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After publicly sharing the release timeline for Electron 5.0 and beyond in February, On Tuesday Electron 5.0 was released, as per the plan, with new features, upgrades, and fixes. Electron ships with the latest version upgrades of core components Chromium, Node.js, and V8: Chromium 73.0.3683.119, Node.js 12.0.0, and V8 7.3.492.27. Electron 5.0 also includes improvements to Electron-specific APIs. With this release, Electron 2.0.x has reached end of life. Major changes in Electron 5.0 Packaged apps will now behave the same as the default app. A default application menu will be created (unless the app has one) and the window-all-closed event will be automatically handled. (unless the app handles the event) Mixed sandbox mode is now enabled by default. Renderers launched with sandbox: true will now be actually sandboxed, where previously they would only be sandboxed if mixed-sandbox mode was also enabled. The default values of nodeIntegration and webviewTag are now false to improve security. The SpellCheck API has been changed to provide asynchronous results. New features BrowserWindow now supports managing multiple BrowserViews within the same BrowserWindow. Electron 5 continues with Electron's Promisification initiative.  This initiative will convert callback-based functions in Electron to return Promises. During this transition period, both the callback and Promise-based versions of these functions will work correctly, and will both be documented. A total of 12 APIs were converted for Electron 5.0. Three functions were changed or added to systemPreferences to access macOS systems' colors. These include systemPreferences.getAccentColor, systemPreferences.getColor, and systemPreferences.getSystemColor The function process.getProcessMemoryInfo has been added to get memory usage statistics about the current process. New remote events have been added to improve security in the remote API. Now, remote.getBuiltin, remote.getCurrentWindow, remote.getCurrentWebContents and <webview>.getWebContents can be filtered. Deprecated APIs Three APIs are newly deprecated in Electron 5.0.0 and planned for removal in 6.0.0. These include Mksnapshot binaries for arm and arm64, ServiceWorker APIs on WebContents, and Automatic modules with sandboxed webContents. These are just a select few updates. For other specific details, you may see the release notes.  Also, check out the tentative 6.0.0 schedule for key dates in the Electron 6 development life cycle. Users can install Electron 5.0 with npm via npm install electron@latest or download the tarballs from Electron releases page. The Electron team publicly shares the release timeline for Electron 5.0 Flutter challenges Electron, soon to release a desktop client to accelerate mobile development How to create a desktop application with Electron [Tutorial]

Yesterday, at the Spark + AI summit, the team at Apache Spark announced .NET for Apache Spark, a popular open source distributed processing engine used for analytics over large data sets. It can also be used for processing real-time streams, batches of data, machine learning, and ad-hoc query. .NET fo Apache Spark for developers .NET for Apache Spark aims at making Apache Spark accessible to .NET developers across all Spark APIs. The team at Apache Spark aims to develop .NET for Apache Spark in the open (as a .NET Foundation member project) along with the Spark and .NET community for the developers. .NET for Apache Spark comes with high-performance APIs for using Spark from C# and F#. With .NET APIs, users can now access all aspects of Apache Spark including streaming, Spark SQL, DataFrames, MLLib, etc. It lets the developers reuse all the skills, code, knowledge, and libraries. The C#/ F# language that binds to Spark will be written on a new Spark interop layer that will offer easier extensibility. .NET for Apache Spark can be used on Linux, macOS, and Windows and is compliant with .NET Standard 2.0. .NET for Apache Spark performance The first preview version of .NET for Apache Spark performs well on the popular TPC-H benchmark. This benchmark consists of a suite of business-oriented queries. .NET for Apache Spark has a better performance against Python and Scala. It is also 2 times faster than Python. What more features can be expected? In the future, the team aims to simplify the documentation and samples and work towards native integration with developer tools such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Jupyter notebooks. Developers can also expect .NET support for user-defined aggregate functions and .NET idiomatic APIs for C# and F# (e.g., using LINQ for writing queries). The team is also working towards adding support for Azure Databricks, Kubernetes, etc. and making .NET for Apache Spark part of Spark Core. Few users are excited about this news and are expecting some major improvement with .NET for Spark. A user commented on HackerNews, “I've seen the announcement about .NET interior support in Apache Spark some time ago. The benchmarks are interesting and tell the story - in few cases it is faster than Python, but slower than native (for Spark) Scala/JVM. Maybe with Arrow interchange Python's performance would increase (and for other interpose that would use Array - i.e. for .Net).” Few others are confused about the transition, as they have to get their teams shifted to the new setup. Another user commented, “Indeed the real sad part is you can’t lead teams there early (premature optimization). Everybody seems to make the same rough transition on their own.” To know more about this news, check out the post by Apache Spark. Winners for the 2019 .NET Foundation Board of Directors elections are finally declared Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support ML.NET 1.0 RC releases with support for TensorFlow models and much more!

Twitter, yesterday launched a dedicated reporting feature to allow users to more easily report manipulative elections-related content. This content includes but is not limited to: Misleading information about how to vote or register to vote (for example, that you can vote by Tweet, text message, email, or phone call); Misleading information about requirements for voting, including identification requirements; and Misleading statements or information about the official announced date or time of an election. On encountering a misleading tweet, users can select report tweet from the drop-down menu and mark it as “it’s misleading about voting”. They can also select the option that best tells how the tweet is misleading about voting. Last year, Twitter shared an update on their work on maintaining conversational health and protecting the integrity of the mid-term US elections. This work ranged from updating their rules, detecting and removing several fake accounts, and introducing new features like electoral labels for election candidates. Twitter says that the new reporting feature will be used to tackle deliberate attempts to mislead about voting, starting with India’s #LokSabhaElections2019. This strengthened approach will be fully operational in India beginning today and in the EU from April 29. However, Twitter is a bit late to join the party considering India is already in Phase 3 of its election process with election results to be announced on 23rd May. https://twitter.com/KoshyG/status/1121026950733025281 It is also surprising as to why Twitter has only chosen India and the EU for it’s reporting feature. General elections will be held in Guatemala on June 16, 2019, to elect the President and Congress. The 2019 Australian federal election will be held on Saturday 18 May 2019 to elect members of the 46th Parliament of Australia. https://twitter.com/moimoi_arr/status/1121248501134962688 https://twitter.com/madcatjo2point0/status/1121000788954796032 On asking a Twitter spokesperson, whether it'll be available in the US, Twitter told CNET: "We're exploring this for critical elections outside the United States, and we'll provide an update on 2020 if and when we have one." Dorsey meets Trump privately to discuss how to make public conversation “healthier and more civil” on Twitter. Jack Dorsey engages in yet another tone deaf “public conversation” to better Twitter Highlights from Jack Dorsey’s live interview by Kara Swisher on Twitter: on lack of diversity, tech responsibility, physical safety and more.

Just two days ago the research team at OpenAI developed Sparse Transformer, a deep neural network that sets new records at predicting what comes next in a sequence, be it text, images, or sound. This transformer uses an algorithmic improvement of the attention mechanism for extracting patterns from sequences that are 30 times longer. This Transformer incorporates an O(N \sqrt{N}) reformulation of the O(N^2) Transformer self-attention mechanism with several other improvements on rich data types. Initially, the models used on these data were designed for one domain. Also, it was difficult to scale to sequences more than a few thousand elements long. The new Sparse Transformer can model sequences with tens of thousands of elements with hundreds of layers for achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains. With this technique, the researchers aim to build AI systems that possess a greater ability to understand the world. The team also introduced several other changes to the Transformer which includes a restructured residual block and weight initialization for improving the training of very deep networks.The team also introduced a set of sparse attention kernels that efficiently compute subsets of the attention matrix. The team further experimented on recomputation of attention weights during the backward pass to reduce memory usage. Initial Experimentation with Deep Attention In Transformers, ‘attention’ is defined as a process where every output element is connected to every input element, and the weightings between them are dynamically calculated based upon the circumstances. Transformers are more flexible than models with fixed connectivity patterns. These Transformers can consume large amounts of memory while being applied to data types with many elements, like images or raw audio. One way of reducing this memory consumption is by recomputing the attention matrix from checkpoints during backpropagation which is a well-established technique in deep learning for reducing memory usage. However, the major issue with recomputing the attention matrix was that it was reducing memory usage at the cost of more computation and also, it couldn’t deal with large inputs. To overcome this, the OpenAI researchers introduced Sparse Attention. Using Sparse Attention patterns for large inputs For very large inputs, computing a single attention matrix can become impractical. The OpenAI researchers instead opted for sparse attention patterns, where each of the output position computes weightings from a subset of input positions. In the entire process, the researchers first visualized the learned attention patterns for deep Transformers on images and then found out that many showed interpretable and structured sparsity patterns. The team also realized that the input portions are focused on small subsets and they show a high degree of regularity. The researchers also implemented a two-dimensional factorization of the attention matrix, where the network can attend to all positions through two steps of sparse attention. They implemented it to preserve the ability of their network to learn new patterns. The first version is strided attention which is roughly equivalent to each position attending to its row and its column and is a bit similar to the attention pattern. The second version is fixed attention which attends to a fixed column and the elements after the latest column element. According to the researchers, it is a useful pattern and can be used when the data doesn’t fit into a two-dimensional structure. Testing Sparse Transformers on density modeling tasks The researchers test their architecture on density modeling tasks including natural images, text, and raw audio using CIFAR-10, Enwik8, and Imagenet 64 datasets respectively.. The team trained strided Sparse Transformers on CIFAR-10 images represented as sequences of 3072 bytes. They also trained models on the EnWik8 dataset for representing the first 108 bytes of Wikipedia containing variability in the periodic structure. They further trained on the version of downsampled ImageNet 64. The researchers found out that sparse attention achieved lower loss than full attention and it is also faster. Future scope and limitations According to the researchers, the sparse attention patterns are only preliminary steps in the direction of efficient modeling of long sequences. The researchers think that exploring different patterns and combinations of sparsity is useful and learning sparse patterns is a promising avenue of research for the next generation of neural network architectures. According to them, the autoregressive sequence generation still seems impractical for very high-resolution images or video. The optimized attention operations may prove to be useful for modeling high dimensional data, like multi-scale approaches. This is just an overview of the Sparse Transformer architecture. For more detailed information, we recommend you to read the research paper. OpenAI Five bots destroyed human Dota 2 players this weekend OpenAI Five beats pro Dota 2 players; wins 2-1 against the gamers OpenAI introduces Neural MMO, a multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents

Boeing Co. recently signed a $43 million contract from the US Navy to develop a fleet of massive drone submarines called Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs). Boeing and the US Navy haven’t disclosed any details of the size of the submarines. However, the design of these unmanned submarines would be based on their previously developed underwater drone prototype Echo Voyager unmanned sub. Major work will be carried out in Boeing’s Huntington Beach facility, and the drones are expected to be completed by 2022. The Echo Voyager is a 51-foot-long drone submarine that can achieve a range of roughly 6,500 nautical miles and is built to incorporate a modular payload section, which will allow it to take on a variety of different missions. According to Boeing, it can ‘perform at sea for months at a time,’ and does not require launch or recovery by a support vehicle and runs on a hybrid system that combines battery and marine diesel. Source: Boeing Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington, D.C, said, “What it shows is that the Navy is willing to start putting some real money behind the acquisition of unmanned undersea vehicles. This is the first time the Navy has put significant money down on UUV (unmanned underwater vehicles) that have a military, war-fighting capability." Margaret E. Kosal, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology said, “Analysts say undersea drones could be used for missions once conducted by crewed submarines, while the lack of a crew gives the drones an advantage in conducting "persistent surveillance for activities that might take place in an area where there is concern about underwater mines.” Clark also added that developing undersea drones comes with added technical challenges which are not experienced by aerial counterparts. Rosa Zheng, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh University explains that water is a much thicker medium. This actually makes real-time communication more difficult than sending transmissions through air. Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the Rand Corp. think tank, said that “unlike an aerial drone, which can access satellite communications to gain its bearings and show what it sees in real time to a human operator thousands of miles away, an underwater drone loses access to the electromagnetic spectrum once it is below the waterline.” It was just last month that Boeing’s safety analysis procedure was questioned as authorities around the world — including the U.S., Europe, China, and Indonesia — grounded Boeing 737 Max planes being subject to two fatal crashes in less than six months involving the same plane model. And Boeing taking up this project, people are skeptical of what the consequences would be. https://twitter.com/jvaughn575/status/1120514009915064322 To know more about this announcement in detail, head over to U.S Naval Institute’s official blogpost. “Deep learning is not an optimum solution for every problem faced”: An interview with Valentino Zocca 4 common challenges in Web Scraping and how to handle them Microsoft workers protest the lethal use of Hololens2 in the $480m deal with US military

It is not a week yet since Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey appeared on TED talks and allowed to make fun of him at a public forum. Specifically when users on Twitter bashed him by asking questions on platform health and safety and why it continues to allow President Donald Trump to spread hateful and inflammatory tweets. Motherboard today reports that Dorsey along with other Twitter executives held a closed door meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House. The meeting was 30 minutes long and the company anticipated it to be about “the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” according to the email written to Motherboard by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety. https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1120797268456513537 In another email obtained by Motherboard which appears to be from Dorsey and he writes, “As you know, I believe that conversation, not silence, bridges gaps and drives towards solutions,” he further wrote. “I have met with every world leader who has extended an invitation to me, and I believe the discussions have been productive, and the outcomes meaningful.” He added, “Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all. In the end, I believe it’s