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Apple announced yesterday that they will be conducting an event named, Apple Special Event, on September 12, 2018. It will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater. You can also watch the live-streaming of the event on its official website. Source: Apple What can we expect? In Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held in June this year, it announced upgraded operating systems for iPhone and iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Currently, the beta versions of iOS 12, macOS Mojave, watchOS 5, tvOS 12 is available through Apple Developer Program. The Apple Developer Program allows developers to try out beta versions of Apple software for a few months before it is released in public. Speculations are Apple might share the final release dates of the operating systems at this event. Based on the keynote, following are some of the new features that we can expect in the new OS releases: iOS 12 An all-round faster and more responsive experience. Can FaceTime 32 people at once. A new kind of Animoji, called Memoji is introduced, to match your personality and mood. ARKit 2 enables you to share AR objects through messages and mail and view them in the real world. Screen Time will give you insight into how you use your devices. Read also: Apple releases iOS 12 beta 2 with screen time and battery usage updates among others macOS Mojave Comes with a Dark Mode that will help you focus on your work. The Stacks feature automatically organizes your files into related sets. Finder will help you locate a file by how it looks. Metadata provides you the key details of any file. Continuity camera helps you shoot a nearby object or scan a document and have it automatically appear on your Mac. Read also: macOS Mojave: Updates to the Mac experience for 2018 watchOS 5 Activity Competitions allows you to challenge a friend for a seven-day competition. Workout Updates senses when you are moving and alerts you to start the Workout app. Advanced running features are added like Pace alerts, Rolling pace, and Cadence. With Apple Podcasts you can stay connected to the stories, personalities and news you love. Using Walkie-Talkie you can have one-on-one conversation with anyone who has compatible iWatch. tvOS 12 Added support for Dolby Atmos audio. Compatible movie purchases upgraded for free in iTunes. Zero sign-on feature to simplify the cable authentication process. New aerial screensavers created in partnership with the International Space Station have been added. Siri integration will allow users to search for specific content via voice for quicker content access. With many rumours around, it is expected that Apple might introduce a new iPhone named, iPhone XS in 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch variants. It is also speculated that a new Apple Watch Series 4 will be unveiled with its design focused mainly on increasing the screen size. The new watch may also have solid state buttons and improved heart rate detection. We also expect to see two iPad Pro upgrades with Face ID and no Home button. To know more on this Special Event, check out their official website and also follow the regular updates by 9TO5Mac. Could Apple’s latest acquisition yesterday of an AR lens maker signal its big plans for its secret car? Apple bans Facebook’s VPN app from the App Store for violating its data collection rules 16 year old hacked into Apple’s servers, accessed ‘extremely secure’ customer accounts for over a year undetected

It was only two days ago when Jamie Kyle, a Lerna Developer decided to modify the Lerna’s license to ban companies who are the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ) contractors from using the software. This decision has now been reverted by the Lerna Core team and Kyle has been removed from the development project. Now, any organization who wishes to use the Lerna software is free to use it. Kyle stated, on Wednesday, over Github how he has been deeply disturbed by ICE’s behavior with American immigrants and the companies who have collaborated with ICE “don’t have any licensing rights” and “any use of Lerna will be considered theft”. Daniel Stockman, a core Lerna contributor, removed Kyle from the project, yesterday morning and pointed out that the license change was a “rash decision” that was “unenforceable”. He also added that there were “several past violations of [Lerna’s] code of conduct” as there were instances when Kyle’s behavior was rude and impolite. As reported to Motherboard, Kyle thinks his removal from the team is a result of Stockman’s discussion of the issue with Microsoft employees. But, Stockman denied the characterization to Motherboard. “I think developers can be activists if they so choose, and I support tools and licenses designed to make this easier,” said Stockman. He also added that because he is willing to revoke the relicensing doesn’t mean that he is an ICE supporter, and described ICE as “monstrous” and “must be abolished”. Public opinion about Lerna’s current decision is varied: https://twitter.com/alicegoldfuss/status/1035214998375559173 