Tech News

Last week, Mastodon 2.8, a self-hosted social media service, was shipped with Keybase’s brand new proof system. Yesterday, the team behind Keybase announced that this new proof system is now available for all Mastodon servers. With this update, any community will be able to cryptographically connect their profiles to Keybase. https://twitter.com/malgorithms/status/1117888468544147456 Keybase is a free security app for groups, communities, families, and friends using which you can affirm your identity across the web. At its core, Keybase is a key directory that maps social media identities to encryption keys. Users can also have an encrypted chat with Keybase’s end-to-end chat service called Keybase Chat. With Keybase, users can prove a “link” between online identities such as Twitter or Reddit account and their encryption keys. So, instead of relying on a system like OAuth, identities are proven by posting a signed statement on the account a user wants to prove ownership of. For instance, a user just needs to enter their Twitter handle in the Keybase app following which a signed tweet is generated and is sent to Twitter. Once the tweet is posted, the user returns to the Keybase app. This mechanism makes identity proofs publicly verifiable instead of having to trust that the service is truthful. Though this method is quick and easy, it does have some limitations. Keybase app automatically generates the verification tweet, which users are expected to post. However, the user can edit these tweets. The Keybase team has now updated the proof system, which solves this problem. When a user claims on Keybase that they are a user on a site, they are redirected to that particular site. The verification is then completed in just two steps: Source: Keybase The site will then show the following row, signaling that the user is verified: Source: Keybase To read the full announcement, visit Keybase’s official website. Mastodon 2.7, a decentralized alternative to social media silos, is now out! Mastodon 2.5 released with UI, administration, and deployment changes 5 ways to reduce App deployment time

Today, Platform9 open sourced Klusterkit under the Apache 2.0 license. It is a set of three open source tools that can be used separately or in tandem to simplify the creation and management of highly-available, multi-master, production-grade Kubernetes clusters on-premise, air-gapped environments. Tools included in Klusterkit ‘etcdadm’ Inspired by the ‘kubeadm’ command, ‘etcdadm’ is a command-line interface (CLI) for operating an etcd cluster. It makes the creation of a new cluster, addition of a new member, or the removal of a member from an existing cluster easier. It is adopted by Kubernetes Cluster Lifecycle SIG,  a group that focuses on deployment and upgrades of clusters. ‘nodeadm’ This is a CLI node administration tool that complements kubeadm by deploying all the dependencies required by kubeadm. You can easily deploy a Kubernetes control plane or nodes on any machine running Linux with the help of this tool. ‘cctl’ This is a cluster lifecycle management tool based on Kubernetes community's Cluster API spec. It uses the other two tools in Klusterkit to easily deploy and maintain highly-available Kubernetes clusters in on-premises, even air-gapped environments. Features of Klusterkit It comes with multi-master (K8s HA) support Users can deploy and manage secure etcd clusters It provides rolling upgrade and rollback capability It works in air-gapped environments Users can backup and recover etcd clusters from quorum loss You can control plane protection from low memory/ low CPU conditions. Klusterkit solution architecture Source: Platform 9 Klusterkit stores the metadata of the Kubernetes cluster you build, in a single file named ‘cctl-state.yaml’. You can invoke the cctl CLI to orchestrate the lifecycle of a Kubernetes cluster from any machine which contains this state file. For performing CRUD operations on clusters, cctl implements and calls into the cluster-api interface as a library. It uses ssh-provider, the machine controller for the cluster-api reference implementation. The ssh-provider then, in turn, calls etcdadm and nodeadm to perform cluster operations. In an email sent to us, Arun Sriraman, Kubernetes Technical Lead Manager at Platform9, explaining the importance of Klusterkit, said, “Klusterkit presents a powerful, yet easy-to-use Kubernetes toolset that complements community efforts like Cluster API and kubeadm to allow enterprises a path to modernize applications to use Kubernetes, and run them anywhere -- even in on-premise, air-gapped environments.” To know more in detail, check out the documentation on GitHub. Pivotal and Heroku team up to create Cloud Native Buildpacks for Kubernetes Kubernetes 1.14 releases with support for Windows nodes, Kustomize integration, and much more Introducing ‘Quarkus’, a Kubernetes native Java framework for GraalVM & OpenJDK HotSpot

Yesterday, the Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that they are developing a new and highly secure communication platform. This program will be called as ‘Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE)’ and will be similar to WhatsApp. The RACE program plans on building a distributed messaging system which can exist completely within a network; provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging; and also preserve privacy to any participant in the system. DARPA in the program description mention that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system." RACE also mentions that the program will further seek to explore approaches to preserving privacy, such as secure multiparty computation and obfuscated communication protocols. According to the program description on DARPA’s official website, “The goal of the RACE program is to create a system capable of avoiding large-scale compromise.” “RACE research efforts will explore: 1) preventing compromised information from being useful for identifying any of the system nodes because all such information is encrypted on the nodes at all times, even during computation; and 2) preventing communications compromise by virtue of obfuscating communication protocols”, the description reads. For now, the team has not revealed complete details of the project. However, they’ll update the users on any new changes made. Visit DARPA’s official website for more. DARPA’s $2 Billion ‘AI Next’ campaign includes a Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program Katie Bouman unveils the first ever black hole image with her brilliant algorithm Obfuscating Command and Control (C2) servers securely with Redirectors [Tutorial]

Last month, the team at Ruby announced that support for Ruby 2.3 series has ended. Security and bug fixes from the recent Ruby versions won’t be backported to Ruby 2.3. As there won’t be any patches of 2.3, the Ruby team has recommended users to upgrade to Ruby 2.6 or 2.5 as soon as possible. Currently supported Ruby versions Ruby 2.6 series Ruby 2.6 series is currently in the normal maintenance phase. The team will backport bug fixes and will release an urgent fix for it in case of urgent security issue/bug. Ruby 2.5 series Ruby 2.5 series is currently in the normal maintenance phase. The team will backport bug fixes and will release an urgent fix for it in case of urgent security issue/bug. Ruby 2.4 series Ruby 2.4 series is currently in security maintenance phase. The team won’t backport any bug fixes to 2.4 except for security fixes. The team will release an urgent fix for it in case of urgent security issue/bug. The team is also planning to end the support for Ruby 2.4 series by March 31, 2020. To know more about this news, check out the post by Ruby. How Deliveroo migrated from Ruby to Rust without breaking production Ruby on Rails 6.0 Beta 1 brings new frameworks, multiple DBs, and parallel testing Ruby 2.6.0 released with a new JIT compiler

Last month, the European Parliament passed the Copyright Directive that includes Article 11 and Article 13. The directive got 348 votes in favor whereas 274 were against, and 36 declined to vote. Yesterday, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France and Germany were amongst the 19 nations that agreed to the EU's Copyright Directive. Majority of the EU ministers voted for it and just a few in the likes of  Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden opposed it. Considering the majority supporting it, the directive has been passed. According to Article 11 or link tax, news aggregating sites need to obtain a license before linking or using a snippet of news articles. The motive behind this article was to help original content creators gain some revenue from services like Google News and Apple News. Article 13 is for “meme ban” or the “upload filter”. According to Article 13, online content sharing platforms like Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud need to take care of the content they put in order to prevent copyright infringement by their users. This also makes these platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement by their users. Even though the copyright directive was passed in the EU, the legislation still needed to be approved by the Council of Ministers before formal adoption. A majority of 55% of Member States that represent 65% of the population was required to adopt the legislation. In reality, this was achieved with 71.26% votes in favor, and so the Copyright Directive will now pass into law. With both Germany and the UK agreeing to the directive, the Copyright Directive is now adopted. https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1117679032890478594 EU member states will have two years for implementing the law which will require platforms like YouTube to sign licensing agreements with creators to use their content. If they fail to do so, the infringing content would have to be taken down and shouldn’t be uploaded again to their services. https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1117713424555835394 European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncke said in a statement that “With the passing of the legislation, Europe is making copyright rules “fit for the digital age.” He further added, “Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users and responsibility for platforms. When it comes to completing Europe’s digital single market, the copyright reform is the missing piece of the puzzle.” Antonio Tajani, president of European Parliament, and the European Council, Donald Tusk, still needs to sign the directive. As there are still two years for this directive to be implemented, the impact of this action will only be witnessed once the directive officially gets in action. But it seems the big and small scale tech companies will be the ones getting affected. Also, the publishing firms who post content on a regular basis may get affected because of the limitation on using the source link of original content. The actual impact of the law and how it plays out in practice remains yet to be seen. The member states will have two years to transpose the thing into their respective national legislations. Five EU countries oppose the EU copyright directive EU legislators agree to meet this week to finalize on the Copyright Directive EU passes the Copyright Directive with the controversial Article 13 and 11  

Yesterday, the team behind Qt released the latest version, Qt Creator 4.9.0, a cross-platform software development framework for embedded and desktop applications. This release comes with programming language support, changes to UI, QML support and much more. What’s new in Qt Creator 4.9.0? Language support Qt Creator 4.9 comes with added support for document outline, find usages, and also for code actions that allow the language server to suggest fixes at a specified place in the code. The team has changed the highlighter. It is now based on the KSyntaxHighlighting library, which is used in KDE for this purpose. Changes to UI In this release, the UI for diagnostics from the Clang analyzer tools have been improved as they now are grouped by file now. Diagnostics from the project’s header files are now also included. QML Support The team updated their QML parser to Qt 5.12 that added support for ECMAScript 7. Profiling This release comes with perf, which is a performance profiling tool for software that runs on a Linux system. The integration in Qt Creator is available for applications that run on a local Linux system, and for applications that run on a remote Linux system from a Linux or Windows host. Generic Projects Users can now add a QtCreatorDeployment.txt file to their generic project for specifying the necessary information about where to deploy and which files to deploy. Support for OS For Windows, the team has added support for MSVC (Microsoft Visual C++) 2019. For macOS, a Touch Bar has been added so that users can run Qt Creator on a MacBook. And for Linux, the team has added OpenSSH tools. To know more about this news, check out the Qt blog post. Qt Creator 4.9 Beta released with QML support, programming language support and more! Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS Qt creator 4.8 beta released, adds language server protocol  

Last week, Joe Groff of the Swift Core Team published a post on the Swift forums discussing refining the Swift Generics model which was established by the Generics Manifesto, almost three years ago. The post introduced new changes to improve the UI of how generics work in the Swift language. The first part of this group of changes is the SE-0244 proposal. This proposal introduces some features around function return values. SE-0244 proposal The SE-0244 proposal addresses the problem of type-level abstraction for returns.  At present Swift has three existing generics features in Swift 5. Type-level abstraction The syntax of a type level abstraction is quite similar to generics in other languages, like Java or C#. In this users type out the function definitions, use angle brackets, and conventionally use T for a generic type, all of it happening at the function (or type) level. Each of the functions for Type-level abstraction has a placeholder type T. Each call site then gets to pick what concrete type is bound to T, making these functions very flexible and powerful in a variety of situations. Value-level abstraction Value-level abstraction deals with individual variables. It is not concerned with making general statements about the types that can be passed into or out of a function; instead, developers need to worry only about the specific type of exactly one variable in one place. Existential type Many swift libraries consist of composable generic components which provide primitive types along with composable transformations to combine and modify primitive shapes into more complex ones. These transformations may be composed by using the existential type instead of generic arguments. Existential types are like wrappers or boxes for other types. However, they bring more dynamism and runtime overhead than desired. If a user wants to abstract the return type of a declaration from its signature, existentials or manual type erasure are the two choices. However, these come with their own tradeoffs. Tradeoffs of existing generics features The biggest problem of the original genetic manifesto is generalized existentials. Present existentials have a variety of use cases that could never be addressed. Although existentials would allow functions to hide their concrete return types behind protocols as implementation details, they would not always be the most desirable tool for this job. This is because they don’t allow functions to abstract their concrete return types while still maintaining the underlying type's identity in the client code. Also, Swift follows in the tradition of similar languages like C++, Java, and C# in its generics notation, using explicit type variable declarations in angle brackets. However, this notation can be verbose and awkward. So new improvements need to be made for existing notations for generics and existentials. Reverse generics Currently Swift has no way for an implementation to achieve type-level abstraction of its return values independent of the caller's control. If an API wants to abstract its concrete return type from callers, it must accept the tradeoffs of value-level abstraction. If those trade-offs are unacceptable, the only alternative in Swift today is to fully expose the concrete return type. These tradeoffs led to the introduction of a new type system feature to achieve type-level abstraction of a return type. Coined as reverse generics by Manolo van Ee, this system behaves similar to a generic parameter type, but whose underlying type is bound by the function's implementation rather than by the caller. This is analogous to the roles of argument and return values in functions; a function takes its arguments as inputs and uses them to compute the return values it gives back to the caller. This process has already begun with a formal review in progress on SE-244: Opaque Result Types. This proposal covers the “reverse generics” idea and some keyword in return types. “If adopted”, says Tim Ekl, a Seattle-area software developer, “it would give us the ability to return a concrete type hidden from the caller, indicating only that the returned value conforms to some protocol(s)”. He has also written an interesting blog post summarizing the discussion by Joe Groff on the swift forums page. Note: The content of this article is taken from Joe Groff’s discussion. For extensive details, you may read the full discussion on the Swift forums page. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 is here! Implementing Dependency Injection in Swift [Tutorial] Apple is patenting Swift features like optional chaining

Last week, Facebook, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, announced its annual stockholders' meeting, which will be held on May 30. Going by the proposals listed in the notice looks like the main agenda of this meeting is to make changes to Facebook’s governance structure. The notice lists eight stockholders proposals that Facebook investors will be casting their votes for. One of these proposals is titled as “a stockholder proposal regarding an independent chair,” indicating that the investors will be deciding on whether Mark Zuckerberg should step down as the chairman and be replaced by an independent hire. In recent years, we have witnessed an endless number of scandals in which Facebook played a major part, the main one being the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. These scandals have left the investors, who boast of having nearly $3 million shares of the company, in anger and frustration. They believe that Facebook has been unable to properly address these issues because its current corporate governance structure gives Zuckerberg dual power of both CEO and chairman. Facebook has a dual-class structure, Class A and B. Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of class A shares and not-so-surprisingly Zuckerberg has more than 75% of class B stock. This makes him the holder of more than half of the voting power at Facebook and therefore allows him to dismiss the investor proposals. Last year in July, Trillium Asset Management, which manages about $11 million (£8.4 million) in Facebook stock, wrote a proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the social-networking giant. "A CEO who also serves as a chair can exert excessive influence on the board and its agenda, weakening the board's oversight of management. Separating the chair and CEO positions reduces this conflict, and an independent chair provides the clearest separation of power between the CEO and the rest of the board," reads the proposal by Trillium Asset Management. Facebook has previously said that splitting Zuckerberg’s role would create "uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency in board and management function." This time, however, Facebook’s board of directors have called for voting against the stockholders’ proposal. Facebook added, “Our board of directors currently believes that the most effective leadership model is that Mr. Zuckerberg, our founder, and controlling stockholder, serves as both Chairman and CEO.” Their response further says, “We believe our board of directors is functioning effectively under its current structure, and that the current structure provides appropriate oversight protections. We do not believe that requiring the Chair to be independent will provide appreciably better direction and performance, and instead could cause inefficiency in board and management function and relations.” Looking at the previous responses by Facebook on such proposals, chances of Zuckerberg stepping down as chair is very similar. “They have zero chance of succeeding. There's no way in hell that Zuckerberg will voluntarily relinquish his position at the top or his control of so much voting power,” adds a Redditor. Another user adds,  “Won't matter. Zuckerberg has special shares that give him essentially majority votes by himself”. Read the full story at Business Insider. Facebook AI introduces Aroma, a new code recommendation tool for developers Facebook AI open-sources PyTorch-BigGraph for faster embeddings in large graphs Ahead of Indian elections, Facebook removes hundreds of assets spreading fake news and hate speech, but are they too late?

Last week, Open AI’s new algorithm that is trained to play the complex strategy game, Dota 2, beat the world champion e-sports team OG at an event in San Francisco, winning the first two matches of the ‘best-of-three’ series. The competition included a human team of five professional Dota 2 players and AI team of five OpenAI bots. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1117166996917870592 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1117276770082775040 Dota 2 is a complex multiplayer strategy game, where two teams of five players each, compete to destroy a large structure that is defended by the opposing team known as the "Ancient", while also defending their own. The game consists of over 100 unique characters, deep skill trees, etc. The five Open AI bots had been trained using deep reinforcement learning techniques and had played 45000 years worth of Dota 2 gameplay in a span of 10 months. OpenAI constantly kept improving by playing itself in a virtual environment. During Dota 2, each team had to pick out of 17 heroes. In the first match, OpenAI used different aggressive tactics and human players managed to survive for more than 40 minutes. One such tactic used by the OpenAI bots involved spending the earned in-game currency to revive heroes upon death, during the start of the match. In the case of the second match, OpenAI’s performance got even better and gained an early edge against OG. Overall, it took less than 20 minutes for the AI to win against humans. The last round was won by the humans. This was the last planned public demonstration of OpenAI's bot, however, Open AI’s research team is now working on new software that allows humans to collaborate alongside the OpenAI Five software in real time. This will allow the team to learn from its unique strategies and patterns. OpenAI is also planning to release a platform, called Arena, that would allow the public to play against OpenAI Five. The platform will be open for three days from April 18th at 9 PM Eastern time. However, this collaboration may not be made available to the public. Apart from that Sam Altman, Co-founder, and CEO, OpenAI, is focussing on a different area of research, which involves making the AI adapt to work in less perfect simulators. Also, OpenAI is working on using reinforcement learning to provide robotic hands more human-like movement, reports the Verge. “What OpenAI is trying to do is build general artificial intelligence and to share those benefits with the world and make sure it’s safe. We’re not here to beat video games, as fun as that is. We’re here to uncover secrets along the path the AGI”, said Altman. Public reaction to the news is largely positive with people congratulating OpenAI for the win: https://twitter.com/LGDgaming/status/1117417389275086848 https://twitter.com/jackgrove2/status/1117211879485603842 https://twitter.com/felipempleite_/status/1117167661396430848 https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1117205960152502272 OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company to accelerate AGI research and attract top AI talent OpenAI introduces Neural MMO, a multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents OpenA’s new versatile AI model, GPT-2 can efficiently write convincing fake news from just a few words

Back in January, a group of Amazon shareholders put forward a proposition to ban the sale of the company’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, to government agencies around the world. For months the company has fought the proposal, using rules set by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to avoid the vote. But with the SEC ruling against the company and in favor of its shareholders just a few weeks ago (on March 28 and April 3), the tech giant was, for once at least, fighting a losing battle. Now, the company is finally facing up to the reality of its position. Last week it confirmed the vote will take place at the annual shareholder meeting on May 22. Why do shareholders want to stop the company from selling Rekognition? It might seem strange that shareholders would want to reduce a company’s ability to sell more products. But Rekognition is no normal product and has faced scrutiny for months from a number of different quarters. Earlier this month, a group of prominent industry and academic AI researchers urged Amazon in an open letter to stop selling its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies. The researchers argued that repeated studies and scrutiny have shown that Rekognition has higher error rates for people of color and women. The sale of Rekognition to governments until Amazon could prove that “the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights.” There’s a good deal of data backing up the AI researchers’ position. In 2018 an ACLU study did an experiment in which Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress to mugshot photos, while earlier this year an MIT Media Lab study showed that Rekognition struggled when trying to correctly identify women of color. In response to this research, Amazon has gone on record asserting that researchers weren’t using Rekognition properly. However, that doesn’t really solve the issue: police say they don’t use Rekognition in the way Amazon claims it recommends, either. It’s important to note that shareholders are not unwavering in their opposition to Rekognition. Instead they have called for “an evaluation using independent evidence” to ensure “the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights.” Essentially, the shareholders’ position is one about guaranteeing that the company is making the right level of checks and balances when developing a product that has the potential to be so transformative. What does the Amazon leadership say? Amazon’s Board of Directors opposes the proposal. The Board cites the fact that Rekognition has never received any complaints about the product in relation to privacy or human rights from any of its customers. The Amazon Board wants to block third parties from studying Rekognition In addition to the proposal to ban the sale of facial recognition tech to government agencies around the world, shareholders will also vote on another proposal to have a third party study the privacy and human rights implications of Amazon’s Rekognition. The Amazon Board opposes that proposal too. It argues that their commitment to privacy and human rights is enough, outlined in the company’s Terms of Service. This has been the company’s position for the last year whenever it has been met with criticism. Amazon’s perspective isn’t one that’s shared across the tech world. Last year, Microsoft’s president and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, argued for for the federal regulation of face recognition: “We live in a nation of laws, and the government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology,” Smith wrote. “As a general principle, it seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government.” Over 30 AI experts join shareholders in calling on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition, its facial recognition tech, for government surveillance Amazon Rekognition faces more scrutiny from Democrats and German antitrust probe AWS updates the face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities in Amazon Rekognition  

On Saturday, Microsoft confirmed to TechCrunch that their email services were hacked from January 1, 2019, till March 28, 2019. Microsoft told TechCrunch, “Certain ‘limited’ number of people who use web email services managed by Microsoft—which cover services like MSN and Hotmail—had their accounts compromised.” “We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access”, a Microsoft spokesperson told in an email. Following this, Microsoft sent out an email to all the affected users stating that hackers were potentially able to access an affected user’s e-mail address, folder names, the subject lines of e-mails, and the names of other e-mail address the user communicates. However, they were not able to access the content of any e-mails or attachments or login credentials like passwords. Microsoft recommended the affected users to reset their account password. https://twitter.com/jason_koebler/status/1117557557051166721 According to the letter from Microsoft to affected users, the hackers got into the system by compromising a customer support agent’s credentials. Once identified, those credentials were disabled. Microsoft informed the users that it didn’t know what data was viewed by the hackers or why, but cautioned that users might, as a result, see more phishing or spam emails as a result. “You should be careful when receiving any e-mails from any misleading domain name, any e-mail that requests personal information or payment, or any unsolicited request from an untrusted source”, the letter mentioned. To know more about this news, head over to TechCrunch. Mozilla considers blocking DarkMatter after Reuters reported its link with a secret hacking operation, Project Raven MarioNet: A browser-based attack that allows hackers to run malicious code even if users’ exit a web page Understanding the cost of a cybersecurity attack: The losses organizations face

A global debate regarding the sale of facial recognition tech to the government has been ongoing for quite some time now. It is largely over the concern that government tracking public’s every move will hamper public privacy and develop a constant fear of being watched among the citizens. It will also provide the government an unfair ability to target immigrants, religious minorities, people of color & ethnicity. Giant tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have already gone under the scanner due to the opposition faced by rights groups and public rights organizations. These groups have been urging tech companies to reconsider the consequences that can emerge after selling the facial recognition tech to the government. Although it still remains a debate between the U.S. tech firms, government, and the citizens, it appears to be set in action across China. China apparently is using facial recognition tech to keep a track on around 11 million Uighurs, a Muslim minority, for the purposes of ‘search and review’. China has already been chastised globally for detaining nearly one million members of these Muslim ethnic minorities in indoctrination camps in its western region Xinjiang. Paul Mozur, Asia tech correspondent with the New York Times, published an article, shedding light on the harsh reality of this privacy-hampering practice. It’s the first known example of facial recognition being used intentionally by a government to racially profile and a massive ethical leap for A.I”, writes Mozur. https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1117468889007435777 The facial recognition tech looks out for Uighurs on the basis of their appearance and keeps a tab on their day to day activities. This practice which was earlier only ongoing in the west Xinjiang (home for Uighurs), to track people’s DNA, is now being implemented in other parts of China. Earlier this year, law enforcement in the central Chinese city of Sanmenxia had a facial recognition system that tracked whether its residents were Uighurs or not about 500,000 times in a month. Also, law enforcement at the central province of Shaanxi aimed to acquire a smart camera system in 2018 that would identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes. Generally, facial recognition tech tracks people on the basis of skin color and face shapes. However, China’s facial surveillance, with the help of tech startups, have managed to classify people based on ‘social definition’ of race or ethnicity with the new ‘minority recognition’ feature. Chinese AI companies to aid with the software include Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime, and CloudWalk. With the help of machine learning, engineers feed thousands of labeled images of Uighurs and non-Uighurs to train the systems to recognize the pattern, which in turn, helps distinguish between different ethnic groups. Claire Garvie, an associate at center on privacy and tech at Georgetown Law, told New York Times, “If you make a technology that can classify people by ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.” Additionally, a face-image database has been set up for people with criminal records, mental illnesses, history of drug abuse, and those who have petitioned the government over grievances. A national database of criminals includes about 300,000 faces, and people with a history of drug use totals 8,000 faces, in the city of Wenzhou. Just last month, an analyst at Tencent & WeChat, Matthew Brennan, tweeted a video of a facial recognition kiosk at Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in the People’s Republic of China that went viral. The video showed kiosk giving Brennan personalized flight information after scanning his face within a fraction of seconds. According to Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this practice by China is a major threat to its democracy and an ‘urgent crisis’. Critics have labeled China negatively for its gladiatorial show of tech-enabled authoritarianism and power over Uighurs. https://twitter.com/DrProsper_/status/1117704098986565632 https://twitter.com/DrProsper_/status/1117704098986565632 Alarming ways governments are using surveillance tech to watch you Chinese tech companies don’t want to hire employees over 30 years of age ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub

Last week, the community behind Apache Flink announced the release of Apache Flink 1.8.0. This release comes with the finalized state evolution support, lazy cleanup strategies for state TTL, improved pattern matching support in SQL, and more. Finalized state schema evolution support This release marks the completion of the community-driven effort to provide a schema evolution story for user state managed by Flink. The following changes are made to finalize the state schema evolution support: The list of data types that support state schema evolution is now extended to include POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). All Flink built-in serializers are upgraded to use the new serialization compatibility abstractions. Implementing abstractions using custom state serializers is now easy for advanced users. Continuous cleanup of old state based on TTL In Apache Flink 1.6, TTL (time-to-live) was introduced for the keyed state. TTL enables cleanup and makes keyed state entries inaccessible after a given timeout. The state can also be cleaned when writing a savepoint or checkpoint. With this release, continuous cleanup of old entries is also allowed for both the RocksDB state backend and the heap backend. Improved pattern-matching support in SQL This release extends the MATCH_RECOGNIZE clause by adding two new updates: user-defined functions and aggregations. User-defined functions are added for custom logic during pattern detection and aggregations are added for complex CEP definitions. New KafkaDeserializationSchema for direct access to ConsumerRecord A new KafkaDeserializationSchema is introduced to give direct access to the Kafka ConsumerRecord. This will give users access to all data that Kafka provides for a record including the headers. Hadoop-specific distributions will not be released Starting from this release Hadoop-specific distributions will not be released. If a deployment relies on ‘flink-shaded-hadoop2’ being included in ‘flink-dist’, then it must be manually downloaded and copied into the /lib directory. Updates in the Maven modules of Table API Users who have a ‘flink-table’ dependency are required to update their dependencies to ‘flink-table-planner’. If you want to implement a pure table program in Scala or Java, add  ‘flink-table-api-scala’ or ‘flink-table-api-java’ respectively to your project. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by Apache Flink. Apache Maven Javadoc Plugin version 3.1.0 released LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0 released with support for JDK 11, JUnit 5 and more!

Facebook and it's family of apps Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram were hit by another major outage yesterday. This is their second outage within a month.  According to downdetector.com, issues started at 6:30 AM ET, leaving users unable to load fresh content on Instagram and Facebook or message each other via Whatsapp and Messenger. The issue was resolved at 9 AM ET the same day and Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all up and running. https://twitter.com/bansaldinesh23/status/1117674796152545280 Thousands of Facebook (and it's other platform) users took to Twitter to share their issues creating memes about the outage. https://twitter.com/brfootball/status/1117389780915040256 https://twitter.com/9GAG/status/1117383821962272769 https://twitter.com/habet01/status/1117486075319132161 Twitter saves the day! https://twitter.com/asal_kc/status/1117439995411877890 https://twitter.com/Ace55061783/status/1117425187895435264 https://twitter.com/felizkrennews/status/1117427741127782406 Some also tweeted about how these platforms are controlling us to the extent that even a small break is unbearable. https://twitter.com/zamirmohyedin/status/1117682923342196736 Others used this opportunity to market their own products. https://twitter.com/NEstimator/status/1117434348981166085 Facebook has not tweeted about the outage on its Twitter page or its developer site. However, in a statement to Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said, “Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.” As per the Facebook nature, it slyly refused to shared details on what caused the blackout. Just last month the Facebook family of apps were hit with a 14-hour long outage, the longest in its history. The blackout caused a bigger hit to the revenue of advertisers on Facebook that spend large amounts of money to reach potential customers on Facebook platforms. It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally apologized for the blackouts on Twitter blaming a server configuration change for the mishap. Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours blackout, longest in its history Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Outage plagues Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp ahead of Black Friday Sale, throwing users and businesses into panic.

It was just a little over a week ago when Google released its diversity annual report for the year 2019. And last thursday, its chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown, who co-wrote the report with Melonie Parker, announced that she is leaving Google to join Gusto, a leading Denver and San Francisco based HR-tech firm. “I’m joining the team at Gusto...that’s on a mission to create a world where work empowers a better life. I’ll be leading the People team at a company that is all about people”, writes Brown in a LinkedIn post. https://twitter.com/dmbrown1/status/1116361389201739776 Brown is being replaced by Melonie Parker, who earlier served as the Global director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Google. Brown had joined Google as the Chief Diversity Officer back in June 2017 and earlier worked at a similar profile at Intel. “Danielle has dedicated her career to helping foster humanity at work. Most recently, she served as vice president, employee engagement and chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google, where she focused on ensuring their workplace and culture were respectful, safe, and inclusive — values we hold paramount at Gusto. Danielle will be an incredible addition to the Gusto team”, said Josh Reeves, co-founder, and CEO, Gusto.   https://twitter.com/GustoHQ/status/1116360860492894210 Gusto serves 6 million small businesses all over the U.S. and provides small businesses with a full-service people platform. The platform provides business owners with all the features they need to build their team.   Eileen Naughton, Google VP of People Operations, confirmed Brown’s departure and told TechCrunch that she’s “grateful to Danielle for her excellent work over the past two years to improve representation in Google’s workforce and ensure an inclusive culture for everyone. We wish her all the best in her new role at Gusto”. https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1116567286372913152 Liz Fong Jones, a former Google Engineer, who left Google earlier this year in February, tweeted in response to the news of Brown’s departure, saying that it’s not a good sign for Google. She mentioned that Brown wasn't “always popular with execs and employees” but was a  “straight shooter”. https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1116361831742881793 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1116362110743863298 Jones at her departure cited Google’s lack of leadership in response to the demands made by employees during the Google walkout in November 2018. She had also published a post on Medium, stating, ‘grave concerns’ related to strategic decisions made at Google and the way it ‘misused its power’. Brown hasn’t specified a reason for her departure from Google but wrote on her Linkedin post that “What if, in addition to trying to solve for employee engagement and inclusion within the biggest tech companies in the world, we tried to solve those critical needs for every local storefront, every new startup just getting off the ground, or every doctor’s office across our communities?” Google is facing a lot of controversies over its employee treatment and work culture. Just last week,  over 900 Google workers signed a letter urging Google for fair rights for its contract workers, who make up nearly 54% of the workforce. Google in response rolled out mandatory benefits for its TVCs including health care, paid sick leaves, tuition reimbursement, and minimum wage among others. Brown hasn’t spoken out yet anything regarding her experience within Google and writes that she’s “thrilled to join Gusto and advance its mission. I look forward to a future where work empowers a better life for all small businesses and their teams” Audience reaction to the news is largely positive with people congratulating Brown on her new role at Gusto. https://twitter.com/Katrina_HRM/status/1116522924578525184 https://twitter.com/nataliaenvy/status/1116391017458966528 Ian Goodfellow quits Google and joins Apple as a director of machine learning Google employees filed petition to remove anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant Kay Coles James from the AI Council Is Google trying to ethics-wash its decisions with its new Advanced Tech External Advisory Council?