Tech News

Yesterday, the team at Redox released Redox OS 0.5.0, a Unix like operating system written in Rust. The team has added important programs and libraries to this release. What’s new in Redox OS 0.50? Cairo This release comes with Cairo, a 2D graphics library that supports multiple output devices. It produces consistent output on all output media and takes advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It is implemented as a library which is written in the C programming language, while the bindings are available for various programming languages. relibc Redox OS 0.50 features relibc, a portable POSIX C standard library which is written in Rust and supports Redox and Linux. It reduces the issues with newlib and further creates a safer alternative to a C standard library. It has been designed to be used under redox, as an alternative to newlib. Event system The event system has been redesigned for providing support for select and poll. This release comes with new packages added to the Cookbook as well as for memory mapping support implemented in it. Standard images This release comes with new images based on new bootloaders for coreboot and EFI. The team has worked towards providing libraries for EFI Rust development and for developing coreboot payloads in Rust. LLVM This release also features the LLVM Project which is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. The LLVM Core libraries come with a target-independent optimizer and a code generation support for popular CPUs.          GLib This version of Redox OS comes with GLib which is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME.                   Pixman Redox OS 0.50 comes with Pixman that is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation that features image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Orbital widget toolkit This release comes with Orbital Widget Toolkit which is a multi-platform GUI toolkit for building user interfaces with Rust. This toolkit is based on the entity component system pattern which provides a functional-reactive API. It provides fast performance and ease over cross-platform development. Few users are happy and excited about this release and are appreciating the Redox team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Congrats on getting another release out the door! I was beginning to fear that momentum was stalling in lieu of PopOS. Keep up the great work!” The developer of Redox OS shared that there are still security concerns in the kernel with regards to memory management. He commented, “There are a couple known security issues in the kernel regarding memory management. One is that memory is granted in pages, so buffers passed to a scheme are over-mapped for the process handling it. You have to be root to handle a scheme, so it was not a high severity issue.” He further added that there are concerns with the grants which can be dropped by owning process and highlighted that more kernel work is needed. He commented, “Another is that grants can be dropped by the owning process while in use by another process. This can lead to the re-allocation of said grants in the owning process, making memory accessible to the other users of the grant. More kernel work is needed to prevent schemes from leaking data in this manner.” To know more about this news in detail, check out Redox’s official announcement. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support LLVM 8.0.0 releases! JUnit 5.4 released with an aggregate artifact for reducing your Maven and Gradle files  

Mike Fikes, the creator of Replete, a ClojureScript REPL for iOS and Android, announced last month that Replete 2.0 has been updated with ClojureScript 1.10.516. https://twitter.com/mfikes/status/1096224601124806656 Replete 2.0 offers a full-featured REPL environment, ideal for ClojureScript language learning.  Replete 2.0 is a new flagship version that includes an Android application along with a handful of other functions. Replete 2.0 introduces file & network IO via replete.core, replete.io and replete.http namespaces. Replete depends on the ability of ClojureScript to self-host, and thus always essentially carry its compiler with it. Replete iOS was one of the first applications that used self-hosted ClojureScript. Replete was then ported to Android, just recently, states Fikes on Hacker Rank. Fikes had also tweeted earlier in January this year, stating that he wanted help from people who can test the beta version of Replete 2.0. https://twitter.com/mfikes/status/1086743669825261569 Moreover, with Replete 2.0, users can now send text to Replete via a URL from other apps for evaluation as the ‘generic hooks’ still exist. In fact, there used to be an iOS app called Lisping earlier that allowed you to edit text and then send it to Replete for evaluation. Fikes further stated that he only uses Lisping and Replete for ‘quick checks of things’ (observing what a particular form might evaluate to, checking a docstring, etc). “I've never really used Replete for any heavy development”, states Fikes.   Clojure 1.10 released with Prepl, improved error reporting and Java compatibility ClojureCUDA 0.6.0 now supports CUDA 10 Clojure 1.10.0-beta1 is out!

Last week, Wednesday marked the first major milestone for Fyne, which is a cross-platform GUI written in Go. Fyne 1.0 uses OpenGL to provide cross-platform graphics and the entire toolkit is developed using scalable graphics. The Fyne toolkit communicates with operating system graphics using OpenGL, which is supported on almost all desktop and laptop systems. To do this, it relies on the built-in functionality of Cgo, the C language bridge for Go. For packaging, it uses fyne package command to generate and package all the required metadata for an application to distribute on macOS, Linux, or Windows. By default, it will build an application bundle for the current platform, which can be used in part of a cross-compilation workflow. What’s new in Fyne 1.0? Canvas API (rect, line, circle, text, image) Widget API (box, button, check, entry, form, group, hyperlink, icon, label, progress bar, radio, scroller, tabs, and toolbar) Light and dark themes Pointer, key and shortcut APIs (generic and desktop extension) OpenGL driver for Linux, macOS, and Windows Tools for embedding data and packaging releases Currently, the release only supports desktop applications. For more info, read Fyne’s blog. You may also check out Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go to learn more about Go programming. Introducing Web High-Level Shading Language (WHLSL): A graphics shading language for WebGPU State of Go February 2019 – Golang developments report for this month released Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary

PyPy team released version 7.1 of PyPy, a fast and compliant Python Interpreter, yesterday. PyPy 7.1 explores new features, improvements, and other changes. PyPy 7.1 supports x86 machines on common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD), ARM32,  s390x running Linux, etc. What’s new in PyPy 7.1? PyPy 7.1 comes with two different interpreters, namely, PyPy2.7 (an interpreter that supports the syntax and features of Python 2.7) and PyPy3.6-beta (second official release of PyPy that supports 3.6 features). The latest release finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Users can remove the conversions from strings to unicode internally, thus leading to a nice speed bump. The UTF-8 changes have been merged to the py3.5 branch (Python3.5.3). The ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays has been improved in PyPy 7.1. The CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) backend has been updated to version 1.12.2 in PyPy 7.1. Users can use CFFI as opposed to the c-extensions to interact with C and cppyy to interact with C++ code. PyPy team states that they need help from the contributors in case of PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, for tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, and general help with making RPython’s JIT even better. For more information, check out the official PyPy 7.1 release notes. PyPy 7.0 released for Python 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 alpha Python 3.8 alpha 2 is now available for testing Python steering council election results are out for January 2019

GNU team released version 4.0 of their GNU Nano, a text editor for Unix-like computing systems that use command line interface, yesterday. GNU Nano 4.0 explores new changes and improvements. GNU Nano 4.0 release has been named as “Thy Rope of Sands”. What’s new in GNU Nano 4.0? The overlong line that used to get automatically hard-wrapped has been fixed in GNU Nano 4.0. Smooth scrolling has become the default in GNU Nano 4.0. No newline character will be added automatically at end of buffer. Option --breaklonglines (-b) can easily turn the automatic hard-wrapping back on. Other pption --jumpyscrolling (-j) provides the chunky, half-screen scrolling, and option --emptyline (-e) leaves the line below the title bar unused. <Alt+Up> and <Alt+Down> can now do a linewise scroll instead of a findnext. Option --guidestripe=<number> is now able to draw a vertical bar at the given column in GNU Nano 4.0. In case a line continues offscreen, it will now end with a highlighted ">" in GNU Nano 4.0. The bindable functions such as 'cutwordleft' and 'cutwordright' have been renamed in GNU Nano 4.0. The paragraph-jumping functions have been moved from Search to Go-to-Line. An option --rebinddelete can compensate for more misbindings. The --disable-wrapping-as-root configure option has been removed. For more details on GNU Nano 4.0, check out the official release notes. GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements GNU Health Federation message and authentication server drops MongoDB and adopts PostgreSQL GNU Bison 3.3 released with major bug fixes, yyrhs and yyphrs tables, token constructors and more

