Tech News

Last week, the team behind Ubuntu announced the release of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo Beta, which comes with Linux 5.0 support, GNOME 3.32, and more. Its stable version is expected to release on April 18th, 2019. Following are some of the updates in Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo: Updates in Linux kernel Ubuntu 19.04 is based on Linux 5.0, which was released last month. It comes with support for AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor, complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, and much more. Toolchain Upgrades The tools are upgraded to their latest releases. The upgraded toolchain includes glibc 2.29, OpenJDK 11, Boost 1.67, Rustc 1.31, and updated GCC 8.3, Python 3.7.2 as default,  Ruby 2.5.3, PHP 7.2.15, and more. Updates in Ubuntu Desktop This release ships with the latest GNOME 3.32 giving it a refreshed visual design. It also brings a few performance improvements and new features: GNOME Disks now supports VeraCrypt, a utility used for on-the-fly encryption. A panel is added to the Settings menu to help users manage Thunderbolt devices. With this release, more shell components are cached in GPU RAM, which reduces load and increases FPS count. Desktop zoom works much smoother. An option is added to automatically submit error reports to the error reporting dialog window. Other updates include new Yaru icon sets, Mesa 19.0, QEMU 13.1, and libvirt 14.0. This release will be supported for 9 months until January 2020. Users who require Long Term Support are recommended to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead. To read the full list of updates, visit Ubuntu’s official website. Chromium blacklists nouveau graphics device driver for Linux and Ubuntu users Ubuntu releases Mir 1.0.0 Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released

A number of US airlines have been grounded for around 40 minutes by a software failure, causing significant delays to passengers travelling across the country. The issue is believed to have been caused by a problem with something called AeroData. AeroData program that helps to manage things like weight and balance - flight controllers need full visibility on this for planes to be allowed to fly. A tweet by the Federal Aviation Authority this morning confirmed the problem, citing "computer issues" as the reason for delays across the U.S. https://twitter.com/FAANews/status/1112681600788119553 However, within an hour, the FAA provided a further update, saying that "the issue has now been resolved." However, given that even a short delay would have a knock on effect on flights throughout the day, it advised passengers to get in direct contact with the airlines with which they are flying. A spokeswoman for Delta is quoted on USA Today saying "a brief third-party technology issue that prevented some Delta Connection flights from being dispatched on time this morning has been resolved." Flight delays are making the case for software resiliency The details of the failure have not yet been revealed, but it nevertheless looks like the air industry is making a particularly strong case for investing in the resiliency of software. "These airline outages will keep occurring unless something changes." Kolton Andrus, CEO and co-founder of chaos engineering platform Gremlin said: "These airline outages will keep occurring unless something changes. Systems are becoming more complex, and more than ever they rely on software that breaks. While we should continue to celebrate airlines that respond quickly, resolve issues, and maintain a good customer service -- we should celebrate even more the engineering teams at airlines who are catching problems before they cause outages in the first place." Read next: Chaos Engineering: managing complexity by breaking things

Last week, RedTeam Pentesting had discovered a command injection vulnerability in the web-based certificate generator feature of the Cisco RV320 router. According to RedTeam Pentesting, the feature was inadequately patched by the vendor. On Saturday, Cisco acknowledged that it had mismanaged a patch which would give rise to a vulnerability in two router models, namely, Cisco RV320 and RV325 WAN VPN routers. https://twitter.com/RedTeamPT/status/1110843396657238016 The security flaws These router vulnerabilities were discovered way back in September 2018. Post four months the discovery, a patch was issued for blacklisting the curl which is a command-line tool used for transferring data online and is also integrated into internet scanners. The idea behind introducing this curl was to prevent the devices from the attackers. Cisco patches were intended to protect these vulnerable devices. And initially, it was believed that Cisco’s patches were the ideal choice for businesses. Cisco’s RV320 product page reads, "Keep your employees, your business, and yourself productive and effective. The Cisco RV320 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN Router is an ideal choice for any small office or small business looking for performance, security, and reliability in its network." Around 10,000 of these devices are still accessible online and are vulnerable to attacks. Cisco’s patch could merely blacklist the curl which turned out be a major problem. In January, this year, security researcher David Davidson published a proof-of-concept for two Cisco RV320 and RV325 vulnerabilities. The security flaws patched by Cisco were: CVE-2019-1652 This flaw allows remote attackers to inject and run admin commands on the device without using a password. CVE-2019-1653 This flaw allows remote attackers to get sensitive device configuration details without using a password. But it seems instead of fixing the vulnerable code in the actual firmware, Cisco has instead blacklisted the user agent for curl. https://twitter.com/bad_packets/status/1110981011523977217 Most of the users are surprised by this news and they think that these patches can be easily bypassed by the attackers. https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1110995488235503616 https://twitter.com/tobiasz_cudnik/status/1111068710360485891 To know more about this news, check out RedTeam Pentesting’s post. Redis Labs raises $60 Million in Series E Funding led by Francisco partners San Francisco legislation proposes a citywide ban on government’s use of facial recognition technology Cisco and Huawei Routers hacked via backdoor attacks and botnets  

