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Yesterday, at the ongoing IEEE’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Yann LeCun, Facebook AI Research director, presented a paper that touched upon the latest trends and the future of deep learning hardware. ISSCC is a five days event happening in San Francisco, where researchers present the current advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. LeCun in his presentation highlighted several AI trends company should consider in the coming years. Here are some of the highlights from his presentation: Machines should be given some “common sense” With the advancements in deep learning the computer understanding of images, audio, and texts has improved. This has allowed developers to build new applications such as information search and filtering, autonomous driving, real-time language translation, and virtual assistants. These advancements, however, are heavily dependent on supervised learning, which requires human-annotated data or reinforcement learning. LeCun believes that in the next decades, researchers should put their efforts into making machines learn just like humans, by mere observations and occasional actions or in short, by self-supervised manner. To do that, researchers need to find a way to put some level of “common sense” in machines. For this, we need deep learning architectures that are much larger than the one we have currently. LeCun, in his paper Deep Learning Hardware: Past, Present, and Future, wrote, “If self-supervised learning eventually allows machines to learn vast amounts of background knowledge about how the world works through observation, one may hypothesize that some form of machine common sense could emerge.” Empowering machines with human-like capabilities will allow them to make complex decisions. These machines could help in very critical issues like detecting hate speech and inappropriate content on Facebook, enabling virtual assistants to infer context like humans, and more. Ahead of the presentation, LeCun, in an interview with Business Insider said, "There are cases that are very obvious, and AI can be used to filter those out or at least flag for moderators to decide. But there are a large number of cases where something is hate speech but there's no easy way to detect this unless you have a broader context ... For that, the current AI tech is just not there yet." Machine learning chips that can fit everyday devices LeCun is hopeful that in future we will see computer chips that can fit in everyday devices such as vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers. With the machine learning chip incorporated, any device will be able to make smart decisions. For instance, a lawnmower will be able to recognize the difference between weeds and garden roses. Currently, we do have mobile devices with AI built in them to do things like recognizing a user’s face to unlock the device. In the coming years, more work will be put in to make mobile computing chips more sophisticated. LeCun also spoke about the need for hardware specifically designed for deep learning. The current hardware restricts developers to use batches of data in the learning and optimization phase of machine learning models. This will change in the coming years. “If you run a single image, you’re not going to be able to exploit all the computation that’s available to you in a GPU. You’re going to waste resources, basically, so batching forces you to think about certain ways of training neural nets,” he said. A new programming language for deep learning, which is more efficient than Python LeCun believes that deep learning now needs a new programming language which is much more efficient than Python. In an interview with VentureBeat, Yann LeCun said, “There are several projects at Google, Facebook, and other places to kind of design such a compiled language that can be efficient for deep learning, but it’s not clear at all that the community will follow, because people just want to use Python.” He believes that the imaginations of AI researchers and computer scientists tend to be tied to hardware and software tools available. “The kind of hardware that’s available has a big influence on the kind of research that people do, and so the direction of AI in the next decade or so is going to be greatly influenced by what hardware becomes available. It’s very humbling for computer scientists because we like to think in the abstract that we’re not bound by the limitation of our hardware, but in fact, we are.” To know about the other trends LeCun shared, check out the Facebook AI blog. Using deep learning methods to detect malware in Android Applications Researchers introduce a deep learning method that converts mono audio recordings into 3D sounds using video scenes Stanford researchers introduce DeepSolar, a deep learning framework that mapped every solar panel in the US

Splunk announced that it will no longer be selling its services to Russian companies. There will be no direct sales or via partners. This also includes companies whose headquarters is situated in Russia. However, they will continue to provide support for existing accounts/services. But, any renewals or expansion of accounts will not be entertained. Security researcher @SwiftOnSecurity spotted this first. https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1097694742706556928 Some users are encouraging the act and also suggesting this be done in China: https://twitter.com/Primed_Mover/status/1097717830580166657 They plan to continue services globally with this exception. The announcement on the Splunk website explains that this decision is effective for: “...opportunities with technical partners, resellers, distributors and vendors. It also applies to business with subsidiaries based in countries outside of Russia whose parent company is in Russia, or who would use the software or services within the territory.” Splunk is a business intelligence tool with a web UI. They also provide Security information and event management. It’s not very clear as to why they decided to drop support for Russia. Malicious cyber crimes like disinformation propaganda and hacks have been traced back to Russia in the past. Perhaps Splunk does not want to be linked to such activities or actors. Splunk leverages AI in its monitoring tools Splunk introduces machine learning capabilities in Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Why should enterprises use Splunk?

