Tech News

Mozilla Foundation along with other organizations, wrote an open letter to Facebook this week. The letter urges Facebook to do its part against political advertisement disinformation in 2019. Over the recent years, there have been multiple hearings and Facebook has refused to disclose proper transparency in their operations. They have made promises to EU lawmakers about controlling disinformation in political advertisements but have not really followed through. Citizens have a right to know information about the people running the advertisement campaigns. But Facebook also blocked ad transparency tools last month. The letter states that by restricting ad transparency “you [Facebook] are undermining transparency, eliminating the choice of your users to install tools that help them analyse political ads, and wielding control over good faith researchers who try to review data on the platform.” The letter further mentions that just promises and press statements are not enough, real actions need to be taken by Facebook against such advertisements that affects voter choices. They have asked Facebook to implement certain measures by April 1, 2019 in order to provide developers with sufficient time to create transparency tools before the elections. The measures are: An open Ad Archive API for advanced research of tools that analyze political ads. Clear distinguishment of political ads from content. Include sponsor identity and amount spent in all EU countries. Stop harassing good researchers who are building tools for greater transparency in Facebook advertisements They also believe that Facebook and other similar platforms can play a positive role in enabling democracy. The letter is signed by companies like All Out, OpenMedia, Wikimedia UK, and many others. You can read the letter on the Mozilla Foundation website. Is Anti-trust regulation coming to Facebook following fake news inquiry made by a global panel in the House of Commons, UK? German regulators put a halt to Facebook’s data gathering activities and ad business Facebook faces multiple data-protection investigations in Ireland

Earlier this month, Uber open-sourced Pelton, a unified resource scheduler that manages resources across distinct workloads. Pelton, first introduced in November last year, is built on top of Mesos. “By allowing others in the cluster management community to leverage unified schedulers and workload co-location, Peloton will open the door for more efficient resource utilization and management across the community”, states the Uber team. Peloton is designed for web-scale companies such as Uber that consist of millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. Peloton comes with advanced resource management capabilities such as elastic resource sharing, hierarchical max-min fairness, resource overcommits, and workload preemption. Peloton uses Mesos to aggregate resources from different hosts and then further launch tasks as Docker containers. Peloton also makes use of hierarchical resource pools to manage elastic and cluster-wide resources more efficiently. Before Peloton was released, each workload at Uber comprised its own cluster which resulted in various inefficiencies. However, with Peloton, mixed workloads can be colocated in shared clusters for better resource utilization. Peloton feature highlights Elastic Resource Sharing: Peloton supports hierarchical resource pools that help elastically share resources among different teams. Resource Overcommit and Task Preemption: Peloton helps with improving cluster utilization by scheduling workloads that use slack resources. Optimized for Big Data Workloads:  Support has been provided for advanced Apache Spark features such as dynamic resource allocation. Optimized for Machine Learning: There is support provided for GPU and Gang scheduling for TensorFlow and Horovod. High Scalability: Users can scale to millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. “Open sourcing Peloton will enable greater industry collaboration and open up the software to feedback and contributions from industry engineers, independent developers, and academics across the world”, states the Uber team. Uber and Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles Uber and GM Cruise are open sourcing their Automation Visualization Systems Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts

CASL has released a new version 2.0 bringing with it several compelling opportunities for enhancing web app authorization methods. CASL is an isomorphic authorization JavaScript library which allows you to fix user abilities in the system. It grants you to set permissions in order to access the required resources in the system. You need to define the permissions in a single location since you cannot duplicate them across UI components, API services, and database queries. Some of the noteworthy changes available in CASL 2.0 are: Package Refactoring Refactoring is a process of changing a software system to improve the internal structure of the code without altering the external performance.   The lerna project has refactored CASL 2.0 to monorepo. Because of which MongoDB related functionality is moved into a different package, thus decreasing the core library size. You can find the core package at casl/ability and MongoDB related functionality at casl/mongoose, while helper function at casl/ability/extra. You don’t need to worry about updating your dependencies, thanks to renovate bot. CASL procures Frontend frameworks CASL now has complementary packages for leading frontend frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular and Aurelia. You can now integrate CASL into different single page applications with ease.   For more details, you can refer the README file for each library: CASL Vue package CASL React package CASL Angular package CASL Aurelia package Set abilities per fields Now you can set permissions per field of your application. For example if you want certain users with the ability to change the name of the product but not the product description. You can see suitable form fields for different roles in the admin panel Demo Examples If you want demo tutorials as per CASL 2.0 and complementary packages you can visit: Integrate CASL authorization in Vuejs2 application using CASL and Vue Integrate CASL authorization in React application using CASL and React Integrate CASL authorization in Aurelia application using CASL and Aurelia Integrate CASL authorization in Expressjs application using CASL and Expressjs Integrate CASL authorization in Feathersjs application using CASL and Feathersjs If you want to start implementing CASL library in your project or work, you can visit the GitHub page.

After facing a device fingerprinting bug and security breach, Stack Overflow was again in the news on Thursday. This time it was about its homepage that showcased its new proprietary products while hiding away the primary feature it is widely known for: open, public Q&A. How the updated Stack Overflow homepage looked like? The updated homepage showed the various products Stack Overflow provides. However, it did not show any straightforward way to reach the Q&A site. Here is how the updated UI looked like: Source: Stack Overflow A Stack Overflow user wrote, how he felt when he first saw this homepage: Private Q&A. Oh, this one of those exclusive sites, maybe a forum, where you get to discuss stuff in private, probably need to pay for it, it says coworker, flagship, those are pricey words. Jobs? Oh, this must be like LinkedIn. Probably only professionals and such that only elevate themselves and talk boring stuff. You probably need to pay for exposing your account or something, as you need to on those other job sites to stand a chance. Create an account? And next they'll ask for my credit card, right? No thanks, I'll move on to TechNet or wherever. Other regular users also found this abrupt change frustrating and confusing. A Stack Overflow user compared the updated homepage to that of Facebook and LinkedIn where you require to have an account to post things. He wrote, "Today before I logged in I saw the new home page, and it immediately felt the same to me as going to Facebook or LinkedIn before you have an account. There's a big wall of gibberish that essentially says, "You can't do anything here until you start handing over information about yourself.” It is understandable that Stack Overflow is looking for new avenues for revenues. In 11 years of its existence, it has become much more than a Q&A site with voting and editing functionalities. It provides Stack Overflow for Teams, a private place for your team members to exchange questions and answers about your proprietary software. Another one is, Stack Overflow Talent that helps employers post job listings and discover talents around the globe for their organizations. Stack Overflow for Enterprise provides a platform for building a standalone Q&A community. Despite these new incredible offerings, for most people the Q&A site is what Stack Overflow is, rest all is just an addition to the main product. Hiding the actual feature for which developers visit the site behind a hamburger, while giving the actual screen space to proprietary products is what has turned off many developers. How Stack Overflow responded? After facing backlash, Stack Overflow responded with a workaround for the moment and is currently reviewing the feedback it is getting from the users. Stack Overflow said, “Overall changes in design will not be made at this moment (we are still collecting the feedback you are all posting - thanks for that). And we are carefully reviewing it and will make them later if it's necessary, however, we do want to make it easier to get to the open Q&A as fast as possible, and that means not changing the design right now.” To make it somewhat easier for the users to reach the Q&A section, it has hyperlinked the "open community" in the description. Also, the blue button which was earlier called “Create an account” now goes directly to the Q&A page. Source: Stack Overflow Developers also suggested what Stack Overflow can do to fix this problem, while also showcasing its proprietary products. Here's what a user recommended: “If you're really serious about improving it, then I have some recommendations. 1) reduce the size of the hero banner by ~50%. 2) Remove the "for developers, by developers" section and have the "Developers" button at the top go straight to stackoverflow.com/questions. 3) Remove the section on SO for Teams pricing -- that belongs as a click-through page via the "Private Q&A" link on the "For business by developers" section. On that subject, "Private Q&A" should say "Teams (Private Q&A)". 4) Remove redundant .talent-slope div and .py64 div below it.” Providing teams and enterprises a private area to discuss their coding problems is an incredible idea and there is no wrong in advertising these products to people who love using Stack Overflow. However, it does feel a little overboard to make it the main centerpiece of the homepage, when Stack Overflow is mainly known for its free Q&A feature. Also, considering the huge user base, the whole outcry could have been avoided by a little consultation from the users. Approx. 250 public network users affected during Stack Overflow’s security attack Do Google Ads secretly track Stack Overflow users?