Last week, Daniel Rosenwasser, Program Manager for TypeScript, announced the release of TypeScript 3.4. This release comes with faster subsequent builds with the ‘--incremental’ flag, higher order type inference from generic functions, type-checking for globalThis, and more. Following are some of the updates in TypeScript 3.4: Faster subsequent builds TypeScript 3.4 comes with the ‘--incremental’ flag, which records the project graph from the last compilation. So, when TypeScript is invoked with the ‘--incremental’ flag set to ‘true’, it will check for the least costly way to type-check and emit changes to a project by referring to the saved project graph. Higher order type inference from generic functions This release comes with various improvements around inference, one of the main being functions inferring types from other generic functions. At the time of type argument inference, TypeScript will now propagate the type parameters from generic function arguments onto the resulting function type. Updates in ReadonlyArray and readonly tuples Now, using read-only array-like types is much easier. This release introduces a new syntax for ReadonlyArray that uses a new readonly modifier for array types: function foo(arr: readonly string[]) { arr.slice();        // okay arr.push("hello!"); // error! } TypeScript 3.4 also adds support for readonly tuples. To make a tuple readonly, you just have to prefix it with the readonly keyword. Type-checking for globalThis This release supports type-checking ECMAScript’s new globalThis, which is a global variable that refers to the global scope. With globalThis, you can access the global scope that can be used across different environments. The globalThis variable provides a standard way for accessing the global scope which can be used across different environments. Breaking changes As this release introduces few updates in inference, it does come with some breaking changes: TypeScript now uses types that flow into function calls to contextually type function arguments. Now, the type of top-level ‘this’ is typed as ‘typeof globalThis’ instead of ‘any’. As a result, users might get some errors for accessing unknown values on ‘this’ under ‘noImplicitAny’. TypeScript 3.4 correctly measures the variance of types declared with ‘interface’ in all cases. This introduces an observable breaking change for interfaces that used a type parameter only in keyof. To know the full list of updates in TypeScript 3.4, check out the official announcement. An introduction to TypeScript types for ASP.NET core [Tutorial] Typescript 3.3 is finally released! Yarn releases a roadmap for Yarn v2 and beyond; moves from Flow to Typescript

Boston Dynamics, an American engineering and robotics design company has come up with the latest version of the Handle robot that will be useful in factories. The company previously launched the original version of this bot in 2017. And in the same year, Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank, which previously was under Google’s parent company Alphabet. The latest version of Handle which is a mobile manipulation robot has been designed for logistics. https://twitter.com/BostonDynamics/status/1111371709406302209 Last week, Boston Dynamics released a video on YouTube where the Handle robot is shown loading different types of boxes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns   The robot autonomously performs SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. Handle has a vision system that tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing. When Handle places a box onto a pallet, it uses force control to place the box against its neighbors. The robot is designed to handle boxes up to 15 Kg (33 lb). And works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall). Previously, Boston Dynamics has released interesting videos showing dog-like robots unloading dishwashers and climbing stairs, galloping Bovidae-like creatures, etc. A description on the Boston Dynamics website about Handle reads, “Handle is a robot that combines the rough-terrain capability of legs with the efficiency of wheels. It uses many of the same principles for dynamics, balance, and mobile manipulation found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex.” The Handle robot video is trending on Youtube with over 1,767,161 views. People seem to be excited about  Handle but few are being skeptical about the target audience for Handle. https://twitter.com/jesusmoses/status/1112304357482090496 While others think it will help companies e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart for their smooth warehouse functioning. https://twitter.com/MRagnorok/status/1111694538303787009 Know more about Handle on the Boston Dynamics’ website. Boston Dynamics’ ‘Android of robots’ vision starts with launching 1000 robot dogs in 2019 Boston Dynamics adds military-grade mortor (parkour) skills to its popular humanoid Atlas Robot How to choose components to build a basic robot  

