Tech News

Apple is planning on merging the apps made for iPhone, iPad, and Mac by 2021, as a part of its project, codenamed Marzipan. Apple revealed details related to the project at the 2018 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), reports Bloomberg. Bloomberg notes that this move by Apple will make it easier for the software developers to build tools and apps since they’ll only have to build an app once and then have it work on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers. It will also boost the overall revenue of the firm as it takes a cut of various app-related purchases and subscriptions. Moreover, Apple is going to be launching a software development kit this June at WWDC, to allow developers to port their iPad apps to Mac computers. The software development kit will prevent the developers from writing the software code twice, however, they will have to submit separate versions of the app to Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores. As reported by Bloomberg, Apple will expand the kit so that iPhone applications can be converted into Mac apps in 2020. Finally, by 2021, developers will be able to merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications into one app. Following this, developers will no longer need to submit separate versions of the app to different Apple App Stores and will allow iOS apps to be downloaded directly from Mac computers. “The most direct benefit of the Marzipan project will be to make life easier for the millions of developers who write software for Apple’s devices. For example, later this year Netflix Inc. would be able to more easily offer a Mac app for watching the video by converting its iPad app”, states Bloomberg. Also, Twitter could publish a single app for all its Apple customers by 2021. Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Apple revoked Facebook developer certificates due to misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program; Google also disabled its iOS research app

Youtube faced backlash for another content regulation problem when videos of young children with exposed private parts began surfacing. These videos also displayed advertising from major brands alongside the content, leading to major companies like Nestle, Disney, Fortnite pull these YouTube ads from the identified videos. This issue was first discovered on Sunday, when Matt Watson, a video blogger, posted a 20-minute clip detailing how comments on YouTube were used to identify certain videos in which young girls were in activities that could be construed as sexually suggestive, such as posing in front of a mirror and doing gymnastics. Youtube received major criticism from companies and individuals alike for recommending videos of minors and allowing pedophiles to comment on these posts, with a specific time stamp of the video of when an exposed private part of the young child was visible. YouTube was also condemned for monetizing these videos allowing advertisements for major brands like Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Fortnite, Grammarly, L’Oreal, Maybelline, Metro: Exodus, Peloton and SingleMuslims.com, etc to be displayed on these videos. Companies pull out ads from Youtube Following this news, a large number of companies pulled their advertising spending from YouTube. Grammarly told Wired, “We’re absolutely horrified and have reached out to YouTube to rectify this immediately, we have a strict policy against advertising alongside harmful or offensive content. We would never knowingly associate ourselves with channels like this.” A spokesperson for Fortnite publisher Epic Games told Wired, that it had paused all pre-roll advertising on YouTube. “Through our advertising agency, we have reached out to YouTube to determine actions they’ll take to eliminate this type of content from their service,” Fortnite added. Disney and Nestle have also paused advertising on YouTube. Replying to these accusations, a Youtube spokesperson said in an email, “Any content --including comments -- that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments.” People on Twitter have strongly condemned YouTube’s actions. https://twitter.com/gossip_garden/status/1097396580691234816 https://twitter.com/tsosnierz/status/1097412787603759104 https://twitter.com/justin_ksu/status/1098419470253596679 https://twitter.com/rep_turd/status/1097984363948457984 Youtube also recently updated its algorithm, introducing a new strikes system to make its community guidelines more transparent and consistent. They are introducing more opportunities for everyone to understand Youtube’s policies, a consistent penalty for each strike, and better notifications. Last month, YouTube announced an update regarding YouTube recommendations aiming to reduce the recommendations of videos that promote misinformation and conspiracy theories. YouTube bans dangerous pranks and challenges Youtube promises to reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Ex-googler explains why this is a ‘historic victory’. Is YouTube’s AI Algorithm evil?