https://twitter.com/xander76/status/1034842377775529984 https://twitter.com/chriseppstein/status/1034863523493339136 https://twitter.com/benwiley4000/status/1035031630333796352 https://twitter.com/siziyman/status/1035051041111326720 “Open source, even in a project where there is only one active contributor, is never just about one individual. Even acquiescence from multiple core contributors is not sufficient to justify a change like this,” says Stockman. For more coverage on the news, check out the post by Motherboard. Skepticism welcomes Germany’s DARPA-like cybersecurity agency – The federal agency tasked with creating cutting-edge defense technology Amazon calls Senator Sanders’ claims about ‘poor working conditions’ as “inaccurate and misleading” Google slams Trump’s accusations, asserts its search engine algorithms do not favor any political ideology  

Google and Mastercard have apparently signed a deal that was kept as a secret from most of the two billion Mastercard holders. The deal allows Google to track users’ offline buying habits. The search engine giant has been stalking offline purchases made in stores through Mastercard purchase histories and correlating them with online ad interactions. Both companies haven’t released an official statement about the partnership to the public about the arrangement. In May 2017, Google announced a service called “Store Sales Measurement”, which recorded about 70 percent of US credit and debit card transactions through third-party partnerships.  Selected Google advertisers had access to this new tool, which tracked whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. As reported by Bloomberg, an anonymous source familiar to the deal stated that Mastercard also provided Google with customers’ transaction data thus contributing to the 70% share. It’s highly probable that other credit card companies, also contribute the data of their customer transactions Advertisers spend lavishly on Google to gain valuable insights into the link between digital ads, a website visit or an online purchase. This supports the speculations that the deal is profitable for Google. How do they track how you shop? A customer logs into his/her Google account on the web and clicks on any Google ad.  They may often browse a certain item without purchasing it right away. Within 30 days, if he/she uses their MasterCard to buy the same item in a physical store, Google will send the advertiser a report about the product and the effectiveness of its ads, along with a section for “offline revenue” letting the advertiser know the retail sales. All of this raises the question on how much does Google actually know about your personal details? Both Google and Mastercard have clarified to The Verge that the data is anonymized in order to protect personally identifiable information. However, Google declined to confirm the deal with Mastercard. A Google spokesperson released a statement  to MailOnline saying: "Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information. We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners. Google users can opt-out with their Web and App Activity controls, at any time.” This new controversy closely follows the heels of an earlier debacle last week when it was discovered that Google is providing advertisers with location history data collated from Google Maps and other more granular data points collected by its Android operating system. But this data never helped in understanding whether a customer actually purchased a product. Toggling off "Web and App Activity"  (enabled by default) will help in turning this feature off. The category also controls whether Google can pinpoint your exact GPS coordinates through Maps data and browser searches and whether it can crosscheck a customer's offline purchases with their online ad-related activity. Read more in-depth coverage on this news first reported at Bloomberg. Google slams Trump’s accusations, asserts its search engine algorithms do not favor any political ideology Google’s Protect your Election program: Security policies to defend against state-sponsored phishing attacks, and influence campaigns Google Titan Security key with secure FIDO two factor authentication is now available for purchase  

As per the Market Watch reports yesterday, Amazon shares surged past the $2000 milestone for the first time. 31 out of 47 analysts surveyed their price target to be above the level projecting the e-commerce giant’s market capitalization to be $1 trillion if the Amazon stock rises to at least $2,050.27. The stock AMZN, +0.03% ran up to an all time intraday high of $2,025.57 as much as 1.4%  earlier in the session, slightly to be up 0.3% in an afternoon trade. Amazon would become the second company after Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.21% to top $1 trillion in market cap if the stock rises to at least $2,050.27. Apple became the first-ever $1 trillion U.S. company on Aug 2 this year. Source: Market Watch In a research note by Analyst Greg Melich at MoffettNathanson, Melich highlights the potential growth for the Amazon’s Cloud business. He mentioned that despite the growing competition from other technology-sector heavyweights like Microsoft Corp and Google’s Alphabet Inc, AWS will gain market share and expand profitability. Melich says, “We are often asked, is Amazon a retailer, a tech company, or a budding media juggernaut? The answer is all of the above. Amazon’s retail business remains $1,200 of value in the sum-of-the-parts valuation of the stock price, while AWS accounts for about $900.” Read the full coverage on the Market Watch blog. Amazon calls Senator Sanders’ claims about ‘poor working conditions’ as “inaccurate and misleading” Amazon may be planning to move from Oracle by 2020 Amazon Echo vs Google Home: Next-gen IoT war