Yesterday, Computer Sweden revealed that 2.7 million recorded calls to Sweden’s 1177 medical assistance phone service were left without password protection or encryption security, on an open web server. The server was operated by MediCall, an outsourced call-center provider based in Thailand, but owned by Swedish nationals. MediCall is a subcontractor to Medhelp, a Stockholm firm, and the primary contractor that supplies 1177 call services to Inera, the Swedish company that heads up the national 1177 service. Inera is jointly owned by Sweden’s 21 regions and municipalities. Inera stated that the calls are recorded to check their quality. They further confirmed that the security issue had been discovered and remedied by the subcontractor, but added that it doesn’t have any agreement with the subcontractor. The report by Computer Sweden reveals that 2.7 million call recordings, and a total of 170,000 hours of calls logged over six years, could be remotely accessed from any browser if the IP address of the web server was known. No authentication was required to access the audio files and browser connections to the web server were not encrypted using HTTPS. Computer Sweden listened to some of the recordings to understand the severity of the issue and they found that the calls included sensitive information about patients’ diseases and ailments, medication, and medical history. People also described their children’s symptoms and provided their social security numbers for assistance. MediCall's call center system was developed by Swedish tech company Voice Integrate Nordic. Tommy Ekström, the CEO of Voice Integrate Nordic, said the leak was "catastrophic" due to the sensitivity of the information. Access to the storage device has now been closed after the review done by Computer Sweden. Users are now speculating if the incident will attract attention from Europe’s GDPR laws. It’s likely that Sweden's data protection authority will try to determine which organization was responsible for the unprotected server. GDPR also requires the data is not kept for any longer than needed for the purposes it is processed. In this case, the data has been exposed on the internet since 2003. The Collections #2-5 leak of 2.2 billion email addresses might have your information, German news site, Heise reports SBI data leak in India results in information of millions of customers exposed online GDPR complaint claims Google and IAB leaked ‘highly intimate data’ of web users for behavioral advertising

Last week, the team at WireGuard announced an initial version of WireGuard for macOS and have also launched the app in the Mac App Store. The app makes use of Apple’s Network Extension API to provide native integration into the operating system's networking stack. WireGuard is a fast, modern, and secure VPN tunnel. The new app can import new tunnels from archives and files, or you can create one from scratch. Developers said that it is currently undergoing rapid development, and taking feedback from users in implementing new and exciting features. According to TechCrunch, “The app is a drop-down menu in the menu bar. You can manage your tunnel and activate on-demand connections for some scenarios. For instance, you could choose to activate your VPN exclusively if you’re connected to the internet using Wi-Fi, and not Ethernet.” Source: TechCrunch Developers say “because the app uses these deep integration APIs, we're only allowed to distribute the application using the macOS App Store (whose rejections, appeals, and eventual acceptance made for quite the stressful saga over the last week and a half).” To know more about this announcement, read WireGuard’s email thread. Mozilla releases Firefox 62.0 with better scrolling on Android, a dark theme on macOS, and more Undetected Linux Backdoor ‘SpeakUp’ infects Linux, MacOS with cryptominers Final release for macOS Mojave is here with new features, security changes and a privacy flaw

Apple is bracing its speed in the AI race after Google and Amazon, which is clear by its latest move of acquiring Pullstring, a San Francisco-based AI startup, Axios reports. Founded in 2011 by a group of ex Pixar executives, Pullstring specializes in helping companies build conversational voice apps such as Alexa and Google Assistant. Pullstring was originally used to power voice apps for toys, including Hello Barbie in 2015. According to a report by Axios, Pullstring might help Apple's Siri in order to better compete with Alexa. It further broadened its service with IoT-enabled gadgets such as Amazon Echo and Google Assistant. The startup has raised around $44 million in venture capital, from firms like Greylock, CRV, True Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and First Round Capital. According to PitchBook, its most recent post-money valuation was just north of $160 million. The deal between Apple and Pullstring is said to be around $30 - $40 million, though it is still not clear how will Apple benefit out of the deal (monetarily). As Apple is still behind both Google and Amazon in terms of adoption of voice apps and being open to developers, this latest move might help the company to overcome this gap. Apple users are hoping that this news turns to be good for them. But only time will tell if it really turns out to be one. https://twitter.com/mordacai/status/1096580336434200576 Apple announces the iOS 12.1.4 with a fix for its Group FaceTime video bug Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Apple reinstates Facebook and Google Developer Certificates, restores the ability to run internal iOS apps  

China’s Huawei Technologies which was recently accused by the U.S. government for stealing trade secrets have again come in light for using tactics to steal Apple’s trade secrets, The Information reports. The tactics include Huawei engineers appealing to Apple's third-party manufacturers and suppliers with promises of big orders. However, instead of using the opportunity to inquire on processes related to Apple’s component production, Huawei used suspicious tactics that tried to reverse engineer technology from Apple and other competitors in the electronics market. Huawei has been trying to obtain technology from rivals, especially from Apple’s suppliers in China. Huawei has also previously copied a popular feature in Apple’s smartwatch. Last year in November, a Huawei engineer got in touch with a supplier that helps in making Apple’s heart rate sensor. The engineer arranged for a meeting on the pretext of offering the supplier a manufacturing contract. The Huawei engineer even emailed the executive a photo of material it was considering for a heart rate sensor and said, “Feel free to suggest a design you already have experience with.” But the supplier didn’t leak out any details regarding the Smart Watch. In a statement to The Information, an Apple executive said, "They were trying their luck, but we wouldn't tell them anything." Apple Watch has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and  Huawei’s smartwatch didn’t receive good feedback as users complained about the performance of its heart rate monitor. According to a spokesperson who was interviewed by The Information, “In conducting research and development, Huawei employees must search and use publicly available information and respect third-party intellectual property per our business-conduct guidelines.” Reportedly, Huawei has been adding up to the fight between the U.S. and China. U.S. companies such as Motorola and Cisco Systems have made similar claims against Huawei in civil lawsuits. According to the report by The Information, Chicago-based company, Akhan Semiconductor which helps in making durable smartphone glass, said it cooperated with a federal investigation into a theft of its intellectual property by Huawei. Huawei has been accused of using the prospect of its business relationship with Akhan to acquire samples of its glass, which Huawei took and studied. According to The Information, Huawei encouraged its employees to steal information and post it on an internal company website. The employees were also given an email address where they could send the information. Huawei had a formal program for rewarding employees that steal information. The employees get bonuses that increase based on the confidential value of the information. The company also assured employees they wouldn’t be punished for taking such actions. Huawei was suspected of copying Apple’s connector which was developed in 2016, that made the MacBook Pro hinge thinner. Last year, Huawei’s MateBook Pro showed up a similar component which was made of 13 similar parts assembled in the same manner. A former Apple employee when interviewed at Huawei was constantly asked about Apple’s upcoming products and technological features. The former Apple employee didn’t give any details and stopped interviewing at Huawei. The employee said, “It was clear they were more interested in trying to learn about Apple than they were in hiring me.” People are shocked because of the tactics used these days. A comment on HackerNews reads, “the bar for trade secrets theft is pretty low these days.” Few others think that China is getting targeted by the media. Another comment reads, “Is it just me or does there seem to be a mainstream media narrative trying to stoke the fires of nationalism against China with Huawei being the current lightning rod?” Apple announces the iOS 12.1.4 with a fix for its Group FaceTime video bug Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Apple reinstates Facebook and Google Developer Certificates, restores the ability to run internal iOS apps

Yesterday, Kali Linux’s first release for 2019 was announced. Kali Linux 2019.1 comes with a variety of changes and new features including, support for Metasploit version 5.0, kernel up to version 4.19.13, ARM updates and numerous bug fixes. Users with a Kali installation can upgrade using: root@kali:~# apt update && apt -y full-upgrade You can also download new Kali Linux ISOs directly from the official website or from the Torrent network. What’s new in Kali Linux 2019.1? Support for Metasploit 5.0 The new version of Kali Linux now supports Metasploit version 5.0, which was released last month. Metasploit 5.0 introduces multiple new features including Metasploit’s new database and automation APIs, evasion modules and libraries, expanded language support, improved performance, and more. Kali Linux 2019.1 also includes updated packages for theHarvester, DBeaver, and more. theHarvester helps Penetration testers in the early stages of the penetration test to gather emails, subdomains, hosts, employee names, open ports and banners from different public sources. DBeaver is an SQL client and a database administration tool. Updates to ARM The 2019.1 Kali release for ARM include: The operating system has an upgraded kernel (v4.19.13) that supports the use of both Banana Pi and Banana Pro single board computers. Veyron has also been moved to a 4.19 kernel The Offensive Security virtual machine and ARM images have also been updated to 2019.1 Raspberry Pi images have been simplified. Separate Raspberry Pi images are no longer there for users with TFT LCDs because Kali 2019.1 now comes with re4son’s kalipi-tft-config script on all of them.  For setting up a board with a TFT, users can run ‘kalipi-tft-config’ and follow the prompts. You can go through the changelog to know detailed bug fixes. Kali Linux 2018 for testing and maintaining Windows security – Wolf Halton and Bo Weaver [Interview] Implementing Web application vulnerability scanners with Kali Linux [Tutorial] Kali Linux 2018.2 released

Yesterday, Kamil Mielnik, a JavaScript Developer who specializes in React technology stack, introduced a new automated refactoring tool for React and Redux called R-Factor. Just like C# and Java programmers, who are spoiled with a variety of refactoring tools, JavaScript developers can use this tool to save their time. With this refactoring tool, React developers will not have to spend time writing very common code manipulations. R-Factor does not break your code, keeps your formatting, and can refactor a file in a reasonable amount of time. It comes with a set of 20 automated refactorings. Out of this 20 automated refactorings, 10 are for React components, 8 are for Redux, and the remaining two are other refactorings. It also provides 16 configuration options, using which you can match your code formatting, naming, and other preferences. Though the initial goal of this tool was to only cover React and Redux refactoring, in the future, we could see some features going beyond React and Redux. Following are some of the refactorings that are introduced: Add className: This will add the className prop to a component and apply it to its root JSX element. Convert SVG to component: With this refactoring, you can convert an SVG into a React component. Convert to arrow component: This will turn a component into a functional component defined as an arrow function. Convert to function component: You can convert a component to a functional component defined as a function. Connect: This connects a component to the Redux store with both mapStateToProps & mapDispatchToProps generated. This refactoring tool is supported on Windows, Linux, and macOS and the supported editors include Atom, Sublime Text 3, and VSCode. For using the R-Factor tool, you need to buy the license key. Before you actually start using it on your project, you can try the R-Factor tool online. To know more in detail, check out the official website of R-Factor. React Native 0.59 RC0 is now out with React Hooks, and more Reactive programming in Swift with RxSwift and RxCocoa [Tutorial] React 16.8 releases with the stable implementation of Hooks

Last week, The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on developing an internet data privacy legislation to enhance consumer protections; the one similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GAO report was requested by the House Energy and Commerce Committee two years ago and have scheduled a hearing for February 26. During this hearing, the committee will discuss GAO’s findings and the possibility of drafting the US' first federal-level internet privacy law. GAO officials said, “Recent developments regarding Internet privacy suggest that this is an appropriate time for Congress to consider comprehensive Internet privacy legislation.” The GAO officials recommended that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should be put in charge of overseeing internet privacy enforcement. GAO investigators cited the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal as an example of why a federal-level internet privacy law is important. According to ZDNet, some of the examples include: The dangers to user privacy due to the lack of regulation and oversight in the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector where devices collect massive amounts of information without users' knowledge. Automakers collecting data from smart cars owners. The lack of federal oversight over companies that collect and resell user information. The lack of protections for mobile users against secret data collection practices. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), the official who requested the report in 2017, said, “This detailed GAO report makes clear that now is the time for comprehensive congressional action on privacy that should include ensuring any agency that oversees consumer privacy has the tools to protect consumers. These recommendations and findings will be helpful as we look to develop privacy legislation in the coming months.” For its report, the GAO committee also analyzed the FTC's previous 101 user internet privacy investigations. It also took into consideration feedback from the private sector, academia, advocacy groups, other government agencies, and nine former FTC and FCC top-ranking officials, including seven former commissioners. To know more about this news in detail, read the complete GAO report. U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports U.S weapons can be easily hacked GDPR complaint claims Google and IAB leaked ‘highly intimate data’ of web users for behavioral advertising French data regulator, CNIL imposes a fine of 50M euros against Google for failing to comply with GDPR

The Google AI team in collaboration with DeepMind announced a new and open source “Deep Planning” Network, called PlaNet, last week. PlaNet is an AI agent that learns a world model using only image inputs and further plans with these models to gain experiences. PlaNet can easily solve a variety of image-based control tasks as well as compete with the advanced model-free agents. The Google AI team is also releasing the source code for the research community to further explore and build upon PlaNet. How does PlaNet work? PlaNet depends on a compact sequence of hidden or latent states. This is known called a latent dynamics model where instead of predicting directly from one image to the next image, the latent state forward is first predicted. “By compressing the images in this way, the agent can automatically learn more abstract representations, such as positions and velocities of objects, making it easier to predict forward without having to generate images along the way”, states the Google AI team. In a latent dynamics model, the information of the input images gets integrated into the hidden states with the help of an encoder network. The hidden state then gets further projected forward to predict future images and rewards. For planning, past images are encoded into the current hidden state, and then the future rewards for multiple action sequences are predicted.  PlaNet agents trained on different image-based control tasks PlaNet agents are trained across a variety of image-based control tasks. These tasks pose different challenges such as partial observability, sparse rewards for catching a ball, etc. Moreover, a single PlaNet agent is trained to solve all six tasks. Without any changes to the hyperparameters, this multi-task agent is able to achieve the same mean performance as individual agents. “We advocate for further research that focuses on learning accurate dynamics models on tasks of even higher difficulty, such as 3D environments and real-world robotics tasks. We are excited about the possibilities that model-based reinforcement learning opens up”, states the Google AI team. For more information, check out the official Google AI PlaNet announcement. Google News Initiative partners with Google AI to help ‘deep fake’ audio detection research Google AI releases Cirq and Open Fermion-Cirq to boost Quantum computation Google announces the general availability of a new API for Google Docs

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs is proposing that it receives a cut of property taxes, development fees and, increased land value for its work in Toronto, Toronto Star reports. Sidewalk Labs is planning to make Toronto's eastern waterfront into a 4.9-acre smart city which will be affordable and sustainable. In a statement to The Star, Daniel Doctoroff, CEO at Sidewalks Labs, said, “Infrastructure Sidewalk is considering funding would otherwise be unfinanceable. If we are prepared to do that when no one else is, we need to get paid back.” Though this proposal has the potential to generate around C$6 billion ($4.5 billion) to pay for the infrastructure over 30 years but is yet to be approved by the Toronto city and the public. The project plan chalked by Sidewalk Labs is for a light railway transit, 2,500 homes where 40 percent would be below market price. According to the company, the tall-timber factory which they are planning currently will create 4,000 jobs. These will be initially financed by Sidewalk but the company further plans to regain the investment through the various taxes. In an email to The Canadian Press, Sidewalk spokeswoman Keerthana Rang said, “The company does not intend to develop the entire eastern waterfront. Instead, Sidewalk will develop about 15 percent, leaving the rest to be developed “just like any other neighborhood in the city.” Last week, even Amazon scrapped off  its plans to set up its second headquarters in New York after facing a backlash. Just like Amazon's HQ2 project, even Sidewalk Labs has received backlash from locals who are worried about the company's lack of transparency and data privacy concerns. When asked regarding the public backlash, Micah Lasher, head of policy and communications at Sidewalk Labs said he expected people would not pre-judge what the company is proposing, and that public discussion would be an important part of the process. Toronto Mayor John Tory, said, “The City and Waterfront Toronto have not received any formal proposal at this time and no permissions or dispensations have been granted. Any final proposal ... will be given full public scrutiny ... and, ultimately, consideration by Waterfront Toronto and City Council.” But Paula Fletcher, Toronto City Councillor was not much happy with this idea and said, “I was terribly shocked because this was not within the scope of the project. I think it’s a big credibility problem for everybody.” It seems tech companies are mostly opting for PPP (Public Private Partnership) model. Italso looks like it is a proven model as it saves governments from spending a large amount of money. However, according to many, it is not a good plan as it consumes money from people’s pockets. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “The vast majority of public-private partnerships really end up being "public eats the costs, but private entities win all the benefits. It's gotten to the point that the mere existence of the phrase "public-private partnership" is a red flag that something corrupt is happening. (If it was a good faith effort and all above board, then it would all be done publicly in the first place).” Another user commented, “The fundamental problem of any PPP is that a lot can go wrong or change in 20, 50 years. It's impossible to predict and anticipate future economic climate so both parts try to set up adversarial contracts where they are protected as much as possible.” To know more about this news, check out the post by The Star. Shareholders sue Alphabet’s board members for protecting senior execs accused of sexual harassment Alphabet’s Waymo to launch the world’s first commercial self driving cars next month Richard DeVaul, Alphabet executive, resigns after being accused of sexual harassment    