Apple announced last week that it has canceled its AirPower charging mat over concerns related to its inability to achieve “high standards” for the product. Apple had first announced details about the AirPower charging mat during the company’s iPhone X event in September 2017. During the event, Apple said that AirPower would be shipped in 2018, but failed to follow up for the next 18 months. The speculation over AirPower chargers getting canceled grew when Apple removed all info regarding AirPower from its website. However, the rumors of its cancellation went down as iOS 12.2 beta release included support for a wireless charger. “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have canceled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch”, Dan Riccio, SVP of Hardware Engineering, Apple, told TechCrunch. Had the chargers shipped, a multitude of new and unique features would have welcomed the users. For instance, apart from being wireless, AirPower charger would have also been equipped with multi-device charging feature (ability to charge three devices at once), and a unique technology with multiple coils, among others. Many people have made speculations about the reason behind AirPower cancellation, with many blaming it on issues related to engineering and overheating. Craig Lloyd, a staff writer at iFixit, published a post where he discusses the possible reasons behind charger’s cancellation. Craig states that Wireless charging pads use electric current in your phone’s wire coil that helps charge the battery. However, this electricity being transmitted isn’t perfectly clean and generates noise that can interfere with other wireless devices. When different coils are charged together, a slightly different waveform is generated. Apple wanted to create a large charging platform with the help of overlapping coils which would allow AirCharger to power different devices on the charger mat. However, this introduced a different set of challenges. “Apple boxed themselves into an electromagnetic corner. What they wanted to do was physically possible—and they surely had it working in the lab—but they couldn’t consistently meet the rigorous transmission requirements that are designed to keep us safe from our gadgets”, states Craig. Now although Apple failed to deliver this product, it has not lost hope yet. “We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward”, said Riccio. Public reaction to the news is largely comical, as users took to Twitter to post memes regarding the news. https://twitter.com/wannatechnow/status/1112664509108375552 https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1111710778741190656 https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/1111772531210534912 https://twitter.com/amelvand/status/1112031397831692289 Apple’s March Event: Apple changes gears to services, is now your bank, news source, gaming zone and TV Apple to merge the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021 Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets

Last week, Joe Watkins, a PHP developer, shared that PHP 8 will support the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation. This decision was the result of voting among the PHP core developers for supporting JIT in PHP 8 and also in PHP 7.4 as an experimental feature. If you don’t know what JIT is, it is a compiling strategy in which a program is compiled on the fly into a form that’s usually faster, typically the host CPU’s native instruction set. To do this the JIT compiler has access to dynamic runtime information whereas a standard compiler doesn’t. How PHP programs are compiled? PHP comes with a virtual machine named the Zend VM. The human-readable scripts are compiled into instructions, which are called opcodes that are understandable to the virtual machine. Opcodes are low-level, and hence faster to translate to machine code as compared to the original PHP code. This stage of execution is called compile time. These opcodes are then executed by the Zend VM in the runtime stage. JIT is being implemented as an almost independent part of OPcache, an extension to cache the opcodes so that compilation happens only when it is required. In PHP, JIT will treat the instructions generated for the Zend VM as the intermediate representation. It will then generate an architecture dependent machine code so that the host of your code is no longer the Zend VM, but the CPU directly. Why JIT is introduced in PHP? PHP hits the brick wall Many improvements have been done to PHP since its 7.0 version including optimizations for HashTable, specializations in the Zend VM for certain opcodes, specializations in the compiler for certain sequences, and many more. After so many improvements, now PHP has reached the extent of its ability to be improved any further. PHP for non-Web scenarios Adding support for JIT in PHP will allow its use in scenarios for which it is not even considered today, i.e., in other non-web, CPU-intensive scenarios, where the performance benefits will be very substantial. Faster innovation and more secure implementations With JIT support, the team will be able to develop built-in functions in PHP instead of C without any huge performance penalty. This will make PHP less susceptible to memory management, overflows, and other similar issues associated with C-based development. We can expect the release of PHP 7.4 later this year, which will debut JIT in PHP.  Though there is no official announcement about the release schedule of PHP 8, many are speculating its release in late 2021. Read Joe Watkins’ announcement on his blog. PEAR’s (PHP Extension and Application Repository) web server disabled due to a security breach Symfony leaves PHP-FIG, the framework interoperability group Google App Engine standard environment (beta) now includes PHP 7.2

The Elastic team released version 7.0 rc1 of its open source distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine, Elasticsearch, last week. Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1 explores new features, breaking changes, deprecations, and bug fixes among others. New features Allocation: There’s a new Node repurpose tool in Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1. Security: Internal security index has been switched to “.security-7”. Breaking Changes Distributed: Cluster state size has been removed. Features: Migration upgrade and Assitance APIs are removed. Enhancements Retention lease sync intervals have been reduced. Retention leases have been integrated to recovery from remote. Dedicated retention lease exceptions have been added. Support has been added for selecting percolator query candidate matches in elasticsearch 7.0 rc1 that contains geo_point based queries. Bug Fixes and deprecations Size has been deprecated in cluster state response Fallback has been deprecated to java on PATH The issue of sibling pipeline aggregators reduction during non-final reduce has been solved. nextDoc has been extended to delegate to the wrapped doc-value iterator for date_nanos. Non-super users are now allowed to create API keys. A consistent view of realms is now used for authentication. Reading auto-follow patterns from x-content has been enabled in Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1. auto-followers have been stopped on shutdown. Node tool cleanup has been fixed. Serializing state will be now avoided in case it is already serialized. waitForActiveShards will be ignored when syncing leases. multi_value_field_leniency has been added inside FieldHitExtractor. For more information, check out the official Elasticsearch 7.0 rc1 release notes. Elasticsearch 6.5 is here with cross-cluster replication and JDK 11 support Search company Elastic goes public and doubles its value on day 1 How does Elasticsearch work? [Tutorial]

Technology giant IBM has been sued by 4 former employees of IBM Corporation in federal court of New York for violating laws prohibiting age discrimination in the workplace: the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act (OWBPA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). The suit alleges IBM downsized its senior employees for negative performance reviews so it could oust them from the company as it formed a “Millennial Corps” and focused on hiring “early professionals,” the lawsuit claims. The employees who filed the lawsuit against IBM are Steven Estle, Margaret Ahlders, Lance Salonia and Cheryl Witmer. They alleged that the company in 2014 began downgrading their annual performance scores, and they started receiving worse evaluations than in previous years. When they were fired in 2016, IBM falsely characterized their departures as retirements, the suit claimed. “I did my job very well and received glowing remarks on my annual evaluations for 33 years,” said Cheryl Witmer, a plaintiff in the complaint who was terminated as part of a Resource Action in May 2016 at age 57. “Suddenly in my 34th year, I was unfairly downgraded in my annual evaluation. Nothing about my work changed; what changed is that IBM decided to replace me with a much younger worker.” “In the past six years alone, IBM has discharged over 20,000 U.S. employees who were at least 40 years old in pursuit of a company-wide practice of using forced group terminations, referred to as ‘Resource Actions,’ to accomplish its goal of removing older employees from its labor force,” said the lawsuit filed by the former IBM employees. Three have worked at the company for more than three decades, and one for more than 10 years, the suit said. All were over 55 when they were sacked in May 2016, according to the suit. The suit alleged that IBM required employees to submit claims of age discrimination to binding arbitration, but also banned them from collective arbitration over such claims. IBM said in an emailed statement that the plaintiffs’ theories have been rejected by courts including the U.S. Supreme Court. “We are confident that our arbitration clauses are legal and appropriate,” the firm said. The company added that a body of Supreme Court cases upholds arbitration agreements. The purported purge started in 2014, with the firm carrying out a plan to fix its “seniority mix” by imposing an “aggressive performance management posture,” the suit filed in federal court in New York alleged. One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000 employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according to the suit. “In 2015 and 2016, IBM doubled down on its efforts to replace its long-tenured, older employees with the younger Millennials it sought to recruit,” the suit alleged. “IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’– IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.’” A 2016 presentation concerning one section of the company “specifically called for managers to exempt all ‘early professional hires’ from layoff, regardless of performance,” the suit claimed. “The long-serving, older employees were provided no such exemption.” Also starting in 2014, IBM began demanding that laid-off workers waive their right to collective action, the suit alleged. Employees were offered severance worth a month’s salary, continuing health and life insurance coverage for a period depending on time with the firm, free career counseling, and up to $2,500 for skills training, the suit said. But workers would not receive any of those benefits if they didn’t sign an agreement not to bring age-discrimination claims collectively, even in arbitration, the suit claimed. By this arrangement, IBM sought to deprive workers of the economies and advantages of pursuing legal action together, and “instead to burden them with the limitations and costs of bringing individual actions challenging the same discriminatory practices in secret arbitrations separate from each other,” the suit alleged. “With misgivings, but facing the prospect of a difficult job search and economic hardship, each Plaintiff reluctantly signed the waiver,” the suit said. The suit took aim at a 2006 IBM internal report on employee demographics that purportedly called older workers “gray hairs” and “old heads,” and concluded that younger workers were “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.” In 2014,  IBM made no secret that it was shifting its resources and focus to targeting a much younger demographic. For example, the company launched a blog, “The Millennial Experience,” and a social media campaign led by the hashtag #IBMillennial.” The suit cited a presentation given at a 2014 IBM event, in which slides shown allegedly indicated that Millennials exhibited desirable work qualities such as trusting data and making decisions through collaboration, while workers over 50 had undesirable attributes such as being “more dubious” of analytics, putting “less stock in data” and being less motivated to consult colleagues. The complaint comes after a bombshell story last year in March by ProPublica, “Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM,” which exposed a company-wide pattern of age discrimination practices spanning many units and geographical locations. In addition to seeking to invalidate the illegal waiver of their rights under the ADEA, Plaintiffs will seek the issuance of notice to all other similarly situated laid off older employees who were coerced into signing the invalid releases. They are also seeking the certification of their collective claims under the ADEA, as well as declaratory, equitable, and monetary relief. Copies of the lawsuit and arbitration complaints are available through these links. IBM, Oracle under the scanner again for questionable hiring and firing policies Diversity in Faces: IBM Research’s new dataset to help build facial recognition systems that are fair IBM announces the launch of Blockchain World Wire, a global blockchain network for cross-border payments

Last week, Joel Spolsky announced that he is stepping down as the CEO of Stack Overflow and taking up a new role as Chairman of the site's Board. That means that one of the most popular question and answer sites on the planet - and one of the most important for software developers - is now looking for its new CEO. https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1111267189133316097 Back in 2008, Spolsky, along with with Jeff Atwood, co-founded Stack Overflow with the idea of bringing voting and editing to a Q&A site. The idea was to make it easier for programmers to find the right answer, instead of scrolling endlessly in a discussion forum. Explaining what makes Stack Overflow different from other Q&A sites on his blog, Joel on Software, Spolsky said, “already, it’s better than other Q&A sites, because you don’t have to read through a lot of discussion to find the right answer if it’s in there somewhere.” At a Microsoft conference, just six months after the site’s launch, Spolsky asked how many developers were using the site. He and Atwood were pleasantly surprised when one-third of the crowd rose their hands. Today, however, practically every developer visits Stack Overflow to learn from other developers. In addition to the huge user base, the company has now grown to almost 300 employees and has achieved $70m in revenue last year. For the future of Stack Overflow, Spolsky hopes to make the platform more inclusive and welcoming for new users. “The type of people Stack Overflow serves has changed, and now, as a part of the developer ecosystem, we have a responsibility to create an online community that is far more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of newcomers,” he adds. Many Stack Overflow users have a love/hate relationship with the platform. Some developers find the site intimidating and unwelcoming - a fact that Stack Overflow itself has acknowledged in the past. For example, threads can sometimes become filled with condescending, sarcastic, and dismissive comments, particularly when newcomers fail to follow site rules. They are simply expected to know things right from the start. A Stack Overflow user shares a solution to this, “I think if new users were given a walkthrough of the site, how it works, and what's expected, it would be MUCH more welcoming, and the comments (while still sometimes unnecessarily sarcastic) would be more warranted, since the requirements have been clearly laid out.” Saying things like “thank you” and “please” are considered noise and a distraction from the actual point. There are endless examples of such behavior, but they are not really limited to newbies. When a woman seeking help on a Flexbox margins issue posted on Stack Overflow, she got a message saying, “if you don’t get this…you have no business making a portfolio as a web developer”. April Wensel, the founder of Compassionate Coding, has been writing consistently about the problems users sometimes face on Stack Overflow, sharing numerous examples of people being rude and demeaning. She hopes that the next CEO will take the right measures to make the site inclusive and “more human”: https://twitter.com/aprilwensel/status/1111331785730719745?s=19 Read Spolsky's announcement at the Stack Overflow blog. Stack Overflow celebrates its 10th birthday as the most trusted developer community 4 surprising things from StackOverflow’s 2018 survey. StackOverflow just updated its developers’ salary calculator; includes 8 new countries in 2018.  