Yesterday, Microsoft announced NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) support on its Azure platform. Following this, data scientists, researchers, and developers can build, test, and deploy GPU computing projects on Azure. With this availability, users can run containers from NGC with Azure giving them access to on-demand GPU computing that can scale as per their requirement. This eventually eliminates the complexity of software integration and testing. The need for NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) It is challenging and time-consuming to build and test reliable software stacks to run popular deep learning software such as TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, PyTorch, and NVIDIA TensorRT. This is due to the operating level and updated framework dependencies. Finding, installing, and testing the correct dependency is quite a hassle as it is supposed to be done in a multi-tenant environment and across many systems. NGC eliminates these complexities by offering pre-configured containers with GPU-accelerated software. Users can now access 35 GPU-accelerated containers for deep learning software, high-performance computing applications, high-performance visualization tools and much more enabled to run on the following Microsoft Azure instance types with NVIDIA GPUs: NCv3 (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs) NCv2 (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs) ND (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs) According to NVIDIA, these same NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) containers can also work across Azure instance types along with different types or quantities of GPUs. Using NGC containers with Azure is quite easy. Users just have to sign up for a free NGC account before starting, then visit Microsoft Azure Marketplace to find the pre-configured NVIDIA GPU Cloud Image for Deep Learning and high-performance computing. Once you launch the NVIDIA GPU instance on Azure, you can pull the containers you want from the NGC registry into your running instance. You can find detailed steps to setting up NGC in the Using NGC with Microsoft Azure documentation. Microsoft Azure’s new governance DApp: An enterprise blockchain without mining NVIDIA leads the AI hardware race. But which of its GPUs should you use for deep learning? NVIDIA announces pre-orders for the Jetson Xavier Developer Kit, an AI chip for autonomous machines, at $2,499  

Microsoft declared in a new policy on Thursday, that its suppliers and contractors will have to provide no less than 12 weeks of paid leave to new parents, for either a birth or an adoption. The tech giant mandated a pay of up to $1,000 per week for those on paternity leave, and has offered vendors 12 months to implement the change if they want to continue to work with them. This applies to vendors with more than 50 employees and covers workers involved in substantial projects for Microsoft. The decision was spurred by a new parental leave legislation that will take effect in Washington in 2020. “While the law will benefit the employees of our suppliers in Washington State, it will leave thousands of valued contributors outside of Washington behind,” Ms. Dev Stahlkopf, Microsoft’s general counsel said, adding that Microsoft’s new policy will affect thousands of workers outside of Washington. “We understand this may increase our costs, and we think that’s well worth the price,” she opined. Currently, Microsoft provides its own employees 12 weeks of fully paid leave for new parents, and an additional eight weeks for birth mothers. With this mandate, it is inching toward providing similar benefits to a workforce that isn’t directly employed under them. “Studies show that paid parental leave enriches the lives of families,” Stahlkopf said, adding that women who take paid maternity leave are more likely to be in the workforce a year later and earn more than mothers who do not receive paid time off. At present, a meagre 13% of private sector workers in the United States have access to paid parental leave, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reveals. Some experts affirm that measures like these reinstate the importance of parental benefits, but contend that a concrete federal policy be established to improve work-life balance of employees. “That’s the only way we’re going to see large margins of low- and middle-income Americans get access to paid leave,” said Adrienne Schweer, a representative of the Paid Family Leave Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. based think tank. For more details visit the Microsoft Blog. Microsoft announces Project Athens and GopherSource for the Go community at GopherCon Lerna relicenses to ban major tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir from using its software as a protest against ICE How Microsoft 365 is now using artificial intelligence to smartly enrich your content in OneDrive and SharePoint

