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The Australian National University (ANU) recently revealed they were hacked and personal data of students and staff over 19 years have been accessed. An official letter from ANU’s Vice-Chancellor, Brian Schmidt said that in late 2018 a “sophisticated operator” accessed their systems illegally. However, the breach was detected just two weeks ago and the ANU staff is working towards strengthening the systems “against secondary or opportunistic attacks”, Schmidt said. Regarding details on what data was affected, Schmidt wrote, “Depending on the information you have provided to the University, this may include names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, personal email addresses, and emergency contact details, tax file numbers, payroll information, bank account details, and passport details. Student academic records were also accessed.” However, the systems that store credit card details, travel information, medical records, police checks, workers' compensation, vehicle registration numbers, and some performance records have not been affected. Schmidt also said, “We have no evidence that research work has been affected” and that ANU is working closely with Australian government security agencies and industry security partners to investigate further. Suthagar Seevaratnam, ANU’s Chief Information Security Officer, also wrote a letter, today, addressing the ANU community and suggested certain steps users can take to stay safe while using emails, passwords, and also advice on general device maintenance and configuration. “If you have not reset your ANU password since November 2018, it is highly advised that you do so immediately,” he mentions in his letter. This is the second data breach in ANU’s system, which lasted for seven months. Last year, in July, the ANU revealed that hackers infiltrated its systems. Schmidt said, “Following the incident reported last year, we undertook a range of upgrades to our systems to better protect our data.  Had it not been for those upgrades, we would not have detected this incident”. “The university said it did not believe data was stolen in that attack, which national security sources said was the work of the Chinese government”, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. What will hackers actually gain by such data breach? The Australian National University is considered to be one of the nation's most prestigious educational institutions and is home to global leading research. The hackers may be trying to leverage more information about international students who attend classes at the ANU university. “The ANU also educates on national security and houses the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and the National Security College”, ABC Canberra news reports. Jamie Travers, a producer at ABC Canberra, tweeted that he had a conversation with the ANU media and they declined any information sharing about the massive breach. https://twitter.com/JamieTravers/status/1135732681407262725 Tom Uren, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told Travers that there could be two possible types of hackers behind this breach: 1) A state-sponsored group (presumably China) 2) A cybercriminal gang Travers also put forward his hypothesis on “why would a state-sponsored group such as China hack the ANU?” by giving two reasons: https://twitter.com/JamieTravers/status/1135749238468382720 https://twitter.com/JamieTravers/status/1135749435185516544 In one of his tweets, Travers also highlighted the profit a cybercriminal gang would get by breaching the ANU data, which include: Could use TFNs to file bogus tax returns. Could use bank account details to try and access users’ account. Could sell data as a whole to someone else online for ID theft. Schmidt, in his letter, said, “the University has taken immediate precautions to further strengthen our IT security and is working continuously to build on these precautions to reduce the risk of future intrusion”. To know more about this news in detail, read Brian Schmidt’s official letter to ANU’s students and staff. Facebook confessed another data breach; says it “unintentionally uploaded” 1.5 million email contacts without consent Canva faced security breach, 139 million users data hacked: ZDNet reports DockerHub database breach exposes 190K customer data including tokens for GitHub and Bitbucket repositories

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

Google has come under continued criticism for its censored Chinese search engine since it was revealed earlier this year.  But the Project - named Project Dragonfly - is today facing a day of action from human rights organization Amnesty International. Saying that "the app would set a dangerous precedent for tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments," Amnesty yesterday launched a petition opposing the project, and will be coordinating protests outside Google offices around the world. Although Google has faced tough criticism - not least from within the organization itself - Amnesty International's focus on the company represents another major challenge for Google to contend with as it ends a tough 2018. Arguably, Amnesty has shifted the complexion of the issue. It has forced it to become a question of human rights, not just of business priorities and practical compromises. What does Amnesty say about Google's Project Dragonfly? As you can imagine, Amnesty International is