Earlier this month, the team at Lazarus announced the release of Lazarus 2.0.0, an open-source cross-platform built with FPC 3.0.4 (Free Pascal Compiler). What’s new in Lazarus 2.0.0 LCL (Lazarus Component Library) Interface Changes ScreenToClient and ClientToScreen can now be calculated without scrollbar offset. Support for mouse wheel horz scrolling. This release comes with added flags to exclude support for some graphics formats to create smaller applications. The image list now supports multiple resolutions of one image. All the LCL controls now support High-DPI glyphs on Windows+Linux and Retina on Mac without any additional code. Every LCL control that supports ImageList now has a new ImagesWidth property for deciding what custom width at 96 PPI (100% scale) is to be used. IDE Changes This release includes several High-DPI IDE improvements and a retina support on Cocoa The IDE parses the custom compiler options for the fpc switch -FN<namespaces> for defining the default namespaces. Editor Lazarus 2.0.0 comes with "smart move cursor" moving commands for editor mappings. They are useful as an alternative for Ctrl+Left/+Right/+Shift+Left/+Shift+Right key. This release comes with added Goto/Toggle bookmark submenu for the toolbar. Additional options to fine-tune outline colors. Debugger This release comes with an added option "FixStackFrameForFpcAssert" to workaround fpc wrong frame pointer. There is an added option "FixIncorrectStepOver" to workaround "step over" issues experienced on some platforms. Components incompatibilities TSpinEditEx and TFloatSpinEditEx now inherit a common base class TSpinEditExBase. The reticule component is removed because the crosshair cursor is included in the more versatile charttools. To know more about this news, check out the Lazarus’ official post. Creating a Lazarus Component Microsoft joins the OpenChain Project to help define standards for open source software compliance Mapzen, an open-source mapping platform, joins the Linux Foundation project

Last year in November at the Chrome Dev Summit keynote, Google introduced .dev, a domain dedicated to developers and technology. The registration process has already started on Feb 16 and the team is set to launch its Early Access Program. The registration process has already started on Feb 16. According to the timeline shared at the Chrome Dev Summit, the Early Access Program will start on Feb 19th at 8:00 am PST to February 28th at 7:59 am PST. Under this program, users can register available .dev domains by giving an extra fee. This fee will decrease as we get closer to the General Availability phase, which starts February 28 onwards. After registering the domain, users will be required to pay $12/year cost for .dev domains. In addition to a dedicated space for developers, this domain will provide built-in security, as it is included on the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) preload list. This essentially means that all the connections to .dev websites and pages will be made using HTTPS. Looking at Google’s track record of killing its products over time, some Hacker News users were little skeptical about this service. One user commented, “I wouldn't lease the domain through Google domains. Use a different registrar --- if possible, one that you'll be able to trust. That registrar will work with the registry of the TLD, which would be google in this case, and has a much better chance of actually resolving issues than if you were a direct customer of Google Domains.” Another user said, “They have a well-established track record of enthusiastically backing exciting new projects way outside of their core competency just to dump them like hot garbage several years later...It doesn't seem like a smart move to lease a domain from a politically active mega-monopoly that might decide to randomly become your competitor in 2 years.”  Countering this argument, one of the Google developers from the team launching .dev said,  “You'll be glad to know that TLDs can't simply be discontinued like other products might be. ICANN doesn't allow it. The procedures in place preventing a live TLD from shutting down are called EBERO.” Read more about the .dev domain on its official website. Chromium developers propose an alternative to webRequest API that could result in existing ad blockers’ end Google Chrome developers “clarify” the speculations around Manifest V3 after a study nullifies their performance hit argument Regulate Google, Facebook, and other online platforms to protect journalism, says a UK report