On Wednesday, the German government announced the creation of a new federal agency to develop cutting-edge cyber defense technology. The agency would resemble the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and would be managed by the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the interior. Germany has always had background of rising numbers of cyber attacks. German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen affirms that the agency would encourage Germany’s investment in new technologies and in the protection of critical digital infrastructure. The agency will also be partnering with other EU countries on agency projects. The agency akin to DARPA will make Germany more independent in its fight against cyber threats. Ministers in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government said on Wednesday that Germany will invest €200 million over the next five years to launch this agency that will develop its own cyber defense capabilities. The news, however, was not taken well by some lawmakers who have expressed their concerns about the new agency. The issue of military-led and cyber warfare has been a  disputable topic in Germany. Anke Domscheit-Berg, digital policy spokeswoman for the Left Party, expressed her concern on this matter. She believes that more digital security would definitely help Germany, however, her apprehension lies in the fact that the agency is located between the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry. Green Party spokesman Konstantin von Notz argued that the agency will work against the Foreign Ministry’s work. In a statement released to DW, Noz mentioned that the agency would massively undermine the Foreign Ministry’s efforts at the UN to outlaw cyber weapons Instead of promoting a spiraling escalation in the digital space, the government needs to make a U-turn on IT security.” Read the entire coverage of this article on DW for more insights on the matter. Facebook’s AI algorithm finds 20 Myanmar Military Officials guilty of spreading hate and misinformation, leads to their ban Google Employees Protest against the use of Artificial Intelligence in Military Fitness app Polar reveals military secrets

Yesterday, OpenStack announced its 18th release, Rocky. This release aims at addressing new demands for infrastructure driven by AI, machine learning, NFV and edge computing, by starting with a bare metal foundation and enabling containers, VMs and GPUs. The Rocky update is the second OpenStack update for 2018 and follows the Queens milestone that became available on Feb, 28. [box type="info" align="" class="" width=""]Rocky is named after the mountains stretching across British Columbia, the location of the previous OpenStack Summit.[/box] Highlights and Improvements in OpenStack Rocky Rocky includes several other enhancements with two key highlights such as, Improvements to the ‘Ironic’ project's bare metal provisioning service Fast Forward Upgrades Improvements to the ‘Ironic’ project's bare metal provisioning service OpenStack Ironic brings increased sophisticated management and automation capabilities to bare metal infrastructure. It is also a driver for Nova, allowing multi-tenancy. This means users can manage physical infrastructure in the same way they are used to managing VMs, especially with new Ironic features landed in Rocky: User-managed BIOS settings: BIOS (basic input output system) performs hardware initialization and has many configuration options supporting a variety of use cases when customized. The different BIOS options can aid users in gaining performance, configuring power management options, or enabling technologies such as SR-IOV or DPDK. Ironic now lets users manage BIOS settings, supporting use cases like NFV and giving users more flexibility. Conductor groups: In Ironic, the “conductor” uses drivers to execute operations on the hardware. Ironic has introduced the “conductor_group” property, which can be used to restrict what nodes a particular conductor (or conductors) have control over. This allows users to isolate nodes based on physical location, reducing network hops for increased security and performance. RAM Disk deployment interface: This is a new interface in Ironic for diskless deployments. This interface is seen in large-scale and high-performance computing (HPC) use cases when operators desire fully ephemeral instances for rapidly standing up a large-scale environment. Fast Forward Upgrades (FFU) The Fast Forward Upgrade (FFU) feature from the TripleO project helps users to overcome upgrade hurdles and get on newer releases of OpenStack faster. FFU lets a TripleO user on Release “N” quickly speed through intermediary releases to get on Release “N+3” (the current iteration of FFU being the Newton release to Queens). This helps users in gaining access to the ease-of-operations enhancements and novel developments like vGPU support present in Queens. Additional Highlights in Rocky Cyborg In Rocky, Cyborg introduces a new REST API for FPGAs, an accelerator seen in machine learning, image recognition, and other HPC use cases. This allows users to dynamically change the functions loaded on an FPGA device. Qinling Qinling is introduced in Rocky. Qinling (“CHEEN - LEENG”) is a function-as-a-service (FaaS) project that delivers serverless capabilities on top of OpenStack clouds. This allows users to run functions on OpenStack clouds without managing servers, VMs or containers, while still connecting to other OpenStack services like Keystone. Masakari This supports high availability by providing automatic recovery from failures. It also expands its monitoring capabilities to include internal failures in any instance, such as a hung OS, data corruption or a scheduling failure. Octavia This is the load balancing project that adds support for UDP (user datagram protocol), bringing load balancing to edge and IoT use cases. UDP is the transport layer frequently seen in voice, video and other real-time applications. Magnum This project makes container orchestration engines and their resources first-class resources in OpenStack. Magnum has become a Certified Kubernetes installer in the Rocky cycle. Passing these conformance tests gives users confidence that Magnum interacts with Kubernetes. To know more about other highlights in detail, visit Rocky’s release notes. Automating OpenStack Networking and Security with Ansible 2 [Tutorial] Introducing VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) 5.0, a new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud Deploying OpenStack – the DevOps Way

In July, Google had announced the Titan Security keys built with hardware chip to verify key integrity. Now they are available for purchase from the Google store. The security key looks like a dongle and provides two factor authentication which is more secure than just a username and password. These Titan keys are based on the FIDO standards which Google considers as the strongest and most phishing resistant two factor authentication method. This security key was initially made available to Google Cloud users. Now it is available to the public. How does the Google Titan key protect your account? Security keys are based on a standard public key cryptography protocol. The client registers a public key with the online service initially and during the authentication. Then for authentication, the online service asks the client to prove its ownership of the private key with a cryptographic signature. Google jointly contributed to the two factor authentication technical specifications to the FIDO Alliance and launched support for Gmail in 2014. The company has been working with Yubico and NXP to develop security keys internally from 2012. In a Google Cloud Blog post, Christiaan Brand, Product Manager, Google Cloud stated, “At Google, we have had not reported or confirmed account takeovers due to password phishing since we began requiring security keys as a second factor for our employees.” Google has engineered the firmware in the chips with security in mind. This firmware is permanently sealed in a secure hardware chip and is resilient to hardware attacks. Therefore the security factor is sealed in the chip itself during manufacture. FIDO has standardized the authentication protocol used between the client and server. This protocol is being implemented in popular operating systems like Android and Chrome and also the Chrome browser. The security keys can be used to authenticate services like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, GitHub, Salesforce, Stripe, and Twitter. Do you need it? If you have important information in your accounts or would like stronger security as an individual or for your organization, the Google Titan key is a good option. It is available for $50 in the Google store (only US for now) and includes a Bluetooth and USB key with the required connectors. For more details visit the Google Cloud Blog. Google introduces Cloud HSM beta hardware security module for crypto key security Google’s Protect your Election program: Security policies to defend against state-sponsored phishing attacks, and influence campaigns Defending Democracy Program: How Microsoft is taking steps to curb increasing cybersecurity threats to democracy

Mozilla is taking a stand against web advertising practices with an announcement today that its Firefox browser will soon block web trackers by default. Users can expect a series of updates over the next few months while this feature comes into reality. This proactive approach to protect consumer privacy, aims to give them more choice over what information they share with third party sites. Mozilla has been always in the forefront of giving users the assurity of data privacy. They started off by blocking pop-up ads in the very first public Firefox release in 2004. The wholesale blocking of ads and trackers in private browsing mode starting in 2015 is another testament to the fact. Mozilla has made it clear that even though some sites will continue to want user data in exchange for content, they will have to ask users for it. This gives advertising platforms a reason to care about their users’ experience and is a positive change for people who up until now had no idea of the value exchange they were asked to make. Mozilla’s three key initiatives to put this approach into practice: #1 Improving page load performance A new feature will be introduced in Firefox Nightly that will blocks trackers slowing down page loads. Loading third party trackers makes it slow for a website to load as a whole. For users on slower networks, the effect is worse. This messes with the user’s experience on the web. Firefox will study the effects of blocking trackers and test the new feature using a shield study in September.  If the approach succeeds in improving page performance well, slow-loading trackers will be blocked by default in Firefox 63. #2 Removing cross-site tracking Users expect a certain level of privacy on the web. However, many web browsers fail to help users obtain the level of privacy that they should be entitled to. Taking this into account, Firefox will strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content. This is already available for Firefox Nightly users to try out. A shield study will be carried out with some beta users in September to check this feature. All Firefox 65 users can expect this update coming their way soon. After all, no one appreciates the thought of being constantly tracked by third-party sites to obtain information in secret. #3 Mitigating harmful practices The third approach Mozilla is taking is to block harder-to-detect practices like fingerprinting-a technique that allows them to invisibly identify users by their device properties. This will also put a stop on crypto mining scripts that silently mine cryptocurrencies on the user’s device. The Twitter community has received this news well and many Firefox users have expressed their appreciation over this initiative. Source: Twitter The November release of Firefox 57, added an option to let people block all trackers. Worldwide, 1.3 percent of people enable Firefox tracking protection today which means out of   250 million monthly active users, it represents the choice of about 3 million people. Now as a bonus, users can block add trackers as well! Source: Cnet.com This goes to show the level of trust that users have in Firefox and we are sure that like always firefox will not disappoint. You can read the detailed news of the upcoming update on Mozilla’s official blog. Mozilla’s new Firefox DNS security updates spark privacy hue and cry Mozilla, Internet Society, and web foundation wants G20 to address “techlash” fuelled by security and privacy concerns Firefox Nightly’s Secure DNS Experimental Results out  

Google announced yesterday the release of a new version of its multi-language, cross-platform cryptographic library, named, Tink 1.2.0 to secure data. Earlier versions of Tink are already in use by Google to secure data of their products such as AdMob, Google Pay, Google Assistant, Firebase, the Android Search App, etc. Tink 1.2.0 is built on top of libraries such as BoringSSL, and Java Cryptography Architecture. It comprises cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use, and hard to misuse. With Tink 1.2.0, it is easy to perform cryptographic operations like data encryption, digital signatures, etc, as it requires only a few lines of code. It focuses on eliminating as many data misuses as possible. For instance, if the encryption mode needs nonces and reusing nonces would make the encryption mode less secure, then Tink does not allow the user to pass nonces. Tink 1.2.0 also indicates security properties (e.g., safe against chosen-ciphertext attacks) directly in interfaces. This enables security auditors and automated tools to quickly discover usages where security guarantees don’t align with the security requirements. It provides support for key management, which includes, key rotation and phasing out of deprecated ciphers. Other than that, Tink 1.2.0 is customizable. This means that it is easy to add a custom cryptographic scheme or an in-house key management system that can work seamlessly with other parts of Tink. All the parts of Tink are easily removable as well as compostable. The components in Tink 1.2.0 can be selected and assembled in various combinations. As an example, if only digital signatures are needed, then symmetric key encryption components can be excluded to reduce the code size in your application. For more information, check out the official Google blog. Say hello to Sequoia: a new Rust based OpenPGP library to secure your apps Google releases new political ads library as part of its transparency report Google slams Trump’s accusations, asserts its search engine algorithms do not favor any political ideology

