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At the first day of Accelerate 2019, DataStax unveiled DataStax Constellation, a modern cloud platform specifically designed for Apache Cassandra. DataStax is a leading provider of the always-on, active everywhere distributed hybrid cloud database built on Apache Cassandra. https://twitter.com/DataStax/status/1130803273647230976 DataStax Accelerate 2019 is a three-day event (21-23 May) happening at Maryland, US. On the agenda, this event has 70+ technical sessions, networking with experts and people from leading companies like IBM, Walgreens, T-Mobile, and also new product announcements. Sharing the vision behind DataStax Constellation, Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax, said, “With Constellation, we are making a major commitment to being the leading cloud database company and putting cloud development at the top of our priority list. From edge to hybrid to multi-cloud, we are providing developers with a cloud platform that includes the complete set of tools they need to build game-changing applications that spark transformational business change and let them do what they do best.” What is DataStax Constellation? DataStax Constellation is a modern cloud platform that provides smart services for easy and rapid development and deployment of Cassandra-based applications. It comes with an integrated web console that simplifies the use and management of Cassandra. DataStax Constellation provides an interactive developer tool for CQL (Cassandra Query Language) named DataStax Studio. This tool makes it easy for developers to collaborate by keeping track of code, query results, and visualizations in self-documenting notebooks. The Constellation platform is initially launched with two cloud services, DataStax Apache Cassandra-as-a-Service and DataStax Insights: DataStax Apache Cassandra as a Service DataStax Apache Cassandra as a Service enables you to easily develop and deploy Apache Cassandra applications in the cloud. Here are some of the advantages and features it comes with: Ensures high availability of applications: It assures uptime and integrity with multiple data replicas. Users are only charged when the database is in use, which significantly reduces operational overhead. Reduces administrative overhead: It makes your applications capable of self-healing with its advanced optimization and remediation mechanisms. Better performance than open-source Cassandra: This provides up to three times better performance than open source Apache Cassandra at any scale. DataStax Insights DataStax Insights is performance management and monitoring tool for DataStax Constellation and DataStax Enterprise. Here are some of the features it comes with: Centralized and scalable monitoring: It provides centralized and scalable monitoring across all cloud and on-premise deployments. Simplified administration: It provides an at-a-glance health index that simplifies administration via a single view of all clusters. Automated performance tuning: Its AI-powered analysis and recommendations enable automated performance tuning. Sharing his future plans regarding Constellation, Bosworth said, “Constellation is for all developers seeking easy and obvious application deployment in any cloud. And the great thing is that we are planning for it to be available on all three of the major cloud providers: AWS, Google, and Microsoft.” DataStax plans to make Constellation, Insights, and Cassandra as a Service available on all three cloud providers in Q4 of 2019. To know more about DataStax Constellation, visit its official website Instaclustr releases three open source projects for Apache Cassandra database users ScyllaDB announces Scylla 3.0, a NoSQL database surpassing Apache Cassandra in features cstar: Spotify’s Cassandra orchestration tool is now open source!

Last year, a GDPR complaint was filed against Google and other ad auction companies regarding data breach. The complaint alleged that tech companies broadcasted people’s personal data to dozens of companies, without proper security through a mechanism of “behavioural ads”. The complaint was filed by a host of privacy activists and pro-privacy browser firm Brave. This year in January, new evidences emerged indicating the broadcasted data includes information about people’s ethnicity, disabilities, sexual orientation and more. This sensitive information allows advertisers to specifically target incest, abuse victims, or those with eating disorders. This complaint was filed by an anti-surveillance NGO, the Panoptykon Foundation. The initial complaints were filed in Ireland, the UK, and Poland. Now, yesterday, a new GDPR complaint about Real-Time Bidding (RTB) in the online advertising industry was filed with Data Protection Authorities in Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In total seven EU countries have raised the GDPR issue, this week when it marked completion of one year since Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force. The complaints were lodged by Gemma Galdon Clavell , Diego Fanjul , David Korteweg , Jef Ausloos , Pierre Dewitte , and Jose Belo . The complaints suggest Google and other major companies have leaked vast scale of personal data to the “Ad Tech” industry. https://twitter.com/mikarv/status/1130374705440018433 How RTB system is used for data breach According to the complaint, Google’s DoubleClick recently renamed “Authorized Buyers”, has 8.4 million websites and uses it to broadcasts personal data about visitors to over 2,000 companies. Google is using Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system for it. This means every time a person visits Google web page, intimate personal data about the users and what they are viewing is broadcasted in a “bid request”. These requests are then sent to hundreds of other companies to solicit bids from potential advertisers’ for the opportunity to show an ad to a specific visitor. This data includes people’s exact locations, inferred religious, sexual, political characteristics. The data also includes what users are reading, watching, and listening to online, and a unique code which details to  'Expression of Interest' section on a website. The next biggest ad exchange is AppNexus, owned by AT&T, which conducts 131 billion personal data broadcasts every day. Once the data is broadcasted, there is no control as to what happens to the data thereafter. Google has a self-regulatory guideline for companies that rely on its broadcast, according to which, companies should inform them if they are breaking any rules. Google has assured that over 2,000 companies are “certified” in this way. However, Google DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers sends intimate personal information about virtually every single online person to