Security over the web via passwords can be crucial as passwords are hard to memorize, easy to forget and can be easily phished or cracked. However, Microsoft Edge has recently made dealing with passwords a lot easier by introducing the Web Authentication specification. This new feature allows an improved and a more secure user experience along with a passwordless experience on the web. Using Web Authentication, Edge users can now sign in with their face, fingerprint, PIN, or portable FIDO2 devices. These methods leverage strong public-key credentials instead of passwords. Why go passwordless? Many users might still be skeptical of moving onto these methods. On the other hand, we allow most of the online websites (shopping, food ordering websites, and so on) to store our credit card numbers, our other sensitive information without any investigation. These credentials are hidden using just passwords; an outdated security model which can be easily hacked. Microsoft aims for a secure and passwordless experience on the web via advanced methods such as Windows Hello biometrics and creation of Web Authentication, an open standard for passwordless authentication. How does Web authentication work? Windows Hello allows users to authenticate without a password on any Windows 10 device. They can make use of biometrics like face and fingerprint recognition to log in to websites by a simple glance or use a PIN number to sign in. External FIDO2 security keys also work for authentication with a removable device and the user’s biometrics or PIN. There are still some websites which do not offer a complete passwordless model yet. For such websites, backward compatibility with FIDO U2F devices can act as a strong enough secondary security besides the password. At the RSA 2018 conference, Microsoft discussed how APIs shall be used to approve a payment on the web via one’s facial identity. To get started with Web Authentication in Microsoft Edge, one can install Windows Insider Preview build 17723 or higher to try out the updated feature. Read more about this feature on the Microsoft Web Authentication guide. Web Security Update: CASL 2.0 releases! Amazon Cognito for secure mobile and web user authentication [Tutorial] Oracle Web Services Manager: Authentication and Authorization

Yesterday, Apollo introduced its Apollo GraphQL Platform for product engineering teams. It is built on Apollo's core open source GraphQL client and server and comes with additional open source devtools and cloud services. This platform is a combination of open source components, commercial extensions, and cloud services. The following diagram depicts its architecture: Source: Apollo GraphQL The Apollo GraphQL platform consists of the following components: Core open source components Apollo Server: It is a JavaScript GraphQL server used to define a schema and a set of resolvers that implement each part of that schema. It supports AWS Lambda and other serverless environments. Apollo Client: It is a GraphQL client that manages data and state in an application. It comes with integrations for React, React Native, Vue, Angular, and other view layers. iOS and Android clients: These clients allows to query a GraphQL API from native iOS and Android applications. Apollo CLI: It is a command line client that provides access to Apollo cloud services. Cloud services Schema registry: It is a central registry that acts as a central source of truth for a schema. It propagates all changes and details of your data,allowing multiple teams to collaborate with full visibility and security on a single data graph. Client registry: It is a registry that enables you to track each known consumer of a schema, which can include both pre-registered and ad-hoc clients. Operation registry: It is a registry of all the known operations against the schema, which similarly can include both pre-registered and ad-hoc operations. Trace warehouse: It is a data pipeline and storage layer that captures structured information about each GraphQL operation processed by an Apollo Server. Apollo Gateway GraphQL gateway is the commercial plugin for Apollo Server. It allows multiple teams to collaborate on a single, organization-wide schema without mixing everyone’s code together in a monolithic single point of failure. To do that, the gateway deploys “micro-schemas” that reference each other into a single master schema. This master schema then looks to a client just like any regular GraphQL schema. Workflows In addition to these components, Apollo also implements some useful workflows for managing a GraphQL API. Some of these workflows are: Schema change validation: It checks the compatibility of a given schema against a set of previously-observed operations using the trace warehouse, operation registry, and (typically) the client registry. Safelisting: Apollo provides an end-to-end mechanism for safelisting known clients and queries, a recommended best practice that limits production use of a GraphQL API to specific pre-arranged operations. To read the full announcement check out Apollo’s official announcement. Apollo 11 source code: A small step for a woman, and a huge leap for ‘software engineering’ 7 reasons to choose GraphQL APIs over REST for building your APIs Baidu open sources ApolloScape and collaborates with Berkeley DeepDrive to further machine learning in automotives