unequivocal in its condemnation of the censored search engine. Joe Westby, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Technology and Human Rights, said "this is a watershed moment for Google. As the world’s number one search engine, it should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible to everyone, not backing the Chinese government’s dystopian alternative." One of Amnesty's biggest fears is that Project Dragonfly could set a precedent. There's a chance it could make it acceptable for tech companies to cooperate with nations with poor records on human rights. Westby argued that "if Google is happy to capitulate to the Chinese government’s draconian rules on censorship, what’s to stop it cooperating with other repressive governments who control the flow of information and keep tabs on their citizens?" What is Amnesty International doing to protest? Amnesty International has put together a plan to raise awareness of Project Dragonfly, in a bid to gain more support from Google employees and, indeed, the wider public. Alongside the petition and planned protests, Amnesty also put together a satirical Google recruitment video. If you want to work for Google on the project, you need "great coding skills, five years’ experience, and absolutely no morals." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6nU42tqXvA&fe= How has Google responded to Amnesty International? Google hasn't, at the time of publication, responded to any requests for comment. However, CEO Sundar Pichai has always defended Project Dragonfly from criticism, saying that with China accounting for more than 20% of the world's population, Google is "compelled" to continue on its mission to help spread information to everyone around the world, regardless of who or where they are. He has also been keen to stress that Project Dragonfly is only an experiment, and has failed to commit to timelines for launching the search engine. It would appear that Google is still testing the waters and seeing if it can find a PR line it thinks employees and the general public will be happy with.

JFrog the DevOps based artifact management platform has announced a $165 million Series D funding, yesterday. This funding round was led by Insight Venture Partners. The secured funding is expected to drive JFrog product innovation, support rapid expansion into new markets, and accelerate both organic and inorganic growth. Other new investors included Spark Capital and Geodesic Capital, as well as existing investors including Battery Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and Vintage Investment Partners. Additional JFrog investors include JFrog Gemini VC Israel, Qumra Capital and VMware. JFrog transforms the way software is updated by offering an end-to-end, universal, highly-available software release platform. This platform is used for storing, securing, monitoring and distributing binaries for all technologies, including Docker, Go, Helm, Maven, npm, Nuget, PyPi, and more. As of now, according to the company, more than 5 million developers use JFrog Artifactory as their system of record when they build and release software. It also supports multiple deployment options, with its products available in a hybrid model, on-premise, and across major cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. The announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of coding-collaboration site GitHub earlier this year. Since its Series C funding round in 2016, the company has seen more than 500% sales growth and expanded its reach to over 4,500 customers, including more than 70% of the Fortune 100. It continues to add 100 new commercial logos per month and supports the world’s open source communities with its Bintray binary hub. Bintray powers 700K community projects distributing over 5.5M unique software releases that generate over 3 billion downloads a month. Read more about the announcement on JFrog official press release. OmniSci, formerly MapD, gets $55 million in series C funding. Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition is good for the open source community. Chaos engineering platform Gremlin announces $18 million series B funding and new feature for “full-stack resiliency”

PyCon Conference 2018, held between May 9 -17 at Cleveland, United States, is one of the largest annual gatherings in the Python programming community. Every year features a range of important announcements and discussions, many of which could have a huge impact on the future of Python. This year featured discussions on everything from data science to cryptocurrencies. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights. Quantum Computing Quantum computers are turning into reality, 30 years after they were first theorized. Companies such as IBM, Google, Intel, and Microsoft have all jumped into the quantum computing pool by announcing their own quantum devices. Although Quantum computing is still at a very early stage, Python is slowly becoming a de facto language for programming quantum computers due to its vast ecosystem of libraries. Dr. Ravi Chityala, a Senior Engineer at Elekta Inc, gave an impressive talk on quantum computing while highlighting several caveats that distinguish a traditional and quantum computer. He also demonstrated how to program a quantum computer on stage with Python. Check out the complete presentation here. Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are all the rage right now. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin had attracted a lot of attention in the past one year, mostly from people who were trying to make a quick buck. But this trends seems to be settling down. People are shifting their focus to understanding the technology behind cryptocurrencies. This is where Blockchain comes into the picture. What’s important to developers and businesses is how Blockchain can be applied. The lack of knowledge about how Blockchain works is a barrier that stops many  people entering and exploring the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. The session “Getting Started with Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies in Python” at PyCon conducted by Amirali Sanatinia, aimed to solve this problem by helping them understand the nuts and bolts of Blockchain and embark their journey on this revolutionary technology. Django 2.0 Unchained Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks for Python. Last December the Django team released version 2 of the popular server-side framework. Since this was one of the major releases, it was no surprise that Django was a hot topic of discussion at PyCon 2018. Harry Percival, author of Test-Driven Development with Python, presented a couple of tutorials specifically for Python testers. His tutorial was an introduction to doing Test-Driven Development (TDD) with Django.He shed some light on how automated software testing has moved from being a niche interest to an important new way of thinking about how to optimise automation testing. Serverless Python Serverless is the latest phase in the evolution of cloud development; it has recently exploded in terms of popularity. Going serverless lets developers to focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises. This reduced overhead helps them to achieve the required scale without the overhead of running and managing the fleet of servers. Since Python is one of the few languages supported by AWS Lambda, developers can leverage it to build fast and cost-effective solutions. In PyCon 2018 we saw some exciting sessions which highlighted the latest developments in Serverless computing. James Saryerwinnie’s tutorial on Building serverless applications with AWS Chalice, sparked the interest of professional developers, while Michael Herman’s tutorial on Going Serverless with OpenFaaS, Kubernetes, and Python was explored how to build and deploy a full-stack application that uses Flask (client-facing app) along with OpenFaaS to handle background processes. While the list of sessions is long we can only cover so much. One of the most important reasons for the dominating success of Python’s popularity is it’s vibrant community and PyCon is a shining example of that. It truly symbolises how liked minded people come together and share the knowledge to make the software development world a better place to live. You can catch up on all the sessions, tutorials, and events at PyCon 2018 at their official website and their Youtube vlog. Should you move to Python 3? 7 Python experts’ opinions How to write high quality code in Python: 15+ tips for data scientists and researchers Why is Python so good for AI and Machine Learning? 5 Python Experts Explain    

After announcing Redis 5 RC1 in May earlier this year, the stable version of Redis 5 was released yesterday. This release comes with a new Stream data type, LFU/LRU info in RDB, active defragmentation version 2, HyperLogLogs improvements and many other improvements. What is new in Redis 5? Redis 5 comes with a new data type called Stream, which models a log data structure in a more abstract way. Three new modules got important APIs: Cluster API, Timer API, Dictionary API. With these APIs, you can now build a distributed system with Redis using it just as a framework, creating your own protocols. To provide better-caching accuracy after a restart or when a slave does a full sync, RDB now stores the LFU and LRU information. In the future releases, we are likely to see a new feature that sends TOUCH commands to slaves to update their information about hot keys. The cluster manager is now ported from Ruby to C and is integrated with redis-cli. Because of this change, it is faster and no longer has any dependency. To learn more about the cluster manager, you can run the redis-cli --cluster help command. Also, many commands with subcommands have a HELP subcommand. Sorted set commands, ZPOPMIN/MAX, and blocking variants are introduced. These commands are used in applications such as time series and leaderboards. With active defragmentation version 2, the process of defragmenting the memory of a running server is better than before. This will be very useful for long-running workloads that tend to fragment Jemalloc. Jemalloc is now upgraded to version 5.1 Improvements are made in the implementations of the HyperLogLog data structure with refined algorithms to offer a more accurate cardinality estimation. This version comes with better memory reporting capabilities. Redis 5 provides improved networking especially related to emitting large objects, CLIENT UNBLOCK and CLIENT ID for useful patterns around connection pools and blocking commands. Read the full Redis 5 release notes on GitHub. MongoDB switches to Server Side Public License (SSPL) to prevent cloud providers from exploiting its open source code Facebook open sources LogDevice, a distributed data store for logs RxDB 8.0.0, a reactive, offline-first, multiplatform database for JavaScript released!