these companies, billions of times a day. This is one of the massive leakage of personal data recorded so far as this occurs hundreds of billions of times every day. In a statement to Fix AdTech, CEO of Eticas, Gemma Galdon Cavell has said, “We hope that this complaint sends a strong message to Google and those using Ad Tech solutions in their websites and products. Data protection is a legal requirement must be translated into practices and technical specifications” Google will be fined heavy for not complying to GDPR Under the GDPR, a company is not permitted to use personal data unless it tightly controls what happens to that data. Article 5 (1)(f) requires that personal data be “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing and against accidental loss.” The largest GDPR fine ever, is issued to Google amounting to 50M euros. In January, a French data protection watchdog, CNIL alleged that the search engine giant was breaking GDPR rules around transparency. It also reported that Google did not have valid legal base, when processing people's data for advertising purposes. Meanwhile, Google is still appealing to the fine. Many users on Hacker News are having varied opinions regarding the need for regulation and also about the credibility of GDPR. A user states, “To be clear, I think some privacy regulation is necessary, but there seems to be some kind of dissonance. People want a service, but are unwilling to pay for it nor give their data. Then they complain to the government that they should be able to get the service without payment anyway.” Another user added, “From a user perspective, GDPR has no impact so far. I am still being tracked to death wherever I go. Neither do companies offer me a way to get the data they have about me.” GAO recommends for a US version of the GDPR privacy laws ProtonMail shares guidelines to help organizations achieve EU GDPR compliance As US-China tech cold war escalates, Google revokes Huawei’s Android support, allows only those covered under open source licensing

Today, the team at Elastic announced that the core security features of the Elastic Stack are now free. They also announced about releasing Elastic Stack versions 6.8.0 and 7.1.0 and the alpha release of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetestoday. With the free core security features, users can now define roles that protect index and cluster level access, encrypt network traffic, create and manage users, and fully secure Kibana with Spaces. The team had opened the code for these features last year and has finally made them free today which means the users can now run a fully secure cluster. https://twitter.com/heipei/status/1130573619896225792 Release of Elastic Stack versions 6.8.0 and 7.1.0 The team also made an announcement about releasing versions 6.8.0 and 7.1.0 of the Elastic Stack, today. These versions do not contain new features but they make the core security features free in the default distribution of the Elastic Stack. The core security features include TLS for encrypted communications, file and native realm to create and manage users, and role-based access control to control user access to cluster APIs and indexes. The features also include allowing multi-tenancy for Kibana with security for Kibana Spaces. Previously, these core security features required a paid gold subscription, however, now, they are free as a part of the basic tier. Alpha release of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes The team has also announced the alpha release of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) which is the official Kubernetes Operator for Elasticsearch and Kibana. It is a new product based on the Kubernetes Operator pattern that lets users manage, provision, and operate Elasticsearch clusters on Kubernetes. It is designed for automating and simplifying how Elasticsearch is deployed and operated in Kubernetes. It also provides an official way for orchestrating Elasticsearch on Kubernetes and provides a SaaS-like experience for Elastic products and solutions on Kubernetes. The team has moved the core security features into the default distribution of Elastic Stack to ensure that all clusters launched and managed by ECK are secured by default at creation time. The clusters that are deployed via ECK include free features and tier capabilities such as Kibana Spaces, frozen indices for dense storage, Canvas, Elastic Maps, and more. Users can now monitor Kubernetes logs and infrastructure with the help of Elastic Logs and Elastic Infrastructure apps. Few users think that security shouldn’t be an added feature, it should be inbuilt. A user commented on HackerNews, “Security shouldn't be treated as a bonus feature.” Another user commented, “Security should almost always be a baseline requirement before something goes up for public sale.” Few others are happy about this news. A user commented, “I know it's hard to make a buck with an open source business model but deciding to charge more for security-related features is always so frustrating to me. It leads to a culture of insecure deployments in environments when the business is trying to save money. Differentiate on storage or number of cores or something, anything but auth/security. I'm glad they've finally reversed this.” To know more about this news, check out the blog post by Elastic. Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1 releases with new allocation and security features Elastic Stack 6.7 releases with Elastic Maps, Elastic Update and much more! AWS announces Open Distro for Elasticsearch licensed under Apache 2.0  

Today, the team at Google has announced a new version of its Google Glass, called Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, an augmented reality headset. Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is now an official Google product. https://youtu.be/5IK-zU51MU4 Glass Enterprise Edition has been useful for workers in a variety of industries ranging from logistics to manufacturing, to field services. It helps workers for accessing checklists, view instructions or sending inspection photos or videos, etc. This headset is no more under Google’s parent company Alphabet’s X “Moonshot Factory”. The official blog reads, “Now, in order to meet the demands of the growing market for wearables in the workplace and to better scale our enterprise efforts, the Glass team has moved from X to Google.” https://twitter.com/Theteamatx/status/1130504636501090305 https://twitter.com/jetscott/status/1130506213379235840 Glass Enterprise Edition 2 helps businesses to improve the efficiency of their employees. It costs $999, and it’s not being sold directly to consumers. Features of Glass Enterprise Edition 2 An improved camera with good performance and quality that builds on an existing first person video streaming and collaboration features. Features a new processor built on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 platform. It provides a powerful multicore CPU (central processing unit) and a new artificial intelligence engine. Comes with a USB-C port for fast charging It also features a thicker, bulkier design, which helps to fit a larger 820mAh battery compared to the original's 570mAh. It also helps in power savings, enhancing the performance and support for computer vision and advanced machine learning capabilities. Google team further mentions, “We’ve also partnered with Smith Optics to make Glass-compatible safety frames for different types of demanding work environments, like manufacturing floors and maintenance facilities.” Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is built on Android which makes it easier for customers to integrate the services and APIs they already use. And also supports Android Enterprise Mobile Device Management in order to scale deployments. Even other big tech companies like Microsoft, Vuzix, and Epson are also working towards business-focused augmented reality glasses and make their positions strong in this league. To know more about this news, check out the official blog post by Google. Google AI engineers introduce Translatotron, an end-to-end speech-to-speech translation model Introducing Minecraft Earth, Minecraft’s AR-based game for Android and iOS users As US-China tech cold war escalates, Google revokes Huawei’s Android support, allows only those covered under open source licensing  

Yesterday, Microsoft officially made the canary builds of Chromium-based Microsoft Edge available for macOS 10.2 and above. This announcement follows the release of canary and developer previews of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10 users last month. https://twitter.com/MSEdgeDev/status/1130624513035591680 Edge for Mac already surfaced online, earlier this month. A Twitter user, who goes by the name WalkingCat, shared download links for the developer and canary builds even before the official release. https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1125607963282948096 Updates in Microsoft Edge for macOS The macOS preview build comes with essentially the same features as the Windows one but is tweaked according to macOS conventions. These updates include changes in the fonts, menus, keyboard shortcuts, title casing, and other areas. This macOS version has rounded corners for tabs, which Microsoft plans to bring to Windows as well. Microsoft has also taken advantage of the macOS hardware features to provide user experiences exclusive to macOS. The macOS exclusive features include website shortcuts, tab switching, and video controls via the Touch Bar. Users will be able to access these features through the familiar navigation with Mac trackpad gestures. Source: Microsoft With this release, Microsoft aims to provide web developers with a consistent platform across different operating systems. This version comes with support for Progressive Web Apps that you can debug using the browser developer tools. Microsoft in the announcement wrote, “For the first time, web developers can now test sites and web apps in Microsoft Edge on macOS and be confident that those experiences will work the same in the next version of Microsoft Edge across all platforms.” Microsoft Edge Insider Channels Similar to Windows 10, the macOS preview builds will be made available through three preview channels: Dev, Beta, and Canary, that are collectively called Microsoft Edge Insider Channels. Source: Microsoft Canary builds are the ones that will receive updates every night. Developer builds are much more stable than the Canary builds and will be updated weekly. Beta builds are the most stable ones when compared to the three and will receive updates every 6 weeks. Right now only the Canary Channel is open, from which you can download the canary builds of Microsoft Edge. Microsoft says that the Dev channel builds will be available “very soon” to run alongside the canary version. You can share your feedback with Microsoft via the “Send feedback” smiley. To know more in detail, visit Microsoft’s Blog. Microsoft makes the first preview builds of Chromium-based Edge available for testing Microsoft confirms replacing EdgeHTML with Chromium in Edge

Climate change effects are now visible in all countries around the globe. The world is witnessing phenomena like higher temperature, flooding, ice-melting, and much more. There have been many technologies invented in the last decade to help humans understand and adapt to these climatic changes. Earlier this month, researchers from Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, ConscientAI Labs and Microsoft Research came up with a project that aims to generate images which will depict accurate, vivid, and personalized outcomes of climate change using Machine Learning (ML) and Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGANs). This will enable individuals to make more informed choices about their climate future by creating an understanding of the effects of climate change, while maintaining scientific credibility using climate model projections. The project is to develop a Machine Learning (ML) based tool. This tool will show in a personalized way, the probable effect that climate change will have on a specific location familiar to the viewer. When given an address, the tool will generate an image projecting transformations which are likely to occur there, based on a formal climate model. For the initial version, the generated images consist of houses and buildings specifically after flooding events. The challenge in generating realistic images using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGANs) is to collect the training data needed in order to extract the mapping function. The researchers manually searched open source photo-sharing websites for images of houses from various neighborhoods and settings, such as suburban detached houses, urban townhouses, and apartment buildings. They have gathered over 500 images of non-flooded houses and the same number of flooded locations, and re-sized them to 300x300 pixels. The networks were trained using the publicly available PyTorch. The CycleGAN model for 200 epochs were trained using the trained images, using the Adam solver with a batch size of 1 and training the model from scratch with a learning rate of 0.0002. As per the CycleGAN training procedure, the learning rate is constant for the first 100 epochs and linearly decayed to zero over the next 100 epochs. Project Output and Future Plan The trained CycleGAN model was successful in learning an adequate mapping between grass and water, which could be applied to generate fairly realistic images of flooded houses. This will work best with single-family, suburban-type houses which are surrounded by an expanse of grass. From the 80 images in the test set, it was found that about 70% were successfully mapped to realistically flooded houses. This initial version of the CycleGAN model will illustrate the feasibility of applying generative model to create personalized images of an extreme climate event i.e., flooding, that is expected to increase in frequency based on climate change projections. Subsequent versions of this model will integrate more varied types of houses and surroundings, as well as different types of climate-change related extreme event phenomena (i.e. droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, air pollution etc), depending on the expected impacts at a given location, as well as forecast time horizons. There’s still scope for improvement with regard to the color scheme of the generated images and the visual artifacts. Furthermore to channel the emotional response of the public, into behavioural change or actions, the researchers are planning another improvement to the model called ‘choice knobs’. This will enable users to visually see the impact of their personal choices, such as deciding to use more public transportation, as well as the impact of broader policy decisions, such as carbon tax and increasing renewable portfolio standards. The projects greater aim is to help the general population progress towards more visible public support for climate change mitigation steps on a national level, facilitating governmental interventions and helping make the required rapid changes to a global sustainable economy. The researchers have stated that they need to explore more physical constraints to GAN training in order to incorporate more physical knowledge into these projections. This will enable a GAN model to transform a house to its projected flooded state and also take into account the forecast simulations of the flooding event represented by the physical variable outputs and probabilistic scenarios by a climate model for a given location. Response to the project Few developers have liked the idea of using technology, to produce realistic images depicting the effect of climate change in your own hometown which may make people understand the adverse effects of it. https://twitter.com/jameskobielus/status/1129392932988096513 While some developers are not sure if showing people a picture of their house submerged in water is going to create any difference. A user on Hacker news comments, “The threshold for believing the effects of climate change has to change from reading/seeing to actually being there and touching it. Or some far more reliable system of remote verification has to be established” Another user adds, “Is this a real paper? It's got to be a joke, right? a parody? It's literally a request to develop images to be used for propaganda purposes. And for those who will say that climate change is going to end the world, yeah, but that doesn't mean we should develop propaganda technology that could be used for some other political purpose.” There are already many studies/evidences to make people aware of the effects of climate change, depicting a picture of their house submerged in water is not going to move them anymore. Climate change is already happening and effecting our day to day lives. What we need now are stronger approaches towards analysing, mitigating, and adapting to these changes and inspiring more government policies to fight against these climate changes. To know more details about the project, head over to the research paper. Read More Amazon employees get support from Glass Lewis and ISS on its resolution for Amazon to manage climate change risks ICLR 2019 Highlights: Algorithmic fairness, AI for social good, climate change, protein structures, GAN magic, adversarial ML and much more Responsible tech leadership or climate washing? Microsoft hikes its carbon tax and announces new initiatives to tackle climate change

Last week, the Firefox DevTools Debugger team shared the recent updates in Firefox DevTools to make debugging of modern apps more consistent. They have also worked on making the debugger more predictable and capable of understanding common tools in web development like webpack, Babel, and TypeScript. These updates are ready for trying out in Firefox 67, which is planned to be released tomorrow (May 21). The team also shared that Firefox 68 will come with a more “polished” version of these features. https://twitter.com/FirefoxDevTools/status/1129066199017353216 Today, every browser comes with a powerful suite of developer tools that allows you to easily inspect and debug your web applications. These tools enable you to do a bunch of things like inspecting currently-loaded JavaScript, editing pages on-the-fly, quickly diagnosing problems, and more. The Firefox team has introduced many improvements and updates to these tools and here are some of the highlights: Revamped source map support Source maps provide a way to keep your client-side code readable and debuggable even after combining and minifying it. The new debugger comes with revamped support for source maps that now “perfects the illusion that you’re debugging your code, not the compiled output from Babel, Webpack, TypeScript, vue.js, etc.” To help developers generate correct source maps, the team and the community has contributed patches to build tools like Babel, a JavaScript compiler and configurable transpiler. Predictable breakpoints for effortless pausing and stepping This improved debugger architecture solves several issues that developers were commonly facing like lost breakpoints, pausing in the wrong script, or stepping through pretty-printed code. Now, they will also be able to easily debug minified scripts, arrow functions, and chained method calls with the help of inline breakpoints. Console debugging with logpoints Developers often resort to console logging (using console.log statements for printing messages to the console) when they want to quickly observe their program’s flow without having to pause the execution. However, this way of debugging can become quite tedious. This is why starting from Firefox 67, developers will have a new breakpoint called ‘logpoint’ that dynamically injects ‘console.log()’ statements into your running application. Better debugging for JavaScript Workers A web worker is a script that runs in the background without having any effect on the main execution thread of a web application. It takes care of all the laborious processing allowing the main thread to run without being slowed down. Firefox will now come with an updated Threads panel through which you will be able to switch between contexts and also independently pause different execution contexts. This will allow workers and their scripts to be debugged within the same Debugger panel. These were some of the highlights from the long list of updates and improvements. Check out the official announcement by Mozilla to know more in detail. Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla adds protection against fingerprinting and Cryptomining scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