Have you ever noticed that when you google lyrics of a particular song, Google displays them on its Search results card all along? A lyrics website Genius Media Group Inc. has accused Google of stealing lyrics from its site and reposting them in search results without permission. Additionally Genius claims to have caught Google “red handed” with the help of a Morse code embedded in their lyrics. On 16th June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Genius’ web traffic has dropped in recent years as Google has posted lyrics on its search results page in “information boxes” instead of routing users to lyric sites like Genius. In March, 62 percent of mobile searches on Google did not result in a click-through to another site. https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1140201102102732800 Companies like Genius and other such lyrics website depend on search engines like Google to send music lovers to the website who stock hard-to-decipher lyrics of hip-hop songs and other pop hits. While Google posting song lyrics themselves is not a crime, Genius claims that Google has been lifting the song lyrics directly from Genius without permission and reposting them on the search result page. They have also shown evidence by inserting two forms of apostrophes embedded in Genius-housed lyrics. The company started to collect proof in 2016, the team at Genius positioned both “straight” and “curly” apostrophes in their lyrics. So when the apostrophes were converted into dots and dashes like Morse code, it spelled out the words “Red Handed.” Genius added that, using these apostrophes, they found over 100 instances of Google using Genius’ own lyrics in the Google search results. Check out the below video posted by WSJ to see how Genius caught Google copying the lyrics from its website: “Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” Genius’s chief strategy officer Ben Gross told the Wall Street Journal. “We noticed that Google’s lyrics matched our lyrics down to the character.” The Wall Street Journal confirmed Genius’ accusations by matching the results of a set of randomly chosen three songs from the list of 100 instances. The songs included Alessia Cara’s “Not Today” – as well as Genius’ lyrics for Desiigner’s near-indecipherable “Panda,” which the rapper himself submitted the lyrics to the site. According to the New York Post, Google has denied the accusations through their partnership with LyricFind, which provides the search engine with lyrics through a deal with music publishers. “We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,” Google said. Moreover, Google issued a second statement to say it’s investigating the issues and would terminate its agreements with partners that aren’t “upholding good practices.” “We do not source lyrics from Genius,” LyricFind Chief Executive Darryl Ballantyne said. Canva faced security breach, 139 million users data hacked: ZDNet reports Microsoft open sources SPTAG algorithm to make Bing smarter! Time for data privacy: DuckDuckGo CEO Gabe Weinberg in an interview with Kara Swisher

Google made the Bitcoin dataset publicly available for analysis in Google BigQuery in February, this year. On the same lines, it announced Ethereum dataset availability in BigQuery, recently, on August 29th for smart contract analytics. Ethereum blockchain is considered as an immutable distributed ledger similar to its predecessor, Bitcoin. However, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s creator, extended Ethereum’s set of capabilities by including a virtual machine that can execute arbitrary code stored on the blockchain as smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain data are now available for exploration with BigQuery. All historical data are in the ethereum_blockchain dataset, which updates daily. Need for Ethereum blockchain data availability on Google Cloud Ethereum blockchain peer-to-peer software has an API for a subset of commonly used random-access functions, for instance, checking transaction status, looking up wallet-transaction associations, and checking wallet balances. API endpoints neither exist for easy access to the data stored on-chain, nor for viewing the blockchain data in aggregate.  Given below is an example chart showing the total Ether transferred, and average transaction cost, aggregated by day: Source: Google Such a visualization, underpinned with a database query aids in making business decisions, such as prioritizing improvements to the Ethereum architecture itself to balance sheet adjustments. BigQuery has strong OLAP capabilities to support such an analysis during ad-hoc and in general situations. Also, this does not require additional API implementation. Accordingly, Google built a software system on Google Cloud that: Synchronizes the Ethereum blockchain to computers running Parity in Google Cloud. Performs a daily extraction of data from the Ethereum blockchain ledger, including the results of smart contract transactions, such as token transfers. De-normalizes and stores date-partitioned data to BigQuery for easy and cost-effective exploration. Google has also demonstrated a number of interesting queries and visualizations based on the Ethereum dataset. The analysis focus on three topics: Smart contract function calls On-chain transaction time-series and transaction networks Smart contract function analytics The Ethereum blockchain dataset is also available on Kaggle. You can query the live data in Kernels, Kaggle’s no charge in-browser coding environment, using the BigQuery Python client library. The Ethereum ETL project on GitHub contains all source code used to extract data from the Ethereum blockchain and load it into BigQuery. Read more about this news in detail on Google Cloud blog. Vitalik Buterin’s new consensus algorithm to make Ethereum 99% fault tolerant How to set up an Ethereum development environment [Tutorial] Everything you need to know about Ethereum

The Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is Apple’s yearly summer event for developers where the tech giant announces all the major updates related to its software and hardware platform. The event spanning from June 4-8, at McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, is expected to make big news as Apple plans to launch iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad, MacOS 10.14 for desktops among other announcements. Along with these annual OS releases we can also expect to see improvements to Apple’s very own Swift programming language slated to be released later in the year and plenty of other updates to ARKit and Siri as well. iOS 12 will have rigorous testing and digital wellbeing in focus Image Source: Apple iOS A number of rumors are circulating about what new features will be added to iOS 12 and it sounds like it is going to be a subtle change rather than drastic upgrades. Codenamed “Peace” iOS 12 will heavily focus on performance and bug fixes. Earlier this year on his visit to China, Tim Cook, stressed on the fact that due to the growing user base of the iOS devices, it becomes imperative to do rigorous testing before releasing an update to the software. This response from the Apple CEO came after a lot of advertisements featuring iOS 11 bugs surfaced on the internet. So what features are expected to be rolled out in iOS 12? Here is a list of possible announcements at WWDC: A Digital Health tool for parents, enabling them to manage children’s digital time. Animoji Update Animoji integration into FaceTime Sleep tracking improvements Multi-user sessions support for AR games and FaceTime Improved message and presencing technologies Another important update that is rumored to be added this time around is the Unified App Framework named Project Marzipan, which will let developers create a single app with an interface that adapts to the device it’s running on. While sources from Bloomberg say that this could be rolled out only as early as next year, we could see some sort of announcement at the conference next month. Will macOS 10.14 finally bring iOS into its fold? Image Source: Apple macOS The 2018 edition of Apple’s Mac operating system is likely to be released as a public beta, a month after the WWDC; followed by an actual release in September or October, based on the release trends from the previous editions. While Tim Cook, hinted that there would be no cross-platform compatibility between iOS and macOS applications, such a feature will greatly increase the number of available apps on Macs. It could also mean that Apple will bring some of its iOS-only apps, like Home, to the Mac. Apart from this, we can see several minor additions to macOS like improvements in Safari for better video conferencing and AI image identification capabilities. ABI (application binary interface) comes to Swift 5 Image Source: Apple Swift Swift continues its evolution as one of the safest, fastest, and most expressive languages, with better performance and new features in every release. One of the most awaited features in this year’s edition is Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability, a feature which was originally intended for the Swift 4 release, but got delayed. If you already know what an API is, then understanding ABI becomes a lot easier. It is a compiled version of an API. When you write source code, you access the library through an API. Once the code is compiled, your application accesses the binary data in the library through the ABI. One of the big advantages of ABI is that it enables OS vendors to embed a Swift Standard Library and runtime in the OS that is compatible with applications built with Swift 5 or later. Other notable features to be announced at WWDC are: String ergonomics to improve processing of the string type Improvements to existing standard library facilities Improvements to the Foundation API so the Cocoa SDK can work seamlessly with Swift Syntactic additions Laying the groundwork for a new concurrency model Is 2018 the year when users say, “Hey Siri, you the best!”? Image Source: Apple Siri Siri was one of the most widely-used voice assistants in the world when it was first introduced in 2011. Since then Apple has faced some stiff competition from Amazon powered Alexa and Google's me-too efforts tied to its Assistant running on Android, iOS and most of the Google products. The pressure is mounting on Apple to compete in this wildly competitive voice platform space. Hopefully this year Apple would address or add several key capabilities in Siri that could help them stand out. The most likely enhancements include: SiriKit: New domains to be the added to the current APIs. Siri already includes messaging, payments, phone calls, and ride bookings. Workflow: Apple acquired Workflow a year ago, a Workflow Intent for Siri could enable third parties to craft any sort of skill for users to launch with their voice, or graphically from any iOS device. Apples hope that this could be their answer to Alexa skills or Google’s Actions. Better “Hey Siri”: Apple has been enhancing how different Siri devices work together on the same network, an issue that neither Amazon or Google have really had. This is still a work in progress, but HomePod already does a good job of silencing your iPhone when both are listening for "Hey Siri." ARKit Image Source: Apple ARKit Last year at WWDC Apple debuted ARKit and enabled developers to create engaging virtual experiences augmented over the real world. This year we can expect a lot of improvements in this tool. For starters, the new ARKit 1.5 which was released last month brings a lot of new features to the framework such as the ability to detect vertical and irregularly shaped surfaces, detecting 2D objects and allowing developers to interact with them with better resolution. With the framework now evolving we expect to see some cool demos in this year’s conference; perhaps an integration of ARKit with Maps, along the lines of what we saw in the I/O conference earlier this month. These announcements are exciting, confirming our hunch that Apple will show off their high-profile initiatives that will shape the coming year. While only a few thousand lucky developers will get a chance to attend, others can live stream the event on Apple’s official website. Apple steals AI chief from Google F8 AR Announcements Watson-CoreML : IBM and Apple’s new machine learning collaboration project

Last week, Torkel Ödegaard co-founder of Grafana released the stable version Grafana 6.2. This version has improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things. Improved Security Datasources will now store passwords and basic auth passwords in ‘secureJsonData’ which will be encrypted by default. Browser caching is now disabled for full page requests, which will enable mitigation of risky sensitive information. Upgrade notes is provided to migrate existing data sources to use encrypted storage. Provisioning Environment variables can now support and reload configs without restarting Grafana. This feature will not allow deletion of provisioned dashboards. Instead, when a user tries to delete or save a provisioned dashboard, a relative file path to the file is shown in the dialog. Bar Gauge Panel This is an exciting feature, which is similar to the current Gauge panel and shares almost all its options. Bar Gauge uses both horizontal and vertical spaces much better, which helps in stacking efficiently. The Bar Gauge also comes with three unique display modes: Basic, Gradient, and Retro LED. Panels Without Title Sometimes panels do not need a title, but still the panel header takes up space. This makes ‘Singlestats’ have bad vertical centering. In version 6.2, Grafana will now allow panel content to use the full panel height, in case there is no panel title. Lazy Loading of Panels Out of View Grafana will not issue any data queries for panels that are not visible. This will greatly reduce the load on the data source backends, when loading dashboards with many panels. This was one of the most requested features from Grafana users. Minor Features and Fixes User time zone support added, called ‘Explore’ Support for configuring timeout durations and retries Support for multiple subscriptions per datasource A small bug fixed which will display percentile metrics in table panel called ‘Elasticsearch’ ‘InfluxDB’ to provide support for POST HTTP verb ‘CloudWatch’ is an important fix for default alias disappearing in v6.1 New ‘Search’ option Ödegaard has also notified users to switch to the new repo soon, as the previous depreciated repo will be removed on July 1. The new repository will contain all the old releases, so the user will not have to upgrade to switch package repository. Users of Grafana are quite happy with the new Grafana 6.2 version. https://twitter.com/PeterZaitsev/status/1131211702169739269 A user on Hacker News commented, “Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is here to stay!” Another user added, “Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some environmental data.” Read more about the Grafana v6.2 release on the Grafana blog. Grafana 6.0 beta is here with new panel editor UX, google stackdriver datasource, and Grafana Loki among others ‘Tableau Day’ highlights: Augmented Analytics, Tableau Prep Builder and Conductor, and more! Facebook files a lawsuit against South Korean data analytics firm, Rankwave, for unlawful data use amidst high profile calls to “break it up”

Anima Anandkumar has now bid adieu to AWS after working as the principal scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She joined AWS in November 2016, as Principal Scientist on Deep Learning. She is best known for her work in the development and analysis of tensor algorithms and in the design, development, and launch of Amazon SageMaker. Anima has earned several prestigious awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and Young Investigator Research award. After her successful 2 year stint in Amazon AWS, she has left her current post and written a heartwarming post on her personal blog. In her own words, “I want to recollect the rich learning experiences I had and the amazing things we accomplished over the last two years.” Amazon was Anima’s first industry job out of academia. She saw huge potential to democratize AI and hence chose AWS, it is the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. During her tenure at Amazon she worked on the latest GPU instances, Deeplens,  and on computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition and other technologies. Her most important contribution, however, remains, Amazon SageMaker. Its broad adoption led to AWS increasing its ML user base by more than 250 percent over the last year. Anima says, “It was personally fulfilling to build topic modeling on SageMaker (and AWS comprehend) based on my academic research, which uses tensor decompositions. SageMaker topic-modeling automatically categorizes documents at scale and is several times faster than any other (open-source) framework. Taking the tensor algorithm from its theoretical roots to an AWS production service was a big highlight for me.” As a part of applied research at AWS, she has worked on deep active learning, crowdsourcing and semi-supervised learning methods in a number of domains. She contributed to Amazon community outreach by building partnerships with universities and non-profit organizations to democratize AI.  She also represented AWS at many prominent avenues, including Deep Learning Indaba 2017, the first pan-African deep learning summit, Mulan forum for Chinese women entrepreneurs, Geekpark forum for startups in China and Shaastra 2018 at IIT Madras in India. Anima has always been a supporter of women in tech. When Anima went to IIT Madras, she realized the fewer number of women around her (the female to male ratio at IIT Madras was 1:20 then). “Even though I missed having more women in IIT, the women who got in there were remarkable since they overcame other barriers and still performed well; it gave a lot of confidence. Though I do wish there were more women and I'm always looking how to improve the diversity, it should be towards helping women overcome barriers (without compromising on performance/quality).” Her contributions make us realize the fact that women in tech are an important facet even though they are in smaller numbers. Read Anima’s adieu blog for a trip down her memory lane at AWS Cloud. Apollo 11 source code: A small step for a woman, and a huge leap for ‘software engineering’. “Technology opens up so many doors” – An Interview with Sharon Kaur from School of Code. Netflix brings in Verna Myers as new VP of Inclusion strategy to boost cultural diversity.

Last week, the MLPerf effort released the results for MLPerf Training v0.6, the second round of results from their machine learning training performance benchmark suite. These benchmarks are used by the AI practitioners to adopt common standards for measuring the performance and speed of hardware that is used to train AI models. As per these benchmark results, Nvidia and Google Cloud set new AI training time performance records. MLPerf v0.6 studies the training performance of machine learning acceleration hardware in 6 categories including image classification, object detection (lightweight), object detection (heavyweight), translation (recurrent), translation (non-recurrent) and reinforcement learning. MLPerf is an association of more than 40 companies and researchers from leading universities, and the MLPerf benchmark suites are being the industry standard for measuring machine learning performance.  As per the results, Nvidia’s Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs used an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD for completing on-premise training of the ResNet-50 model for image classification in 80 seconds. Also, Nvidia turned out to be the only vendor who submitted results in all six categories. In 2017, when Nvidia launched the DGX-1 server, it took 8 hours to complete model training. In a statement to ZDNet, Paresh Kharya, director of Accelerated Computing for Nvidia said, “The progress made in just a few short years is staggering." He further added, “The results are a testament to how fast this industry is moving." Google Cloud entered five categories and had set three records for performance at scale with its Cloud TPU v3 Pods. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) set three new performance records in the latest round of the MLPerf benchmark competition. The three record-setting results ran on Cloud TPU v3 Pods, are Google’s latest generation of supercomputers, built specifically for machine learning.  The speed of Cloud TPU Pods was better and used less than two minutes of compute time. The TPU v3 Pods also showed the record performance results in machine translation from English to German of the Transformer model within 51 seconds. Cloud TPU v3 Pods train models over 84% faster than the fastest on-premise systems in the MLPerf Closed Division. TPU pods has also achieved record performance in the image classification benchmark of the ResNet-50 model with the ImageNet data set, as well as model training in another object detection category in 1 minute and 12 seconds. In a statement to ZDNet, Google Cloud's Zak Stone said, "There's a revolution in machine learning.” He further added, "All these workloads are performance-critical. They require so much compute, it really matters how fast your system is to train a model. There's a huge difference between waiting for a month versus a couple of days." Google suffers another Outage as Google Cloud servers in the us-east1 region are cut off Google Cloud went offline taking with it YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, and a number of other web services Google Cloud introduces Traffic Director Beta, a networking management tool for service mesh  

On Tuesday, The Linux Foundation announced that Facebook’s GraphQL project has been moved to a newly-established GraphQL Foundation, which will be hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation. This foundation will be dedicated to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate the development of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem. GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012 and was later open-sourced in 2015. It has been adopted by many companies in production including Airbnb, Atlassian, Audi, CNBC, GitHub, Major League Soccer, Netflix, Shopify, The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, and Yelp. Why GraphhQL Foundation has been created? The foundation will provide a neutral home for the community to collaborate and encourage more participation and contribution. The community will be able to spread responsibilities and costs for infrastructure which will help in increasing the overall investment. This neutral governance will also ensure equal treatment in the community. The co-creator of GraphQL, Lee Byron said: “As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support.” The foundation will also provide more resources for the GraphQL community which will benefit all contributors. It will help in organizing events and working groups, formalizing governance structures, providing marketing support to the project, and handling IP and other legal issues as they arise. The Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin believes that this new foundation will ensure the long-term support for GraphQL: “We are thrilled to welcome the GraphQL Foundation into the Linux Foundation. This advancement is important because it allows for long-term support and accelerated growth of this essential and groundbreaking technology that is changing the approach to API design for cloud-connected applications in any language.” In the next few months, The Linux Foundation with Facebook and the GraphQL community will be finalizing the founding members of the GraphQL Foundation. Read the full announcement on The Linux Foundation’s website and also check out the GraphQL Foundation’s website. Introducing Apollo GraphQL Platform for product engineering teams of all sizes to do GraphQL right 7 reasons to choose GraphQL APIs over REST for building your APIs Apollo 11 source code: A small step for a woman, and a huge leap for ‘software engineering’

Atlassian has completely revamped it’s traditional Jira software adding a simplified user experience, new third-party integrations, and a new product roadmaps tool. Announced yesterday, in their official blog post, they mention that “They’ve rolled out an entirely new project experience for the next generation with a focus on making Jira Simply Powerful.” Sean Regan, head of growth for Software Teams at Atlassian, said: “With a more streamlined and simplified application, Atlassian hopes to appeal to a wider range of business execs involved in the software-creation process.” What’s new in the revamped Jira software? Powerful tech stack: Jira Software is transformed into a modern cloud app. It now includes an updated tech stack, permissions, and UX. Developers have more autonomy, administrators have more flexibility and advanced users have more power. “Additionally, we’ve made Jira simpler to use across the board. Now, anyone who works with development teams can collaborate more easily.” Customizable workflow: To upgrade user experience, Atlassian has introduced a new feature called build-your-own-boards. Users can customize their own workflow, issue types, and fields for the board. They don’t require administrator access or the need to jeopardize other project’s customizations. Source: Jira blog This customizable workflow was inspired by Trello, the task management app acquired by Atlassian for $425 million in 2017. “What we tried to do in this new experience is mirror the power that people know and love about Jira, with the simplicity of an experience like Trello.” said Regan. Third party integrations: The new Jira comes with almost 600 third-party integrations. These third-party applications, Atlassian said, should help appeal to a broader range of job roles that interact with developers. Integrations include Adobe, Sketch, and Invision. Other integrations include Facebook's Workplace and updated integrations for Gmail and Slack. Jira Cloud Mobile: Jira Cloud mobile helps developers access their projects from their smartphones. Developers can create, read, update, and delete issues and columns; groom their backlog and start and complete sprints; respond to comments and tag relevant stakeholders, all from their mobile. Roadmapping tool: Jira now features a brand new roadmaps tool that makes it easier for teams to see the big picture. “When you have multiple teams coordinating on multiple projects at the same time, shipping different features at different percentage releases, it’s pretty easy for nobody to know what is going on,” said Regan. “Roadmaps helps bring order to the chaos of software development.” Source: Jira blog Pricing for the Jira software varies by the number of users. It costs $10 per user per month for teams of up to 10 people; $7 per user per month for teams of between 11 and 100 users; and varying prices for teams larger than 100. The company also offers a free 7-day trial. Read more about the release on the Jira Blog. You can also have a look at their public roadmap. Atlassian acquires OpsGenie, launches Jira Ops to make the incident response more powerful. GitHub’s new integration for Jira Software Cloud aims to provide teams with a seamless project management experience. Atlassian open sources Escalator, a Kubernetes autoscaler project

Saturday was the ninth anniversary of the day when the Go team open-sourced the initial sketch of Golang. On each anniversary they list what has happened over the past year for Go. Golang adoption indicated in surveys In 2018 Go users expressed in multiple surveys about their happiness with using Go. Many developers who do not use Golang currently also indicated their intent to learn Go before any other language. In the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, Golang was in the top 5 most loved and top 3 most wanted languages. This indicated that developers using Go like it, and developers not using Go want to. ActiveState’s 2018 Developer Survey had Go topping the charts with 36% of users responding with “Extremely Satisfied” using Go and 61% of the users responded with “Very Satisfied” or better. While the JetBrains’s 2018 Developer Survey awarded Go the “Most promising language” with 12% of respondents using Go today and 16% with the intention to use Go in the future. Also in the HackerRank 2018 Developer Survey, 38% developer responses indicated that were intending to learn Go next. The evolution of the Golang community The first Go conferences and Go meetups were held five years ago. Since then, there has been major growth in community leadership. Now there are more than 20 Go conferences and over 300 Go-related meetups across the world. There have also been hundreds of great talks in 2018. The Go code of conduct has been revised to better support inclusivity in the Go community. Go 2 After five years since Go 1, the Go core team is looking into changes to support the language at scale. A draft design for Go modules was published in August, which included ideas to better support error values, error handling, and generic programming. And the most recent release, Golang 1.11, included preliminary support for modules. Golang contributors There has been an increasing number of contributors for Go through the years. In Q2 2018, a milestone was hit when for the first time, the contributions from the community were more than that of the Go team. For more details, visit the Go Blog. Go 2 design drafts include plans for better error handling and generics Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates