Tech News

Last week at the Google I/O, Flutter UI framework expanded from mobile to multi-platform and the company released the first technical preview of Flutter for web. On Friday, Google announced new updates to Flutter for building Chrome OS applications. Flutter tools allow developers to build and test their apps directly on the Chrome OS. New updates for Flutter for Chrome OS Along with Flutter’s seamless resizing feature, Flutter for Chrome OS comes with additional features such as scroll wheel support, hover management, and better keyboard event support. The Flutter team also added a new set of lint rules to the Flutter tooling to catch violations of the most important of the Chrome OS best practice guidelines. This will help developers get a better idea of whether their Android app is going to run well on Chrome OS. In the IDE or when running flutter analyze at the command line, developers can see lints if their Flutter app has issues targeting Chrome OS. Image source: GitHub Lint rules can be turned on the Flutter app by creating a file named analysis_options.yaml in the root of your Flutter project. The contents should look similar to this: include: package:flutter/analysis_options_user.yaml analyzer: optional-checks:   chrome-os-manifest-checks Developing Flutter on ChromeOS has got the developer community excited. https://twitter.com/mklin/status/1127001767873409025 https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1126921052922081280 https://twitter.com/lehtimaeki/status/1103602179556937729 If you’d like to target Flutter for Chrome OS, you can do so today simply by installing the latest version of Flutter. Google I/O 2019: Flutter UI framework now extended for Web, Embedded, and Desktop Google launches Flutter 1.2, its first feature update, at Mobile World Congress 2019 Google I/O 2019 D1 highlights: smarter display, search feature with AR capabilities, Android Q and more.

Microsoft stepped up its tablet game by releasing the all-new Surface Go yesterday. The 10-inch Windows tablet looks exactly likes its expensive and popular counterpart, the Surface Pro device. Only smaller, less powerful and way cheaper, starting at $399. It includes features such as a 10-inch screen, front-facing camera with facial recognition, USB-C 3.1 port, and an integrated kickstand among others. Source: Microsoft Mechanics Let’s have a look at the features that make this tablet all the more alluring: Design Surface Go comes with a  built-in kickstand which includes unlimited positions. It has got corners that are slightly round as compared to the latest Surface Pro and a user familiar magnesium design surface. It weighs 1.15 lbs, making it a bit heavier as compared to the iPad but lighter than the Surface Pro. It consists of large bezels surrounding the screen which provides a place to hold the tablet. You get wider keyboard attachment with these bezels even though they make the tablet look quite dated when compared to the latest versions of the iPad. Display The Go has a smaller 3:2 aspect ratio display (1800 x 1200 pixel resolution). Its 3:2 touchscreen makes it easy for the users to use Go in landscape mode for more productivity. It also supports all the split-screen and multitasking modes that are available in Windows 10. Processor It comes with Intel’s Pentium Gold 4415Y processor with a RAM of either 4GB or 8GB. It provides storage of 64GB  eMMC or a 128GB SSD. Its processor is a dual-core seventh-generation model. According to Microsoft, this was chosen as it is able to provide the right balance between performance, battery life, and thermal properties which allows for a thin, fanless design. Battery Microsoft Surface Go has a USB-C 3.1 port which is Microsoft’s signature surface connector. This helps charge the tablet along with outputting video and data to external devices. Microsoft says the Surface Go tablet comes with up to nine hours of battery life. Additional Features Operating System: Go Tablet runs Windows 10 with S mode enabled. With Go, you can access only Edge browser and apps that are available in the Microsoft Store. Keyboard: The Surface Go consists of an additional keyboard cover which is available in four different colors, and can work with an optional Surface Pen. The Surface Go’s Type Cover provides “laptop-class typing” that comes with a scissor-key mechanism as well as 1 mm of key travel. The trackpad is much larger than the trackpad on the current Type Cover for the Surface Pro. If you add the keyboard, it will increase the price of the Go tablet to $99 or $129 ( depending on which color you choose) while the Pen adds another $99. There’s also a new $34.99 Surface Mobile Mouse. It is an ambidextrous, and two-button Bluetooth mouse which comes with a scroll wheel. It is available in colors like silver, red, and blue which matches the keyboard cover and pen. The new Surface Go is available for pre-order starting today and will start shipping in August. Leap Motion open sources its $100 augmented reality headset, North Star HTC Vive Focus 2.0 update promises long battery life, among other things for the VR headset