The Unity Team has come out with  Unity Game Studio Report 2018 to share insights of its relevant benchmarking data on the existing studios with other emerging studios. The aim is to share information with the emerging studios on how the fellow creative studio teams operate and make successful games. The Unity Game Studio Report 2018 has been collated based on a study with the leads of 1,445 small and medium independent creative studios (ranging in size from 2 to 50 employees) from across the globe. This includes the studios using Unity as their main game engine as well as the studios using other game engines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hoO_5qNel0 Unity Game Studio Report 2018 Let’s have a look at few of the major highlights of this report. Studios are recent, independent and compact As per the 2018 Unity Game Studio report, 91% of the surveyed studios that have been recently established are fully independent and the majority of them are developing their own IPs. Studios develop, publish and promote games on their own                                          Unity Game studio report 2018 40% of the existing and emerging studios are focussed on developing AR/VR, which proves that platforms are becoming more established among independent creators. The majority of studios are publishing their project themselves. For marketing, the popular media for these studios are Facebook and Twitter. The Unity Game Studio report also highlights that 53% of the studios monetize their projects via premium payments, while 36% of them plan on monetizing with the freemium model.   Studios need a wide range of tools to run 69% of the emerging studios use team collaboration along with cloud storage solutions. Less than 40% of the studios use analytics to analyze players’ behavior. Studios run on a lean budget                                               Unity Game studio report 2018 As mentioned in the Unity Game Studio Report, approximately 60% of the budget for all studios comes from freelancing and self-funding. But, a small part from their budget still gets spent on training the employees. The report also highlights the hard work that the majority of the independent game studios put in to continue to establish themselves. “Not only do (independent developers) bring their creative vision to life, they do so with ingenuity, flair, and lots of bootstraps, overcoming challenges posed by constrained resources with imagination, moxie, and dedication to their love of creating games”, as written by Jen MacLean, Executive Director at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in the report foreword. For more information, check out the complete Unity Game Studio Report 2018.   Unity switches to WebAssembly as the output format for the Unity WebGL build target Implementing the Unity game engine and assets for 2D game development [Tutorial] Designing UIs in Unity: What you should know

Yesterday, Amazon issued its response to the accusations made by US Senator, Bernie Sanders, saying that all his claims are misleading. Sanders has been tweeting horror stories of working at Amazon for almost a month leading to the "Amazon vs Sanders" war. According to Sanders, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the tech giant, despite being one of the richest persons in the world, is paying his employees very low wages. Because of this, the employees have to depend on taxpayer-funded programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing to survive. In an interview with TechCrunch, Sanders said that he is seeking more information about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses ahead of the legislation he’s preparing to introduce on September 5. He is all set to introduce a bill next week aimed at improving the work conditions in large companies such as Amazon and Walmart. He has also circulated a form for Amazon’s current and former employees to share their working experience at Amazon. Amazon clarified that, it is paying employees highly competitive wages and is providing them a climate controlled and safe workplace. On Sanders’ SNAP references, it said that the employees who are on SNAP include people who worked for them for a short period of time and/or chose to work part-time. Amazon has listed various benefits provided to its employees ensuring employee well-being and personal development. It further suggested, those interested in learning more about warehouse conditions can book a tour to one of its fulfillment centers and “see the actual implementations, live.” The head of Global Operations, Dave Clark, posted a tweet encouraging his associates to submit a response stating the truth: Sanders said, he is not affected by Amazon’s response and has challenged them to make their hiring numbers, hourly rate, and benefits public: With so many claims made by both the parties, it is difficult to conclude who is on the right side. The probably lies somewhere in the middle. One thing is clear though, stories such as these are a sign of an active democracy where tech and government push each other to be better. If you want to know more on this story, see this official statement by Amazon and also follow Bernie Sanders on Twitter. Amazon may be planning to move from Oracle by 2020 How Amazon is reinventing Speech Recognition and Machine Translation with AI Cortana and Alexa become best friends: Microsoft and Amazon release a preview of this integration

Following Facebook’s move to restrict cross-posts from other platforms earlier this month via changes to its API platform, many users noticed their old Twitter posts disappearing from Facebook this week. The cross-posting option lets users publish their Twitter posts to Facebook automatically. The absence of cross posting was first noticed by users who heavily relied on cross-posting to keep their Facebook active. Without that feature, the Twitter app for Facebook was not of much use. This had caused a lot of old posts to disappear, first noticed around August 26, leaving users furious. Some of the users’ profiles were left fairly empty since they relied on cross-posting to keep their accounts active. Facebook API platform changes are a part of Facebook’s plan to take strict measures on misuse of its platform after the Cambridge Analytica scandal at the start of this year. Since then, Facebook has been taking a variety of efforts to prevent data misuse; stopping third-parties from being able to post to Facebook is one of them. TechCrunch was the first to report on the issue is sudden disappearance of cross-posts from Twitter, and Facebook confirmed to them the same day that it is checking the issue. Common belief is that changes in the API to prevent cross-posting would not have mass-deleted all the older posts. Following these changes from Facebook, Twitter asked Facebook for its app to be deleted from their platform. The result was users’ old Twitter posts on Facebook getting deleted. Turns out that this was just a bug and now it is fixed. In a statement to Axios, Facebook cleared the confusion saying "A Twitter admin requested their app be deleted, which resulted in content that people had cross-posted from Twitter to Facebook also being temporarily removed from people’s profiles. However, we have since restored the past content and it's now live on people’s profiles." You can find the original report on TechCrunch. Facebook Watch is now available world-wide challenging video streaming rivals, YouTube, Twitch, and more A new conservative employee group within Facebook to protest Facebook’s “intolerant” liberal policies Facebook’s AI algorithm finds 20 Myanmar Military Officials guilty of spreading hate and misinformation, leads to their ban

Following the U.S President Donald Trump’s accusatory tweet on Tuesday morning, Google released a statement on the same day denying that it's algorithms favor liberal media outlets over right-wing ones. President Donald Trump went on to claim that Google search results for “Trump News” reports fake news. He accused the search engines’ algorithms of being rigged. Source: Twitter   Source: Twitter The 96% statistics were apparently taken from the results of a PJ Media investigation into Google News searches for the word "Trump".  The news came with a headline "96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets." Writer Paula Bolyard said she made the assessment after typing “Trump News” into Google’s ‘News’ tab across multiple computers, and then analyzed the top results against conservative journalist Sharyl Attkisson’s media bias chart. Trump has been tweeting since late July about discriminatory practices on Twitter and other social media sites more broadly and now his focus on Google is making rounds on the internet. Google’s spokesperson Riva Sciuto, addressed these accusations by stating that hundreds of improvements are done to the search giant’s algorithms each year to ensure that they surface high-quality content and the most relevant answers in response to users' queries. Google testifies that setting a political agenda was never entertained nor were its search results biased toward any political ideology These allegations- based on an analysis from the conservative online media outlet has little evidence behind them. “Google and Twitter and Facebook, they’re really treading on very, very troubled territory. And they have to be careful,” the president said later on Tuesday. “It’s not fair to large portions of the population.” Just 9 hours ago, the President posted another video with the caption #StopTheBias claiming that Google had promoted Barack Obama's state of the union address on its homepage but refused to do the same for Trump once he got elected as the president. The Trump administration on Tuesday said it might explore regulating Google, an effort that would challenge protections around free speech online. Jack Dorsey to testify explaining Twitter algorithms before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Facebook, Twitter takes down fake accounts with ties to Russia and Iran, suspected to influence the US midterm elections Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Installer before patch was ready