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest labour organization in the United States, published an open letter on Kotaku, a video game website and blog, last week. The letter urges the video game industry workers to unionize and voice their support for better treatment within the workplace. The letter is from secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler and this is the first time when AFL-CIO has made a public statement about unionizing game developers. Shuler talks about the struggles of game developers and the unfair treatment that they go through in terms of work conditions, job instability, and inadequate pay in the letter.  Shuler mentions that although U.S. video game sales reached $43 billion in 2018 ( which is 3.6 times larger than the film industry’s record-breaking box office) and is a “stunning accomplishment” for the game developers, they are still not getting the respect that they deserve.   “You’ve built new worlds, designed new challenges and ushered in a new era of entertainment. Now it’s time for industry bosses to start treating you with hard-earned dignity and respect”, writes Shuler. She mentions that game developers often work for outrageous hours in a stressful and toxic work condition, unable to ask for better due to the fear of losing their jobs. She gives an example of developers at Rockstar Games who shared their experiences of  “crunch time” (when the pressure to succeed is extreme) lasting months and sometimes even years to meet the unreal demands from management and deliver a game that made their bosses earn $725 million in its first three days. “They get rich. They get notoriety. They get to be crowned visionaries and regarded as pioneers. What do you get?”, writes Shuler. According to Shuler, this is a moment for change and change will come when developers come together as a strong union by using their “collective voice” to ask for a “fair share of wealth” that the game developers create every day. She writes that the CEOs and the bosses would treat the developers right only when they stand together and demand it. “You have the power to demand a stake in your industry and a say in your economic future. Whether we’re mainlining caffeine in Santa Monica, clearing tables in Chicago or mining coal in West Virginia, we deserve to collect nothing less than the full value of our work”, states Shuler. Public reaction to the news is mostly positive, with some people calling out for a better and stronger alternative than unions: https://twitter.com/kwertzy/status/1096471380357349376 https://twitter.com/getglitched/status/1096499209719685120 https://twitter.com/moesidegaming/status/1096666233011871744 https://twitter.com/legend500/status/1096571646805188608 https://twitter.com/turnageb/status/1096481116763107328 Check out the complete letter here. Open letter from Mozilla Foundation and other companies to Facebook urging transparency in political ads Google TVCs write an open letter to Google’s CEO; demands for equal benefits and treatment The cruelty of algorithms: Heartbreaking open letter criticizes tech companies for showing baby ads after stillbirth

Last week, Intel released a big patch series to introduce the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver, which is being added to the Intel "i915" Linux kernel DRM driver. Intel stated that these patches were in “preparation for upcoming devices with device local memory”, without giving out any specific details of these “upcoming devices”. It was in December 2018, that Intel had made its plans clear that it's working on everything from integrated GPUs and discrete graphics for gaming to GPUs for data centers. Fast forward to 2019, Intel is now testing the drivers required to make them run. Phoronix was the first to speculate that this device-local memory was for Intel's discrete graphics cards with dedicated vRAM; expected to debut in 2020. Specifying their motivations behind the release of the new patches, Intel tweeted: https://twitter.com/IntelGraphics/status/1096537915222642689 Amongst other features once implemented, the patches will allow a system to: Have different "regions" of memory for system memory as for any device local memory (LMEM). Introduce a simple allocator and allow the existing GEM memory management code to allocate memory to different memory regions. Providing fake LMEM (local memory) regions to exercise a new code path. These patches will lay the groundwork for Linux support for the upcoming dedicated GPU’s. According to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel, "With past generations of Intel graphics, we generally see the first Linux kernel patches roughly a year or so out from the actual hardware debut." Twitter users have expressed enthusiasm towards this announcement: https://twitter.com/benjamimgois/status/1096544747597037571 https://twitter.com/ebound/status/1096498313392783360 You can head over to Freedesktop.org to have a look at these patches. Researchers prove that Intel SGX and TSX can hide malware from antivirus software Uber releases AresDB, a new GPU-powered real-time Analytics Engine TensorFlow team releases a developer preview of TensorFlow Lite with new mobile GPU backend support