousands of line-of-business and SaaS apps as they connect to Azure AD. They plan to deliver new support for password-less sign-in to Azure AD-connected apps via Microsoft Authenticator. The Microsoft Authenticator app replaces your password with a more secure multi-factor sign-in that combines your phone and your fingerprint, face, or PIN. Using a multi-factor sign-in method, users can reduce compromise by 99.9%. Not only is it more secure, but it also improves user experience by eliminating passwords. The age of the password might be reaching its end thanks to Microsoft. Azure IoT Central is now generally available Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure IoT Central in December 2017. At Ignite yesterday, Azure made its IoT Central generally available. Azure IoT Central is a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, which enables customers and partners to provision an IoT solution in seconds. Users can customize it in just a few hours, and go to production the same day—all without requiring any cloud solution development expertise. Azure IoT Central is built on the hyperscale and enterprise-grade services provided by Azure IoT. In theory, it should match the security and scalability needs of Azure users. Microsoft has also collaborated with MultiTech, a leading provider of communications hardware for the Internet of Things, to integrate IoT Central functionality into the MultiConnect Conduit programmable gateway. This integration enables out-of-the-box connectivity from Modbus-connected equipment directly into IoT Central for unparalleled simplicity from proof of concept through wide-scale deployments. To know more about Azure IoT central, visit its blog. Microsoft Azure introduces Azure Digital Twins, the next evolution in IoT Azure Digital Twins allows customers and partners to create a comprehensive digital model of any physical environment, including people, places, and things, as well as the relationships and processes that bind them. Azure Digital Twins uses Azure IoT Hub to connect the IoT devices and sensors that keep the digital model up to date with the physical world. This will enable two powerful capabilities: Users can respond to changes in the digital model in an event-driven and serverless way to implement business logic and workflows for the physical environment. For instance, in a conference room when a presentation is started in PowerPoint, the environment could automatically dim the lights and lower the blinds. After the meeting, when everyone has left, the lights are turned off and the air conditioning is lowered. Azure Digital Twins also integrates seamlessly with Azure data and analytics services, enabling users to track the past and predict the future of their digital model. Azure Digital Twins will be available for preview on October 15 with additional capabilities. To know more, visit its webpage. Azure Sphere, a solution for creating highly secure MCU devices In order to help organizations seize connected device opportunities while meeting the challenge of IoT risks, Microsoft developed Azure Sphere, a solution for creating highly secure MCU devices. At Ignite 2018, Microsoft announced that Azure Sphere development kits are universally available and that the Azure Sphere OS, Azure Sphere Security Service, and Visual Studio development tools have entered public preview. Together, these tools provide everything needed to start prototyping new products and experiences with Azure Sphere. Azure Sphere allows manufacturers to build highly secure, internet-enabled MCU devices that stay protected even in an evolving threat landscape. Azure Sphere’s unique mix of three components works in unison to reduce risk, no matter how the threats facing organizations change: The Azure Sphere MCU includes built-in hardware-based security. The purpose-built Azure Sphere OS adds a four-layer defense, in-depth software environment. The Azure Sphere Security Service renews security to protect against new and emerging threats. Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP announced the Open Data Initiative At the Ignite conference, the CEOs of Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP introduced an Open Data Initiative to help companies connect, understand and use all their data to create amazing experiences for their customers with AI. Together, the three long-standing partners are reimagining customer experience management (CXM) by empowering companies to derive more value from their data and deliver world-class customer experiences in real-time. The Open Data Initiative is based on three guiding principles: Every organization owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data. Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioral and operational data. A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open and extensible data model to extend the solution. Microsoft now lets businesses rent a virtual Windows 10 desktop in Azure Until now, virtual Windows 10 desktops were the domain of third-party service providers. However, from now on, Microsoft itself will offer these desktops. The company argues that this is the first time users will get a multiuser virtualized Windows 10 desktop in the cloud. Most of the employees don’t necessarily always work from the same desktop or laptop. This virtualized solution will allow organizations to offer them a full Windows 10 desktop in the cloud, with all the Office apps they know, without the cost of having to provision and manage a physical machine. A universal search feature across Bing and Office.com Microsoft announced that it is rolling out a universal search feature across Bing and Office.com. The Search feature will be later supported in Edge, Windows, and Office. The Search feature will be able to index internal documents to make it easier to find files. Search is going to be moved to a prominent and consistent place across the apps that are used every day whether it is Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, etc.  Also, personalized results will appear in the search box so that users can see documents that they worked on recently. Here’s a small video to know more about the universal search feature. https://youtu.be/mtjJdltMoWU New AutoML capabilities in Azure Machine Learning service Microsoft also announced new capabilities for its Azure Machine Learning service, a technology that allows anyone to build and train machine learning models to make predictions from data. These models can then be deployed anywhere – in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge.  At the center of the update is automated machine learning, an AI capability that automatically selects, tests and tweaks machine learning models that power many of today’s AI systems. The capability is aimed at making AI development more accessible to a broader set of customers. Preview announcement of SQL Server 2019 Microsoft announced the first public preview of SQL Server 2019 at Ignite 2018. This new release of SQL Server, businesses will be able to manage their relational and non-relational data workloads in a single database management system. Few expectations at the SQL Server 2019 include: Microsoft SQL Server 2019 will run either on-premise or on the Microsoft Azure stack Microsoft announced the Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, which will allow businesses to port their database to the cloud without any code changes Microsoft announced new database connectors that will allow organizations to integrate SQL Server with other databases such as Oracle, Cosmos DB, MongoDB, and Teradata To know more about SQL Server 2019, read, ‘Microsoft announces the first public preview of SQL Server 2019 at Ignite 2018’ Microsoft Ignite 2018: New Azure announcements you need to know Azure Functions 2.0 launches with better workload support for serverless Microsoft, Adobe and SAP announce Open Data Initiative, a joint vision to reimagine customer experience, at Ignite 2018  

California likes to be leading the way when it comes to digital regulation. Just a few weeks ago it passed legislation that looks like it could restore net neutrality. Now, a bill designed to tighten IoT security, is with the governor awaiting signature for it to be carried into California state law. The bill, SB-327 Information privacy: connected devices, was initially introduced in February 2017 by Senator Jackson. It was the first legislation of its kind in the US. Approved at the end of August, it will come into effect at the start of 2020 once signed by Governor Jerry Brown. Read next: IoT Forensics: Security in an always connected world where things talk What California’s IoT bill states The new IoT security bill covers another of important areas. For example, for manufacturers, IoT devices will need to contain certain safety and security features: Security should be appropriate to the nature and function of the device. The feature should be appropriate to the information an IoT may collect, contain, or transmit. It should be designed to protect the device and information within it from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure. If an IoT device is requires authentication over the internet, further conditions need to be met, such as: The preset password must be unique to each device that is manufactured. The device must ask the user to generate a new authentication method before being able to use it for the first time. It’s worth noting that the points mentioned above for IoT security are not applicable to IoT devices that are subject to security requirements under federal law. Also a covered entity like a health care provider, business associate, contractor, or employer subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) or the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act is exempt from the title points mentioned. The IoT is a network of several of devices that connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. They are not openly visible as most of them are used in a local network but often do not have many security measures. The bill doesn't have any exact definitions for a ‘reasonable security feature’ but provides a few guiding points in interest a user’s security. The legislation states: “This bill, beginning on January 1, 2020, would require a manufacturer of a connected device, as those terms are defined, to equip the device with a reasonable security feature or features that are appropriate to the nature and function of the device, appropriate to the information it may collect, contain, or transmit, and designed to protect the device and any information contained therein from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure, as specified.” Criticisms of the IoT bill Some cybersecurity experts have criticised the legislation. For example, Robert Graham writes on his Security Errarta blog that the bill is “based on a superficial understanding of cybersecurity/hacking that will do little improve security, while doing a lot to impose costs and harm innovation.” He explains that “the point [of good cybersecurity practice] is not to add ‘security features’ but to remove ‘insecure features’.” Graham’s criticisms underline that while the legislation might be well-intentioned, whether it will be impactful remains another matter. This is, at the very least, a step in the right direction by a state that is keen to take digital security and freedom into its own hands. You can read the bill at the California Legislative information website. How Blockchain can level up IoT Security Defending your business from the next wave of cyberwar: IoT Threats

Yesterday at the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP came together to announce the Open Data Initiative. This initiative aims to help companies to better govern their data and support privacy and security initiatives. What is the Open Data Initiative? Open Data Initiative is an open alliance that aims to eliminate silos and enables a seamless flow of customer data. For this initiative, the trios (Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP) are enhancing interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms through a single data model. These applications and platforms include Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA. How this initiative will help companies? This initiative will help other companies in the following ways: Companies will be able to build and adopt intelligent applications that will understand data, relationships, and metadata spanning multiple services from Adobe, SAP, Microsoft and their partners It will help companies to use the information trapped in internal and external silos to extract more value from its own data in real time to better serve customers Based on their preference or needs, companies will be able to move transactional, operational, customer or IoT data to and from the common data lake Enable companies to create data-powered digital feedback loops for greater business impact Top retail companies are showing support and excitement for the Open Data Initiative. Barry Simpson, chief information officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said: “This initiative from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP is an important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System. Our digital growth plans centered around our customers are fueled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.” To know more about the Open Data Initiative, check out the press release on Microsoft’s official website. Microsoft announces the first public preview of SQL Server 2019 at Ignite 2018 SAP creates AI ethics guidelines and forms an advisory panel Adobe set to acquire Marketo putting Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing