Tech News

Last week, the team behind ML.NET announced the release of ML.NET 1.0 RC (Release Candidate), an open-source and cross-platform machine learning framework for .NET developers.  ML.NET 1.0 RC is the last preview release before releasing the final ML.NET 1.0 RTM (Requirements Traceability Matrix) this year. Developers can use ML.NET in sentiment analysis, product recommendation, spam detection, image classification, and much more. What’s new in ML.NET 1.0 RC? Preview packages According to the Microsoft blog, “Heading ML.NET 1.0, most of the functionality in ML.NET (around 95%) is going to be released as stable (version 1.0).” The packages that will be available for the preview state are TensorFlow, Onnx components, TimeSeries components, and recommendation components. IDataView moved to Microsoft.ML namespace In this release, IDataView has been moved back into Microsoft. ML namespace based on feedback the team received. Support for TensorFlow models This release comes with added support for TensorFlow models, an open source machine learning framework used for deep learning projects. The issues in ML.NET version 0.11 related to TensorFlow models have been fixed in this release. Major changes in ML.NET 1.0 RC The ‘Data’ namespace has been removed in this release with the help using Microsoft.Data.DataView. The Nuget package has been added for Microsoft.ML.FastTree. Also, PoissonRegression has been changed to LbfgsPoissonRegression. To know more about this release, check out the official announcement. .NET team announces ML.NET 0.6 Qml.Net: A new C# library for cross-platform .NET GUI development ML.NET 0.4 is here with support for SymSGD, F#, and word embeddings transform!A

Last month, Apple took a major step towards strengthening its AI team by hiring Ian Goodfellow, a researcher in the field of machine learning. He is best known for his projects in artificial intelligence at Google as the director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. The news broke just last week when Goodfellow updated his LinkedIn profile from Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google to Director of machine learning at Apple. https://twitter.com/iDownloadBlog/status/1114222866956980226 Andrew Ng, former head of Baidu AI Group/Google Brain gave best wishes to Ian Goodfellow, saying his former student Ian joins Apple.   https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg/status/1114304151809224704 Ian Goodfellow’s tech contribution Ian Goodfellow is a researcher in machine learning who has contributed towards Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. Goodfellow has previously interned at Willow Garage, the robotics research lab that brought the Robotics Operating System. At Google, he contributed to TensorFlow related project and also was a member of the Google Brain team. He has previously worked at OpenAI, an AI research consortium which was originally funded by Elon Musk and other tech leaders. Apple’s interest in AI It seems Apple is trying to rank higher amongst the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Just last year Apple hired John Giannandrea as the senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy who previously worked as the head of AI and search at Google and managed the AI strategy there. https://twitter.com/teslainvernon/status/1113977211369824256 Apart from exploring AI for features like FaceID and Siri, Apple has been also working on autonomous driving technology. Tim Cook, CEO at Apple has referred autonomous vehicle as “the mother of all AI projects” in scale which is also supposed to be a project similar to the Special Projects. Apple has reportedly absorbed the co-founders and few staff members of Lighthouse, maker of AI-powered home security cameras after buying the patents of Lighthouse AI. Tough times for Google The news regarding the switch of Goodfellow to Apple comes when the newly formed Advanced Technology External Advisory Council aimed to help Google with the major issues in AI such as facial recognition and machine learning fairness, gets dissolved. The AI team at Google seems to be in a major fix with the latest development happening in the company. To know more about this news, check out the post by CNBC. ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) file a complaint against the border control officers for violating the constitutional rights of an Apple employee Google dissolves its Advanced Technology External Advisory Council in a week after repeat criticism on selection of members Apple officially cancels AirPower; says it couldn’t meet hardware’s ‘high standards’

Last week, Bleeping Computer reported that the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Microsoft Edge will not allow users to disable hyperlink auditing that was possible in previous versions. What is hyperlink auditing? The Web Applications 1.0 specification introduced a new feature in HTML5 called hyperlink auditing for tracking clicks on the links. To track user clicks, the “a” and “area” elements support a “ping” attribute that takes one or more URIs as a value. For example: When you click on the hyperlink, the “href” link will be loaded as expected, but additionally, the browser will also send an HTTP POST request to the ping URL. The request headers can then be examined by the scripts that receive the ping POST request to find out where the ping came from. Which browsers have made hyperlink auditing compulsory? After finding this issue in Safari Technology Preview 72, Jeff Johnson, a professional Mac, and iOS software engineer reported this to Apple. Despite this, Apple released Safari 12.1 without any settings to disable hyperlink auditing. Prior to Safari 12.1, users were able to disable this feature with a hidden preference. Similar to Safari, in Google Chrome hyperlink auditing was enabled by default. Users could previously disable this by going to “chrome://flags#disable-hyperlink-auditing” and setting the flag to “Disabled”. But, in Chrome 74 Beta and Chrome 75 Canary builds, this flag has been completely removed. Microsoft Edge and Opera 61 Developer build also removes the option to disable/enable hyperlink auditing. Firefox and Brave, on the other hand, have disabled hyperlink auditing by default. In Firefox 66, Firefox Beta 67, and Firefox Nightly 68 users can enable it using the browser.send_pings setting, the Brave browser, however, does not allow users to enable it at all. How people are reacting to this development? The hyperlink auditing feature has received mixed reactions from developers and users. While some were concerned about its privacy implications, others think that this process makes the user experience more transparent. Sharing how this development can be misused, Chris Weber co-founder of Casaba Security wrote in a blog post,  “the URL could easily be appended with junk causing large HTTP requests to get sent to an inordinately large list of URIs. Information could be leaked in the usual sense of Referrer/Ping-From leaks.” One Reddit user said that this feature is privacy neutral as this kind of tracking can be done with JavaScript or non-JavaScript redirects. Sharing other advantages of the ping attribute, another user said, “The ping attribute for hyperlinks aims to make this process more transparent, with additional benefits such as optimizing network traffic to the target page loads more quickly, as well as an option to disable sending the pings for more user-friendly privacy.” Though this feature brings some advantages, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) encourages user agents to put control in the hands of the users by providing them a feature to disable this behavior. “User agents should allow the user to adjust this behavior, for example in conjunction with a setting that disables the sending of HTTP `Referer` (sic) headers. Based on the user's preferences, UAs may either ignore the ping attribute altogether or selectively ignore URLs in the list,” mentions WHATWG. To read the full story, visit Bleeping Computer. Google dissolves its Advanced Technology External Advisory Council in a week after repeat criticism on selection of members Microsoft’s #MeToo reckoning: female employees speak out against workplace harassment and discrimination Mozilla is exploring ways to reduce notification permission prompt spam in Firefox

The EU has sent Valve, the creator of desktop gaming’s biggest storefront Steam and five other video game publishers a ‘Statements of Objections’ for “geo-blocking” PC video game purchases. In a statement, the EU found that these companies “prevented consumers from purchasing videogames cross-border from the other Member States, which is a breach of EU competition rules.” Valve is the owner of the largest PC video game distribution platform called “Steam”. The other five PC video game publishers include Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax. The ‘Statements of Objections’ was sent more than two years after the investigation was first opened against these companies. Valve provides "activation keys" to these video game publishers which are required for consumers to play PC video games bought on channels other than Steam. However, Valve and the five PC video game publishers are accused of forming a bilateral partnership to prevent consumers from purchasing and using PC video games acquired elsewhere than in their country of residence. This is against EU antitrust rules and violates Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union via Regulation 2018/302, which prohibits geo-blocking. Valve is accused of blocking cross-border sales of PC games in countries, including Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "In a true Digital Single Market, European consumers should have the right to buy and play video games of their choice regardless of where they live in the EU. Consumers should not be prevented from shopping around between the Member States to find the best available deal. Valve and the five PC video game publishers now have the chance to respond to our concerns." EU said it can "adopt a decision prohibiting the conduct and imposing a fine of up to 10% of a company's annual worldwide turnover" if it "concludes that there is sufficient evidence of infringement." In a statement, Valve told Venture Beat, that while it has indeed worked with game publishers to implement region locks, these are not related to sales made through its Steam store. A spokesperson for Valve, Doug Lombardi, said, "The EC's charges do not relate to the sale of PC games on Steam. Instead, the EC alleges that Valve enabled geo-blocking by providing Steam activation keys and—upon the publishers' requests—locking those keys to particular territories within the EEA". Valve further explained: The region locks only applied to a small number of game titles. Approximately just 3 percent of all games using Steam -- and none of Valve's own games -- at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA. Valve believes that the EC's extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law. Nonetheless, because of the EC's concerns, Valve actually turned off region locks within the EEA starting in 2015, unless those region locks were necessary for local legal requirements. Such as German content laws or geographic limits on where the Steam partner is licensed to distribute a game. Koch Media claimed the proceedings date back to business performed before 2015 in a public statement. They said, “Koch Media will monitor the process closely and is fully committed to complying with all rules and regulations." Valve’s multitude of online defenders opposed the EU’s decision considering, uniform prices may leave developers in a tricky position when it comes to finding the ideal price point. In a Hacker News thread, people wrote down their views: “But now think about the consequences of this: everybody in the EU has to pay the same price for the games. There's an income difference of 5-10 times between different EU countries. The poorest ones will have to now pay the same price as the richest ones. A game costing >€60 when you have less than €300 disposable income per month is crazy expensive.” “Why would everyone have to pay the same price for games? Where does this logic come from? The EU doesn't force you to price thing the same across all countries. But you are just not allowed to ban people from buying a thing in one EU country and take it to another - this is the CORE tenement of EU's single market and without this limitation, the EU single market cannot exist.” Seeing the EU’s allegations, Valve will most probably stop all these practices in the EU, but continue to make profits elsewhere in the world.  On Hacker News, a user wrote down Valve's response, “Basically, they don't agree with it, but stopped doing it years ago since they knew the EU was going to give them problems with it. They also said that it only applied to physical copies of games that included a code to redeem on steam, so they weren't making any money off of this, and it was only done at the request of some publishers.” Valve plans to bring new events system and store discoverability feature to Steam this year. Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned; challenging Valve’s dominance. Valve’s Steam Play Beta uses Proton, a modified WINE, allowing Linux gamers to play Windows games.

Today, Sven Efftinge, the Technical Co-founder of Gitpod.io, announced the launch of Gitpod, a cloud IDE that tightly integrates with GitHub. Along with the launch, starting from today, the Gitpod app is also available on GitHub marketplace. What is Gitpod? While working on a project, a lot of time goes into switching contexts between projects and branches, setting up a development environment, or simply waiting for the build to complete. To reduce this time and effort, Gitpod provides developers disposable, ready-to-code development environments for their GitHub projects. What are its advantages? Automatically pre-builts every commit Gitpod, similar to continuous integration tools, automatically pre-builds every commit. So, when you open a Gitpod workspace you will not only find the code and tools ready but also that the build has already finished. Easily go back to previous releases A Gitpod workspace is configured through a .gitpod.yml file written in YAML. This file is versioned with your code, so if at some point, you need to go back to old releases, you can easily do that. Pre-installed VS Code extensions You will get several VS Code extensions pre-installed in Gitpod such as Go support from Microsoft’s own extension. The team plans to add more VS Code extensions in the near future and later developers will be allowed to define any extensions they want. Supports full-featured terminals In addition to supporting one of the best code editors, Gitpod comes with full-featured terminals that are backed by Linux container running in the cloud. So, you get the same command-line tools you would use locally. Better collaboration Gitpod supports two major features for collaboration: Sharing running workspaces: This feature allows you to share a workspace with a remote colleague. It comes handy when you want to hunt down a bug together or do some pair programming. Snapshots: With this feature, you can take an immutable copy of your dev environment at any point in time and share the link wherever you want. Users will receive an exact clone of the environment including all state and even UI layout. How you can use Gitpod? For creating a workspace you have two options: You can prefix any GitHub URL with gitpod.io/#. You can also use the Gitpod browser extension available for Chrome and Firefox users, which adds a button to GitHub that does the prefixing for you. You can watch the following video to know exactly how Gitpod works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41zSHJthZI Read more in detail on Gitpod’s official website. Introducing git/fs: A native git client for Plan 9 ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub Sublime Text 3.2 released with Git integration, improved themes, editor control and much more!

On Wednesday, CNBC held its At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York. Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO (also appointed to Trump’s American Workforce Policy Board) had a discussion around several strategies and announcements regarding job change due to AI and IBM’s predictive attrition AI. Rometty shared details about an AI that IBM HR department has filed a patent for, as first reported by CNBC. The AI is developed with Watson (IBM’S Q&A AI), for “predictive attrition Program”, which can predict at 95% of accuracy about which employees are about to quit. It will also prescribe remedies to managers for better employee engagement.  The AI retention tool is part of IBM products designed to transform the traditional approach to HR management. Rometty also mentioned that since IBM has implemented AI more widely, it has been able to reduce the size of its global human resources department by 30 percent. Rometty states that AI will be effective at tasks where HR departments and corporate managers are not very effective. It will keep employees on a clear career path and will also help identify their skills. Rometty mentions that many companies fail to be 100% transparent with the employees regarding their individual career path and growth which is a major issue. But, IBM AI will be able to better understand the data patterns and adjacent skills, which in turn, will help with identifying an individual’s strength. "We found manager surveys were not accurate. Managers are subjective in ratings. We can infer and be more accurate from data”, said Rometty. IBM also eradicated the annual performance review method. "We need to bring AI everywhere and get rid of the [existing] self-service system," Rometty said. This is because AI will now help the IBM employees better understand which programs they need to get growth in their career. Also, poor performance is no longer a problem as IBM is using "pop-up" solution centers that help managers seek the expected and better performance from their employees. "I expect AI to change 100 percent of jobs within the next five to 10 years," said Rometty. The need for “skill revolution” has already been an ongoing topic of discussion in different organizations and institutions across the globe, as AI keeps advancing. For instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, gave a warning, last year, that the UK needs to skill up overall and across different sectors (tech, health, finance, et al) as up to 15 million jobs in Britain are at stake. This is because artificial intelligence is replacing a number of jobs which were earlier a preserve of humans. But, Rometty has a remedy to prevent this “technological unemployment” in the future. She says, “to get ready for this paradigm shift companies have to focus on three things: retraining, hiring workers that don't necessarily have a four-year college degree and rethinking how their pool of recruits may fit new job roles”. IBM also plans to invest $1 billion in training workers for “new collar” jobs, for workers with tech-skills will be hired without a four-year college degree. These "new collar" jobs could include working at a call center, app development, or a cyber-analyst at IBM via P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School) program. P-TECH is a six-year-long course that starts with high school and involves an associate's degree. Other measures by IBM include CTA apprenticeship Coalition program, which is aimed at creating thousands of new apprenticeships in 20 states in the US. These apprenticeships come with frameworks for over 15 different roles across fields including software engineering, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, creative design, and program management. As far as employers are concerned, Rometty advises to “bring consumerism into the HR model. Get rid of self-service, and using AI and data analytics personalize ways to retrain, promote and engage employees. Also, move away from centers of excellence to solution centers”. For more information, check out the official conversation with Ginni Rometty at CNBC @Work Summit. IBM sued by former employees on violating age discrimination laws in workplace Diversity in Faces: IBM Research’s new dataset to help build facial recognition systems that are fair IBM launches Industry’s first ‘Cybersecurity Operations Center on Wheels’ for on-demand cybersecurity support

Amazon has been exploring itself in the health care sector since quite some time now. Just last year, Amazon bought the online pharmacy PillPack for $1 billion in order to sell the prescription drugs. The company introduced Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that allows users to extract relevant clinical information from the unstructured text in patient records. Amazon is even working with Accenture and Merck to develop a cloud-based platform for collaborators across the life sciences industry with a motive to bring innovation in the drug development research. Amazon has now taken a bigger leap by announcing its voice assistant, Alexa as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, which means that it can work with health care and medical software developers in order to invent new programs or skills with voice and provide better experiences to their customers. With the help of Amazon Alexa, developers will design new skills to help customers manage their healthcare needs at home by simply using voice. Patients will now be able to book a medical appointment, access the hospital post-discharge instructions or check on the status of a prescription delivery, and much more just via the voice! HIPAA has been designed to protect patients in cases where their personal health information is shared with health care organizations such as hospitals. This will allow healthcare companies to build Alexa voice tools capable of securely transmitting the patient’s private information. The consumers will now be able to use new Alexa health skills for asking questions such as “Alexa, pull up my blood glucose readings” or “Alexa, find me a doctor,” and will receive a response from the voice assistant. The company further announced the launch of six voice programs including Express Scripts, My Children's Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health, and Livongo. These new tools allow patients to use Alexa for accessing personalized information such as prescription, progress updates after surgery, and much more. Rachel Jiang, a member of Amazon’s health and wellness team, who previously worked at Microsoft and Facebook announced that Amazon has invited six healthcare partners to use its HIPAA-compliant skills kit to build voice programs. But the company expects to get more healthcare providers on board to access its information. Jiang wrote in a post, “These new skills are designed to help customers manage a variety of healthcare needs at home simply using voice – whether it’s booking a medical appointment, accessing hospital post-discharge instructions, checking on the status of a prescription delivery, and more.” Boston Children’s Hospital now has a new HIPAA-compliant skill dubbed “ERAS” for kids that are discharged from the hospital and for their families. With the help of Alexa’s voice assistant, patients and their families or caregivers can now ask questions to the care team about their case. Even the doctors can now remotely check in on the child’s recovery process. Livongo, a digital health start-up, works with employers in order to help them in managing workers with chronic medical conditions. Livongo developed a skill for people with diabetes that uses connected glucometers that would ask about the patient’s blood sugar levels. In a statement to CNBC, Livongo’s president Jenny Schneider told that “There are lots of reasons she expects users to embrace voice technologies, versus SMS messaging or other platforms. Some of those people might have difficulty reading, or they just have busy lives and it’s just an easy option.” Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management organization is working towards building a way for members to check the status of their home delivery prescription via Alexa. Voice technology has been booming in the health care sector and skills like the ones mentioned above will bring health care to home and make the patients lives easy and cost-effective. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer for Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “We’re in a renaissance of voice technology and voice assistants in health care. It’s so appealing as there’s very little training, it’s low cost and convenient.” To know more about this news, check out  Amazon’s official announcement. Amazon won’t be opening its HQ2 in New York due to public protests MariaDB announces MariaDB Enterprise Server and welcomes Amazon’s Mark Porter as an advisor to the board of directors Over 30 AI experts join shareholders in calling on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition, its facial recognition tech, for government surveillance  

Last week Google announced the formation of Advanced Technology External Advisory Council, to help the company with the major issues in AI such as facial recognition and machine learning fairness. And it is only a week later that Google has decided to dissolve the council, according to reports by Vox. In a statement to Vox, a Google spokesperson said that “the company has decided to dissolve the panel, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), entirely.” The company further added, “It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We’ll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics.” This news comes immediately after a group of Google employees criticized the selection of the council and insisted the company to remove Kay Coles James, the Heritage Foundation President for her anti-trans and anti-immigrant thoughts. The presence of James in the council had somewhere made the others uncomfortable too. When Joanna Bryson was asked by one of the users on Twitter, if she was comfortable serving on a board with James, she answered, “Believe it or not, I know worse about one of the other people.” https://twitter.com/j2bryson/status/1110632891896221696 https://twitter.com/j2bryson/status/1110628450635780097 Few researchers and civil society activists had also voiced their opinion against the idea of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ.  Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioural economist and privacy researcher, had declined an invitation to join the council. https://twitter.com/ssnstudy/status/1112099054551515138 Googlers also insisted on removing Dyan Gibbens, the CEO of Trumbull Unmanned, a drone technology company, from the board. She has previously worked on drones for the US military. Last year, Google employees were agitated about the fact that the company had been working with the US military on drone technology as part of so-called Project Maven. A lot of employees decided to resign because of this reason, though later promised to not renew Maven. While talking more on the ethics front, Google has even offered resources to the US Department of Defense for a “pilot project” to analyze drone footage with the help of artificial intelligence. The question that arises here, “Are Googlers and Google’s shareholders comfortable with the idea of getting their software used by the US military?” President Donald Trump’s meet with the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai adds more to it. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1110989594521026561 Though this move by Google seems to be a mark of victory for more than 2300 Googlers and supporters who signed the petition and took a stand against Transphobia, it is still going to be a tough time for Google to redefine its AI ethics. Also, the company might have saved itself from this major turmoil if they had wisely selected the council members. https://twitter.com/EthicalGooglers/status/1113942165888094215 To know more about this news, check out the blog post by Vox. 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? Amazon joins NSF in funding research exploring fairness in AI amidst public outcry over big tech #ethicswashing

It was later last month on 19th March, when Norsk Hydro ASA, a Norwegian and one of the world’s largest aluminum producer firm, had to halt its production due to a cyber attack that impacted its operations across Europe and the U.S. Earlier this week, the firm shared a video on YouTube, highlighting how the employees of Magnor Extrusion in Norway (one of the 160 hydro sites affected by the cyber attack) went out of their way to keep the plant up and running during crucial times. “With a tremendous effort of our colleagues at Magnor, the plant has managed to get production up to 100% of normal production, despite operating in normal mode”, states the video. https://twitter.com/NorskHydroASA/status/1110981944513388544 Olav Schulstad, Production Manager at Magnor mentions that people have been very supportive in the firm and volunteered to help without even being asked. Also, Frode Halteigen, an operator at Magnor, mentioned in the video that all the employees including the people on the shop floor sacrificed time with their families and weekends, to be able to get the operations back in shape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ZlVuM0we0&feature=youtu.be                                     Cyber Attack on Hydro Magnor In fact, many employees also took unconventional roles to help out on the shop floor. For instance, Mads Madsstuen is an Area Sales Manager but is helping out with the shop floor in the plant. https://twitter.com/fabrikkfrue/status/1113426747809247232 https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1113442133267091456 Post-attack, Norsk Hydro kept providing updates on the attack to inform the public about progress made in securing safe and stable operations across the company. “With a systematic approach our experts are step by step restoring business-critical IT based functions to ensure stable production, serve our customers and limit financial impact, while always safeguarding our employee’s safety,” said Eivind Kallevik, CFO, Norsk Hydro in an update posted on March 21st. As per the update, the root cause of the problems had been detected, and a cure had been identified. Hydro’s experts have been working since then on bringing the virus infected systems back to a pre-infected state. The firm also called in experts from Microsoft and other IT security partners to help Hydro take all necessary actions in a systematic way to get business back in normal operation. “Hydro has experienced good progress over the weekend and continues to approach normal operations after the cyber attack. Our focus so far has been technical recovery. This week we are moving on to business and operation recovery”, Hydro updated earlier this week. Norsk Hydro lost over $40 million in the week following the cyber attack as it incapacitated most of its operations. It decided to switch the units to manual operations after the company’s IT systems had been attacked and blocked with ransomware, called LockerGoga. LockerGoga is a new and evolving ransomware that could have infected the systems at Norsk via stolen remote desktop credentials, phishing or a nonupdated targeting software reports Chemistry World. Other two US-based chemical companies, namely, Momentive and Hexion, have also suffered cyber attacks due to LockerGoga. The video states that thousands of people at Hydro around the world, are working day and night to fix the operations, showing a “true display of care, courage, and collaboration”. It sheds light on the indefatigable fervor of the Nosk Hydro employees and how the firm has managed to foster a work culture that many companies should aspire to. The video also shows behind-the-scenes of how challenging it becomes for the employees within a company to recuperate with the reality of such extensive cyber attacks in terms of both financial and operational constraints. Resecurity reports ‘IRIDUIM’ behind Citrix data breach, 200+ government agencies, oil and gas companies, and technology companies also targeted A security researcher reveals his discovery on 800+ Million leaked Emails available online Security researcher exposes malicious GitHub repositories that host more than 300 backdoored apps

On Wednesday, Ori Bernstein, a software engineer at Google, shared details about the Git client he has implemented for Plan 9, a non-posix system. The client named git/fs is implemented in Plan 9 flavor C and comes with tools for writing repository contents. Why git/fs is being introduced? This is the first time someone has implemented a Git client for Plan 9. The upstream Git uses a large number of system calls that are not supported in Plan 9. Bernstein came up with this client to enable working with git repositories without having to clone the git interface directly. Git/fs structure Git/fs provides read-only access to scripts via a file system mounted on ‘/mnt/git’. You will find the following content in ‘/mnt/git’: /mnt/git/object: This includes the objects in the repo. /mnt/git/branch: This includes the branches in the repo. /mnt/git/ctl: This is a file showing the status of the repo. /mnt/git/HEAD: This is an alias for the currently checked out commit directory. You can directly access the repository from the shell using standard tools. The scripts and binaries will manipulate the repository contents directly and the changes done will be immediately mirrored in the filesystem. To improve user experience, the author has put more focus on building a consistent and minimalist interface that supports the necessary functionality. Git/fs does not have any concept of the staging area. There are only three states that files can be in namely, ‘untracked', 'dirty', and 'committed'. To do the tracking it uses empty files under .git/index9/{removed,tracked}/path/to/file. The client is currently hosted in Mercurial, a distributed revision-control tool, as it is the current native plan 9 version control system. To know more detail about Git/fs, head over to its Bitbucket repository. Chris Dickinson on how to implement Git in Rust ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub Sublime Text 3.2 released with Git integration, improved themes, editor control and much more!  

Pivotal Inc., a software and services firm, announced yesterday that it has teamed up with Heroku to create Cloud Native Buildpacks for Kubernetes and beyond. Cloud Native Buildpacks turn source code into production-ready Docker images that are OCI image compatible and is based around the popular Buildpack model. The new project is aimed at allowing developers to get more productive with Kubernetes. The Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team also released a selection of next-gen Cloud Foundry buildpacks that are compatible with the Cloud Native Buildpacks. This will allow users to try buildpacks out on Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Pivotal Application Service (PAS). https://twitter.com/pivotalcf/status/1113426937685446657 “The project aims to deliver a consistent platform-to-buildpack contract for use in more places. The interface defined by this contract is informed by learnings from maintaining production-grade buildpacks for years at both Pivotal and Heroku” states the Pivotal team. With the new Cloud Native Buildpacks, you can create containers by just pushing the code without using any runtime dependencies. On “cf” pushing the custom code, buildpacks automatically add in the framework dependencies and create an application “droplet” that can be run on the platform. This droplet model allows Cloud Foundry to handle all the dependency updates. Application runtimes can also be updated by pulling in the latest buildpacks and rebuilding a droplet. Cloud Native Buildpacks expand on this idea and build an OCI (Open Container) image, capable of running on any platform.“We believe developers will love the simplicity of this single command to get a production quality container when they prefer not to author and maintain their own Dockerfile”, states the Pivotal team. Other reasons why Cloud Native Buildpacks are a step ahead than traditional buildpacks: Portability through OCI standard. Cloud Native Buildpacks can directly produce the OCI Images from source code. This makes Cloud Native Buildpacks much more portable, making them easy to use with  Kubernetes and Knative. Better modularity. Cloud Native Buildpacks are modular, offering platform operators more control over how developers can build their code during runtime. Speed. Cloud Native Buildpacks build faster because of advanced build caching, layer reuse, and data deduplication. Fast troubleshooting. Cloud Native Buildpacks helps troubleshoot production issues much faster as they can be used in a developer local environment. Reproducible builds. Cloud Native Buildpacks allow reproducible container image builds. What next? Pivotal team states that Cloud Native Buildpacks need some more work for it to be ready for enterprise scenarios. Pivotal is currently exploring adding three new features such as image promotion, operator control, and automated image patching. For image promotion, Pivotal is exploring a build service effective at image updating. This would allow the developers to promote images through environments, and cross PCF foundations. Also, Pivotal is exploring a declarative configuration model which will deliver new images to your registry whenever your configuration falls out of sync. “The best developers strive to eliminate toil from their lives. These engineers figure that if a task doesn’t add value, it should be automated..with Cloud Native Buildpacks, developers can happily remove.. toil from their jobs”, states Pivtol team. For more information, check out the official Pivotal Blog. CNCF accepts Cloud Native Buildpacks to the Cloud Native Sandbox CNCF Sandbox, the home for evolving cloud native projects, accepts Google’s OpenMetrics Project. Google Cloud hands over Kubernetes project operations to CNCF, grants $9M in GCP credits.

United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security has become the talk of the town after its recent act of violating an Apple employee’s constitutional rights. Just two days ago, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint against the border control officers for violating the constitutional rights of Dr. Andreas Gal, an Apple employee while he was returning from a business trip to Sweden. https://twitter.com/andreasgal/status/1113160811206213632 Who is Dr. Andreas Gal? Dr. Andreas Gal, a successful entrepreneur and technologist, a U.S. citizen who currently is an employee at Apple. He is also the former Chief Executive Officer at Silk Labs and the former Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla Corporation. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. He has taken a lot of initiatives to prevent warrantless mass surveillance and spread the use of encryption at Mozilla. What exactly happened? The letter by ACLU highlighted CBP’s detention and intrusive interrogation of Dr. Gal and they attempted to check his devices. Last year on 29th November, Dr. Gal arrived at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) while returning from a business trip in Sweden. He holds the Global Entry status that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travellers upon arrival in the United States. After landing at SFO, the immigration agents checked his passport on the jetbridge, he then proceeded to the Global Entry kiosk in the customs and border area. Gal was given a receipt marked as ‘Tactical Terrorism Response Teams’ (TTRT) on it. Gal presented the receipt from the kiosk along with his U.S. passport, to an immigration officer there. After reviewing Dr. Gal’s passport and Global Entry receipt, he instructed him to go to Customs Area B but kept Gal’s passport. He was then interrogated by three CBP officers who were armed with holstered handguns at Customs Area B. Dr. Gal was asked a number of questions regarding his travel plans, his employment history, his work at Apple, and his electronic devices. He was even asked questions about his work at Mozilla and travel to Canada. Even after repeatedly being asked by Dr. Gal about the baseless process of interrogation, the officers didn’t answer. In a statement to The Register, he said, "There I quickly found myself surrounded by three armed agents wearing bullet proof vests. They started to question me aggressively regarding my trip, my current employment, and my past work for Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to open technology and online privacy." He was travelling with an Apple iPhone XS and an Apple MacBook Pro, both were issued to him by Apple for software development reasons. The laptop even had a sticker which read, “PROPERTY OF APPLE. PROPRIETARY.”  Whereas the phone had a sticker with a serial number but not Apple’s name where its lockscreen displayed “Confidential and Proprietary,” and also had a number to call if the device is found. The officers even asked Dr. Gal to pull up his itinerary on his mobile phone and searched his wallet and all his luggage and asked questions about everything they found. Gal told the officers that he would email them the itinerary instead and he needs to speak with a lawyer and his employer before giving CBP officers full access to his mobile phone. But the CBP officers ordered Dr. Gal to enter the passcode to his mobile phone and laptop and hand it over to them. https://twitter.com/waltmossberg/status/1113538170707173379 According to the ACLU report, “Gal never refused to provide the passcodes to access the electronic devices in his possession, he only asked that he be allowed to consult with an attorney to ensure that he would not violate non-disclosure agreements with his employer.” After the intense interrogation session, Gal was allowed to leave with his devices but without his Global Entry card and he was told that his privileges would be revoked because he refused to comply with the search. Gal said, “My past work on encryption and online privacy is well documented, and so is my disapproval of the Trump administration and my history of significant campaign contributions to Democratic candidates. I wonder whether these CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] programs led to me being targeted." https://twitter.com/redhotnerd/status/1113540610546372608 Are developers who travel endangered? Here it's important to note that the questions that were asked to Dr. Gal were not limited to his identity or citizenship, they were much beyond that. After this incident, a question that arises is how secure are the developers with respect to work-related travels? Developers, data analysts, testers or researchers carry a lot of sensitive data while their work-related travels. If they come across with such an interrogation, then they might end up leaking out their company’s sensitive data and which would go against the company’s law. https://twitter.com/kifleswing/status/1113514144903331840 To know more about this news, check out the post by ACLU. Apple officially cancels AirPower; says it couldn’t meet hardware’s ‘high standards’ Donald Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook ‘Tim Apple’ Apple’s March Event: Apple changes gears to services, is now your bank, news source, gaming zone, and TV    

Just two days ago, the team at Fedora announced the release of Fedora 30 Beta to test its six variants including a workstation, server, silverblue, spins, Labs, and ARM. This release comes with GNOME 3.32, improved performance and much more. https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/1113079013696856065 What’s new in Fedora 30 Beta? Desktop environment options This release features two new options for the desktop environment, namely DeepinDE, a user-friendly domestic desktop by Deepin Technology Co. and Pantheon Desktop, mainly used in the elementary OS and is least customizable. Improved DNF performance This release features zchunk format which is a new compression format designed for highly efficient deltas. All the DNF (Dandified YUM) repository metadata is now compressed with the zchunk format in addition to xz or gzip. When Fedora’s metadata is compressed using zchunk, DNF downloads only the differences between earlier copies of the metadata and the current version. GNOME 3.32 This release comes with GNOME 3.32, which is the latest version of GNOME 3. It features updated visual style, improved user interface, icons, and much more. Testing needed Since it is a beta release, users might encounter bugs or experience that some of the features are missing. Users can report issues encountered during testing by contacting the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in #fedora-qa on Freenode. Updated packages This release includes updated versions of many popular packages including Golang, GNU C Library, Bash shell, Python, and Perl. Major changes Binary support for deprecated and unsafe functions have been removed from libcrypt. Python 2 package has been removed from this release. In this release, language support groups in Comps file has been replaced by rich dependencies in the langpacks package. Obsolete scriplets have been removed from this release. Few users are excited about this release but others are still facing some bugs and dependency issues since it is the beta version. https://twitter.com/YanivKaul/status/1113132353096953857 To know more about this news, check out the official post by Fedora Magazine. GNOME 3.32 released with fractional scaling, improvements to desktop, web and much more Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support Fedora 29 released with Modularity, Silverblue, and more

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has broken off its partnerships with Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE, amidst them facing US federal investigations. MIT follows suite moves by Stanford University, University of California’s flagship Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, who have all cut future research collaborations with Huawei. Late December, Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer, Wanzhou Meng, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder, was arrested in Canada. Huawei was allegedly involved in violating U.S.’ sanctions on Iran. Huawei was under constant scrutiny by the US government following the ban on ZTE from selling devices with American-made hardware and software. ZTE was also found guilty of violating US sanctions on Iran. Then in January, the U.S. Government officially charged Huawei for stealing T-Mobile’s trade secrets along with bank fraud to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran. Only a month had passed when Huawei came in the light again for using dirty tactics to steal Apple’s trade secrets. U.S. companies such as Motorola and Cisco Systems have made similar claims against Huawei in civil lawsuits. A Chicago-based company, Akhan Semiconductor even cooperated with a federal investigation into a theft of its intellectual property by Huawei. Huawei’s power in the mobile telecommunications sector and blatant ignorance of cybersecurity laws is alarming. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the cases “expose Huawei’s brazen and persistent actions to exploit American companies and financial institutions and to threaten the free and fair global marketplace. That kind of access could give a foreign government the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information, conduct undetected espionage, or exert pressure or control.” In a letter sent to the faculty on Wednesday, Richard Lester, MIT’s associate provost, and Maria Zuber, the school’s vice-president for research, said, “At this time, based on this enhanced review, MIT is not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions.” The letter further stated, “Most recently we have determined that engagements with certain countries – currently China [including Hong Kong], Russia and Saudi Arabia – merit additional faculty and administrative review beyond the usual evaluations that all international projects receive.” Since Huawei’s ban in the US, the country is trying to prevent its allies from using Huawei technology for critical infrastructure, especially focusing on the five English speaking countries also known as the Five Eyes (US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain). Australia and New Zealand have so far stopped operators from using Huawei equipment in their 5G networks. In the EU however, policymakers have made it a mandate for EU nations to share data on 5G cybersecurity risks and produce measures to tackle them by the end of the year. “The aim is to use tools available under existing security rules plus cross-border cooperation,” the bloc’s executive body said. Now, it is upto individual EU countries to decide whether they want to ban any company on national security grounds. China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information Cisco and Huawei Routers hacked via backdoor attacks and botnets Huawei launches HiAI

Last week, Microsoft announced the general availability of F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019. This release comes with a new record type called Anonymous Records and also few updates in the F# Core library. F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 For the updates and development of new features in F# 4.6, the team followed an open RFC process. Writing named record types in F# was not really easy in previous versions and to address exactly that a new type is introduced called Anonymous Records. These F# record types do not have any explicit name and can be declared in an ad-hoc fashion. Updates in F# Core library In the F# Core library, updates are made to the 'ValueOption' type. With this release, a new attribute is added called DebuggerDisplay that helps in debugging. The IsNone, IsSome, None, Some, op_Implicit, and ToString members are added. In addition to these updates, there is now a 'ValueOption' module, which has the same functions the Option module has. F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 A lot of focus has been put on improving the performance of F# tools for Visual Studio, especially for larger solutions. Previously, F# compiler and tools struggled when used for larger solutions and caused a lot of memory and CPU usage. To address this problem the team has done few updates in the F# parser, reduced the cache sizes, significantly reduced the allocations when processing format strings, and more. This release also comes with a new feature that intelligently idents pasted code based on where your cursor is. You can use this feature by turning on Smart Indent via Tools > Options > Text Editor > F# > Tabs > Smart this will be on automatically. Read the entire list of updates in F# 4.6 and F# tools for Visual Studio 2019 on Microsoft’s blog. Microsoft releases TypeScript 3.4 with an update for faster subsequent builds, and more Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP share new details about the Open Data Initiative Microsoft introduces Pyright, a static type checker for the Python language written in TypeScript