Facebook announced yesterday that it’s making SPARTA, a  C++ library of software components that help build high-performance static analyzers, available as open-source yesterday. “This library is part of a broad, long-term vision to expand the use of abstract interpretation in our tools at Facebook. We are open-sourcing SPARTA to provide an industrial-scale abstract interpretation infrastructure for the broader static analysis community to use”, states the Facebook team. SPARTA is aimed at simplifying the engineering of Abstract Interpretation as its set of software components consist of a simple API. Since building an industrial-grade static analysis tool based on Abstract Interpretation from the very start is difficult, SPARTA is very beneficial.It’s also highly performant and can be assembled easily to build a production-quality static analyzer. Abstract Interpretation refers to a theory of semantic approximation that provides a foundational framework for the design of static program analyzers. SPARTA works by providing important data structures that are used in virtually every static analyzer. SPARTA encapsulates the complex implementation details of abstract interpretation and hence frees the developer to focus on the main fundamental axes in the design of an analysis. Other than that, all the static analyzers that are used in the ReDex code optimizer for Android are based on SPARTA’s library. These run on industrial-scale Android apps from Facebook and other large companies that have adopted ReDex.SPARTA makes it possible for these analyses to be expressed concisely and also guarantees high-level performance. Apart from the performance related benefits, SPARTA also makes it easier to write correct analyses. The algorithms and data structures implemented in SPARTA are also highly generic. It is language-independent; despite its use in ReDex, and contains no Android-specific logic. Also, its algorithms are capable of generalizing across different scopes of static analyses. “In the future, we could consider adding support for other features, including numerical abstractions or points-to analysis”, states the Facebook team. For more information, check out the official SPARTA blog post. Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts Facebook open sources the ELF OpenGo project and retrains the model using reinforcement learning Google open sources ClusterFuzz, a scalable fuzzing tool

In a joint statement from five European countries posted on the Kingdom of Netherlands website, they oppose the EU Copyright Directive. The text of this EU copyright directive was finalized two weeks ago and met with a lot of criticism. Article 11 and Article 13 of the directive enforce copyright restrictions that would be almost impossible to implement and would break the functioning of media and news as we know now. The five EU countries opposing the directive are Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Italy, and Finland. They do support the intentions of stimulating innovation, creativity, production of new content etc,. But they note that the finalized text of the directive does not meet with these intentions or objectives. The final text does not strike a good balance between copyright holders and EU citizens, and companies. Therefore, they feel that it’ll only hinder innovation as opposed to promoting it. The countries think the directive will have a ‘negative impact on the competitiveness of the European Digital Single Market’. They also express that the directive lacks legal clarity and will lead to uncertainties encroaching EU citizen rights. The Kingdom of Netherlands website displays: “It [EU Copyright Directive] fails to strike a balance between protecting right holders and the interests of individual citizens. This is why the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Italy and Finland don’t support the final package.” Hence, they state in the document that they do not consent with the proposed text of the Directive. This is a good move, but many find other EU countries missing in the document. A hacker news user says: “where's Sweden and Denmark? Or the much-hyped E-stonia?” Drafts of Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive have been finalized Article 13 back on Track- France and Germany join hands to save the EU’s Copyright Directive Reddit takes stands against the EU copyright directives; greets EU redditors with ‘warning box’

On Tuesday, Google announced its plans to acquire cloud migration company Alooma, which helps other companies move their data from multiple sources into a single data warehouse. Alooma not only provides services to help with migrating to the cloud but also helps in cleaning up this data and then using it for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning use cases. Google Cloud’s blog states that “ The addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable” The financial details of the deal haven't been released yet. In early 2016, Alooma raised about $15 million, including an $11.2 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Aloomas’ blog states that “Joining Google Cloud will bring us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning” In a statement to TechCrunch, Google says “Regarding supporting competitors, yes, the existing Alooma product will continue to support other cloud providers. We will only be accepting new customers that are migrating data to Google Cloud Platform, but existing customers will continue to have access to other cloud providers.” This means that, after the deal is closed, Alooma will not accept any new customers who want to migrate data to any competitors--for instance, Amazon’s Azure. Those who use Alooma in combination with AWS, Azure and other non-Google services will likely start looking for other solutions. Microsoft acquires Citus Data with plans to create a ‘Best Postgres Experience’ Autodesk acquires PlanGrid for $875 million, to digitize and automate construction workflows GitHub acquires Spectrum, a community-centric conversational platform