Yesterday, the team at Facebook’s AI research announced that they have expanded and enhanced their LASER (Language-Agnostic SEntence Representations) toolkit to work with more than more than 90 languages, written in 28 different alphabets. This has accelerated the transfer of natural language processing (NLP) applications to many more languages. The team is now open-sourcing LASER and making it as the first exploration of multilingual sentence representations. Currently 93 languages have been incorporated into LASER. LASER achieves the results by embedding all languages together in a single shared space. They are also making the multilingual encoder and PyTorch code freely available and providing a multilingual test set for more than 100 languages. The Facebook post reads, “The 93 languages incorporated into LASER include languages with subject-verb-object (SVO) order (e.g., English), SOV order (e.g., Bengali and Turkic), VSO order (e.g., Tagalog and Berber), and even VOS order (e.g., Malagasy).” Features of LASER Enables zero-shot transfer of NLP models from one language, such as English, to scores of others including languages where training data is limited. Handles low-resource languages and dialects. Provides accuracy for 13 out of the 14 languages in the XNLI corpus. It delivers results in cross-lingual document classification (MLDoc corpus). LASER’s sentence embeddings are strong at parallel corpus mining which establishes a new state of the art in the BUCC, 2018 workshop on building and using comparable Corpora, shared task for three of its four language pairs. It provides fast performance with processing up to 2,000 sentences per second on GPU. PyTorch has been used to implement the sentence encoder with minimal external dependencies. LASER supports the use of multiple languages in one sentence. LASER’s performance improves as new languages get added and the system keeps on learning to recognize the characteristics of language families. Sentence embeddings LASER maps a sentence in any language to a point in a high-dimensional space such that the same sentence in any language will end up in the same neighborhood. This representation could also be a universal language in a semantic vector space. The Facebook post reads, “We have observed that the distance in that space correlates very well to the semantic closeness of the sentences.” The sentence embeddings are used for initializing the decoder LSTM through a linear transformation and are also concatenated to its input embeddings at every time step. The encoder/decoder approach The approach behind this project is based on neural machine translation, an encoder/decoder approach which is also known as sequence-to-sequence processing. LASER uses one shared encoder for all input languages and a shared decoder for generating the output language. LASER uses a 1,024-dimension fixed-size vector for representing the input sentence. The decoder is instructed about which language needs to be generated. As the encoder has no explicit signal for indicating the input language, this method encourages it to learn language-independent representations. The team at Facebook AI-research has trained their systems on 223 million sentences of public parallel data, aligned with either English or Spanish. By using a shared BPE vocabulary trained on the concatenation of all languages, it was possible to benefit  low-resource languages from high-resource languages of the same family. Zero-shot, cross-lingual natural language inference LASER achieves excellent results in cross-lingual natural language inference (NLI). The Facebook’s AI research team considers the zero-shot setting as they train the NLI classifier on English and then apply it to all target languages with no fine tuning or target-language resources. The distances between all sentence pairs are calculated and the closest ones are selected. For more precision, the margin between the closest sentence and the other nearest neighbors is considered. This search is performed using Facebook’s FAISS library. The team outperformed the state of the art on the shared BUCC task by a large margin. The team improved the F1 score from 85.5 to 96.2 for German/English, from 81.5 to 93.9 for French/English, from 81.3 to 93.3 for Russian/English, and from 77.5 to 92.3 for Chinese/English. To know more about LASER, check out the official post by Facebook. Trick or Treat – New Facebook Community Actions for users to create petitions and connect with public officials Russia opens civil cases against Facebook and Twitter over local data laws FTC officials plan to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook for privacy violations, Washington Post reports

Last week, Microsoft introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host that provides a physical server hosted on Azure and is not shared with other customers. The company has made few licensing changes that will make the Microsoft software bit expensive for the AWS, Google and Alibaba customers. Currently, the dedicated host is available in two specifications, first is Type 1 based on a 2.3GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) and has 64 vCPUs (Virtual CPUs). It costs $4.055 or $4.492 per hour depending on the RAM (256GB or 448GB). Another is Type 2 based on the Xeon Platinum 8168 (Skylake) and comes with 72 vCPUs and 144GB RAM, it costs $4.039 per hour. These prices don’t include the licensing costs and it seems Microsoft is trying to bring changes in this area.  Last week, the team at Microsoft announced that they will modify their licensing terms related to outsourcing rights and dedicated hosted cloud services on October 1, 2019. The team further stated that this particular change won’t impact the use of existing software versions under the licenses that are purchased before October 1, 2019. The official post reads, “Currently, our outsourcing terms give on-premises customers the option to deploy Microsoft software on hardware leased from and managed by traditional outsourcers.”  The team is updating the outsourcing terms for Microsoft on-premises licenses in order to clarify the difference between on-premise/traditional outsourcing and cloud services. Additionally, they are planning to create more consistent licensing terms across multi-tenant and dedicated hosted cloud services. The customers will either have to rent the software via SPLA (Service Provider License Agreement) or they will have to purchase a license with software assurance, an annual service charge. From October 1, on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights will no longer be deployed with dedicated hosted cloud services that are offered by the public cloud providers like Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon (including VMware Cloud on AWS), and Google. According to Microsoft, they will then be referred to as “Listed Providers.” These changes won’t be applicable to other providers, Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) program as well as to the License Mobility for Software Assurance benefit except for expanding this benefit to cover dedicated hosted cloud services. Customers will benefit from licensed Microsoft products on a dedicated cloud platform Customers will be able to license Microsoft products on dedicated hosted cloud services from the Listed Providers. Users can continue to deploy and use the software under their existing licenses on Listed Providers’ servers that are dedicated to them. But they will noy be able to add workloads under licenses that are acquired on or after October 1, 2019.  Users will be able to use products through the purchase of cloud services directly from the Listed Provider, after 1st October. In case, they have licenses with Software Assurance, then it can be used with the Listed Providers’ dedicated hosted cloud services under License Mobility or Azure Hybrid Benefit rights. These changes aren’t applicable to deployment and use of licenses outside of a Listed Provider’s data center. But these changes are applicable to both first and third-party offerings on a dedicated hosted cloud service from a Listed Provider. To know more about this news, check out the official post by Microsoft. CERN plans to replace Microsoft-based programs with an affordable open-source software Softbank announces a second AI-focused Vision Fund worth $108 billion with Microsoft, Apple as major investors Why are experts worried about Microsoft’s billion dollar bet in OpenAI’s AGI pipe dream?  

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

Last year, the company announced about adopting an approach to anti-tracking considering user data privacy. The company listed a few key initiatives mitigating harmful practices like fingerprinting and cryptomining. Yesterday, Mozilla announced that it is adding a new feature to protect its users against threats and web annoyances in future releases of Firefox. This new feature is available in the beta version of Firefox 67, and the nightly version of Firefox 68. They will be available in the stable release of Firefox in a few weeks. Mozilla has also added a feature to block fingerprinting and cryptomining in Firefox Nightly as an option for users to turn on. The cryptomining and fingerprinting blocks work similar to anti-tracking blocks in current versions of Firefox. Fingerprinting and crypto mining scripts A variety of “fingerprinting” scripts are embedded invisibly on many web pages to harvest a snapshot of users’ computer configuration. These scripts further build a digital fingerprint that can be used for tracking users across the web, even if the user has cleared the cookies. Fingerprinting thus violates Firefox’s anti-tracking policy. Cryptominers is another category of scripts that run costly operations on users’ web browser without the knowledge or consent of the users. It further uses the power of the user’s CPU to generate cryptocurrency for someone else’s benefit. These scripts slow down the computer speed and the drain battery which affects the electric bill. Firefox’s move towards blocking these scripts To overcome these threats, Mozilla has announced new protections against fingerprinters and cryptominers. The company has collaborated with Disconnect and have compiled the list of domains that serve fingerprinting and cryptomining scripts. Cryptomining and fingerprinting blocks have been disabled by default for now but users can activate them in a couple of clicks in the browser settings under “Privacy & Security.” Mozilla has given an option to users option in the latest Firefox Nightly and Beta versions for blocking both kinds of scripts as part of their Content Blocking suite of protections. The team at Mozilla will be testing these protections in the coming months. To know more about this news, check out the official announcement by Mozilla. Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox Mozilla launches Firefox Lockbox, a password manager for Android Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service  

Java is preparing to support pattern matching, part of which is revamping the switch statement. The changes are going to allow the switch statement to be used as both statements and as an expression. The changes to the switch statement will simplify everyday coding. It will also pave the way for the use of pattern matching in switch. The current Java switch statement is similar to the ones in languages such as C and C++. It supports fall-through semantics by default. This traditional control flow is often useful for writing low-level code but is error-prone in switch statements used in higher-level code. Brian Goetz, architect at Oracle has proposed to add a new simplified form, with new "case L ->" switch labels in addition to traditional switch blocks. On label match, only the statement or expression to the right of an arrow label is executed. For example, consider the following method: static void howMany(int k) {    switch (k) {        case 1 -> System.out.println("one");        case 2 -> System.out.println("two");        case 3 -> System.out.println("many");    } } On calling the function on these values: howMany(1); howMany(2); howMany(3); This is the output: one two many A new form of switch label, written "case L ->" is proposed to be added. This is an effort to imply that only the code to the right of the label is to be executed if the label is matched. Like a switch statement, a switch expression can also use a traditional switch block with "case L:" switch labels. Most switch expressions have only one expression to the right of the "case L ->" switch label. When a full block is needed, the break statement is extended to take an argument. The cases of a switch expression must contain a matching switch label for any possible value. In practice, this means that a default clause is required. An enum switch expression covers all known cases. In this case, a default clause can be inserted by the compiler indicating that the enum definition has changed between compile-time and runtime. This is done manually by developers today, but having the compiler insert is less intrusive. Also, a switch expression must execute normally with a value or throw an exception. This has a number of consequences like the compiler checking every switch label. Another consequence is that the control statements like break, return and continue, not being able to jump through a switch expression. For more information visit the official OpenJDK post. No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019 Dagger 2.17, a dependency injection framework for Java and Android, is now out! Build Java EE containers using Docker [Tutorial]

This Saturday, the Golang team released the State of Go February 2019 outlining the developments in the programming language and showing its current state. Since Golang 1.11, changes have been made to the standard library, tooling, and the community. Changes in the standard library html/template The behavior when an interface is typed to an implicit escaper function is changed. It was previously <nil> and is now ignored. Changes under bufio, NewReader The UnreadRune and UnreadByte methods from Reader will return an error if they are called after Peek. new ReplaceAll function There is a new ReplaceAll function where the value passed can be bytes or strings. Changes under builtin: maps printed sorted To print a map sorted by keys, developers can just print the map. However, note that iteration will be done randomly. TLS 1.3 Using TLS 1.3 in Go helps by causing one fewer round trip, securing only cipher suites, and provides support in all major browsers. Tooling changes The following commands now work: go run pkg go run dir Functions can now be run in the debugger. The godoc CLI is now deprecated. The go vet tool is deprecated in Go 1.12. It detects wrapped fmt.Printf errors. modules modules is an alternative to GOPATH. It has integrated versioning and package distribution. runtime/trace Now there are custom events to runtime traces. webassembly Go can now compile to WebAssembly (wasm files) Ports You need Go 1.11 and later for OpenBSD 6.4 arm64 runtime is now faster Windows/arm now has support for Raspberry Pi3 These were a select few important updates from the presentation, for more details you can view The State of Go: Feb 2019. The Golang team has started working on Go 2 proposals Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary GoCity: Turn your Golang program into a 3D city

The July 2018 release of Visual Studio code 1.26 version is now available. This version includes new features for navigation, how to apply a quick fix to any problem, managing extensions and much more. What’s new in the Visual Studio code 1.26? Breadcrumbs The Visual studio editor now has a navigation bar above its contents called Breadcrumbs. It displays the current location and allows quick navigation between symbols and files. Breadcrumb navigation allows one to jump to symbols and files in their workspace. Quick Fixes from Problems panel Now one can apply Quick code fixes from the Problems panel while reviewing warning and errors. When a problem entry is hovered or selected, the respective Quick Fixes are shown via a light bulb indicator. Quick Fixes can be applied either by clicking on the light bulb or by opening the context menu for the problem entry. User setup on Windows The user setup package for Windows, announced in the previous release, is now available. This setup does not require Administrator privileges while installation. It also provides a smoother background update experience. Current users of the system-wide Windows setup will be prompted to switch to the user setup. New users will be directed towards using it by default via Visual Studio code Download page. Terminal column selection Column selection is now supported within the Integrated Terminal via Alt+click. Add all missing imports with a single quick fix The Add missing import Quick Fix can now be applied to all missing imports in a JavaScript/TypeScript file. This Quick Fix requires only a single action to add all missing imports in a JavaScript/TypeScript file. JSX tag completion Now one can work with JSX tags in JavaScript/TypeScript similar to that in HTML. The JSX tags are now closed automatically when you type ‘>’ in a JavaScript or TypeScript file. Auto closing of tags can be disabled by setting "javascript.autoClosingTags": false and "typescript.autoClosingTags": false. Better JS/TS error reporting The TypeScript team has done a lot of work to make JavaScript and TypeScript error messages smarter and clearer. Some error messages now include links to relevant locations in the source code. Improved extension search This release has added an IntelliSense autocompletion to the extension searchfield making it easier. This will help in refining extension searches to filter results based on things like category and install state; or sort results by name, rating, or install count. Extension Pack management Extension Pack management has been improved in this release. An Extension Pack is installed, uninstalled, enabled or disabled always as a single pack. One can now uninstall or disable an extension belonging to an Extension Pack without requiring to uninstall or disable the entire Extension Pack. One can easily manage Extension Packs as a single unit or by individual extension. There is also a new Extension Pack tab which displays which extensions are bundled in the Extension Pack. Preview: Settings editor This version includes a preview of GUI for editing settings. To try it out, one can go to Preferences: Open Settings (Preview) command. It contains rich settings description display, "Table of Contents" tracks scrolling, and much more. Read more about these features in detail on the Visual Studio Code July 2018 version 1.26 release notes. Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio Debugging Xamarin Application on Visual Studio [Tutorial] Visual Studio 2019: New features you should expect to see

Last week, Stjepan Glavina, a Rust programmer at Ferrous Systems, announced that the ‘async-std’ library has now reached its beta phase. This library has the “looks and feels” of Rust’s standard library but replaces its components with their async counterparts. The current state of asynchronous programming in Rust Asynchronous code facilitates the execution of multiple tasks concurrently on the same OS thread. It can potentially make your application much faster while using fewer resources as compared to a corresponding threaded implementation. Speaking of Rust’s asynchronous ecosystem, we can say that it is still early days. The standard library’s Future trait was recently stabilized and the async/await feature will soon be landing in a future version. Why async-std is introduced Rust’s Future trait is often considered to be difficult to understand, not because it is complex but because it is something that people are not used to. Stating what makes Futures confusing, the book accompanying the ‘async-std’ library states, “Futures have three concepts at their base that seem to be a constant source of confusion: deferred computation, asynchronicity and independence of execution strategy.” The ‘async-std’ library, together with its supporting libraries, aims to make asynchronous programming easier in Rust. It is based on Future and supports a set of traits from the futures library. It is also designed to support the new async programming model that is slated to be stabilized in Rust 1.39. The async-std library serves as an interface to all important primitives including filesystem operations, network operations and concurrency basics like timers. In addition to the async variations of I/O primitives found in std, it comes with async versions of concurrency primitives like Mutex and RwLock. It also ships with a ‘tasks’ module that performs a single allocation per spawned task and awaits the result of the task without the need of an extra channel. Speaking about the learning curve of async-std, Glavina said, “By mimicking standard library's well-understood APIs as closely as possible, we hope users will have an easy time learning how to use async-std and switching from thread-based blocking APIs to asynchronous ones. If you're familiar with Rust's standard library, very little should come as a surprise.” The library received a mixed reaction from the community. A user said, “In fact, Rust does have a great solution for non-blocking code: just use threads! Threads work great, they are very fast on Linux, and solutions such as goroutines are just implementations of threads in userland anyway...People tell me that Rust services scale up to thousands of requests per second on Linux by just using 1:1 threads.” A Rust developer on Reddit commented, “Looks good. I'm hoping we can soon see this project, the futures crate, async WGs crates and Tokio converge to build unified async foundations, reduce duplicated efforts (and avoid seeing dependencies explode when using several crates using async together). It's unclear to me why apparently similar crates are popping up, but I hope this is just temporary explorations of async that will merge together.” Check out the official announcement to know more about the async-std library. Also, check out its book: Async programming in Rust with async-std. Rust 1.37.0 releases with support for profile-guided optimization, built-in cargo vendor, and more Introducing Abscissa, a security-oriented Rust application framework by iqlusion Introducing Ballista, a distributed compute platform based on Kubernetes and Rust  

At a press conference yesterday, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire announced that France would levy a new tax on big tech companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, also known as GAFA, w.e.f. January 1, 2019. This tax is estimated to bring in €500m, or about $567 million in the coming year. Le Maire told France24 television, “I am giving myself until March to reach a deal on a European tax on the digital giants. If the European states do not take their responsibilities on taxing the GAFA, we will do it at a national level in 2019.” In an interview with Reuters and a small group of European newspapers, Le Maire said, “We want a fair taxation of digital giants that creates value in Europe in 2019”. France, along with Germany’s help had proposed a comprehensive digital services tax (DST) to cover all 28 EU member states. However, Ireland dismissed the move stating that this would aggravate the US-EU trade intentions. Dublin also said this bloc should happen only after the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had presented its tax proposals in 2019. Le Maire, however, said that France would press ahead alone with the tax. In March 2018, the European Commission published a proposal for a 3% tax on tech giants with global revenues north of €750m ($850 million USD) per year, and EU revenue above €50m (about $57 million). But with disagreements by some member states, including Ireland and the Netherlands, on how to move forward with such a tax, the process has been stalled. Per Le Maire, “The digital giants are the ones who have the money." The companies "make considerable profits thanks to French consumers, thanks to the French market, and they pay 14 percentage points of tax less than other businesses.” In October, British Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Budget that he plans to introduce a digital services tax from April 2020 following a consultation. The Chancellor's office has suggested that the tax would generate at least 400 million pounds ($505 million) per year. According to Reuters, “President Emmanuel Macron’s government has proposed taxing the tech giants on revenues rather than profits, to get around the problem that the companies shift the profits from where they are earned to low tax jurisdictions.” France and Germany in their alternative plan at a meeting of EU finance ministers proposed levying a 3 percent tax on digital advertising from Google and Facebook, which together account for about 75 percent of digital advertising, starting in 2021. Ministers asked the European Commission to work on the new proposal and present its findings to them in January or February. After the meeting, Le Maire said, "It's a first step in the right direction, which in the coming months should make the taxation of digital giants a possibility." To know more about this in detail, visit France24’s complete coverage. Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill, popularly known as the anti-encryption law, opposed by many including the tech community Amazon addresses employees dissent regarding the company’s law enforcement policies at an all-staff meeting, in a first Senator Ron Wyden’s data privacy law draft can punish tech companies that misuse user data