The result for the .NET Foundation Board of Directors 2019 is finally revealed. Out of the 476 voters, 329 casted ballots in this election. After counting the ballots using Scottish STV (Single Transferable Vote), Jon Skeet, Sara Chipps, Phil Haack, Iris Classon, Ben Adams, Oren Novotny, and Beth Massi were declared as winners. In total there were 45 candidates competing for 6 seats. Beth Massi has been appointed by Microsoft while the rest got elected by .NET Foundation Members. Following are the winner profiles Jon Skeet: A Java developer at Google in London and is also C# author and community leader. https://twitter.com/jonskeet/status/1111540160305475584 Sara Chipps: Engineering Manager at Stack Overflow. https://twitter.com/SaraJChipps/status/1111458522418552835 Phill Hacck: A developer and author, and best known for his blog, Haacked. https://twitter.com/haacked/status/1111493618441703427 Iris Classon: Software developer, cloud architect at Konstrukt. She is also a member of MEET (Microsoft Extended Experts Team) Ben Adams: Co-founder and CTO of Illyriad Games. https://twitter.com/jongalloway/status/1111324076981682176 Oren Novotny: Microsoft’s Regional Director, MVP, and chief architect of DevOps & modern software at Insight. https://twitter.com/onovotny/status/1111410983749115905 Beth Massi: Product Marketing Manager for the .NET Platform at Microsoft and has previously worked for the .NET Foundation in 2014. https://twitter.com/BethMassi/status/1108838511069716480 How did the election process go The candidate's votes for a round are calculated by taking the sum of the votes from the previous round and votes received in the current round. The votes received in the current round and votes transferred away in the current round represent “votes being transferred”. The single transferable vote system was opted because it is a type of ranked-choice voting which is used for electing a group of candidates, for instance, a committee or a council. In this type of voting, the votes are transferred from losing candidates to other choices in the ballot. Round 1 The first round considered the count of first choices. Since none of the candidates had surplus votes so the candidates who received the least number of votes or no votes at all got eliminated and votes for other candidates got transferred for the next round. Round 2 Round 2 calculated the count after eliminating Lea Wegner and Robin Krom who received 0 votes. There was a tie between, Lea Wegner and Robin Krom while choosing candidates to eliminate. Though Lea Wegner was later chosen by breaking the tie randomly. Since none of the candidates had surplus votes they got transferred for the next round. Round 3 Round 3 calculated the count after eliminating Robin Krom and transferring votes. Since none of the candidates had surplus votes they got transferred for the next round. Round 4 Round 4 calculated the count after eliminating Nate Barbettini and transferring votes. There was a tie between the candidates Peter Mbanugo, Robert McLaws, Virgile Bello, Nate Barbettini, and Marc Bruins while choosing candidates to eliminate. In this round candidate, Nate Barbettini was chosen by breaking the tie randomly. Since none of the candidates had surplus votes they got transferred for the next round. Round 5 The fifth round considered the count after eliminating Marc Bruins and transferring votes. There was a tie between the candidates, Peter Mbanugo, Robert McLaws, Virgile Bello, and Marc Bruins while choosing the candidates to eliminate. Out of which, Marc Bruins was chosen by breaking the tie randomly. Since none of the candidates had surplus votes they got transferred for the next round. Collectively there were 41 such rounds where each round was an elimination round and then finally the winners were declared. To know more about this news, check out Opavote’s blog post. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support Inspecting APIs in ASP.NET Core [Tutorial] .NET Core 3 Preview 2 is here!

Working long hours at a company, devoid of any work-life balance, is rife in China’s tech industry. Earlier this week on Tuesday, a Github user with the name “996icu” created a webpage that he shared on GitHub, to protest against the “996” work culture in Chinese tech companies. The “996” work culture is an unofficial work schedule that requires employees to work from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, totaling up to 60 hours of work per week. The 99icu webpage mentions the Labor Law of the People’s Republic of China, according to which, an employer can ask its employees to work long hours due to needs of production or businesses. But, the work time to be prolonged should not exceed 36 hours a month. Also, as per the Labor Law, employees following the "996" work schedule should be paid 2.275 times of their base salary. However, this is not the case in reality and Chinese employees following the 996 work rule rarely get paid that much. GitHub users also called out to companies like Youzan and Jingdong, who both follow the 996 work rule. The webpage cites example of a Jingdong PR who posted on their maimai ( Chinese business social network) account that "(Our culture is to devote ourselves with all our hearts (to achieve the business objectives)". 996 work schedule started to gain popularity in recent years but has been a “secret practice” for quite a while. The 996icu webpage went viral online and ranked first on GitHub’s trending page on Thursday. It currently has amassed more than 90,000 stars (a post bookmarking tool). The post is also being widely shared on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, where many users are talking about their experiences as tech workers who followed the 996 schedule. This gladiatorial work environment in Chinese firms has long been a bone of contention. South China Morning Post writer Zheping Huang published a post sharing stories of different Chinese tech employees who shed light on the grotesque reality of China’s Silicon Valley. One such example is of a 33-year-old Beijing native, Yang, who works as a product manager in a Chinese internet company. Yang wakes up at 6 am every day to get through a two-and-a-half-hour commute to reach work. Another example is of Bu, a 20-something marketing specialist who relocated to an old complex near her workplace. She pays high rent, shares room with two other women, and no longer has access to coffee shops or good restaurants. A user named “discordance” on Hacker News commented regarding the GitHub protest, asking developers in China to move to better companies. “Leave your company, take your colleagues and start one with better conditions. You are some of the best engineers I've worked with and deserve better”. Another user “ceohockey60”  commented: “The Chinese colloquial term for a developer is "码农". Its literal English translation is "code peasants" -- not the most flattering or respectful way to call software engineers. I've recently heard horror stories, where 9-9-6 is no longer enough inside one of the Chinese tech giants, and 10-10-7 is expected (10am-10pm, 7 days/week)”. The 996icu webpage states that people who “consistently follow the "996" work schedule.. run the risk of getting..into the Intensive Care Unit. Developers' lives matter”. What the US-China tech and AI arms race means for the world – Frederick Kempe at Davos 2019 China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information Is China’s facial recognition powered airport kiosks an attempt to invade privacy via an easy flight experience

Yesterday, the team at Go announced the results of their user survey for the year 2018. 5,883 users from 103 different countries participated in the survey. Key highlights from the Go User Survey 2018 According to the report, for the first time, half of the survey respondents said that they are currently using Go as part of their daily routine. It seems this year proved to be even better for Go as the graph saw a significant increase in the number of respondents who develop their projects in Go as part of their jobs and also use Go outside of their work responsibilities. Also, a majority of survey respondents said that Go is their most-preferred programming language. Here are some other findings: API/RPC services and CLI tools are the commonly used tools by Go users. VS Code and GoLand have become the most popular code editors among survey respondents. Most Go developers use more than one primary OS for development where Linux and macOS are popular. Automation tasks were declared as the fast-growing area for Go. Web development still remains the most common domain but DevOps has shown the highest year-over-year growth and is also the second most common domain now. Survey respondents have been shifting from on-premise Go deployments to containers and serverless cloud deployments. To simplify the survey report, the team at Go broke the responses down into three groups: The ones who are using Go both in and outside of work The ones who use Go professionally but not outside of work The ones who only use Go outside of their job responsibilities According to the survey, nearly half (46% of respondents) write Go code professionally as well as during their free time because the language appeals to developers who do not view software engineering only as a day job. According to the survey, 85% of respondents would prefer to use Go for their next project. Would you recommend Go to a friend? This year, the team had added a question, "How likely are you to recommend Go to a friend or colleague?" for calculating Net Promoter Score. This score measures the number of "promoters" a product has than "detractors" and it ranges from -100 to 100. A positive value would suggest most people are likely to recommend using a product, while negative values will suggest, most people wouldn’t recommend using it. The latest score (2018) is 61, where 68% are promoters - 7% are detractors. How satisfied are developers with Go? The team also asked many questions about developer satisfaction with Go, in the survey. Majority survey respondents indicated a high level of satisfaction which is consistent with prior year results. Around 89% of the respondents said that they are happy with Go and  66% felt that it is working well for their team. These metrics showed an increase in 2017 and they mostly remained stable this year. The downside About half of the survey respondents work on existing projects that are written in other languages, and ⅓ work on a team or project that prefer a language other than Go. The reason highlighted by the respondents for this is the missing language features and libraries. The team identified the biggest challenges faced by developers while using Go with the help of their machine learning tools. The top three challenges highlighted by the team as per the survey are: Package management is one of the major challenges. A response from the survey reads,“keeping up with vendoring, dependency / packet [sic] management / vendoring is not unified.” There are major differences from more familiar programming languages. A response from the survey reads, “Syntax close to C-languages with slightly different semantics makes me look up references somewhat more than I'd like", Another respondent says, "My coworkers who come from non-Go backgrounds are trying to use Go as a version of their previous language but with channels and Goroutines." Lack of generics is another problem. Another response from the survey reads, “Lack of generics makes it difficult to persuade people who have not tried Go that they would find it efficient. Hard to build richer abstractions (want generics)” Go community Go blog, Reddit's r/golang, Twitter, and Hacker News remain the primary sources for Go news. This year, 55% of survey respondents said they are interested in contributing towards the Go community, though it is slightly lesser than last year (59%). The standard library and official Go tools require interacting with the core Go team which could be one of the reasons for the dip in the percentage. Another reason is the dip in the percentage of participants who are willing to take up the Go project leadership. It was 30% last year and it has become 25% this year. This year only 46% of respondents are confident about taking the leadership of Go, it was 54% last year. You can read the complete results of the survey on Golang’s blog post. Update: The title of this article was amended on 4.1.2019. GitHub releases Vulcanizer, a new Golang Library for operating Elasticsearch Google Podcasts is transcribing full podcast episodes for improving search results State of Go February 2019 – Golang developments report for this month released  