Yesterday, the Qt team released Qt Design Studio 1.1, a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to prototype and develop complex UIs. Qt Design Studio makes collaboration between developers and designers easy and streamlined. Qt Design Studio 1.1 comes with the availability of Linux packages. What’s new in Qt Design Studio 1.1? Qt Design Studio 1.1 is available for Linux The developers who are using Linux can now use Qt Design Studio 1.1 directly on their development system. Qt Photoshop Bridge The team at Qt updated the Qt Photoshop Bridge (which allows sanitizing documents) for Qt Design Studio 1.1. But the PSD (Photoshop Document) files containing annotations from the Qt Photoshop Bridge 1.0, require to be sanitized. Annotations are added for exporting from a PSD file using the Qt Photoshop Bridge. Qt Photoshop Bridge and merging when importing It is now possible to merge the existing QML files with the newly re-imported QML while re-importing from Photoshop to an existing Qt Design Studio project. It is highly used when the user made changes to the exported .ui.qml files using Design Studio. The merging option can be enabled by using a checkbox in the import dialog. Update projects to Qt Design Studio 1.1 Users can update their projects to Qt Design Studio 1.1 by copying the controls from a newly created Qt Design Studio 1.1 project into the existing project from Qt Design Studio 1.0. The folder that needs to be replaced is “imports/QtQuick”. Replacing this folder will update the Qt Design Studio specific components that are used in the project. Major Changes Timeline The local record button has been fixed. The timeline has now been prevented from claiming too much space. Custom colors have been added to the timeline bar items. The issue with the status bar update has been fixed. Property Editor The issue with invalid access to network paths has been addressed. Item Library This release comes with an added support for enums in .metainfo files. The issue with Image.PreserveAspectFit has been fixed. Form Editor The issue with the visibility of the selection rectangle has been fixed. Components This release comes with an added support for negative length of zoom blur and for dash pattern. This release also features added cap style to components. Platform Specific This release features added support for the dark theme on macOS Mojave and Linux package for Linux. Major bug fixes The error messages have been fixed. The clamping keyframe positions to the animation range have been fixed. It is now possible to reset the status bar when changing the QML file. To know more about this news, check out Qt’s blog post. Qt for Python 5.12 released with PySide2, Qt GUI and more Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS Qt Design Studio 1.0 released with Qt photoshop bridge, timeline based animations and Qt live preview  

Google plans to unveil a new gaming-related announcement on March 19th at the Game Developers Conference. This could possibly be based on their Project Stream announced last year. Google teased this announcement to members of the press with a GIF that shows light at the end of a tunnel followed by the date March 19th and at the end are the words "Gather around". There is no concrete information available about this but it is speculated that it’ll be a subscription based game streaming service using Project stream. Unveiling this service at the GDC would make a lot of sense as the conference will attract a lot of gamers. A Hacker news user suggests: “Project Stream will probably allow those on Linux, macOS, and especially ChromeOS to play most games, including recent ones. Which may let people switch platform more easily and/or avoid dual-booting.” Source: Engadget Another user thinks that the subscription service would need a partnership with gaming companies: “If it is Project Stream, Google better announce some serious partnerships alongside the service. Their best bet would probably be to outright buy a major publisher,” Google is not alone or first, in this space, Microsoft also has a game streaming service called xCloud. Amazon is also building a game streaming service. The idea is to handle the graphics-heavy computation at the server end and the users will be able to ‘stream’ the game without the need for high-end hardware. Microsoft is planning to bring Xbox Live gaming to Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, and more Amazon is reportedly building a video game streaming service, says Information Now you can play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome thanks to Google’s new game streaming service

GitHub announced yesterday that it is expanding its bug bounty program by adding some more services into the list, and also increasing the reward amount offers for the vulnerability seekers. It has also added some Legal Safe Harbor terms to its updated policy. All products and services under the github.com domain including GitHub Education, Enterprise Cloud, Learning Lab, Jobs, the Desktop application, githubapp.com, and github.net are a part of this bug bounty list. Launched in 2014, GitHub’s Security Bug Bounty program paid out $165,000 to researchers from their public bug bounty program in 2018. GitHub’s researcher grants, private bug bounty programs, and a live-hacking event helped GitHub reach a huge milestone of $250,000 paid out to researchers last year. GitHub’s new Legal Safe Harbor terms cover three main sources of legal risk including: Protect user’s research activity and authorize if they cross the line for the purpose of research Protect researchers in the bug bounty program from legal exposure via third-parties. Unless GitHub gets user-written permission, they will not share identifying information with a third party Prevent researchers in the bug bounty program from being hit with any site violations when they’ve broken the rules in the spirit of research According to the GitHub blog post, “You won’t be violating our site terms if it’s specifically for bounty research. For example, if your in-scope research includes reverse engineering, you can safely disregard the GitHub Enterprise Agreement’s restrictions on reverse engineering. Our safe harbor now provides a limited waiver for parts of other site terms and policies to protect researchers from legal risk from DMCA anti-circumvention rules or other contract terms that could otherwise prohibit things a researcher might need to do, like reverse engineering or de-obfuscating code.” As for the reward schedule, GitHub says they have increased the reward amounts at all levels: Critical: $20,000–$30,000+ High: $10,000–$20,000 Medium: $4,000–$10,000 Low: $617–$2,000 “We no longer have a maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities. Although we’ve listed $30,000 as a guideline amount for critical vulnerabilities, we’re reserving the right to reward significantly more for truly cutting-edge research”, the GitHub blog states. Switzerland launches a bug bounty program ‘Public Intrusion test’ to find vulnerabilities in its E-Voting systems Hyatt Hotels launches public bug bounty program with HackerOne EU to sponsor bug bounty programs for 14 open source projects from January 2019

Cloudflare users will very soon be able to deploy Workers without having a Cloudflare domain. They will be able to deploy their Cloudflare Workers to a subdomain of their choice, with an extension of .workers.dev. According to the Cloudflare blog, this is a step towards making it easy for users to get started with Workers and build a new serverless project from scratch. Cloudflare Workers’ serverless execution environment allows users to create new applications or improve existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Cloudflare Workers run on Cloudflare servers, and not in a user’s browser, meaning that a user’s code will run in a trusted environment where it cannot be bypassed by malicious clients. workers. dev was obtained through Google’s TLD launch program. Customers can head over to workers.dev where they will be able to claim a subdomain (one per user). workers.dev is fully served using Cloudflare Workers. Zack Bloom, the Director of Product for Product Strategy at Cloudflare, says that workers.dev will especially be useful for Serverless apps. Without cold-starts users will obtain instant scaling to almost any volume of traffic, making this type of serverless seem faster and cheaper. Cloudflare workers have received an amazing response from users all over the internet: Source:HackerNews This news has also been received with much enthusiasm: https://twitter.com/MrAhmadAwais/status/1097919710249783297 You can head over to the Cloudflare blog for more information on this news. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service is now available as a mobile app for iOS and Android Cloudflare’s Workers enable containerless cloud computing powered by V8 Isolates and WebAssembly Cloudflare Workers KV, a distributed native key-value store for Cloudflare Workers