Amazon has been exploring itself in the health care sector since quite some time now. Just last year, Amazon bought the online pharmacy PillPack for $1 billion in order to sell the prescription drugs. The company introduced Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that allows users to extract relevant clinical information from the unstructured text in patient records. Amazon is even working with Accenture and Merck to develop a cloud-based platform for collaborators across the life sciences industry with a motive to bring innovation in the drug development research. Amazon has now taken a bigger leap by announcing its voice assistant, Alexa as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, which means that it can work with health care and medical software developers in order to invent new programs or skills with voice and provide better experiences to their customers. With the help of Amazon Alexa, developers will design new skills to help customers manage their healthcare needs at home by simply using voice. Patients will now be able to book a medical appointment, access the hospital post-discharge instructions or check on the status of a prescription delivery, and much more just via the voice! HIPAA has been designed to protect patients in cases where their personal health information is shared with health care organizations such as hospitals. This will allow healthcare companies to build Alexa voice tools capable of securely transmitting the patient’s private information. The consumers will now be able to use new Alexa health skills for asking questions such as “Alexa, pull up my blood glucose readings” or “Alexa, find me a doctor,” and will receive a response from the voice assistant. The company further announced the launch of six voice programs including Express Scripts, My Children's Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health, and Livongo. These new tools allow patients to use Alexa for accessing personalized information such as prescription, progress updates after surgery, and much more. Rachel Jiang, a member of Amazon’s health and wellness team, who previously worked at Microsoft and Facebook announced that Amazon has invited six healthcare partners to use its HIPAA-compliant skills kit to build voice programs. But the company expects to get more healthcare providers on board to access its information. Jiang wrote in a post, “These new skills are designed to help customers manage a variety of healthcare needs at home simply using voice – whether it’s booking a medical appointment, accessing hospital post-discharge instructions, checking on the status of a prescription delivery, and more.” Boston Children’s Hospital now has a new HIPAA-compliant skill dubbed “ERAS” for kids that are discharged from the hospital and for their families. With the help of Alexa’s voice assistant, patients and their families or caregivers can now ask questions to the care team about their case. Even the doctors can now remotely check in on the child’s recovery process. Livongo, a digital health start-up, works with employers in order to help them in managing workers with chronic medical conditions. Livongo developed a skill for people with diabetes that uses connected glucometers that would ask about the patient’s blood sugar levels. In a statement to CNBC, Livongo’s president Jenny Schneider told that “There are lots of reasons she expects users to embrace voice technologies, versus SMS messaging or other platforms. Some of those people might have difficulty reading, or they just have busy lives and it’s just an easy option.” Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management organization is working towards building a way for members to check the status of their home delivery prescription via Alexa. Voice technology has been booming in the health care sector and skills like the ones mentioned above will bring health care to home and make the patients lives easy and cost-effective. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer for Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “We’re in a renaissance of voice technology and voice assistants in health care. It’s so appealing as there’s very little training, it’s low cost and convenient.” To know more about this news, check out  Amazon’s official announcement. Amazon won’t be opening its HQ2 in New York due to public protests MariaDB announces MariaDB Enterprise Server and welcomes Amazon’s Mark Porter as an advisor to the board of directors Over 30 AI experts join shareholders in calling on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition, its facial recognition tech, for government surveillance  

The .NET team has announced that have completely moved the .NET Core platform to RyuJIT, the compiler written in-house by Microsoft. The team had been long working on this shift to make the compilation faster for .NET Core applications given that web applications today take time to start up. JIT compiler is a program that converts the instructions written in .NET Core to native machine code so that it can be sent to the processor for processing action. The JIT compilers have become a standard to support the compilation for various platforms. They are an improvement over the traditional compilers which require the programs to re-compile when using on different computer systems. RyuJIT is developed by the .NET Core team as the next generation 64-bit compiler that will compile programs twice as fast. The .NET Core compiled with this JIT compiler is recorded to have 30% improved faster start-up time. Also the apps compiled with the RvyJIT produce great code that run efficiently on the servers. The most important factor that helped the performance was basing the RyuJIT to x64, shifting from x86 codebase. One of the major stability factors this will bring is that .NET programs will perform consistently across various architectures and will provide compatibility for .NET programs across the platforms like ARM, mobile, among others. This will help developers maintain a codebase that compiles on both 64-bit and 32-bit compilers and perform on both types of systems. The .NET team has promised the stability of the platform after this move and are expecting the performance to improve. The team is inviting developers to join the community and has put the documentation for the RyuJIT on the GitHub repository. Applying Single Responsibility principle from SOLID in .NET Core Microsoft Open Sources ML.NET, a cross-platform machine learning framework What is ASP.NET Core?

Facebook’s public image suffered quite a few setbacks in recent times. The Cambridge analytica scandal has opened up a pandora’s box full of questions about user data security and privacy. In the recent senate hearings, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had an apologetic tone and he promised to give utmost importance to user data security. The misfortunes however, doesn’t seem to be over for Zuckerberg and Facebook. In a latest security scare, a bug had caused quite a ruckus for the tech giant. Facebook composer bug Now let’s talk about the bugs, yes, you read that correctly, there were more than one recent Facebook bugs affecting user data and privacy. The first bug was related to the Facebook message composer. According to Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan, the bug affected composer’s privacy settings in a way that when the users were creating new posts, it automatically changed the privacy settings to public. This meant that user updates which might have been private, were available publicly. This bug had affected 14 million users worldwide and it was active during 18th May to 22nd May 2018. It took Facebook till 27th May to identify the bug and then rectify the problem. As a trust building measure, Facebook had sent notifications to all the users affected by this breach. A snapshot of the Facebook notification looked like this:   Source: Techcrunch Automatic Unblocking bug The second incident occurred was between 29th May to 5th June. This particular incident was reported via a Facebook blog post which stated that a bug that had affected around 800k Facebook users, had temporarily unblocked contacts and enabled previously blocked contacts to message or view the details of the respective users. This security breach was in a way potentially dangerous since it openly allowed stalking or even harassment. Facebook had although stated that this bug had unblocked one contact per user. The official Facebook notification to the affected users looked like this: Source: Facebook Blog Facebook Analytics Data leak The story of bugs is not over yet. There were recent reports that the Facebook analytics data of around 3 percent Facebook apps were leaked to testers accidentally. This was  due to a faulty automated email system according to Facebook. Although Facebook insists on the fact that no personal user data was leaked, still this incident doesn’t go down well keeping in mind the company’s latest record of user privacy and data secrecy. Facebook is trying to be transparent in its approach to tackle this menace of recurring bugs, but how successful their efforts will be, only time and their future actions will tell. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and ethics in data science Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony: 5 things we learned F8 AR Announcements  

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that according to its updated policies, extensions with obfuscated code will not be accepted on its add-ons platform. It is also becoming much stricter regarding blocking extensions that fail to abide by its policies. These policies will come into effect from June 2019. Last year in October, Google also announced a similar policy, which came into effect with the start of this year, to prevent malicious extensions from reaching its extensions store. If you do not know what obfuscated code means, it is basically writing code that is difficult for a human to understand. Common practices of writing obfuscated code include replacing function or variable names with weird but allowed characters, using reversed array indexing, using look-alike characters, etc. “Generally speaking, just try to find good coding guidelines and to try to violate them all,” said a developer on Stack Overflow. However, obfuscated code should not be confused with minified, concatenated, or otherwise machine-generated code, which are acceptable. Minification refers to the act of removing all unnecessary or redundant data that do not have any effect on the output, such as whitespaces, code comments, or shortening variable names, and so on. “We will no longer accept extensions that contain obfuscated code. We will continue to allow minified, concatenated, or otherwise machine-generated code as long as the source code is included. If your extension is using obfuscated code, it is essential to submit a new version by June 10th that removes it to avoid having it rejected or blocked,” Caitlin Neiman said in a blog post. If your code contains transpiled, minified or otherwise machine-generated code, you are required to submit a copy of human-understandable source code and also instructions on how to reproduce that build. Here is a snippet from Mozilla’s policies: “Add-ons are not allowed to contain obfuscated code, nor code that hides the purpose of the functionality involved. If external resources are used in combination with add-on code, the functionality of the code must not be obscured. To the contrary, minification of code with the intent to reduce file size is permitted.” Mozilla also plans to take stricter steps for those extensions that are found to violate its policies. Neiman said, “We will be blocking extensions more proactively if they are found to be in violation of our policies. We will be casting a wider net, and will err on the side of user security when determining whether or not to block.” If users are already using the extensions which have obfuscated, once the policies are employed, these extensions will be disabled. Many developers are supporting this decision. One Redditor commented, “This is great, obfuscated code doesn't really belong anywhere in the frontend, since you have access to the code and can figure out what the program does given enough time, so why not just make it readable.” Read the announcement on Mozilla blog and to go through the policies visit MDN web docs. Mozilla re-launches Project Things as WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs  

Stack Overflow’s 2018 survey has just been released. It contains some great insights into the way developers live and work. It’s also confirmed plenty of things that have been commonplaces in the tech industry. So, here are the 10 most predictable findings from this year’s survey... JavaScript is the most popular programming language We probably shouldn’t be surprised - JavaScript has come out as the most popular language in the Stack Overflow survey since 2013. And with JavaScript now cemented as the foundational language of the web, it’s unlikely we’re going to see it knocked off its perch any time soon. With the growth of tools like NodeJS extending JavaScript’s capabilities, it’s only going to consolidate its position further. Developers are on Stack Overflow all the time This is a pretty comforting stat for the team at Stack Overflow - they’re the go-to home of almost everyone that works with code on the planet. 32.5% of respondents claimed they check Stack Overflow ‘daily or almost daily’, 31% check it multiple times a day. A further 22% check the site at least once a week. Developers are self-taught and write code outside of work This is something we’re well aware of at Packt - developers are autodidacts. That’s probably partly the nature of working with software that can be so changeable and the nature of developers themselves - curious and exploratory. 86.7% of survey respondents taught themselves a new language, tool or framework outside of any formal setting. The fact that formal education is so rarely sought or provided for explains the fact that so many developers write code outside of work. Stack Overflow’s 2018 survey reports than more than 80% of developers code as a hobby. Git is easily the most popular version control tool This was a sure thing - and the survey stats prove it. 87.2% of respondents reported Git as their version control tool of choice. Despite murmurs online that it’s unnecessarily complicated (the search suggestion next to ‘why is Git so popular’ is ‘why is Git so complicated’), thanks to its powerful scalable features and, of course, the dominance of GitHub in the lives of technical people, it’s become a core part of developer life. Python is the fastest growing programming language on the planet We know just how popular Python is at Packt. We joke that we should just be the Python Publishing Company. This year it has risen above C#, after last year rising above PHP. Where will its rise end? Or, as more and more people need to write code, will it become the de facto language of technology-powered professionals? TensorFlow is getting lots of love TensorFlow was 2018’s most loved tool with more than 73% of developers using it expressing a great deal of enthusiasm for it. Clearly its delivering on its tagline: ‘machine learning for everyone’. React is the most in-demand tool If TensorFlow is the most loved tool, we also weren’t that surprised to see that React is massively in demand. 21.3% of developers who don’t currently use it expressed an interest in using it. Node.js was in second place with 20.9%. The love for TensorFlow must be getting out there as that came in third here, with 15.5% of respondents interested in developing with it. People hate using Visual Basic It’s not hard to find someone complaining about Visual Basic online. The ecosystem is widening, and there are far more attractive options for developers out there. Microsoft are even self-consciously changing their strategy with VB, as this post from last year outlines. Stack Overflow reports that this is the third year in a row that Visual Basic has come out as the ‘most dreaded’ programming language, meaning people using it ‘express no interest in doing so’. Job churn is a fact of life in tech 34.6% of survey respondents changed jobs less than a year ago. A further 22% changed jobs between 1 and 2 years ago. Like technology itself, change is a constant in the lives of many developers - for better and worse. Agile and Scrum are the most popular software development methodologies No surprises here - these methodologies have become embedded in the everyday practices of millions of developers.

Just when people couldn’t keep up with the excitement of the Oculus Go launched at the Facebook’s F8 conference, Google added fuel to the fire by making Lenovo Mirage Solo, the first stand-alone Daydream VR headset, available for purchase at $399.9. Lenovo Mirage Solo VR headset Let’s have a look at the features that are making this headset all the rage: Self-contained VR Headset What makes this VR headset the talk of the town is that it’s the first stand-alone Daydream VR headset. That means it doesn’t require the excess baggage of connecting the phone and then putting on the headset. All you need to do is, just put the headset on and explore the intriguing VR world sans the wires and the added complexity. The hardware inside resembles that of a mobile device. It has a Snapdragon 835 processor with 4GB RAM, and 64GB of storage. It comes with a long battery life of 2.5 hours making the entire VR experience seamless. It consists of embedded sensors along with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer. Also, it has a microSD slot, a USB Type-C port, a power button, volume buttons, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Position-tracking Technology Lenovo Mirage Solo comes with WorldSense, an outstanding 6 degrees of freedom motion tracking feature that helps you move around freely with headsets on, thereby, making the entire experience more immersive. WorldSense helps remove the need to set up extra sensors. It offers: Two inside-out tracking cameras Built-in proximity sensors that detect the position of nearby objects Display Lenovo Mirage Solo comes with a 5.5-inch LCD display. This is an effort to get rid of the blurring issue that happens as you move from one side to the other in the VR world. The screen has a 2,560 x 1,440-pixel resolution with a 110-degree field of view which is similar to Rift and Vive, thereby, making the VR exploration even more interactive. Design The headset body is primarily matte plastic in white color with accents of black, and gray running through it, and a solid plastic strap that wraps around the head. The Lenovo Mirage solo is a self-contained headset, which has a strong built. Yet some people find it bulky as the majority of the weight resides on the top of a wearer’s forehead. However, it is adjustable as the headset can be brought all the way around your skull. Also, the Display housing keeps the light from coming in without disturbing the image, making the headset easily movable. Sound Lenovo Mirage Solo comes with two microphones, but users need to plug in their own headphones into the 3.5-mm jack as it doesn’t come equipped with in-built speakers. Apart from the above-mentioned features, the Mirage Solo depends on the Daydream library for accessing content. The catalog has more than 350 games and apps with over 70 titles optimized for WorldSense. As you can see, Mirage Solo is not flawless. It suffers from issues such as bulky design, no built-in speakers, and limited library app content. But the pros overpower the cons in this case, and it goes without saying that Lenovo Mirage Solo is here to revolutionize the VR experience. To know more, visit the official Daydream Google Blog Oculus Go, the first stand-alone VR headset arrives! Understanding the hype behind Magic Leap’s New Augmented Reality Headsets Build a Virtual Reality Solar System in Unity for Google Cardboard

Yesterday, Containous, a cloud-native networking company, announced Maesh, a lightweight and simple Service Mesh. Maesh is aimed at making service-to-service communications simpler for developers building modern, cloud-native applications. It is easy to use and fully featured to help developers connect, secure and monitor traffic to and from their microservices-based applications. Mesh also supports the latest Service Mesh Interface specification (SMI), a standard specification for service mesh interoperability in Kubernetes. Maesh allows developers to adopt microservices thus, improving the service mesh experience by offering an easy way to connect, secure and monitor the network traffic in any Kubernetes environment. It helps developers optimize internal traffic, visualize traffic patterns, and secure communication channels, all while improving application performance. Also Read: Red Hat announces the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh Maesh is designed to be completely non-invasive, allowing development teams across the organization to incrementally “opt-in” applications progressively over time. It is backed by Traefik’s rich feature-set thus, providing OpenTracing, load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, TCP, rich routing rules, retries and fail-overs, not to mention access controls, rate limits, and circuit breakers. Maesh can run in both TCP and HTTP mode. “In HTTP mode, Maesh leverages Traefik’s feature set to enable rich routing on virtual-host, path, headers, cookies. Using TCP mode allows seamless and easy integration with SNI routing support,” Containous team reports. It also enables critical features across any Kubernetes environment including observability, Multi-Protocol Support, Traffic Management, Security and Safety. Also Read: Mapbox introduces MARTINI, a client-side terrain mesh generation code In an email statement to us, Emile Vauge, CEO, Containous said, “With Maesh, Containous continues to innovate with the mission to drastically simplify cloud-native adoption for all enterprises. We’ve been proud of how popular Traefik has been for developers as a critical open source solution, and we’re excited to now bring them Maesh.” https://twitter.com/resouer/status/1169310994490748928 To know more about Maesh in detail, read the Containous’ Medium blog post. Other interesting news in Networking Amazon announces improved VPC networking for AWS Lambda functions Pivotal open sources kpack, a Kubernetes-native image build service Kubernetes releases etcd v3.4 with better backend storage, improved raft voting process, new raft non-voting member and more

Apple made some major announcements at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference 2019 which concluded yesterday, in Las Vegas. Apple’s head of security engineering, Ivan Krstić announced that anybody who can hack an iPhone will get up to $1 million reward. They have also released a new payout system for security researchers, depending on the type of vulnerability found by them. Krstić also unveiled Apple’s new iOS Security Research Device program, which will be out next year. As part of the program, qualified security researchers will be provided with special iPhones to find out flaws in them. Apple expands its Security bug Bounty program Apple first launched its bug bounty program, in 2016. The previous bug bounty program consisted of $200,000 and included only those involved in Apple’s invite-only bug bounty program. Yesterday, Apple announced that, per Apple’s new security bug bounty program, anyone who can hack an iPhone will receive up to $1 million. Also, the security bounty program has been opened to all security researchers. It will include all of Apple’s platforms, including iCloud, iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS. https://twitter.com/mikebdotorg/status/1159557138580004864 Apple has also released a new payout system with the payouts starting from $100,000 for finding a bug that allows lock screen bypass or unauthorized access to iCloud. Researchers can also gain up to 50% bonus if they find any bugs in a pre-released software. The top payout is booked for hackers who can discover a zero-click kernel code execution with persistence. https://twitter.com/Manzipatty/status/1159680310348537861 https://twitter.com/sdotknight/status/1159807563036340224 https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/1159705960061030400 Apple’s new iOS Security Research Device program Apple gave out details about its new iOS Security Research Device program, which will be out next year. In this program, Apple will be supplying special iPhones to security researchers to help them find security flaws in iOS. However, this the iOS security research device program is available only to researchers who have great experience in security research on any platforms. https://twitter.com/0x30n/status/1159553364159414272 The special devices will be different from the regular iPhones, as it will come with ssh, a root shell, and advanced debug capabilities to ensure identification of bugs. “This is an unprecedented fully Apple supported iOS security research platform,” said Krstić at the conference. https://twitter.com/skbakken/status/1159556808198852608 https://twitter.com/marconielsen/status/1159584902339276801 Though many users have praised Apple for the great money and initiating the security research device program, few also opine that this is not so huge. Given the kind of knowledge and expertise required to find these bugs, there are suggestions that Apple should consider paying these hackers more as they are the ones saving Apple from a lot of negative P.R. Also, they found a bug, which even the Apple employees are sometimes unable to find. A user on Hacker News comments, “1M is a lot of money to me, a regular person, but when you consider that top security engineering talent could be making north of 500k in total compensation, 1M suddenly doesn’t seem all that impressive. It’s a good bet to make on their risk. Imagine paying a mere 1M to avoid a public fiasco where all of your users get owned. This just seems like good business. They could make it 5M, and it would still be worth it to them in the medium to long term.” Another user says, “I'm surprised by how cheap the vulnerabilities market is. A good exploit, against a popular product like Chrome, selling for 100k or even $1M may sound like a lot, but it's really pennies for any top software firm. And $1M is still a lot for a vulnerability by market prices.” Another comment on Hacker News reads, “When I read the article, my first reaction was "Only a million?" Considering the importance of a bug like this to Apple's business and the size of their cash hoard, this sounds like they don't actually care that much.” To know about other highlights at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference 2019, head over to our full coverage. Apple Card, iPhone’s new payment system, is now available for select users Apple plans to suspend Siri response grading process due to privacy issues Data Transfer Project: Now Apple joins Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter to make data sharing seamless

At the Xilinx Developer Forum in San Jose, Arm announced its collaboration with Xilinx, the market leader in FPGAs. The collaboration plans to bring the benefits of Arm Cortex-M processors to FPGA through the Arm DesignStart program, thus providing scalability and a standardized processor architecture across the Xilinx portfolio. Users can expect a fast, completely no-cost access to soft processor IP, while taking advantage of the easy design integration with Xilinx tools and comprehensive software development solutions to accelerate success on FPGA. These processors will enable embedded developers to design and innovate confidently, while benefiting from simplified software development and superior code density. In addition, products can be easily scaled on these processors, thanks to the support of the broadest technology ecosystem of software, tools, and services provided by the team. Arm for FPGA comes with the following benefits: #1 Maximum choice and flexibility Users can obtain an easy and instant access to Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3 soft processor IP for FPGA integration with Xilinx products. They will not be charged any license fee or royalties for this access. #2 Reduced software costs The processor focuses on reducing software costs while obtaining maximum reuse of software across an entire OEM’s product portfolio on a standardized CPU architecture, scaling from single board computers through to FPGAs. #3 Ease of design The team has ensured an easy integration with Xilinx system and peripheral IP through Vivado Design Suite. They use a drag-and-drop design approach to create FPGA systems with Cortex-M processors. The extensive software ecosystem and knowledge base of others designing on Arm, will ultimately result in reducing the time to market for these processors #4 Measures to Combat FOSSi (free and open source silicon) threat Arm Cortex-M1 includes a mandatory license agreement, which contains clauses against reverse-engineering. The clause also prevents the use of these cores for comparative benchmarking. These clauses will assist Arm to enable IP holds up against the latest and greatest FOSSi equivalents (like RISC-V) when running on the same FPGAs. This is not the first time that Arm has raised its voice against FOSSi threats. Earlier this year, they had also launched an aggressive marketing campaign specifically targeting RISC-V. The Arm and Xilinx collaboration will enable developers to take advantage of the benefits of heterogeneous computing on a single processor architecture. To know more about this news, head over to Arm’s official blog. Meet ‘Foreshadow’: The L1 Terminal Fault in Intel’s chips SpectreRSB targets CPU return stack buffer, found on Intel, AMD, and Arm chipsets Qualcomm announces a new chipset for standalone AR/VR headsets at Augmented World Expo

Yesterday, VMware announced that they have achieved their goal of achieving 100% renewable energy in their operations, a year ahead of their 2020 vision. VMware has always been optimistic about the power of technology to help solve societal problems. One of their key focus areas has been to change their relationship with energy. https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1138868618257719297 In 2016, VMware had announced their goal to achieve carbon neutral emissions and to advance its commitment to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2020. They have been successful in reaching both these goals, much before the scheduled time. In November 2018, VMware achieved Carbon Neutrality across all their business operations. Now, they have also powered  100 percent of their operations with renewable energy and have joined RE100, a year early. RE100 is a global corporate leadership initiative to commit influential businesses to 100% renewable electricity and accelerate change towards zero carbon energy. RE100 is led by The Climate Group in partnership with CDP and works to increase corporate demand for–and delivery of–renewable energy. As Data centers are responsible for two percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,  VMware’s technologies have helped IT infrastructure become more efficient by fundamentally changing how their customers use power. They have helped their customers avoid putting 540 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to powering the population of Spain, Germany and Switzerland for one year. In a blogpost, the Vice President of Sustainability at VMware, Nicola Acutt, has mentioned that they could achieve RE100 through a combination of strategies, such as: Opting into clean power through local utilities Locating assets in areas with renewable energy For areas not feasible, they purchased renewable energy credits (RECs). This indicates demand to the global market of renewable energy, and enables the development of its  infrastructure. According to the U.N.’s report, as a society, around 70-85 percent of electricity will have to be shifted to renewable energy sources by 2050, to avoid the worst impacts of climatic change. Acutt states that to achieve this goal, all establishments will have to acquire a system approach to become more efficient. This will help drive the transition to a sustainable economy globally. The response to this news has been great, people are praising VMware for reaching RE100 ahead of their schedule. https://twitter.com/T180985/status/1139059931695345665 https://twitter.com/songsteven2/status/1138908028714065923 https://twitter.com/RSadorus/status/1138985222815404032 Deep learning models have massive carbon footprints, can photonic chips help reduce power consumption? Now there’s a CycleGAN to visualize the effects of climate change. But is this enough to mobilize action? Responsible tech leadership or climate washing? Microsoft hikes its carbon tax and announces new initiatives to tackle climate change