Yesterday, Fastly, a US-based cloud computing service provider, open-sourced its native WebAssembly compiler and runtime, Lucet. Lucet is built on top of Cranelift, Mozilla’s low-level retargetable code generator. It already powers Fastly’s Terrarium project, their experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly, and now it is coming to their edge cloud platform as well. How does Lucet work? Lucet delegates the responsibility of executing WebAssembly programs into two components: compiler and runtime. The compiler compiles WebAssembly modules to native code and the runtime manages resources and traps runtime faults. As it uses ahead-of-time compilation strategy, it simplifies the design and overhead of the runtime compared to just-in-time (JIT) compilation that browser engines use. What are its advantages? Faster and safer execution of WebAssembly programs WebAssembly allows web browsers to safely execute programs with near-native performance. It is supported by some of the most commonly used browsers including Google, Mozilla, and Safari. With Lucet, Fastly aims to take WebAssembly “beyond the browser” by providing users a platform for faster and safer execution of programs on Fastly’s edge cloud. More languages to choose from Since WebAssembly is supported by an impressive list of programming languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, Lucet users will be able to work with the language they prefer. They do not have to be restricted to Fastly’s Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Simultaneous execution of programs The Lucet compiler and runtime ensure that each WebAssembly program is allocated its own resources. This enables Fastly’s edge cloud to simultaneously execute a large number of WebAssembly programs without compromising on security. Supports WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Lucet supports WASI, an API that provides access to various operating-system-like features. These include files and filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers. At the moment, Lucet supports running WebAssembly programs written in C, Rust, and AssemblyScript and its runtime only support x86-64 based Linux systems. To read the official announcement, visit Fastly’s official website. Introducing CT-Wasm, a type-driven extension to WebAssembly for secure, in-browser cryptography Creating and loading a WebAssembly module with Emscripten’s glue code [Tutorial] The elements of WebAssembly – Wat and Wasm, explained [Tutorial]

On Thursday, Facebook rolled out a new Ad Library to provide more stringent transparency for preventing interference in worldwide elections. Previously, Facebook’s ads were used to try to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. The Ad library will provide information on all active ads running on a Facebook page, including politics or issue ads. A previous version of this library called Ads Archive only included ads related to politics or policy issues. Anyone can explore the Library, with or without a Facebook account. A day before Facebook’s Ad Library launch, Mozilla with a group of 10 independent researchers published five guidelines that Facebook and Google’s ad transparency APIs should meet in to ensure complete elections protection. These guidelines were shared publicly with European Commissioners Mariya Gabriel, Julian King, Andrus Ansip, and Vera Jourova. The guidelines were also shared with Facebook and Google. Facebook’s Ad Library, more or less meets the requirements of Mozilla. However, the API itself and any data collected from the API is not accessible to and shareable with the general public. Only those who have passed Facebook Identity Confirmation process will be allowed to access the API. Also, Mozilla mentioned the availability of advertisements going back 10 years, but Facebook will provide data going back 7 years. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports are downloadable for anyone. How does Ad Library work? Ad Library will provide information on who saw the ad, how much money the buyer spent to run it, and the number of impressions it received. This information about ads will be provided for seven years. Users will now be able to search by Page, not just keywords and for Facebook logged in users, past user searches will be saved. People can also report ads from within the ad library. The Library will include additional information about the Pages where the ads appeared, including: Page creation date, previous Page merges, and name changes. Primary country location of people who manage a Page provided it has a large audience or runs ads related to politics or issues in select countries. Advertiser spend information for ads related to politics or issues where the Ad Library Report is currently available. This includes all-time spend and spends over the last week, which was previously only available in the Ad Library Report. Starting in mid-May, Facebook says it will update the Ad Library Report on politics- and issues-related ads daily, rather than just weekly or monthly. The company is also expanding access to the Ad Library API to analyze ads related to politics or issues for a wider group of researchers. For the EU Parliamentary elections Ahead of the European Parliamentary election in May 2019, Facebook is also introducing ads transparency tools in the EU. These tools, Facebook said, would have two major goals. “Preventing online advertising from being used for foreign interference, and increasing transparency around all forms of political and issue advertising.” Per these new tools, EU advertisers will need to be authorized in their country to run ads related to the European Parliamentary election or issues of importance within the EU. The company will be using a combination of automated systems and user reporting to enforce this policy. They also need to provide a “Paid for by” disclaimer clearly communicating who is responsible for the ad. On clicking the disclaimer, information such as the campaign budget associated with an individual ad, how many people saw it and their age, location, and gender, will also be displayed. Satvik Shukla, Product Manager at Facebook wrote in a blog post, “We’re committed to creating a new standard of transparency and authenticity for advertising. By the end of June, we’ll roll out transparency tools for political or issue ads around the world.” Although, Facebook’s battle with ad transparency is still facing troubles on a different end. Yesterday, Facebook was charged with housing discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department alleged that Facebook’s targeted advertising platform violates the Fair Housing Act, “encouraging, enabling, and causing” unlawful discrimination by restricting who can view housing ads. HUD had previously also alerted Twitter and Google last year that it is monitoring their practices for similar violations. Facebook takes an initiative against discriminative ads on its platform Facebook deletes and then restores Warren’s campaign ads after she announced plans to break up Facebook. Open letter from Mozilla Foundation and other companies to Facebook urging transparency in political ads.