important to meet heads of state in order to listen, share our principles and our ideas.” This isn’t Dorsey’s first trip to the White House, in 2011 he moderated the Twitter townhall with Barack Obama where they discussed how social media and especially Twitter has replaced traditional news sources. As Gadde’s email adds that Dorsey recently met with the president of South Korea, the president of Japan, the prime minister of New Zealand, and the prime minister of India. But the CEO hadn’t yet met with Pres. Trump—at least not publicly. And when in 2016, Trump held a meeting with tech leaders including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Dorsey was reportedly not invited. Donald Trump on Tuesday termed Twitter as “very discriminatory” and also said that the company does not treat him well as a Republican. He further accused the company of “playing political games” and called on Congress to “get involved.” It isn’t the first time that Trump complained about a supposed anti-conservative bias on Twitter, in one of the tweets in October, he accused Twitter of removing “many people from my account.” Last July, he accused the platform of “‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans,” or purposely hiding content from right-leaning accounts. He has repeatedly accused Twitter which makes it noteworthy for the reason that this meeting was held.   According to the Washington Post, Trump spent a “significant portion” of the meeting asking Dorsey about why he was losing Twitter followers. This could be the case when yesterday NBC reported that a network of 5000+ pro Trump Russian fake bots were removed from his account shortly after the release of Robert Mueller’s report last week. https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1120703391733362689 In response to all the accusations made by Trump, a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement at the time, “To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets,”. The company has been cracking down on spam accounts and implementing other initiatives to improve the “health” of the platform over the past year. And as this news was reported Donald Trump immediately tweeted with a photo saying it was great meeting the Twitter CEO today. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1120793199650463747 Jack responded back to Trump by thanking him for his time and said “Twitter is here to serve the entire public conversation, and we intend to make it healthier and more civil.” https://twitter.com/jack/status/1120825823647420416 Former engineering manager Leslie Miley tweeted, “Ironic that open conversation and transparency does not apply to this meeting. Ironic that he meets with someone who targets people for harassment including death threats.” https://twitter.com/cwarzel/status/1120800690635333632 Twitter anticipated this earlier and last year it wrote in a blog post that it has special policies for accounts owned by “world leaders.” “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” the company wrote. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.” Jack Dorsey engages in yet another tone deaf “public conversation” to better Twitter Highlights from Jack Dorsey’s live interview by Kara Swisher on Twitter: on lack of diversity, tech responsibility, physical safety and more Russia opens civil cases against Facebook and Twitter over local data laws    

Yesterday, Syrus Akbary, the Founder and CEO of Wasmer, announced the release of WebAssembly Package Manager (WAPM). This package manager is introduced to make it easier for developers to use WebAssembly anywhere. Why WAPM is being introduced? With this package manager, the Wasmer team aims to improve the developer ergonomics of WebAssembly. Explaining the advantages of WAPM, Akbary said, “WebAssembly is an abstraction on top of chipset instructions, this enables wasm modules to run very easily on any machine. If we move this abstraction up we can unlock the potential of having universal binaries that can run anywhere, even on platforms/chipsets not supported at the moment of releasing the binary.” We already have Node.js Package Manager (NPM) that hosts WebAssembly modules. However, the team believes that WebAssembly on the server-side is a different use case and hence deserves a package manager specifically designed for it. What are its advantages? Following are the advantages that WAPM comes brings in: Allows developers to easily publish, download, and use WebAssembly modules. Allows developers to easily define commands on top of Wasm. Enables developers to create universal libraries in WebAssembly that can be used from all languages including Python, PHP, JavaScript, Rust, C, and C++. Enables support for different ABIs (Application Binary Interface) such as WASI, Emscripten, or even new ones in the future. This release comes with a ‘wapm’ command-line application and a website and package registry: wapm.io. Here’s a video demonstrating how WAPM works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDRcHIBFu0c After seeing the governance issues with NPM, many developers are skeptical about another private community package manager “I've grown uncomfortable with NPM being operated by NPM Inc instead of The Node.js Foundation, but it's a hard thing to change once it's established. We should hesitate to support the establishment of another community package manager by a for-profit company,” a Redditor said. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement. Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Fastly open sources Lucet, a native WebAssembly compiler and runtime How you can replace a hot path in JavaScript with WebAssembly

Yesterday, the team behind GNU Shepherd announced the release of GNU Shepherd version 0.6.0, a service manager which is written in Guile that looks after the herd of system services. It also provides a replacement for the service-managing capabilities of SysV-init (or any other init). This release has been bootstrapped with few tools including, Autoconf 2.69, Automake 1.16.1, Makeinfo 6.5, Help2man 1.47.8. What’s new in GNU Shepherd version 0.6.0? Services can now be “one-shot”. The ‘shepherd’ deletes its socket file upon termination. The bug ‘herd stop S’ is no longer an error when S is already stopped. The ‘herd’ exits with non-zero value while executing an action that fails. The ‘shepherd’ ignores reboot errors while running in a container. The translation of error messages has been fixed. This release comes with a new translation that is ta (Tamil). The list of updated translations include uk, zh_CN, fr, pt_BR, sv, da, es, ta, Most of the users are happy and excited about this release. A user commented on the HackerNews thread, “I've written previously about how much I appreciate the Guile info manual. For a document in a relatively obscure help system (other than Emacs users, who even knows about Texinfo?), it's carefully written with an eye to empowering its users. It's perhaps a bit quixotic, but you get the feeling that the GNU project really wants to deliver an OS written in Scheme all the way down, totally under the control of an enlightened end user. The Shepherd project certainly fits with that vision.” Another user commented, “I hesitate to speak for emacs users, because I'm not one really, but I suspect the info format feels really comfortable when viewed with emacs.” Few users think that Shepherd might be a replacement for systemd, a software that provides building blocks for Linux operating system. A comment reads, “Is Shepherd meant to be a replacement for systemd (et al), then?” To know more about this news, check out GNU’s official announcement. GNU Shepherd 0.5.0 releases GNU Nano 4.0 text editor releases! GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements  

It was black day yesterday for the AI community as it lost one of the most celebrated AI pioneers and visionary, Nils John Nilsson. Nilsson passed away at the age of 86 and he was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. He is known for inventing A* algorithm for path finding and also for leading the Shakey project at SRI which was one of the first mobile robots with visual projection and trajectory planning. https://twitter.com/RealAAAI/status/1120704966757216256 Professor Nilsson has published five textbooks on artificial intelligence, namely, Problem-Solving Methods in Artificial Intelligence (1971), Principles of Artificial Intelligence (1980), Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (1998), The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements (2010), and Understanding Beliefs (2014). https://twitter.com/astrorobotic/status/1120717546506919936 https://twitter.com/rodneyabrooks/status/1120801543635132417 He has also served on the editorial boards of the journal Artificial Intelligence and of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. His contributions to the field of planning, search, knowledge representation, and robotics have been respected worldwide. Nilsson was the Chairman of the Computer Science department at Stanford, where he taught artificial intelligence and machine learning. He served the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Center for twenty-three years. He also carried out his research on how robots react to the dynamic world, plan actions based on it, and learn from experience. He has worked on statistical and neural-network approaches to pattern recognition at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Center. Additionally, he has contributed towards the STRIPS automatic planning system. In one of the books, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements, Professor Nilsson wrote, “Clues about what might be needed to make machines intelligent are scattered abundantly throughout philosophy, logic, biology, psychology, statistics, and engineering. With gradually increasing intensity, people set about to exploit clues from these areas in their separate quests to automate some aspects of intelligence.” He also defined Artificial Intelligence in the same book, “Artificial intelligence (AI) may lack an agreed-upon definition… For me, artificial intelligence is that activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality that enables an entity to function appropriately and with foresight in its environment.” Computer Science professor, Andrew Ng expressed his condolences and said that he lost a friend. He appreciated his efforts on A* algorithm and believes that a lot of researchers rely on this wonderful invention. https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg/status/1120551175403786241 https://twitter.com/danieljdick/status/1120826488599670789 Researchers, engineers, and AI enthusiast are mourning and expressing their condolences throughout on internet. Professor Nilsson’s contribution to the field of AI will be remembered always. https://twitter.com/dandre/status/1120568645518860288 https://twitter.com/haymhirsh/status/1120650482018594821 https://twitter.com/Sadeghi_Afshin/status/1120756172557029377 To know more about this news, check out Stanford’s page. OpenAI Five bots destroyed human Dota 2 players this weekend AI Now Institute publishes a report on the diversity crisis in AI and offers 12 solutions to fix it IBM halt sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery amid tepid growth: STAT report  

Julia Angwin, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the Markup, a still-in-development investigative news publication that was slated to launch in July, has been fired over differences with Sue Gardner, the CEO. The news of Angwin's ouster, first reported by The New York Times, prompted five of the website's seven editorial members to announce their resignations. Angwin’s dismissal also drew major public support from the public. Another of its founders, Jeff Larson has been announced as the current editor-in-chief of The Markup. https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120695628181508096 https://twitter.com/thejefflarson/status/1120734924980486144 Julia Angwin, an ex-ProPublica veteran had been working alongside Jeff Larson on the Markup for the last year with the vision of producing meaningful data-centered journalism about the impact of technology on society. The Markup raised more than $23 million in funding last year led by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. After the news of her oust, Angwin wrote a letter addressed to Newmark, seeking him to review and intervene in the situation unfolding at The Markup. The letter was posted on Twitter from an account named “The Real Team Markup” on Tuesday. Per her letter, Executive Director, Sue Gardner is now seeking to change the mission of the newsroom to “one based on advocacy against the tech companies”. During her interview with candidates Gardner used to ask for their “take” on tech companies, and then reportedly rate them based on their hatred toward these companies. Angwin adds, “She has asked me to run articles with headlines such as ‘Facebook is a dumpster fire’”. On retaliating, Angwin was asked to step down from her position as editor-in-chief on March 29 and become a columnist, writing opinion articles. Update: The article has now been updated to include Craig Newmark's response. The story has also been updated on 27th April to include Sue Gardner's response. Gardner disputed this characterization to the New York Times. “There is no change in the mission or purpose of The Markup. We are, pure and simple, a news outlet. We always have been and always will be. Our goals and purpose haven’t changed.” she told NYT. The site had issues with Ms. Angwin involving “leadership, management and willingness to accept feedback and training to grow as an editor-in-chief.” Interestingly, it was Angwin who hired Gardner last year after she forced Angwin to let her become the CEO. Angwin was reluctant but was assured that she would be given an employment contract with job protections for her position as Editor-in-chief but no such contract was signed. Now some people are touting Angwin’s expulsion as a “power grab”. In disapproval of Angwin’s dismissal, multiple staff members of the Markup have also resigned from their positions. 5 out of 7 editorial team members tweeted about their departure, with Angwin tweeting in response that they “can’t afford to do this. This is heartbreaking.” https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120744165615316992 https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120730170514726913 https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120729562567118848 https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120727353842384896 https://twitter.com/JuliaAngwin/status/1120723789812252672 The Markup is now down to 2 editorial employees. Its response: "Mr. Larson said the company had accelerated recruitment and had 'multiple other hires in motion,' and hoped that the launch would not be delayed." The editorial team of Markup has also signed a statement of unequivocal support for Julia Angwin. https://twitter.com/MarkupReal/status/1120675763374776320 Other people have also come forward in solidarity with Angwin. A blog post on Medium opposes her recent ouster as Editor-in-Chief of the Markup  and invites people to sign a public statement of support for Julia Angwin. The blog post has been signed by over 100 people and counting, states, “The Markup is set to launch in July and should not do so without Julia at the helm. We encourage all her original funders to investigate this situation and to take steps to ensure that the Markup stays true to its founding principles.” Journalists and reporters from top publishing sites have also tweeted in support. https://twitter.com/loisbeckett/status/1120733655129702400 https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/1120699832379645954 https://twitter.com/raju/status/1120696905842008065 Update: Craig Newmark responded yesterday via a tweet saying that "he is taking this very seriously" https://twitter.com/craignewmark/status/1121172977398083584 Craig and Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Knight Foundation, Open Society Foundation and the Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative will reassess The Markup's funding. Update: Sue Gardner has also added her response dismissing all of Jula Angwin's claims regarding her oust. https://twitter.com/petersterne/status/1121850342520623105 Google’s Chief Diversity Officer, Danielle Brown resigns to join HR tech firm Gusto Richard DeVaul, Alphabet executive, resigns after being accused of sexual harassment Facebook hires a new general counsel and a new VP of global communications even with no Chief Security Officer.

Today, the team behind Node.js announced the release of Node.js 12 with new updates and features including faster startup and better default heap limits, updates to V8, and much more. This release replaces version 11 in the current release line. With the release of version 12,  Node.js release line will soon become Node.js Long Term Support (LTS) which will release in Oct 2019 What’s new in Node.js 12? V8 Javascript engine v7.4 A new version of the V8 JavaScript engine comes with improved performance, language, and runtime. The team has added a new feature called zero-cost async stack traces, that improves the error.stack property with asynchronous call frames.  With V8 v7.4, there are faster calls with arguments mismatch. Even the JavaScript parsing has got faster. TLS 1.3 This version of Node.js comes with TLS1.3 (Transport Layer Security) support which is now the default max protocol. This release also supports CLI/NODE_OPTIONS switches in order to disable it, if required. Configure default heap limits With Node.js 12 release, the JavaScript heap size is configured based on available memory instead of using defaults which were set by V8 for use with browsers. Now with the help of this configuration, Node.js won’t try to use more memory than is available and would terminate when its memory is exhausted. This feature is highly useful while processing large data-sets. Switch default http parser to llhttp This release will also switch the default parser to llhttp which will be beneficial to make testing and comparing the new llhttp-based implementation easier.   Making native modules get easier Node.js 12 makes building and supporting native modules easier. The new changes include better support for native modules in combination with Worker threads. Users can now use their own threads for native asynchronous functions. Worker threads In this release, the worker threads don’t require the use of a flag. With this release, additional threads can be leveraged whenever required for better results. Diagnostic reports Node.js 12 comes with a new experimental feature called diagnostic report which allows the users to generate a report on demand. The report contains information that can be useful for diagnosing problems in production including crashes, high CPU usage, slow performance, memory leaks, unexpected errors and more. Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia Node.js and JS Foundations are now merged into the OpenJS Foundation 7 Best Practices for Logging in Node.js

Facebook has been facing a lot of scrutiny from different governments all around the world over how it manages customer’s data on its social media platform. It was also under the spotlight for enabling the spreading of misinformation across its network and faces increased pressure to stop the same. Facebook has a series of data breaches and scandals in its recent history. Starting from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, the massive 50M Facebook accounts that were compromised, to the recent data breach where it “unintentionally uploaded” 1.5 million email contacts without consent. To mitigate the fallout of its unending scandals, Facebook has announced two new hirings within its team, yesterday. Jennifer Newstead, currently a legal adviser to the U.S. State Department, will soon be joining as the general counsel of the company and will oversee Facebook’s global legal functions. John Pinette will be joining as the vice president of global communications. Pinette is currently the vice president of marketing and communications at Vulcan, the private company created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Newstead will be replacing Colin Stretch, who announced in July 2018 about his plans to retire from Facebook. However, he will continue at Facebook through the summer to help with the transition, the company mentions in their press release. Stretch had also appeared before Congress in October 2017, to speak on Russian interference in the presidential election. On the other hand, Pinette will be replacing Caryn Marooney, who announced her plans to leave, in February this year. Mentioning Newstead, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, said, “Jennifer is a seasoned leader whose global perspective and experience will help us fulfill our mission. We are also truly grateful to Colin for his dedicated leadership and wise counsel over the past nine years. He has played a crucial role in some of our most important projects and has created a strong foundation for Jennifer to build upon.” Newstead’s assistance in drafting the Patriot Act in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks has been noteworthy. According to The Verge, “ As The Hill points out, a 2002 Justice Department press release describes her (Newstead) as “helping craft” the legislation. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo described her as the “day-to-day manager of the Patriot Act in Congress” in his 2006 book.” “I’m excited to be joining Facebook at an important time and working with such a fantastic team,” Newstead said. “Facebook’s products play an important role in societies around the world. I am looking forward to working with the team and outside experts and regulators on a range of legal issues as we seek to uphold our responsibilities and shared values. Pinette, on the other hand, has led communications for Gates Ventures, the private office and innovation lab of Bill Gates for five years, served as head of Asia Pacific communications for Google, and also held various product and corporate communications leadership positions at Microsoft. He has also served as the first head of external communications for hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. “John’s deep understanding of the technology industry and his experience leading communications teams will be invaluable to helping us communicate the work we do at Facebook every day,” Sandberg said. “We are also thankful to Caryn for her exceptional contribution to Facebook over the past eight years. She has been an inspiring and thoughtful leader to our communications team and countless others at the company. Both she and Colin will be greatly missed.” Also, 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. This means Facebook does not even have a CSO in place. The public has found this move by Facebook appalling, adding more to its long list of poor decision making. A former FB employee told The Verge, “ The platform — with its tentacles in every last aspect of people's lives — is now receiving legal counsel by the woman who authored much of the Patriot Act”. Ryan Mac, a tech reporter, tweeted, “Will be interesting to see what the folks that FB hired away from privacy advocacy institutions like EFF and Access Now will do when they have to work with Newstead.” A US Tech reporter, Laurence Dodds, tweeted about John Pinette, “On his LinkedIn page, Pinette says that he was the director of communications for Microsoft between 1996 and 2007. That means that he was in the hot seat for Microsoft's big antitrust battle – a years-long political and legal confrontation very similar to the one FB is now facing.” To know more about this announcement in detail, visit Facebook’s official press release. “Is it actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again?,” Pulitzer finalist, Carole Cadwalladr on Facebook’s role in Brexit Facebook shareholders back a proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as the board’s chairperson Will Facebook enforce it’s updated “remove, reduce, and inform” policy to curb fake news and manage problematic content?

The EU parliament voted last week to develop what is being described as the largest biometric database on earth. Once created, the database will connect the systems used by various border control, migration and law enforcement agencies into a truly gigantic searchable database for both EU and Non EU citizens. The new database will be called the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and will unify records of over 350 million people. What’s the purpose of the Common Identity Repository? The CIR will streamline a number of operations, bringing together information that is highly distributed - and even siloed - into one place. It will mean that officials will only need to search a single database rather than multiple ones. But accessibility is only one element - it also brings together layers of biometric information such as fingerprints, faces and personal data, like passport numbers. According to Politico Europe, the new system “will grant officials access to a person’s verified identity with a single fingerprint scan.” The multifaceted nature of the system can be explained by the way it was approved by the European Parliament. It went through on two separate votes: one for merging systems used for things related to visas and borders were approved 511 to 123 (with nine abstentions), and the other for streamlining systems users for law enforcement, judicial, migration, and asylum matters was approved 510 to 130 (also with nine abstentions). On this EU officials stated last week that, "The systems covered by the new rules would include the Schengen Information System, Eurodac, the Visa Information System (VIS) and three new systems: the European Criminal Records System for Third Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN), the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)" Criticism of the Common Identity Repository The plan has come in for serious criticism from those who argue that there are serious privacy rights at stake. The civil liberties advocacy group Statewatch had asserted last year that it would lead to the “creation of a Big Brother centralised EU state database and have called CIR as the point of no return.” The European Parliament says “the system will make EU information systems used in security, border and migration management interoperable enabling data exchange between the systems.” It is also argued by the critics that once up and running, CIR will be one of the biggest people-tracking databases in the world, right behind the systems used by the Chinese government and India's Aadhar system. https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1120374735693598720 Microsoft and Cisco propose ideas for a Biometric privacy law after the state of Illinois passed one Biometric Information Privacy Act: It is now illegal for Amazon, Facebook or Apple to collect your biometric data without consent in Illinois SafeMessage: An AI-based biometric authentication solution for messaging platforms

Yesterday, the Svelte community announced the stable release of Svelte 3. In this version, the team has worked towards moving reactivity into the language. Developers will now be able to write components in Svelte with significantly less boilerplate. Svelte is a component framework, similar to JavaScript frameworks such as React and Vue, but comes with an important difference. In the case of traditional frameworks, the major part of the work happens in the browser. On the other hand, Svelte shifts this work into a compile step that happens at the time when your app is built. Instead of relying on techniques like virtual DOM diffing, with this framework, you can write code that surgically updates the DOM when the app state changes. Rich Harris, the Svelte developer, says Svelte aims to be more like spreadsheets. “Spreadsheets are pretty cool and we should be more like them...Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the tools we use to build the web becomes as accessible as spreadsheets are? And, that is one of the Svelte’s overriding goals to make web development accessible...” What’s new in Svelte 3? With the introduction of hooks to React, many other frameworks also started to experiment with their own implementation of hooks. However, Svelte realized that ‘hooks’ was not the “direction they wanted to go in.” Explaining the reason behind not implementing hooks, Harris said, “Hooks have some intriguing properties, but they also involve some unnatural code and create unnecessary work for the garbage collector. For a framework that's used in as well as animation-heavy interactives, that's no good.” Because of these reasons, the team has reached the conclusion that Svelte does not require any API and has chosen to go with no API at all. “We can just use the language,” shared Harris. Not only just components, but the team has also given a completely new look and feel to Svelte in this release. They have also updated the logo, website, and also updated their tagline from 'The magical disappearing UI framework' to 'Cybernetically enhanced web apps'. To know more detail, check out the official announcement by Svelte. Applying Modern CSS to Create React App Projects [Tutorial] React Native development tools: Expo, React Native CLI, CocoaPods [Tutorial] React Native 0.59 is now out with React Hooks, updated JavaScriptCore, and more!

Last month, the Chinese tech companies implemented the idea of long working hours by following the illegal ‘996’ work schedule (from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week). And to this, a GitHub user named “996icu” created a webpage and shared it on GitHub in order to protest against this “996” work culture. The purpose of this initiative is to uphold the labor law and respect the rights and interests of the employees. And to support this, yesterday, Microsoft and GitHub employees drafted a petition in defence of the GitHub repository which could be under threat of Chinese censorship. The project is an initiative towards making the Chinese tech companies obey the labor laws and the international labor convention. The 996.ICU GitHub project description reads, "By following the '996' work schedule, you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit).” This initiative has gathered a huge support within China and has received a positive response from over 200,000 GitHub users. And as it goes viral, Chinese domestic browsers by Tencent and Alibaba have restricted access to the 996.ICU repository by showcasing a warning that reads, “The repository contains illegal or malicious content.” Microsoft and GitHub might get pressurized to remove this repository. In the petition, the Microsoft and GitHub employees have requested the company to continue supporting the cause. The petition reads, “We, the workers of Microsoft and GitHub, support the 996.ICU movement and stand in solidarity with tech workers in China. We know this is a problem that crosses national borders. These same issues permeate across full time and contingent jobs at Microsoft and the industry as a whole. Another reason we must take a stand in solidarity with Chinese workers is that history tells us that multinational companies will pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom as they outsource jobs and take advantage of weak labor standards in the pursuit of profit. We have to come together across national boundaries to ensure just working conditions for everyone around the globe.” It further reads, “We encourage Microsoft and GitHub to keep the 996.ICU GitHub repository uncensored and available to everyone. To other tech workers and industry supporters, we urge you to join us in our support of the 996.ICU movement.” This initiative is also supported by engineers and project managers from Google, Amazon, Trip Advisor, Facebook and other tech companies. To know more about the petition, check out the GitHub page. ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub Jack Ma defends the extreme “996 work culture” in Chinese tech firms Microsoft employees raise their voice against the company’s misogynist, sexist and racist acts