Salesforce informed its customers that it was facing a major issue with its service, early Friday morning, and mentioned that it was working towards resolving the issue soon. The popular cloud-based software company experienced an outage due to its faulty database script after the company made changes to its production environment. Due to this, users got access to a broad amount of data than intended where they could see all the company’s data irrespective of the permissions. Salesforce said that the outage, which began on Friday and lasted just over 15 hours, is over - although some may experience a few issues as the platform gets back up to speed. Salesforce’s chief technology officer and a co-founder, Parker Harris, acknowledged the issue at 12:40 p.m. Eastern time the same day, and tweeted that Salesforce employees were working on the problem. https://twitter.com/parkerharris/status/1129426438325587969 According to reports on Reddit, users not only received read access but also received write permissions, thus, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company's data. Salesforce said the script only impacted customers of Salesforce Pardot or have used Pardot in the past. According to The Register, “To deal with the mess, Salesforce's IT team has denied all access to more than 100 cloud instances that host Pardot users, shutting out everyone else using those same systems, whether or not they were using Pardot.” Customers who were not affected may have also experienced certain service disruptions including customers using Marketing Cloud integrations. https://twitter.com/sfdcmitch/status/1129403764513787905 Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service. Salesforce said, “We have started unblocking customers who were not affected by the permission issues.” https://twitter.com/sfdcmitch/status/1129403764513787905 https://twitter.com/RealSalesAdvice/status/1129421822007566336 On the 18th, at 5.40 a.m. Eastern time, Salesforce, on its status page, announced that access had been restored for administrators of all organizations that had been affected by the permission issues. “We are preparing a set of instructions for admins that may need guidance on how to manually restore those permissions. As soon as the instructions are final, we will inform admins via an email that will contain a link to the instructions,” the company said. The company further updated: “We have restored administrators' access to all affected orgs as of 08:04 UTC. We have prepared a set of instructions for admins that may need guidance on how to manually restore those user permissions. We notified admins via an email that contained a link to the instructions. A subset of admins may still be experiencing issues such as logging in to their orgs, modifying perms that are uneditable, or timeouts.” To know more about this in detail, visit Salesforce’s status page. DockerHub database breach exposes 190K customer data including tokens for GitHub and Bitbucket repositories Facebook confessed another data breach; says it “unintentionally uploaded” 1.5 million email contacts without consent Justice Department’s indictment report claims Chinese hackers breached business  and government network

Last week, the team at Minecraft introduced a new AR-based game called ‘Minecraft Earth’, which is free for Android and iOS users. The most striking feature about Minecraft Earth is that it builds on the real world with augmented reality, I am sure it will remind you of the game Pokémon Go. https://twitter.com/minecraftearth/status/1129372933565108224 Minecraft has around 91 million active players, and now Microsoft is looking forward to taking the Pokémon Go concept on the next level by letting Minecraft players create and share whatever they’ve made in the game with friends in the real world. Users can now build something in Minecraft on their phones and then drop it into their local park for all their friends to see it together at the same location. This game aims to transform single user AR gaming to multi-user gaming while letting users access the virtual world that’s shared by everyone. Read Also: Facebook launched new multiplayer AR games in Messenger Minecraft Earth will be available in beta on iOS and Android, this summer. This game brings modes like creative that has unlimited blocks and items; or survival where you lose all your items when you die. Torfi Olafsson, game director of Minecraft Earth, explains, “This is an adaptation, this is not a direct translation of Minecraft. While it’s an adaptation, it’s built on the existing Bedrock engine so it will be very familiar to existing Minecraft players. If you like building Redstone machines, or you’re used to how the water flows, or how sand falls down, it all works. Olafsson further added, “All of the mobs of animals and creatures in Minecraft are available, too, including a new pig that really loves mud. We have tried to stay very true to the kind of core design pillars of Minecraft, and we’ve worked with the design team in Stockholm to make sure that the spirit of the game is carried through.” Players have to venture out into the real world to collect things just like how it works in Pokemon Go! Minecraft Earth has something similar to pokéstops called “tapables”, which are randomly placed in the world around the player. They are designed to give players rewards that allow them to build things, and players need to collect as many of these as possible in order to get resources and items to build vast structures in the building mode. The maps in this game are based on OpenStreetMap that has allowed Microsoft to place Minecraft adventures into the world. On the Minecraft Earth map, these adventures spawn dynamically and are also designed for multiple people to get involved in. Players can play together while sitting side by side to experience similar adventures at the exact same time and spot. They can also fight monsters, break down structures for resources together, and even stand in front of a friend to block them from physically killing a virtual sheep. Players can even see the tools that fellow players have in their hands on your phone’s screen, alongside their username. Microsoft is also using its Azure Spatial Anchors technology in Minecraft Earth which uses machine vision algorithms so that real-world objects can be used as anchors for digital content. Niantic, a Pokémon Go developer had to recently settle a lawsuit with angry homeowners who had pokéstops placed near their houses. With what happened with Pokemon Go in the past could be a threat for games like Minecraft Earth too. As there are many challenges in bringing augmented reality within private spaces. Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft said, “There are lots of very real challenges around user-generated content. It’s a complicated problem at the scale we’re talking about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tackle it.” https://twitter.com/Toadsanime/status/1129374278384795649 https://twitter.com/ExpnandBanana/status/1129419087216562177 https://twitter.com/flamnhotsadness/status/1129429075490160642 https://twitter.com/pixiebIush/status/1129455271833550848 To know more about Minecraft Earth, check out Minecraft’s page. Game rivals, Microsoft and Sony, form a surprising cloud gaming and AI partnership Obstacle Tower Environment 2.0: Unity announces Round 2 of its ‘Obstacle Tower Challenge’ to test AI game players OpenAI Five beats pro Dota 2 players; wins 2-1 against the gamers

Last week, the team behind Matplotlib announced the release of Matplotlib 3.1. This release comes with the support for Python 3.6+, a helper method for scatter legends, secondary axis support, a concise date formatter, and more. A helper method for scatter legends Previously, for obtaining a legend for a scatter plot, users had two options: plotting several scatters, each with an individual label or, creating proxy artists to show in the legend manually. In Matplotlib 3.1, the PathCollection class comes with the legend_elements() method to obtain the handles and labels for a scatter plot in an automated way. Formatting date ticks better with ConciseDateFormatter Matplotlib’s automatic date formatter is quite verbose, and that is why this version brings ConciseDateFormatter, which helps to minimize the strings used in the tick labels as much as possible. ConciseDateFormatter is a candidate for becoming the default date tick formatter in Matplotlib’s future releases. Source: Matplotlib Secondary x/y axis support Matplotlib 3.1 introduces a way to add a secondary axis on a plot for cases like converting radians to degrees on the same plot. With the help of Axes.axes.secondary_xaxis and Axes.axes.secondary_yaxis, you will now be able to make child axes with only one axis visible. Source: Matplotlib FuncScale and FuncTransform for arbitrary axes scales Two new classes, FuncScale and FuncTransform are introduced to provide users arbitrary scale transformations without having to write a new subclass of ScaleBase. You can use these through the following code: ‘ax.set_yscale('function', functions=(forward, inverse))’ Working with Matplotlib on MacOSX no longer requires a Python framework build Previously, in order to interact correctly with MacOSX through the native GUI framework, users required a framework build of Python. In this version, the app type is updated to remove this dependency so that the MacOSX backend works with non-framework Python. Support for forward/backward mouse buttons Similar to the key_press events, figure managers now support a ‘button_press’ event that allows binding actions to mouse buttons. One of the applications of this event is supporting forward/backward mouse buttons in figures created with Qt5 backend. These are a select few updates and additions. To read the full list of updates in Matplotlib 3.1, check out the official announcement. Matplotlib 3.0 is here with new cyclic colormaps, and convenience methods Creating 2D and 3D plots using Matplotlib How to Customize lines and markers in Matplotlib 2.0  

Update: On Wednesday, according to a leaked memo received by BBC, UK-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei. Also, BT Group Plc won’t offer phones from Huawei when it starts Britain’s first 5G mobile network next week. A number of wireless operators are ditching Huawei’s handsets. On Monday, The U.S. Commerce Department granted a 90-day license for mobile phone companies and internet broadband providers to work with Huawei allowing Google to send software updates to Huawei phones which use its Android operating system till August 19. As of 20th May, the U.S. government temporarily minimized some trade restrictions on Huawei, to help the company’s customers around the world. The U.S. Commerce Department will allow Huawei Technologies to purchase American-made goods in order to maintain existing networks and provide software updates to existing Huawei handsets. According to a report by Reuters, Google has suspended all business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware, software and technical services. Huawei will also be limited from getting updates to Google’s Android operating system. They will only be able to use the public version of Android (known as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Huawei will have to create their own update mechanism for security patches. Future versions of Huawei smartphones that run on Android will also lose access to popular services, including the Google Play Store and Gmail and YouTube apps said Reuters. However, the impact is expected to be minimal in the Chinese market, considering most Google mobile apps are already banned in China. This also means that alternatives offered by domestic competitors such as Tencent and Baidu may see a rise in popularity. https://twitter.com/asymco/status/1130397070181916672 Holders of current Huawei smartphones with Google apps, however, will continue to be able to use and download app updates provided by Google, a Google spokesperson told Reuters. They further added, “We are complying with the order and reviewing the implications. For users of our services, Google Play and the security protections from Google Play Protect will continue to function on existing Huawei devices." https://twitter.com/Android/status/1130313848332988421 Per a Bloomberg report, chipmakers including Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and Broadcom have told their employees they will not supply Huawei till further notice. This can also disrupt the businesses of American chip giants and slow down the rollout of critical 5G wireless networks worldwide -- including in China. Last week the FCC voted unanimously to deny China Mobile’s bid to provide US telecommunications services. Huawei suspension from Google comes after The Trump administration added the Chinese telecom giant to trade blacklist, last week. The Commerce Department said by adding Huawei Technologies and its 70 affiliates under this list means it will ban the company from acquiring components and technology from US firms without government approval. President Donald Trump has taken this decision to “prevent American technology from being used by foreign-owned entities in ways that potentially undermine US national security or foreign policy interests”, said US Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement. The order signed by the President did not specify any country or company but, US officials have previously labeled Huawei a “threat” and actively lobbied allies not to use Huawei network equipment in next-generation 5G networks. Huawei’s ban was not received well by the public especially those with Huawei devices. This is a lose-lose situation for both companies, short term, this hurts Huawei, long term this hurts Android. The news of the US ban did not sit well with Chinese citizens as well.  Per a report by Buzzfeed, people in China are calling for a boycott of Apple products. In February, Huawei was accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets. Per Buzzfeed, many people took to Weibo, China’s popular social media platform to speak against Apple. “The functions in Huawei are comparable to Apple iPhones or even better. We have such a good smartphone alternative, why are we still using Apple?” commented one user.” “I think Huawei’s branding is amazing, it chops an apple into eight pieces,” said another post, describing the company's spliced, red logo. On Twitter, people openly criticized Google’s move as well as the US ban. https://twitter.com/FearbySoftware/status/1130234526137966592 https://twitter.com/iainthomson/status/1130232015276535808 The U.S. China cold war has escalated to become a messy trade war. Now, China faces incremental pressure to build its own smartphone operating system, design its own chips, develop its own semiconductor technology, and implement its own technology standards. https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1130229043272531968 US blacklist China’s telecom giant Huawei over threat to national security Elite US universities including MIT and Stanford break off partnerships with Huawei. China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information

Packt and Humble Bundle are once again partnering to bring a stash of artificial intelligence eBooks and videos to engineers of all stripes. This makes it the perfect opportunity to get past the continuing hype and learning the key technologies and skills they need to build powerful artificial intelligence systems. With 25 titles available, there’s a wealth of content for everyone from tech enthusiasts to committed data geeks to get stuck into. Go straight to Humble Bundle. As always, the bundle will be in support of a featured charity to which customers will be able to donate a portion of the money they spend on the bundle. This bundle will be in support of Worldbuilders (“Geeks doing good”), a charity that promotes humanitarian causes around the world, and Heifer International, an organization working to end global hunger. What titles are featuring in May 2019's AI Humble Bundle? For as little as $1, customers can get their hands on: Machine Learning for Mobile Python Deep Learning Unity Artificial Intelligence Programming Python Machine Learning By Example Mathematical Foundation for AI and Machine Learning For a minimum of $8, customers can get all of the above as well as: Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for IoT Artificial Intelligence By Example Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading Python Machine Learning Cookbook Deep Learning with PyTorch (Video) Advanced Artificial Intelligence Projects with Python Hands-On Python Deep Learning And, for as little as $15, customers can get all of the titles above, as well as unlocking: Deep Learning for Computer Vision Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow Advanced Deep Learning with Keras Mastering Machine Learning Algorithms Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On Deep Learning with TensorFlow Hands-On Transfer Learning with Python Hands-On Deep Learning for Games Python Deep Learning Projects Deep Learning Architecture for Building Artificial Neural Networks AI for Finance The Complete Machine Learning Course with Python The bundle will be available until Sunday 26th May.

Update: On 23rd May, SpaceX successfully launched 60 satellites of the company’s Starlink constellation to orbit after a launch from Cape Canaveral. “This is one of the hardest engineering projects I’ve ever seen done, and it’s been executed really well,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, during a press briefing last week. “There is a lot of new technology here, and it’s possible that some of these satellites may not work, and in fact a small possibility that all the satellites will not work. “We don’t want to count anything until it’s hatched, but these are, I think, a great design and we’ve done everything we can to maximize the probability of success,” he said. On Wednesday night, SpaceX was all set to send a Falcon 9 rocket into the space carrying the very first 60 satellites for its new Starlink commercial satellite internet service. And, while everyone was eagerly waiting for the launch webcast, the heavy winds ruined the show for everyone. SpaceX rescheduled the launch at 10:30 pm EDT from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, but it has canceled the launch yet again citing the reason as software issues. The launch is now delayed for about a week. https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1129181397262843906 Elon Musk’s plans for SpaceX This launch of 60 satellites, weighing 227 kgs each, is actually the first step into creating Elon Musk’s plan of a huge Starlink constellation. He eventually aims to build up a mega constellation of 12,000 satellites. If everything goes well today, Falcon 9 will make a landing on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone-ship in the Atlantic Ocean. After 1 hour and 20 minutes of the launch, the second stage will begin when the Starlink satellites will start self-deploying. On Wednesday, Musk on a teleconference with reporters revealed a bunch of details about his satellite internet service. Revealing the release mechanism behind the satellites he said that each of the satellites does not have their own release mechanism. Instead, the Falcon rocket’s upper stage will begin a very slow rotation and each one will be released in turn with a different amount of rotational inertia. "It will almost seem like spreading a deck of cards on a table,” he adds. Once the deployment happens, the satellites will start powering up their ion drives and open their solar panels. They will then move to an altitude of 550 km under their own power. This is a new approach for delivering commercial satellite internet. Other satellite internet services such as Viasat depend on few big satellites in geostationary orbit over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth as opposed to 550 km in this case. Conventional internet services can suffer from high levels of latency because the signals have to travel a huge distance between the satellite and earth. Starlink aims to bring the satellites to the lower orbit to minimize the distance hence resulting in less lag time. However, the catch here is that as these satellites are closer to the Earth they are not able to cover a large surface area and hence a much greater number of them will be required to cover the whole planet. Though his plans look promising, Musk does not claim of everything going well. He, in the teleconference, said, "This is very hard. There is a lot of new technology, so it's possible that some of these satellites may not work. There's a small possibility that all of these satellites will not work." He further added that six more launches of a similar payload will be required before the service even begins to offer a “minor” coverage. You willl be able to see the launch webcast hauere or also on lthe official website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=rT366GiQkP0 Jeff Bezos unveils space mission: Blue Origin’s Lunar lander to colonize the moon Elon Musk reveals big plans with Neuralink DeepMind, Elon Musk, and others pledge not to build lethal AIation

Last month, Creative Commons announced that its official search engine, CC Search is now out of its beta phase. The search engine offers over 300 million images indexed from multiple collections, better design, and more relevant search results. Announcing the launch, Jane Park, the Director of Product and Research, wrote, “Aesthetically, you’ll see some key changes — a cleaner home page, better navigation and filters, design alignment with creativecommons.org, streamlined attribution options, and clear channels for providing feedback on both the overall function of the site and on specific image reuses.” Creative Commons has been a major provider of openly licensed and public domain images on the web and also the maker of CC licenses. Back in 2017, it launched the beta version of CC Search making it much easier to find images and attributing them to the copyright holder. After being in the beta testing phase for over two years, this overhauled CC Search is capable of searching images across 19 collections from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, an open repository of web crawl data that can be accessed by anyone. It provides improved search loading times and search phrase relevance. It also facilitates reusing images through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution. The search engine is open source with all the source code available on GitHub (CC Search, CC Catalog API, CC Catalog). If you are interested in contributing to the project, you can send your pull requests and proposals on GitHub. Future plans for CC Search Sharing the future plans for CC Search, Jane Park further wrote, “We will continue to grow the number of images in our catalog, prioritizing key image collections such as Europeana and Wikimedia Commons.” For the future, the CC Search team plans to expand the focus of the search engine from just images to other content types as well. Later this year, the team aims to index additional types of CC-licensed works, such as open textbooks and audio. CC Search’s 2019 Roadmap specifies all the features to come in the search engine this year quarter wise. The features include advanced filters on the home page, the ability to browse collections without entering search terms, and improved accessibility and UX on mobile. The CC Search team is also presenting the State of CC Search at the CC Global Summit next month in Lisbon, Portugal. They will be discussing with a global community about the desired features and collections for CC Search. Check out the official announcement by Creative Commons for more details. Flickr says Creative Commons photos won’t be subject to 1,000 picture limit Artist Holly Herndon releases an album featuring an artificial intelligence ‘musician’ Why DeepMind AlphaGo Zero is a game changer for AI research

Yesterday, the team behind Google Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, V8 announced the release of V8 7.5 beta. As per V8’s release cycle, its stable version will release in coordination with Chrome 75 stable release, which is expected to come out early June. This release comes with WebAssembly implicit caching, bulk memory operations, JavaScript numeric separators for better readability, and more. Few updates in V8 7.5 Beta WebAssembly implicit caching The team is planning to introduce implicit caching of WebAssembly compilation artifacts in Chrome 75, which is similar to Chromium’s JavaScript code cache. Code caching is an important way of optimizing browsers, which reduces the start-up time of commonly visited web pages by caching the result of parsing and compilation. This essentially means that if a user visits the same web page a second time, the already-seen WebAssembly modules will not be compiled again, and will instead be loaded from the cache. WebAssembly bulk memory operations V8 7.5 will come with a few new WebAssembly instructions for updating large regions of memory or tables. The following are some of these instructions: memory.fill: It fills a memory region with a given byte. memory.copy: It copies data from a source memory region to a destination region, even if these regions overlap. table.copy: Similar to memory.copy, it copies from one region of a table to another, even if the regions are overlapping. JavaScript numeric separators for better readability The human eye finds it difficult to quickly parse a large numeric literal, especially when it contains long digit repetitions, for instance, 10000000. To improve the readability of long numeric literals, a new feature is added that allows using underscores as a separator creating a visual separation between groups of digits. This feature works with both integers and floating point. Streaming script source data directly from the network In previous Chrome versions, the script source data coming in from the network always had to first go to the Chrome main thread before it was forwarded to the streamer. This made the streaming parser to wait for data that has already arrived from the network but hadn’t been forwarded to the streaming task yet because it was blocked at the main thread. Starting from Chrome 75, V8 will be able to stream scripts directly from the network into the streaming parser, without waiting for the Chrome main thread. To know more, check out the official announcement on V8 Blog. Electron 5.0 ships with new versions of Chromium, V8, and Node.js Introducing Node.js 12 with V8 JavaScript engine, improved worker threads, and much more V8 7.2 Beta releases with support for public class fields, well-formed JSON.stringify, and more