Data forms an integral part of every business or organization which is used to make valuable decisions based on changing circumstances. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a widely adopted technique used by machines to understand and communicate with humans in human language. This enables human to access, analyze and extract data more intelligently from a huge amount of unstructured data. Intel AI Lab’s team of NLP researchers and developers has introduced NLP Architect, a new open-source Python library. This library can be used as a platform for future research and developing the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for natural language processing and natural language understanding. Rapid and recent advancements in deep learning and neural network paradigms has led to the growth in NLP domain. This new library offers flexibility in implementing NLP solutions which are packed with the past and ongoing NLP research and development work of Intel AI Lab. NLP Architect overview The current version of NLP Architect offers noteworthy features which form the backbone in terms of research and practical development. All the following models are provided with required training and inference processes: It consists of NLP core models such as BIST and NP chunker that allows powerful extraction of linguistic features for NLP workflow NLU models such as intent extraction (IE), name entity recognition (NER) used for intent-based applications It consists of modules which address semantic understanding Now consists of components which hold a key for conversational AI such as chatbot applications, dialog applications and more End-to-end deep learning applications such as Q&A, reading comprehension and more Source: AI Intel Blog This library of NLP components provides the required functionality to extend NLP solutions with a range of audience. It provides excellent media for analysis and optimization of Intel software and hardware on NLP workloads. In addition to these models, new features such as data pipelines, common functional calls, and utilities related to NLP domain which are majorly used when deploying models, are added. To know more about the updates, you can refer the official Intel AI blog. How NLP Architect can be used You can train models using the provided datasets, configurations and algorithms You can train models based on your own data You can create new models or extend your existing models You can explore various common and not-so-common challenges faced in NLP domain using deep learning models You can optimize and extend the use of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms You can integrate various modules and utilities from the library to NLP solutions Deep learning frameworks support This repository supports several open source deep learning frameworks such as: Intel Nervana Graph Intel Neon Intel-optimized TensorFlow Dynet Keras Note: We can expect the list of models to update in future. All these models will run with Python 3.5+ If you want to download the open-source Python library or want to contribute to the project by providing valuable feedback, download the code from Github. A complete documentation for all core modules with end-to-end examples can be found in their official page. Intel takes Facebook’s help on AI chip; Cisco uses AI to predict IT services; and more Introducing Intel’s OpenVINO computer vision toolkit for edge computing Facelifting NLP with Deep Learning

In a study published in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers discovered that in some cases of machine learning it cannot be proved whether the system actually ‘learned’ something or solved the problem. They explore machine learning learnability. Axioms leading to axioms in arithmetic models We already know that machine learning systems, and AI systems in general are black boxes. You feed the system some data, you get some output or a trained system that performs some tasks but you don’t know how the system arrived at a particular solution. Now we have a published study from Ben-Davis et al that shows learnability in machine learning is undecidable. In the 1930s, Austrian logician Kurt Gödel showed that a set of axioms forming an arithmetic model lead to more axioms. In the following decades it was demonstrated that the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor refuted using standard mathematical axioms. The hypothesis states that no set of objects is larger in size than integers or smaller in size than real numbers. What does this have to do with machine learning? In machine learning, algorithms are designed to improve performance of certain actions with the data they are trained on. Some problems like facial recognition or recommendation engines cannot be created with regular linear programming. These are problems that can be solved today by machine learning. Machine learning learnability can be defined. A system can be considered learnable if the machine learning model can perform as the best predictor in a family of functions. This needs to be achieved under some reasonable constraints. Typically learnability in a model can be explained by analysing dimensions. But this new research shows that this is not always the case. A learning model introduced in the paper is the focus of the research: estimating the maximum (EMX) which is similar to PAC learning. The authors of the paper discover a family of functions whose learnability in EMX cannot be proved with standard mathematics. What is the EMX problem? As described in the paper, the EMX problem is: “Let X be some domain set, and let F be a family of functions from X to {0, 1} (we often think of each function f∈F as a subset of X and vice versa). Given a sample S of elements drawn i.i.d. from some unknown distribution P over X, the EMX problem is about finding a function f ∈ F that approximately maximizes the expectation EP(f) with respect to P.” In the paper, the authors present an example problem—displaying specific ads to the most frequent visitors of a website. The catch is, which visitors will visit the website is unknown. Now the EMX problem is formed as a question—what is a learner’s ability to find a function whose expected value is the largest. They show a relation between machine learning and data compression. If training data labelled by a function can be compressed, then the family from which the function originates has low complexity. Such a function is considered learnable. Monotone compression Algorithms can be used to compress data. A new one called monotone compression is introduced. They show that this compression is suitable to describe the learnability of function families in the EMX problem. A weak monotone compression is associated with the cardinality of particular infinite sets. The authors use the interval [0, 1] which contains real numbers. The results show that the finite subsets in the interval [0, 1] have monotone compression and are therefore considered learnable in EMX. But, this applied only if the continuum hypothesis is true which stands to be unprovable to date. The problem is how you define learnability In the concluding points, the paper points out an interesting perspective as to why current machine learning models get off easy without any questions about learnability. Or do they? The problem lies in how learnability is defined—as functions or as algorithms?. Current standard definitions focus on the theoretical aspect without considering computational implications. This approach in viewing learnability levies a high cost when more general types of learning is involved. You can read the research paper by Shai Ben-David and others about learnability being undecidable at the Nature journal website. Technical and hidden debts in machine learning – Google engineers’ give their perspective The US Air Force lays groundwork towards artificial general intelligence based on hierarchical model of intelligence NVIDIA demos a style-based generative adversarial network that can generate extremely realistic images; has ML community enthralled

On Wednesday,  Facebook launched Candidate Info, where politicians can pitch on camera. It features thousands of direct-to-camera vertical videos where federal, local and state candidates introduce themselves and explain their top policy priority, qualifications and biggest goal if they win office. Scott Walker (R – WI Governor), Elizabeth Warren (D – MA Senate) and Beto O’Rourke (D – TX Senate) have already posted, while Facebook expects more candidates to participate, shortly. The Facebook mobile app’s navigation drawer will soon show these videos as part of an Election 2018 bookmark. The video clips will begin appearing to the potential constituents in the News Feed, next week. Facebook believes these videos will make it easier for people to learn about and compare different candidates. This feature is an addition to the Town Hall feature which Facebook had launched in 2017, which offers a personalized directory of candidates the users could vote for. In a similar fashion, Candidate Info only shows video clips from politicians running elections relevant to a given user, so in case, you are in California you won’t see videos from the Texas Senate race between O’Rourke and Ted Cruz. Though, you can still find their videos on their Facebook Pages. Considering, the midterms are just around the corner, Facebook is trying its best to protect elections from interference by  domestic and foreign attackers, connect users to candidates, offer transparency about who bought campaign ads, and encourage people to register and vote. With fake news that spread through the social network thought to have influenced the 2016 election, and ill-gotten Facebook user data from Cambridge Analytica applied to Donald Trump’s campaign ad targeting, the social media platform is hoping to avoid similar problematic narratives this time around. We aren’t sure Candidate Info is going to help here though. If anything, it might make things worse for the elections. It looks a lot like a shiny new filter bubble. What happens, for example, if one candidate in a constituency uses this tool to reach their constituents and the other doesn’t? Worse, still what if they don’t own a Facebook profile? This could give one of the parties an undue advantage as they will be on the top of the mind on Election day. And even if both the parties have their accounts and opt for this tool, what’s the guarantee that there won’t be any algorithmic manipulations? One of the campaigns from either of the parties might get an advantage purely based on what’s trending. Thirdly, the logic behind Facebook deciding which candidate’s pitches are relevant to the user based on where they are located is blickered, at best and dangerously comprising the viewer’s worldview, at its worse. Friends and family, though distributed across states, do influence who one votes for by virtue of their shared values. Denying users a chance to understand candidates from other constituencies simply tells an incomplete story. This could prevent healthy national level discussions and directly impact who becomes the next president. The bottomline is users should be ones deciding who to listen to, not the algorithm. Did you know Facebook shares the data you share with them for ‘security’ reasons with advertisers? Coinbase looking to replicate Facebook’s platform strategy with support for more digital assets WhatsApp co-founder reveals why he left Facebook; is called ‘low class’ by a Facebook senior executive