Yesterday, Uber and GM Cruise announced that they are open sourcing their respective Autonomous Visualization Systems (AVS). It is a new way for the industry to understand and share its data. AVS has become a new standard for describing and visualizing autonomous vehicle perception, motion, and planning data while offering a web-based toolkit for building applications. AVS makes it easier for developers to make a decision with respect to their development. It is free for users, so it might encourage developers to come up with interesting developments for the autonomous industry. AVS acts as a standardized visualization layer that frees developers from building custom visualization software for their autonomous vehicles. Developers can now focus on core autonomy capabilities for drive systems, remote assistance, mapping, and simulation, with the help of AVS abstracting visualization. There is a need to have operators understand why their cars make certain decisions. The visualization system helps engineers to break out and playback certain trip intervals for closer inspection. AV operators rely on off-the-shelf visualization systems that aren’t designed with self-driving cars in mind. They are usually limited to bulky desktop computers that are difficult to navigate. Uber has taken a move towards its web-based visualization platform so operators don’t have to learn complex computer graphics and data visualization. Uber opted for XVIZ and streetscape.gl Autonomous vehicle development is rapidly evolving with new services, data sets, and many use cases that require new solutions. The team at Uber had unique requirements that needed to be addressed. The team wanted to manage the data while retaining performance comparable to desktop-based systems. So the team built a system around two key pieces: XVIZ, that provides the data (including management and specification) and streetscape.gl which is the component toolkit to power web applications. Uber’s new tool seems to be more geared to AV operators specifically. While talking about its Autonomous Visualization System, the company said, “It is a customizable web-based platform that allows self-driving technology developers — big or small — to transform their vehicle data into an easily digestible visual representation of what the vehicle is seeing in the real world.” XVIZ XVIZ provides a stream-oriented view of a scene changing over time and also a user interface display system. Users can randomly seek and understand the state of the world at that point. Just like an HTML document, it’s presentation is focused and structured according to a schema that allows for introspection. It also allows for easy exploration and interrogation of the data. streetscape.gl streetscape.gl is a toolkit used for developing web applications that consume data in the XVIZ protocol. It also offers components for visualizing XVIZ streams in 3D viewports, charts, tables, videos, and more. It addresses common visualization challenges such as time synchronization across data streams, coordinate systems, cameras, dynamic styling, and interaction with 3D objects and cross components. Voyage co-founder Warren Ouyang said, “We’re excited to use Uber’s autonomous visualization system and collaborate on building better tools for the community going forward.” Last week, in a Medium post, Cruise introduced its graphics library of two- and three-dimensional scenes called “Worldview.” It provides 2D and 3D cameras, keyboard and mouse movement controls, click interaction, and a suite of built-in drawing commands. Developers can build custom visualizations easily, without having to learn complex graphics APIs or write wrappers to make them work with React. In a statement to Medium, Cruise said, “We hope Worldview will lower the barrier to entry into the powerful world of WebGL, giving web developers a simple foundation and empowering them to build more complex visualizations.” Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts Automation and Robots – Trick or Treat? Home Assistant: an open source Python home automation hub to rule all things smart  

Shazam, the popular song-identifying app removed support for all third-party SDKs with one exception as reported by Appfigures blog. The removed SDKs were of ad networks, analytics trackers, etc. They were removed since these SDKs leaked data to third parties in some way. This is something that Apple is against and is following it on Shazam as they acquired it for $400M last September. The SDKs removed in the iOS update are: Admob Bolts Doubleclick FB ads FB analytics FB login Inmobi IAS Moat Mopub The only third party SDK retained is HockeyApp. Apple doesn't keep third-party SDKs in any of their apps except apple support. On Android, however, the following SDKs are still present for Shazam: Bolts FB analytics Butter knife Crashlytics Fabric Firebase Google maps Okhttp Otto Some users agree with the decision like this comment from Hacker news: “Makes sense, now that Apple owns them.” Another user shared his views on retaining the HockeyApp: “Makes sense to keep the HockeyApp integration as it is an amazing tool for crash analysis and they still need that. Integration with crash analytic is a different type of integration than facebook, advertisement and the other stuff (crap) they have removed.” Apple buys Shazam, and will soon make the app ad-free Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information

Facebook has open sourced it’s ELF OpenGo project and added new features to it. Facebook’s ELF OpenGo is a reimplementation of AlphaGoZero / AlphaZero. Last year in May, ELF OpenGo was released to allow AI researchers to better understand how AI systems learn. This open-source bot had a 20-0 record against top professional Go players and has been widely adopted by the AI research community to run their own Go experiments. Now, the Facebook AI Research team has announced new features and research results related to ELF OpenGo. They have now retrained the model of ELF OpenGo using reinforcement learning and have also released a Windows executable version of the bot, which can be used as a training aid for Go players. A unique archive that shows ELF OpenGo's analysis of 87,000 professional Go games is also released. This will help Go players assess their performance in detail. They are also releasing their data set of 20 million self-play games and the 1,500 intermediate models. Facebook researchers have shared their experiments and learnings of retraining the ELF OpenGo model in a new research paper. The paper details the results of extensive experiments, modifying individual features during evaluation to better understand the properties of these kinds of algorithms. Training ELF OpenGo ELF OpenGo was trained on 2,000 GPUs for 9 days. Post that, the 20-block model was comparable to the 20-block models described in AlphaGo Zero and Alpha Zero. The model was also provided with pretrained superhuman models, the code used to train the models, a comprehensive training trajectory dataset featuring 20 million self-play games, over 1.5 million training mini batches, and auxiliary data. Model behavior during training There is high variance in the model’s strength when compared to other models. This property holds even if the learning rates are reduced. Moves that require significant lookahead to determine whether they should be played, such as “ladder” moves, are learned slowly by the model and are never fully mastered. The model quickly learns high quality moves at different stages of the game. In contrast to the typical behavior of tabular RL, the rate of progression for learning both mid-game and end-game moves is nearly identical. In a Facebook blog post, the team behind this RL model wrote “We're excited that our development of this versatile platform is helping researchers better understand AI, and we're gratified to see players in the Go community use it to hone their skills and study the game. We're also excited to expand last year's release into a broader suite of open source resources” The research paper titled ELF OpenGo: An Analysis and Open Reimplementation of AlphaZero is available on arXiv. Google DeepMind’s AI AlphaStar beats StarCraft II pros TLO and MaNa; wins 10-1 against the gamers. Deepmind’s AlphaZero shows unprecedented growth in AI, masters 3 different games FAIR releases a new ELF OpenGo bot with a unique archive that can analyze 87k professional Go games

Redis Labs, a California-based computer software startup, announced yesterday that it has raised $60 million in Series E financing round led by a new and leading private equity firm, Francisco Partners. Redis Labs has now raised $146 million overall in funding, including $44 million funding round back in August 2017. “This financing enables us to accelerate our strategy to deliver the fastest and most efficient database to the world and enable instant experiences for any modern application”, said Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO at Redis Labs. Other existing investors of Redis Labs such as Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital also participated in the funding round. With the new funds, the company now aims to accelerate global go-to-market execution and invest further in the Redis community. Also, it wants to continue its leadership to deliver the highest performing and most efficient database platform for modern applications. Other than that, Francisco Partners’ CIO, David Golob, will be joining the Redis Labs Board of Directors, along with operating partner Eran Gorev who will be joining the team as a board observer, as a part of the new investment. Redis Labs was found in 2011 by Ofer Bengal (CEO) and Yiftach Shoolman (CTO) and is the home of Redis, the world’s most popular in-memory database. Bengal and Schoolman built a NoSQL database platform using native data structures that could serve app requests directly from the memory. Later in 2015, Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original developer of Redis, joined Redis Labs in 2015 to lead its open source development. Redis Labs is also a commercial provider of Redis Enterprise i.e. the world’s fastest database that makes use of the modern in-memory technologies like NVMe (non-volatile memory express) and Persistent Memory. This enables it to offer cost-effective deployment over multiple public clouds and on-premise data centers.  Other than that, Redis Enterprise also comes with a variety of data modeling techniques including Streams, Graph, Document and Machine Learning, with a real-time search engine. Redis Labs has been ranked as a leader in top analyst reports on NoSQL, in-memory databases, operational databases, and database-as-a-service, and is trusted by seven Fortune 10 companies. Moreover, it has also been voted as the most loved database and is rated the most popular database container. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Redis Labs’ team as the company scales up globally to meet the needs of the Internet economy”, said Matt Spetzler, partner and co-Head of Europe at Francisco Partners. Redis 5 is now out RedisGraph v1.0 released, benchmarking proves its 6-600 times faster than existing graph databases Redis Cluster Features Overview

Last month, Firedome Inc announced the launch of the world’s first endpoint cybersecurity solutions portfolio, specifically tailored to home IoT companies and manufacturers. Firedome has developed business models that allow companies to implement top-quality endpoint cybersecurity solutions to close critical security gaps that are a byproduct of the IoT era. Home IoT devices are susceptible to cyber attacks due to the lack of regulation and budget limitations. Cryptojacking, DDoS and ransomware attacks are only a few examples of cyber crimes threaten the smart home ecosystem and consumer privacy. The low margins in this industry have led to manufacturers facing trouble in implementing high-end cybersecurity solutions. Features of ‘Firedome ‘Endpoint Protection’ solution: A lightweight software agent that can easily be added to any connected device (during the manufacturing process or later on, ‘over the air’), A cloud-based AI engine that collects and analyzes aggregated data from multiple fleets around the world, produces insights from each attack (or attack attempt) and optimizes them across the board. An accompanying 24/7 SOC team that responds to alerts, runs security researches and supports Firedome customers. Firedome solution adds a dynamic layer of protection and is not only designed to prevent attacks from occurring in the first place but also to identify attack attempts and respond to breaches in real time, thereby eliminating damage potential until a firmware update is released. The Firedome Home Solution enables industry players to provide their consumers with cyber protection and security insights for the entire home network. Moti Shkolnik, Firedome’s Co-founder and CEO says that: “We are very excited to formally launch our suite of services and solutions for the home IoT industry and we strongly believe they have the potential of changing the Home IoT cybersecurity landscape. Device companies and other ecosystem players are craving a solution that is tailored to their needs and business constraints, a solution that will address the vulnerability that is so evident in endpoint devices. Home IoT devices are becoming a commodity and the industry must address these vulnerabilities sooner rather than later. That’s why our solution is a ‘must-have’ rather than a ‘nice-to-have’” These solutions provided by Firedome has led to its selection by Universal Electronics Inc., the worldwide leader in universal control and sensing technologies for the smart home, to provide Cybersecurity Features to the Nevo® Butler Digital Assistant Platform product. To know more about this news in detail, head over to Firedome’s official website. California passes the U.S.’ first IoT security bill IoT Forensics: Security in an always connected world where things talk AWS IoT Greengrass extends functionality with third-party connectors, enhanced security, and more

Yesterday, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, revealed that “a sophisticated state actor”  was behind a cyber attack on the Australian Parliament's computing network that also affected the network of major political parties. First reported by The Guardian, the attack affected the computer networks of the Liberal Party and the Nationals - as well as the opposition Labor Party, only three months before the Parliamentary election in May. Morrison told reporters that “Our cyber experts believe that a sophisticated state actor is responsible for this malicious activity”. In a statement to parliament on Monday, he said there was no evidence of electoral interference and measures  were taken to “ensure the integrity of our electoral system”. This intrusion into the networks of political parties was detected by agencies investigating the attack on the Parliament House network. He said security agencies had “acted decisively” to confront the incursion and were “securing these systems and protecting users”. Australian Cyber Security Centre head Alastair MacGibbon stated that the agency was currently unable to answer whether or not data had been stolen because all the agencies involved were "acting extraordinarily quickly and very openly, so we are piecing together all of the events." There is no evidence as to which country was behind the intrusion as well as no comment on how deeply the attack had penetrated the computer networks. The news comes just months after the Assistance and Access Bill was passed that allows the police to tell apps like WhatsApp and Signal to build in so-called “backdoors”, to give investigators access to the contents of messages, to assist in any investigation of cyber offense. However, security experts were unanimously against backdoors since once such a mechanism has been implanted in the app, it can create a target for other countries’ spy agencies and corporate spies to see what people are discussing. Users on Twitter and HackerNews have expressed strong sentiments on this news, one user is blaming the government's choices like weakening the encryption in apps through their new law, that has lead to this attack. Other users are speculating Russia’s hand in this attack. The Sydney Morning Herald stated that just four states — China, Russia, Israel, and the United States — have the capability to perform such an attack. https://twitter.com/Sunflower15661/status/1097322875042910208 https://twitter.com/admburns/status/1097402032833679360 Head over to BBC for more insights on this news. Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies already issued notices under the ‘Assistance and Access’ Act despite opposition from industry groups Australia’s Facial recognition and identity system can have “chilling effect on freedoms of political discussion, the right to protest and the right to dissent”: The Guardian report Australia passes a rushed anti-encryption bill “to make Australians safe”; experts find “dangerous loopholes” that compromise online privacy and safety