Pinterest filed a new IPO paperwork on Friday, in preparation for an initial public offering, expected in April. Pinterest will go public on NYSE with the ticker symbol $PINS. S-1 IPO framework offers a comprehensive look at Pinterest’s business including the revenue generated, salary’s given to CXOs and other details. Pinterest Financials Pinterest has consistently reported revenue growth and falling losses. The company, says it earned more than $750 million in revenue last year, and it’s cut its losses from nearly $200 million in 2016 down to just under $75 million annually. Pinterest says it was, in fact, profitable in the fourth quarter of 2018. Pinterest grew 58.2 percent from 2016 to 2017, and 60.0 percent from 2017 to 2018. In total, Pinterest has posted $1.525 billion in revenue since 2016. Source:  Page 69 of S-1 Pinterest counted 265 million monthly active users, bringing in some $700 million in ad revenue in 2018, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-over-year. Source:  Page 67 of S-1 The company’s global average revenue per user (ARPU) in the year ended December 31, 2018, was $3.14, up 25 percent YoY. Its U.S. ARPU, meanwhile, sat at $9.04, a 47 percent increase from the previous estimation. Source:  Page 70 of S-1 Pinterest closed calendar 2018 with nearly $628 million in cash and equivalents. The company’s operating cash flow improved from -$102.9 million in 2017 to -$60.4 million in 2018, and the firm went from negative investing cash flow to positive last year. In the S-1 filing, “the company says that it will be well-set for future growth after the offering, presuming that it doesn’t manage to reach positive operating cash flow in short order.” The S1-filing also showed the salaries earned by CXOs. Co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann earned a salary of $197,100. However, CFO Todd Morgenfeld earned a base salary of $360,500 with stock awards worth $22,028,696. The company did not break down its stock ownership so it’s not clear what would be the salaries of the execs, once Pinterest goes public.  The company will offer two classes of stock. Class A shares will receive one vote per share, while Class B shares will receive 20 votes per share. Pinterest raised a total of almost $1.5 billion from its investors. The company’s biggest funding round was a $186 million Series G in May 2015, led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, SV Angel, and Wellington Management. The company went on to raised $150 million in June 2017 from Sinai Ventures. Associated Risk factors Pinterest said “eight out of 10 moms” are on its platform, adding that “are often the primary decision-makers when it comes to buying products and services for their household.” In its S-1 filing, Pinterest acknowledges this as a risk and notes that they would now have to penetrate new demographics. The company noted that its reliance on other third-party platforms and services could be a risk factor for the business. In 2018, Facebook changed its login authentication systems, which negatively impacted Pinterest’s user growth in the second quarter of 2018. “If Facebook or Google discontinue single sign-on or experience an outage, then we may lose and be unable to recover users previously using this function, and our user growth or engagement could decline” noted the company in the filing. Pinterest also acknowledged ad-blocking tools as one of its risk factors which may, in the future, harm its profitability. “Existing ad blocking technologies that have not been effective on our service may become effective as we make certain product changes, and new ad blocking technologies may be developed,” the company writes in the filing. US and EU regulations based on privacy and sensitive content policies may also hold Pinterest accountable for failure to comply with possible content removal requirements in the future. This was also identified as one of the risks in the S-1 filing. Pinterest took steps to reduce the spread of misinformation about vaccines on its platform last month when it suspended search results including pins and boards, for the terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. The company notes, “We are in the early stages of our monetization efforts and are still growing and scaling our revenue model. Our growth strategy depends on, among other things, attracting more advertisers (including serving more mid-market and unmanaged advertisers and expanding our sales efforts to reach advertisers in additional international markets), scaling our business with existing advertisers and expanding our advertising product offerings, such as self-serve tools. There is no assurance that this revenue model will continue to be successful or that we will generate increased revenue.” Pinterest’s public offering joins the list of highly-valued technology firms going public this year including Lyft, Zoom and soon Uber and Slack. Here’s what the Twitterati had to say. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1109190664439414784 https://twitter.com/GavinSBaker/status/1109838015764090882 https://twitter.com/DanaWollman/status/1109192413963304960 https://twitter.com/joeloskarr/status/1109553172400562176 Facebook and Google pressurized to work against ‘Anti-Vaccine’ trends after Pinterest blocks anti-vaccination content from its pinboards Slack confidentially files to go public SUSE is now an independent company after being acquired by EQT for $2.5 billion

On Monday, Stanford University launched the new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) to augment humanity with AI. The institute aims to study, guide and develop human-centered artificial intelligence technologies and applications and advance the goal of a better future for humanity through AI, according to the announcement. Its co-leaders are John Etchemendy professor of philosophy and a former Stanford University provost, and Fei-Fei Li, who is a computer science professor and a former Chief Scientist for Google Cloud AI and ML. “So much of the discussion about AI is focused narrowly around engineering and algorithms... We need a broader discussion: something deeper, something linked to our collective future. And even more importantly, that broader discussion and mindset will bring us a much more human-centered technology to make life better for everyone.” Li explains in a blog post. The institute was launched at a symposium on campus, and it will include faculty members from all seven schools at Stanford — including the School of Medicine — and will work closely with companies in a variety of sectors, including health care, and with organizations such as AI4All. "Its biggest role will be to reach out to the global AI community, including universities, companies, governments and civil society to help forecast and address issues that arise as this technology is rolled out," said Etchemendy, in the announcement. "We do not believe we have answers to the many difficult questions raised by AI, but we are committed to convening the key stakeholders in an informed, fact-based quest to find those answers." The symposium featured a star-studded speaker lineup that included industry titans Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Demis Hassabis, and Jeff Dean, as well as dozens of professors in fields as diverse as philosophy and neuroscience. Even California Governor, Gavin Newsom made an appearance, giving the final keynote speech. As the audience of the event included former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Instagram Co-founder Mike Krieger. Any AI initiative that government, academia, and industry all jointly support is good news for the future of the tech field. HAI differs from many other AI efforts in that its goal is not to create AI rivaling humans in intelligence, but rather to find ways where AI can augment human capabilities and enhance human productivity and quality of life. If you missed the event, you can view a video recording here. Institute aims to become a representative of humanity but ends up being claimed as exclusionary While the Institute’s mission stated “The creators and designers of AI must be broadly representative of humanity.” It has been noticed that the institute has 121 faculty members listed on their website, and not a single member of Stanford’s new AI faculty is black. https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1108588849503109120 There were questions as to why so many of the most influential people in the Valley decided to align with this center and publicly support it, and why this center aims to raise $1 billion to further its efforts. What does this center offer such a powerful group of people? https://twitter.com/annaeveryday/status/1108594937145114625 The moment such comments were made on Twitter the institute’s website was quickly updated to include one previously unlisted faculty member, Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor of philosophy. Bidadanure was not listed among the institute’s staff prior, according to a version of the page preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and Juliana also spoke at the institute’s opening event. It is imperative to say that we live in an age where predictive policing is real and can disproportionately hit minority communities, job hiring is handled by AI and can discriminate against women. We closely know about Google and Facebook’s algorithms deciding on what information we see and which conspiracy theory YouTube serves up next. But the algorithms making those decisions are closely guarded company secrets with global impact. In Silicon Valley and the broader Bay Area, the conversation and the speakers have shifted. It’s no longer a question of if technology can discriminate. The questions now include who can be impacted, how we can fix it, and what are we even building anyway? When a group of mostly white engineers gets together to build these systems, the impact on marginalized groups is particularly stark. Algorithms can reinforce racism in domains like housing and policing. Recently Facebook announced that the platform has removed targeting ads related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. Algorithm bias mirrors what we see in the real world. Artificial intelligence mirrors its developers and the data sets its trained on. Where there used to be a popular mythology that algorithms were just technology’s way of serving up objective knowledge, there’s now a loud and increasingly global argument about just who is building the tech and what it’s doing to the rest of us. The stated goal of Stanford’s new human-AI institute is admirable. But to get to a group that is truly “broadly representative of humanity,” they’ve got miles to go. Facebook and Microsoft announce Open Rack V3 to address the power demands from artificial intelligence and networking So, you want to learn artificial intelligence. Here’s how you do it. What can happen when artificial intelligence decides on your loan request

Microsoft made a series of new announcements, earlier this week. These include a new Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac, a first fully automated DNA data storage system, and the Revived Microsoft Office Assistant, Clippy. Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac Microsoft team announced yesterday that it's expanding the reach of the core components of its security platforms (including the new Threat & Vulnerability Management) to Mac devices. Also, the name of these unified endpoint security platforms has been updated to Microsoft Defender ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) from the prior Windows Defender ATP, keeping in mind its new cross-platform nature. “We’ve been working closely with industry partners to enable Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) customers to protect their non-Windows devices while keeping a centralized “single pane of glass” experience”, states the Microsoft Team. Users can install the Microsoft Defender ATP client on devices running macOS Mojave, macOS High Sierra, or macOS Sierra to manage and protect these devices. This app offers next-gen anti-malware protection, allowing users to review and perform configuration of their protection. Users can also configure the advanced settings, including disabling or enabling real-time protection, cloud-delivered protection, and automatic sample submission among others. Moreover, devices with alerts and detections will also get surfaced in the Microsoft Defender ATP portal. Security analysts and admins can then further review these alerts on Mac devices. Other than that, the Microsoft team also plans to bring Microsoft Intune in the future. This would enable the users to configure and deploy the settings via alternative Mac and MDM management tools such as JAMF. Fully automated DNA data storage system Microsoft announced the new and first fully automated DNA data storage system, yesterday. The system allows with the storage and retrieval of data in manufactured DNA. This move is aimed at moving the DNA tech out of the research lab and into commercial data centers, says the Microsoft team. The team (Microsoft researchers and University of Washington) successfully encoded the word “hello” in snippets of fabricated DNA. They then further converted it back to digital data with the help of a fully automated end-to-end system. This automated DNA data storage system makes use of the software developed by the Microsoft and UW team that helps convert the ones and zeros of digital data into the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs (the building blocks of DNA). It then leverages the inexpensive, ‘off-the-shelf’  lab equipment to allow the flow of necessary liquids and chemicals into a synthesizer. This synthesizer then builds the manufactured snippets of DNA and pushes them into a storage vessel. In case the system wants to retrieve the information, it can add other chemicals to properly prepare the DNA and uses microfluidic pumps to push the liquids into other parts of the system. This system is then able to “read” the DNA sequences and convert them back to information understandable by a computer. According to the researchers, “the goal of the project was not to prove how fast or inexpensively the system could work, but simply to demonstrate that automation is possible” Revived Office Assistant Clippy Microsoft revived its 90s Microsoft Office Assistant, called Clippy, earlier this week on Tuesday. Microsoft Office team brought back Clippy as an app that can offer animated Clippy stickers on chats in Microsoft Teams, company’s group chat software.These Clippy stickers were also released on Microsoft’s official Office developer GitHub page, allowing all the Microsoft Teams users to import and use these stickers for free. However, Clippy was removed yet again the next day. This is because the “brand police” within Microsoft was not happy with the reappearance of Clippy on Microsoft Teams, reports The Verge. The GitHub project associated with the same has also been removed. Clippy fans, however, are not happy with the company’s decision and have started a thread requesting Microsoft to bring back Clippy in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft brings PostgreSQL extension and SQL Notebooks functionality to Azure Data Studio Microsoft open-sources Project Zipline, its data compression algorithm and hardware for the cloud Microsoft announces Game stack with Xbox Live integration to Android and iOS

At GDC 2019, the team at Oculus launched a brand new addition to their VR collection, Oculus Rift S in partnership with Lenovo. The reason for this partnership is to speed up manufacturing and to improve upon the design of the original Rift. Oculus Rift S will be priced at $399 during launch in Spring, this year. Jason Rubin, Facebook and Oculus’ vice president of VR partnerships and Nate Mitchell, Oculus’ head of VR product said that every existing and future game on the Rift platform will be playable on the Rift S. Features of the Oculus Rift S Improved Resolution This new VR device has a 2560 x 1440 resolution (or 1280 x 1440 per eye), which is 1.4 times the total pixels higher than the original Rift. The new display is LCD instead of OLED, which brings a handful of benefits like a better fill-factor (less unlit space between pixels). However, this often lacks the rich colors and contrast of OLED. Rift S’s LCD display seems quite up to the task, despite running at 80Hz compared to the Rift’s 90Hz. Clarity and Field of View With improved fill-factor of LCD, the screen door effect (unlit space between pixels) sees a pretty solid reduction which makes the Rift S clarity seem better than the moderate change in resolution. With a slightly larger field of view and minimal mura, what you see inside the headset looks a lot like the original Rift but with better clarity. The screen door effect is less distracting, and it’s easier to get lost in the content. No Hardware IPD Adjustment As Rift S uses a single display, it has no hardware IPD adjustment (unlike the original Rift) to change the distance between the lenses to match the distance between the eyes. A proper IPD setting is important for visual comfort (and makes it easier to achieve maximum panel utilization). While IPD on the Rift S can be adjusted, to an extent, in software, users on the outer limits of the IPD range might be left wanting. Oculus hasn’t specified what they consider to be the headset’s acceptable IPD range. A new ‘Passthrough+’ Rift S new Passthrough+ allows users to ‘see through’ their headset by piping the video feed from the onboard cameras into the displays. The company says they’ve paid special attention to make sure the feed is low latency, high frame rate, and stereo-correct, which is why it’s called ‘Passthrough+’. An inside-out ‘Insight’ tracking Rift S uses an ‘inside-out’ tracking system (called Insight) which places five cameras onto the headset itself. The cameras look at the world around the user, and computer vision algorithms use the information to determine the position of the headset. The on-board cameras also look for glowing lights on the controllers (also invisible via infrared) to determine their location relative to the headset. An inside-out system like this is vastly more complex than the outside-in system of the Rift. Room-scale Out of the Box Rift S is easy to set up, and now has room-scale tracking out of the box, which means players can be more immersed in some games by walking around larger spaces and turning around naturally instead of relying on stick-based turning. Depending upon the game, having full 360 room-scale tracking can really enhance immersion levels. Other features in Rift S include hidden audio, improved design and Ergonomics, and much more. To know more about Oculus Rift S in detail, head over to its official website. Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019 Epic Games announces: Epic MegaGrants, RTX-powered Ray tracing demo, and free online services for game developers Microsoft announces Game stack with Xbox Live integration to Android and iOS  

Epic Games, an American video game and software development company, made a series of announcements, earlier this week. These include: Epic Game’s CEO, Tim Sweeney to offer $100 million in grants to game developers Stunning RTX-powered Ray-Tracing Demo named Troll Epic’s free Online Services launch for game developers Epic MegaGrants: $100 million funds to Game Developers Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games Inc, announced earlier this week that he will be offering $100 million in grants to game developers to boost the growth of the gaming industry. Sweeney made the announcement during a presentation on Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC is the world's largest professional game industry event that ended yesterday in San Francisco. Epic Games also created a $5 million fund for grants that have been disbursed over the last three years. Now Epic Games is off to build a new fund called Epic MegaGrants. These are “no-strings-attached” grants, meaning that they don’t consist of any contracts requiring game developers to do anything for Epic. All that game developers need to do is apply for the grants, create an innovative project, and if the Epic’s judges find it worthy, they’ll offer them the funds. “There are no commercial hooks back to Epic. You don’t have to commit to any deliverables. This is our way of sharing Fortnite’s unbelievable success with as many developers as we can”, said Sweeney. Troll: a Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Another eye-grabbing moment at GDC this year was a “visually stunning” ray tracing demo revealed by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films called "Troll”. Troll was rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4.22 ray tracing and camera effects. And powered by a NVIDIA’s single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.  Troll is visually inspired by Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, whose illustrations are famous for Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology known as ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjt_MqEOcGM                                                            Troll “Ray tracing is more than just reflections — it’s about all the subtle lighting interactions needed to create a natural, beautiful image. Ray tracing adds these subtle lighting effects throughout the scene, making everything look more real and natural,” said Nick Penwarden, Director of Engineering for Unreal Engine at Epic Games. NVIDIA team states in a blog post that Epic Games has been working to integrate RTX-accelerated ray tracing into its popular Unreal Engine 4. In fact, Unreal Engine 4.22 will have the support for new Microsoft DXR API for real-time ray tracing. Epic’s free online services launch for game developers Epic Games also announced the launch of free tools and services, part of the Epic Online Services, which was announced in December 2018. The SDK is available via the new developer portal for immediate download and use. SDK currently supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. Moreover, the SDK, as a part of the release, provides support for two free services, namely, game analytics and player ticketing. Game analytics help developers understand player behavior. It features DAU (Daily active users), MAU (Monthly active users), retention, new player counts, game launch counts, online user count, and more. The ticketing system connects players directly with developers and allows them to report bugs or other problems. These two services will continue to evolve along with the rest of Epic Online Services (EOS) to offer infrastructure and tools required by the developers to launch, operate, and scale the high-quality online games. Epic games will also be offering additional free services throughout 2019, including player data storage, player reports, leaderboards & stats, player identity, player inventory, matchmaking etc. “We are committed to developing EOS with features that can be used with any engine, any store and that can support any major platform...these services will allow developers to deliver cross-platform gameplay experiences that enable players to enjoy games no matter what platform they play on”, states the Epic Games team. Fortnite server suffered a minor outage, Epic Games was quick to address the issue Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android installer Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned

LLVM team released LLVM 8.0, earlier this week. LLVM is a collection of tools that help develop compiler front ends and back ends. LLVM is written in C++ and has been designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs that are written in arbitrary programming languages. LLVM 8.0 explores known issues, major improvements and other changes in the subprojects of LLVM. There were certain issues in LLVM 8.0.0 that could not be fixed earlier (before this release). For instance, clang is getting miscompiled by trunk GCC, and “asan-dynamic” is not able to work on FreeBSD. Other than the issues, there is a long list of changes that have been made to LLVM 8.0.0. Non-comprehensive changes to LLVM 8.0.0 llvm-cov tool can export lcov trace files with the help of the -format=lcov option of the export command. The add_llvm_loadable_module CMake macro has been deprecated. The add_llvm_library macro with the MODULE argument can now help provide the same functionality. For MinGW, references to data variables that are to be imported from a dll can be now accessed via a stub. This will further allow the linker to convert it to a dllimport if needed. Support has been added for labels as offsets in .reloc directive. Windows support for libFuzzer (x86_64) has also been added. Other Changes LLVM IR:  The Function attribute named speculative_load_hardening has been introduced. This will indicate that Speculative Load Hardening should be enabled for the function body. JIT APIs: ORC (On Request Compilation) JIT APIs will now support concurrent compilation. The existing (non-concurrent) ORC layer classes, as well as the related APIs, have been deprecated. These have been renamed with a “Legacy” prefix (e.g. LegacyIRCompileLayer). All the deprecated classes will be removed in LLVM 9. AArch64 Target: Support has been added for Speculative Load Hardening. Also, initial support added for the Tiny code model, where code and the statically defined symbols should remain within 1MB. MIPS Target: Support forGlobalISel instruction selection framework has been improved. ORC JIT will now offer support for MIPS and MIPS64 architectures. There’s also newly added support for MIPS N32 AB. PowerPC Target: This has now been switched to non-PIC default in LLVM 8.0.0. Darwin support has also been deprecated. Also, Out-of-Order scheduling has been enabled for P9. SystemZ Target: These include various code-gen improvements related to improved auto-vectorization, inlining, as well as the instruction scheduling. Other than these, changes have also been made to X86 target, WebAssembly Target, Nios2 target, and LLDB. For a complete list of changes, check out the official LLVM 8.0.0 release notes. LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring LLVM will be relicensing under Apache 2.0 start of next year LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN

Facebook has been in the bad books of the lawmakers and privacy experts because of its data privacy issues and controversial business decisions. This month, Facebook came under the light for using users’ phone numbers for marketing, advertising and making users searchable by their phone numbers across the social network’s different platforms. And it seems all ain’t well at Facebook! Right after the recent investigation report by New York Times, yesterday Facebook opened up about a major blunder of exposing millions of user passwords in a plain text, soon after Security journalist, Brian Krebs first reported about this issue. https://twitter.com/fbnewsroom/status/1108762595987644418 Facebook confessed that it had kept millions of user passwords in a ‘readable format’. Facebook’s engineers and other employees who had access to the company’s internal systems could see the plaintext passwords. Facebook found out in January during the company’s routine security review, that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within their internal data storage systems. Last year, after Alex Stamos, ex-Chief Security Officer at Facebook resigned from the company, Facebook stated that no one would replace Stamos. Facebook decided to not have a central point (CSO) but instead depend on the security teams, basically having no head leading the security team. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Scott Renfro, Facebook software engineer said, “The company (Facebook) wasn’t ready to talk about specific numbers, such as the number of Facebook employees who could have accessed the data.” He further added, “We’ve not found any cases so far in our investigations where someone was looking intentionally for passwords, nor have we found signs of misuse of this data. In this situation what we’ve found is these passwords were inadvertently logged but that there was no actual risk that’s come from this. We want to make sure we’re reserving those steps and only force a password change in cases where there’s definitely been signs of abuse.” Facebook’s login systems are designed to mask the passwords and thereby make them unreadable. This issue has been fixed and the company will notify the users whose passwords were stored in the plain text format. Facebook’s blog post reads, “To be clear, these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook predominantly used by people in regions with lower connectivity.” In a statement to Krebs on Security, a senior Facebook employee told that around 600 million passwords were stored in plain text, and some credentials have been stored in this way since 2012. Facebook stated that no passwords were exposed externally and the company didn’t find any evidence of abuse till date. Facebook has suggested a few steps that users can keep their account secure. Users can change their password in settings on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook suggests that its users avoid reusing passwords across different services. Users have been advised to pick strong and complex passwords for their accounts. Further Facebook recommends that users enable a security key or two-factor authentication in order to protect their Facebook account by using a third party authentication app. This way, whenever a user logs in with his/her password, Facebook will ask for a security code or ask the user to tap their security key to verify. Users are now questioning Facebook’s IT auditors and are wondering what it took the audit team this long to identify this security flaw. According to few others, Facebook opened up about this only because Kerbs on Security highlighted it, otherwise, the company would have kept it as a secret. https://twitter.com/zackwhittaker/status/1108763493392662529 Users are angry and according to them, Facebook is only concerned about their profits and don’t care about its users. Facebook has emphasized that this was an accident and unintentional. One of the users has complained that her account got hacked and she will be losing all of her content there. https://twitter.com/ashleej53189596/status/1108921181925715969 Irrespective of whether this password exposure was intentional or not, it is undeniable that Facebook has a long way to go in terms of rebuilding trust and working on its products, policies and business decisions from a safety and security perspective. To know more about this news, check out Facebook’s official announcement. Facebook takes an initiative against discriminative ads on its platform Are the lawmakers and media being really critical towards Facebook? Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement

On Wednesday, European authorities fined Google 1.49 billion euros for antitrust violations in online advertising and it seems to be the third antitrust fine by the European Union against Google since 2017. As per the regulators,  Google had imposed unfair terms on companies that used its search bar on their websites in Europe. Google has been abusing its power in its Android mobile phone operating system, shopping comparison services, and now search adverts. Last year, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager had fined Google €4.34 billion for using its Android mobile operating system for unfairly keeping its rivals away in the mobile phone market. Two years ago, Google was fined 2.4 billion euros for unfairly favoring its own shopping services over those of its rivals. Newspaper websites or blog aggregators usually have a search function embedded to them. When a user searches something on this search function, the website provides search results and search adverts that appear alongside the search result. Google uses AdSense for Search, that provides the search adverts to the owner of the publisher websites. Google acts as an advertising broker, between advertisers and website owners that provide the space. AdSense also works as an online search advertising broker platform. Google has been at the top in online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area (EEA), with a market share of more than 70% from 2006 to 2016. Last year Google held nearly 75.8% and this year it’s already 77.8%. There is constant growth happening in Google’s search ad market. And it is impossible for competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo to sell advertising space in Google's own search engine results pages. So, they need to work with third-party websites to grow their business and compete with Google. In 2006, Google had included exclusivity clauses in its contracts that prohibit the publishers from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages. In March 2009, Google started to replace the exclusivity clauses with “Premium Placement” clauses. According to these clauses, the publishers had to reserve the most profitable space on their search results pages for Google's adverts and further request a minimum number of Google adverts. This, in turn, affected Google's competitors as they got restricted from placing their search adverts in the most visible and clickable parts of the websites' search results pages. It got more difficult for the competitors when Google included the clauses that would require publishers to seek written approval from Google before making any changes to the way in which the rival adverts were displayed. Google has control over how attractive the competing search adverts would be. Google also imposed an exclusive supply obligation, which would prevent competitors from placing any search adverts on the most significant websites. The company gave the most valuable positions to its adverts and also controlled the performance of the rivals’ adverts. European Commission found that Google's conduct harmed competition and consumers, and affected innovation. Google might face civil actions before the courts of the Member States for damages suffered by any person or business because of its anti-competitive behaviour. To know more about this news, check out the official press release. Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019 Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia Google Open-sources Sandboxed API, a tool that helps in automating the process of porting existing C and C++ code    

It was just yesterday when the employees of Kickstarter, an American crowd-funding platform for creative projects, announced that they are forming a labor union called Kickstarter United, to secure more rights for the firm’s employees. Kickstarter could be the first major tech company comprising a union representation in the US. Today, Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter announced that he is stepping down from his role as a CEO at Kickstarter. Chen stated in an open letter on Kickstarter’s blog that he's going to focus more on the high-level and long-term goals within the company in his role as Chairman of the board. Chen notes that Kickstarter has managed to accomplish a lot in just ten years. For instance, the firm has successfully funded nearly 160,000 projects from all over the world and have pledged to over $4.2 billion projects. Aziz Hasan, head of Kickstarter’s Design & Product teams, will be now handling the daily responsibilities as an ‘Interim CEO’. The Kickstarter PBC board will be working with Aziz over the next weeks and months to make his role as an Interim CEO permanent. BuzzFeed had reported earlier last year in April that after Chen returned back to the role of CEO in 2017, about 50 out of 120 Kickstarter employees had left the company. Out of these, seven of the eight members were a part of the firm’s executive team. “Chen strongly exerted his will on the company — making sudden changes to planned-out Kickstarter features, scrapping project timelines at the last minute, forcing out highly respected employees, and trying to shake up office culture in ways that struck the rank and file as simply bizarre”, mentioned BuzzFeed. Also, As first reported by the Verge, Kickstarter Union states that the firm overall has failed at manifesting its values within the workplace. The Union hopes to encourage “solidarity, transparency, and accountability; a seat at the table.” “It’s been a true honor to serve as CEO for the first five years of this company and again for the last two...10 is just the beginning. And I cannot wait to see what the next 10 years of Kickstarter will bring”, states Chen. You can check out Chen’s official letter here. Dr. Fei Fei Li, Google’s AI Cloud head steps down amidst speculations; Dr. Andrew Moore to take her place Linus Torvalds is sorry for his ‘hurtful behavior’, is taking ‘a break (from the Linux Community) to get help’ Vim-go creator, Faith Arslan, takes an “indefinite sabbatical” from all his open source projects as he’s burnt out

Yesterday, at the ongoing Game Developers Conference (GDC), Google marked its entry in the game industry with Stadia, its new cloud-based platform for streaming games. It will be launching later this year in select countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Europe. https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1108097130147860480 GDC 2019 is a five-day event, which commenced on 18th of this month at San Francisco, CA. It is the world’s largest game industry event which brings together 28,000 attendees to share ideas and discuss the future of the gaming industry. What is Stadia? Phil Harrison, Google’s Vice President, and GM, announcing the game streaming platform said, “Our ambition is far beyond a single game. The power of instant access is magical, and it's already transformed the music and movie industries." Stadia is a cloud-based game streaming platform that aims to bring together, gamers, YouTube broadcasters, and game developers “to create a new experience”. The games get streamed from any data center to any device that can connect to the internet like TV, laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. With this, gamers will be able to access their games anytime and virtually on any screen. And, game developers will be able to use nearly unlimited resources for developing games. Since all the graphics processing happens on off-site hardware, there will be little stress on your local hardware. The demo that Google shared at GDC currently streams video at 1080p, 60 frames per second. At launch, Stadia will come with up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with approximately 25Mbps of bandwidth. In the future, Google is planning to offer 8K resolution and 120 frames per second. Google, in partnership with AMD, is building a custom GPU for its data centers, which will deliver 10.7 teraflops of power.  Also, each Stadia instance will be powered by a custom 2.7GHz x86 processor with 16GB of RAM. Stadia Controller At GDC, Google also talked about a dedicated controller for Stadia that directly connects to a game session in the cloud through WiFi. The controller provides a button for capturing, saving, and sharing gameplay in up to 4K resolution. It also comes integrated with Google Assistant and a built-in microphone. According to a blog post shared by Google, it is not guaranteed that the controller will be offered for sale as the device is not yet authorized by the Federal Communications Commission. While unveiling the game-streaming service, Google did not reveal any details on the pricing. Also, the details regarding when exactly we can expect this service to reach the gamers and developers are unknown. To know more in detail about Stadia, check out the official announcement on Google’s blog post. Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation