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The AndroidHardening project team announced yesterday that they’ve changed the Project name to GrapheneOS. Daniel Micay, a security researcher, shared the details about GrapheneOS on Twitter yesterday. Micay states that the name-change has been done to reflect significant progress of the AndroidHardening Project and how it is becoming a broader and more sustainable project as more developers will be joining the project soon. GrapheneOS is a security and privacy-focused mobile operating system which will now be focused more on developing privacy and security improvements for the Android Open Source Project. In addition to that, it will also include more standalone sub-projects with hardened malloc implementation that can be easily ported to other operating systems, states Micay. Examples of standalone sub-projects within GrapheneOS include the Auditor app and attestation service. Auditor is currently released for only a few selected Android Devices. It is capable of performing local verification with another Android device using a QR code or via a scheduled server-based verification. These standalone projects will be MIT licensed, similar to hardened malloc implementation. Attestation work will also be made MIT licensed soon. Moreover, changes to the other existing projects will make use of upstream licenses (eg; Apache 2). Micay states that although GrapheneOS is currently being supported by some companies, there would still be a strong focus on maintaining distance from other corporations, governments, etc.    “Lots of care will be taken to avoid dependence / coercion. There's already much more diverse sources of support and collaboration”, states Micay. After the project has successfully expanded, support for more devices will be added with the help of Treble. Support for QubesOS as a first-class target will also be added in the future and is currently under work. HTTP-over-QUIC will be officially renamed to HTTP/3 NIPS finally sheds its ‘sexist’ name for NeurIPS Alibaba launches an AI chip company named ‘Ping-Tou-Ge’ to boost China’s semiconductor industry

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, the three pioneers in Artificial Intelligence, as winners of the 2018 Turing Award. The Turing Award was presented to the researchers for their ‘conceptual and engineering breakthroughs’ that resulted in deep neural networks become a critical component of computing. https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1110851884624035852 https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/1110962177903640582 https://twitter.com/AndrewYNg/status/1110913633758769158 The ACM Turing Award, named after the great Alan M. Turing, a British Mathematician, is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. The award brings along with it a $1 million prize which will be split between the winners. Financial support is being offered by Google. ACM states that Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio, worked independently and together to develop conceptual foundations for the field. These researchers worked diligently to identify surprising phenomena via various experiments and also contributed engineering advances that effectively shows the practical advantages of deep neural networks. These deep learning methods have led to many astonishing breakthroughs in the fields of computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics among others. LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio stayed committed to the approach of using artificial neural networks as a tool to help computers recognize patterns and simulate human intelligence. Researchers also faced much criticism initially and their ideas were often met with skepticism. But, the researchers were determined and their ideas have resulted in major technological advances. “At the heart of this progress are fundamental techniques developed starting more than 30 years ago by this year's Turing Award winners, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun”, said Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow, and SVP, Google AI. Dr. Hinton now works as VP and engineering fellow at Google; Dr. LeCun works as the Chief AI Scientist for Facebook, and Dr. Bengio has inked deals with IBM and Microsoft. NGI0 Consortium to award grants worth 5.6 million euro to open internet projects UC Davis students bag $500k award and the 2018 Amazon Alexa prize for creating a social conversational system Mozilla funds winners of the 2018 Creative Media Awards for highlighting unintended consequences of AI in Soceity

On Tuesday, Android Police reported that Google Podcasts is automatically transcribing episodes. It is using these transcripts as metadata to help users find the podcasts they want to listen even if they don’t know its title or when it was published. Though this is coming into light now, Google’s plan of using transcripts for improving search results has already been shared even before the app was actually launched. In an interview with Pacific Content, Zack Reneau-Wedeen, Google Podcasts product manager, said that Google could “transcribe the podcast and use that to understand more details about the podcast, including when they are discussing different topics in the episode.” This is not a user-facing feature but instead works in the background. You can see the transcription of these podcasts in the web page source of the Google Podcasts web portal. After getting a hint from a user, Android Police searched for “Corbin dabbing port” instead of Corbin Davenport, a writer for Android Police. Sure enough, the app’s search engine showed Episode 312 of the Android Police Podcast, his podcast, as the top result: Source: Android Police The transcription is enabled by Google’s Cloud Speech-to-Text transcription technology. Using transcriptions of such a huge number of podcasts Google can do things like including timestamps, index the contents, and make text easily searchable. This will also allow Google to actually “understand” what is being discussed in the podcasts without having to solely rely on the not-so-detailed notes and descriptions given by the podcasters. This could prove to be quite helpful if users don’t remember much about the shows other than a quote or interesting subject matter and make searching frictionless. As a user-facing feature, this could be beneficial for both a listener and a creator. “It would be great if they would surface this as feature/benefit to both the creator and the listener. It would be amazing to be able to timestamp, tag, clip, collect and share all the amazing moments I've found in podcasts over the years, “ said a Twitter user. Read the full story on Android Police. Google announces the general availability of AMP for email, faces serious backlash from users European Union fined Google 1.49 billion euros for antitrust violations in online advertising Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019

Yesterday Facebook rolled out a policy to ban white nationalist content from its platforms. This seems to be a significant step towards the longstanding demands from civil rights groups who said the tech giant was failing to confront the powerful reach of white extremism on social media. The threat posed by social media enabling white nationalism was violently underlined this month when a racist gunman killed 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand, using Facebook and other social media platforms to post live video of the attack. Facebook removed the video and the gunman’s account soon after but the footage was already widely shared on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and 8chan website. In a blog post titled “Standing Against Hate,” that Facebook posted on Wednesday, the company said the ban takes effect next week. As of midday Wednesday, the feature did not yet appear to be live, based on searches for terms like “white nationalist,” “white nationalist groups,” and “blood and soil.” As part of its policy change, Facebook said it would divert users who searched for white supremacist content to Life After Hate, a nonprofit that helps people leave hate groups, and would improve its ability to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to combat white nationalism. Based on information in Motherboard’s report, the platform will use content-matching to delete images previously flagged as hate speech. There was no further elaboration on how that would work, including whether or not URLs to websites like 4chan and 8chan would be affected by the ban. Facebook will not differentiate between white nationalism, white separatism and white supremacy The company had previously banned white supremacist content from its platforms but maintained a murky distinction between white supremacy, white nationalism and white separatism. On Wednesday, it said that its views had been changed by civil society groups and experts in race relations and that it now believed “white nationalism and separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups.” Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which helped Facebook shape its new attitude toward white nationalism, said the earlier policy “left a gaping hole in terms of what it provided for white supremacists to fully pursue their platform.” “Online hate must be confronted if we are going to make meaningful progress in the fight against hate, so this is a really significant victory,” Ms. Clarke said. “It’s clear that these concepts are deeply linked to organized hate groups and have no place on our services,” Facebook said in a statement posted online. It later added, “Going forward, while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.” “Our policies have long prohibited hateful treatment of people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or religion — and that has always included white supremacy,” the company said in a statement. “We didn’t originally apply the same rationale to expressions of white nationalism and separatism because we were thinking about broader concepts of nationalism and separatism — things like American pride and Basque separatism, which are an important part of people’s identity.” The civil rights groups welcome this ban but wait for implementation before approving Facebook’s move Facebook’s decision was praised by civil rights groups and experts in the study of extremism, many of whom had strongly disapproved of the company’s previous understanding of white nationalism. Madihha Ahussain, a lawyer for Muslim Advocates, a civil-rights group, said the policy change was “a welcome development” in the wake of the New Zealand mosque shootings. But she said the company still had to explain how it will enforce the policy, including how it will determine what constitutes white nationalist content. “We need to know how Facebook will define white nationalist and white separatist content,” she said. “For example, will it include expressions of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ sentiment — all underlying foundations of white nationalism? Further, if the policy lacks robust, informed and assertive enforcement, it will continue to leave vulnerable communities at the mercy of hate groups.” Mark Pitcavage, who tracks domestic extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, said the shift from Facebook was “a good thing if they were using such a narrow definition before.” Mr. Pitcavage said the term white nationalism “had always been used as a euphemism for white supremacy, and today it is still used as a euphemism for white supremacy.” He called the two terms “identically extreme.” He said white supremacists began using the term “white nationalist” after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when the term “white supremacy” began to receive sustained scorn from mainstream society, including among white people. “The less hard-core white supremacists stopped using any term for themselves, but the more hard-core white supremacists started using ‘white nationalism’ as a euphemism for ‘white supremacy,’” he said. And he said comparisons between white nationalism and American patriotism or ethnic pride were misplaced. “Whiteness is not an ethnicity, it is a skin color,” Mr. Pitcavage said. “And America is a multicultural society. White nationalism is simply a form of white supremacy. It is an ideology centered on hate.” Progressive nonprofit civil rights advocacy group, Color of Change called Facebook’s new moderation policy a critical step forward. “Color Of Change alerted Facebook years ago to the growing dangers of white nationalists on its platform, and today, we are glad to see the company’s leadership take this critical step forward in updating its policy on white nationalism,” the statement reads. “We look forward to continuing our work with Facebook to ensure that the platform’s content moderation guidelines and training properly support the updated policy and are informed by civil rights and racial justice organizations.” How social media enabled and amplified the Christchurch terrorist attack Google and Facebook working hard to clean image after the media backlash from the Christchurch terrorist attack Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Last week, Jolla announced the release of Sailfish OS 3.0.2. This release goes by the name Oulanka, which is a national park in Lapland and Northern Ostrobothnia regions of Finland. Along with 44 fixed issues, this release brings in a battery saving mode, better connectivity, new device management APIs, and more. Improved power management Sailfish OS Oulanka comes with a battery saving mode, which is enabled by default when the battery goes lower than 20%. Additionally, users can also specify the battery saving threshold themselves by going to the “Battery” section in the settings menu. Better connectivity Improvements are made in this release so that Sailfish OS better handles scenarios when a large number of Bluetooth and WLAN devices are connected to the network. Now, Bluetooth and WLAN network scan will not slow down your devices. Also, many updates have been made in the Firewall introduced in the previous release, Sipoonkorpi, for better robustness. Updates in Corporate API This release comes with several improvements in the Corporate API. New device management APIs are added including data counters, call statistics, location data sources, proxy settings, app auto start, roaming status, and cellular settings. Sailfish X Beta for Xperia XA2 Sailfish X, the downloadable version of Sailfish OS for select devices, continues to be in Beta for XA2 with the Oulanka update. With this release, the team has improved several aspects of Android 8.1 Support Beta for XA2 devices. Now, Android apps will be able to connect to the internet more reliably via mobile data. To know more in detail about Sailfish OS Oulanka, check out the official announcement. An early access to Sailfish 3 is here! Linux 5.1 will come with Intel graphics, virtual memory support, and more The Linux Foundation announces the CHIPS Alliance project for deeper open source hardware integration

Earlier this week at the Adobe Summit, world’s largest conference focused on Customer Experience Management, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP announced that they’re expanding their Open Data Initiative. CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP announced the launch of the Open Data Initiative at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in 2018. The core idea behind Open Data Initiative is to make it easier for the customers to move data between each others’ services. Now, the three partners are looking forward to transforming customer experiences with the help of real-time insights that will be delivered via the cloud. They have also come out with a common approach and a set of resources for customers to help customers create new connections across previously siloed data. Read Also: Women win all open board director seats in Open Source Initiative 2019 board elections “From the beginning, the ODI has been focused on enhancing interoperability between the applications and platforms of the three partners through a common data model with data stored in a customer-chosen data lake”, reads the Microsoft announcement. This unified data lake offers customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services. Also, these companies have come out with a new approach for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform into a customer’s data lake. The whole approach will be activated via Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA. This, in turn, will provide a new level of AI enrichment, helping firms serve their customers better. Moreover, to further advance the development of the initiative, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, also shared the details about their plans to summon a Partner Advisory Council. This Partner Advisory Council will comprise over a dozen firms including Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, etc. Microsoft states that these organizations believe there is a significant opportunity in the ODI to help them offer altogether new value to their customers. “We’re excited about the initiative Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have taken in this area, and we see a lot of opportunity to contribute to the development of ODI”, states Stephan Pretorius, CTO, WPP. Microsoft introduces Pyright, a static type checker for the Python language written in TypeScript Microsoft announces: Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac, a fully automated DNA data storage, and revived office assistant Clippy Microsoft brings PostgreSQL extension and SQL Notebooks functionality to Azure Data Studio

Just two days ago, the team at Shodan introduced Shodan Monitor, a new website that helps users to setup network alerts and keeps a track of what's connected to the internet. Features of Shodan Monitor Networking gets easy with Shodan Monitor Users will be able to explore what they have connected to the internet within their network range. The users can also set up real-time notifications in case something unexpected shows up. Scaling The Shodan platform can handle networks of all the sizes. In case an ISP wants to deal with millions of customers then Shodan could be reliable in that scenario. Security Shodan Monitor helps in monitoring the users’ known networks and their devices across the internet. It helps in detecting leaks to the cloud, identifying phishing websites and compromised databases. Shodan navigates users to important information Shodan Monitor helps in keeping the dashboards precise and relevant by proving the most relevant information with the help of their web crawlers. The information shown to the users on their dashboards gets filtered before getting displayed to them. Component details API Shodan Monitor provides users with developer-friendly API and command-line interface, which has all the features of the Shodan Monitor website. Scanning Shodan’s global infrastructure helps users to scan the networks in order to confirm that an issue has been fixed. Batteries Shodan’s API plan subscription gives users access to Shodan Monitor, search engine, API, and a wide range of websites. Few users are happy about this news and excited to use it. https://twitter.com/jcsecprof/status/1110866625253855235 According to a few others, the website still needs some work as they are facing error while working with the website. https://twitter.com/MarcelBilal/status/1110796413607313408 To know more about this news, check out Shodan Monitor. Will putting limits on how much JavaScript is loaded by a website help prevent user resource abuse? Grunt makes it easy to test and optimize your website. Here’s how. [Tutorial] FBI takes down some ‘DDoS for hire’ websites just before Christmas    

Tech companies are no longer comfortable storing their data in Australia after due to their strict encryption laws, warned Microsoft president Brad Smith. Brad Smith was a speaker at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia event in Canberra which took place on Wednesday. In December, Australia passed a rushed assistance and access bill which allows Australian police and government the powers to issue technical notices. This law requires tech companies to help law enforcement agencies break into individuals’ encrypted data. Using secret warrants, the government can even compel a company to serve malware remotely to the target’s device. Microsoft has expressed concerns storing their data in Australia saying Microsoft’s operations in Australia remain unchanged, but the company is worried about the law’s “potential consequences”. Smith said that Australia had “emerged as a country where companies and governments were comfortable” with storing data, a boon to the tech sector and the economy.” “But when I travel to other countries I hear companies and governments say ‘we are no longer comfortable putting our data in Australia’, he added. “So they are asking us to build more data centers in other countries, and we’ll have to sort through those issues.” Smith said that the bill was written to protect companies from introducing a "systemic weakness" to their platforms, but this is not well defined. After a deal between the Coalition and Labor, a definition was added, but the phrasing is unclear and has left the industry unsure how to interpret it. Per Smith, “There is this wonderful phrase about enabling companies to avoid creating a systemic weakness but that phrase is not defined," he said. "Until it is defined I think people will worry and we will be among those who will worry because we do feel it is vitally important we protect our customer's privacy." “We will have to sort through those issues but if I were an Australian who wanted to advance the Australian technology economy, I would want to address that and put the minds of other like-minded governments at ease," he added. Since its induction, the assistance and access bill has been slammed by many. Those condemning include, Protonmail, a Swiss-based end-to-end email encryption company, and Australia’s email provider, FastMail, who reported that they are losing their customers following the bill. In a similar resistance yesterday, Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, said that Australian the legislation is putting the Australian technology industry in a “chokehold,” creating uncertainty and putting jobs at risk. He also called on the federal government to keep its promise and revisit the bill. FastMail expresses issues with Australia’s Assistance and Access bill Australia’s Assistance and Access (A&A) bill, popularly known as the anti-encryption law, opposed by many in the tech community Australian intelligence and law enforcement agencies already issued notices under the ‘Assistance and Access’ act despite opposition from industry groups

Yesterday, the European Parliament passed the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, also known as EU Copyright Directive. The directive passed in a vote with 348 votes in favor, 274 against, and 36 abstentions. The directive has gone through several amendments before it has reached its final form. It is aimed to provide copyright holders more control over their work. But, critics believe that this could instead give the tech giants more power and will kill the internet freedom. Now, member states have to take the next step of approving the legislation. If they approve it, they will have to implement the law within two years of the legislation getting officially published. The controversial Articles 11 and 13 The directive includes the two controversial articles, Article 11 and Article 13. Article 11, also known as the “link tax”, requires news aggregating sites to obtain a license before linking or using snippet of news articles. This article was introduced to help original content creators to gain a portion of revenue from services like Google News and Apple News. Article 13 has been labelled as “meme ban” or the “upload filter”. According to this article, online content sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud need to put in place “effective and proportionate measures” to prevent copyright infringement by their users. It makes these platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement by their users. As Article 13 seems to be pretty vague about what “best efforts” these platforms should make, critics believe that it means implementing upload filters. So, platforms like YouTube and Facebook will may have to scan every piece of content users upload and check it against a database of copyrighted material. In the current version of Article 13, the European Parliament said that memes are “specifically excluded”. Confirming this, a MEP for London Mary Honeyball said, "There's no problem with memes at all. This directive was never intended to stop memes and mashups.” Swedish MEPs accidentally pushing the wrong voting button Amid all the controversies and protest, a group of Swedish MEPs have added “fuel to the fire” by sharing that they accidentally voted for passing Articles 11 and 13. They thought that the vote they were casting was in the favour of voting down a plan to pass the article. Though these members can get the record amended, the vote will still stand. They have now issued a statement saying that they intended to “open a debate” on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. Emanuel Karlsten, a Swedish journalist said, “Thus, Parliament was stopped by only a single vote from voting on the decision to delete Articles 11 and 13 of the Directive. One wrongly-pushed button fewer, and the result for all of Europe could’ve been very different”. Sweden Democrats issued a comment on the vote, “Today we had three push-button votes on the Copyright Directive. On one of the votes, we pressed the wrong button: the vote on the order in which we would vote. If it had gone through we could’ve voted on deleting Article 13, which we wanted. The vote should have ended up 314–315.” This final decision got a mixed reaction. While Andrus Ansip, the European Commission's vice president for the digital single market, called this a step ahead, Julia Reda, a member of European Parliament, said this was a "dark day for internet freedom." https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110510881069322240 Drafts of Article 13 and the EU Copyright Directive have been finalized Article 13 back on Track- France and Germany join hands to save the EU’s Copyright Directive German OpenStreetMap protest against “Article 13” EU copyright reform making their map unusable

Google yesterday announced a new external advisory board to help monitor the company’s use of artificial intelligence for ways in which it may violate ethical principles it laid out last summer. The group was announced by Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, and it includes experts on a wide-ranging series of subjects, including mathematics, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and even foreign policy. Following is the complete list of the advisory council appointed by Google: Alessandro Acquisti, a leading behavioral economist and privacy researcher. Bubacarr Bah, an expert in applied and computational mathematics De Kai, a leading researcher in natural language processing, music technology and machine learning Dyan Gibbens, an expert in industrial engineering and CEO of Trumbull Joanna Bryson, an expert in psychology and AI, and a longtime leader in AI ethics Kay Coles James, a public policy expert with extensive experience working at the local, state and federal levels of government Luciano Floridi, a leading philosopher and expert in digital ethics William Joseph Burns, a foreign policy expert and diplomat The group will be called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council, and it appears Google wants it to be seen as an independent watchdog keeping an eye on how it deploys AI in the real world. It wants to focus on facial recognition technology and mitigation of built-in bias in machine learning training methods. “This group will consider some of Google’s most complex challenges that arise under our AI Principles ... providing diverse perspectives to inform our work,” Walker writes. Behind the selection of the council As for the members, the names may not be easily recognizable to those outside academia. However, the credentials of the board appear to be of the highest caliber, with resumes that include multiple presidential administration positions and stations at top-notch universities spanning University of Oxford, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and UC Berkeley. Having said that, the selection of the Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James and CEO of Trumbull Dyan Gibbens received harsh criticism on Twitter. It has been noted that James, through her involvement with the conservative think tank, has espoused anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on her public Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/farbandish/status/1110624709308121088 https://twitter.com/EerkeBoiten/status/1110675556713091072 One of the members, Joanna Bryson also expressed astonishing comments on Twitter for being selected as a part of the council. Joanna states, she has no idea of what she is getting into but she will certainly do her best. https://twitter.com/luke_stark/status/1110630992979652608 Google’s history of controversies Last year, Google found itself embroiled in controversy over its participation in a US Department of Defense drone program called Project Maven. Following immense internal backlash and external criticism for putting employees to work on AI projects that may involve the taking of human life, Google decided to end its involvement in Maven following the expiration of its contract. It also put together a new set of guidelines, what CEO Sundar Pichai dubbed Google’s AI Principles, that would prohibit the company from working on any product or technology that might violate “internationally accepted norms” or “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” “We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use,” Pichai wrote at the time. “How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come. As a leader in AI, we feel a deep responsibility to get this right.” Google effectively wants its AI research to be “socially beneficial,” and that often means not taking government contracts or working in territories or markets with notable human rights violations. Regardless, Google found itself in yet another similar controversy related to its plans to launch a search product in China, one that may involve deploying some form of artificial intelligence in a country currently trying to use that very same technology to surveil and track its citizens. Google’s pledge differs from the stances of Amazon and Microsoft, both of which have said they will continue to work the US government. Microsoft has secured a $480 million contract to provide HoloLens headsets to the Pentagon, while Amazon continues to sell its Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies. Google also formed a “responsible innovation team” internally that Walker says has reviewed hundreds of different launches to-date, some of which have aligned with its principles while others haven’t. For example, that team helped Google make the decision not to sell facial recognition technology until there’s been more ethical and policy debate on the issue. Why critics are skeptical of this move? Rashida Richardson, director of policy research at AI Now Institute, expressed skepticism about the ambiguity of Google and other companies’ AI principles at the MIT Technology Review Conference held in San Francisco on Tuesday. For example, Google’s document leans heavily on the word “appropriate.” “Who is defining what appropriate means?” she asked. Walker said that Google's new council is meant to foster more defined discussion. He added that the company had over 300 people looking at machine learning fairness issues. "We’re doing our best to put our money where our mouth is,” Kent said. Google has previously had embarrassing technology screw-ups driven by bias in its machine learning systems, like when its photos algorithm labeled black people as gorillas. It would not be wrong to say that today’s announcement — which perhaps not coincidentally comes a day after Amazon said it would earmark $10 million with the National Science Foundation for AI fairness research, and after Microsoft executive Harry Shum said the company would add an ethics review focusing on AI issues to its standard product audit checklist — appears to be an attempt by Google to fend off broader, continued criticism of private sector AI pursuits. https://twitter.com/smunson/status/1110657292549029888 Thoughtful decisions require careful and nuanced consideration of how the AI principles … should apply, how to make tradeoffs when principles come into conflict, and how to mitigate risks for a given circumstance,” says Walker in an earlier blog post. Google and Facebook working hard to clean image after the media backlash from the Christchurch terrorist attack Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019 Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation)

Yesterday, the team at Elastic released Elastic Stack 6.7 a group of open source products from Elastic designed to help users take data from any type of source and visualize that data in real time. What’s new in Elastic Stack 6.7? Elastic Maps Elastic Maps is a new dedicated solution used for mapping, querying, and visualizing geospatial data in Kibana. They expand on existing geospatial visualization options in Kibana with features such as visualization of multiple layers and data sources in the same map. It also includes features like dynamic data-driven styling on vector layers on maps, mapping of both aggregate and document-level data and much more. Elastic Maps also embeds the query bar with autocomplete for real-time ad-hoc search. Elastic Uptime This release comes with Elastic Uptime, that makes it easy to detect when application services are down or they are responding slowly. It notifies users about problems way before those services are called by the application. Cross Cluster Replication (CCR) Cross Cluster Replication (CCR) now has a variety of use cases that include cross-datacenter and cross-region replication and it is generally available. Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) With this release, Index lifecycle management (ILM) is now generally available and also ready for production use. ILM helps Elasticsearch admins with defining and automating lifecycle management policies, such as how data is to be managed and moved between phases like hot, warm, cold, and deletion phases while it ages. Elasticsearch SQL Elasticsearch SQL, helps users with interacting and querying their Elasticsearch data using SQL. Elasticsearch SQL functionality includes the JDBC and ODBC clients, which allows third-party tools to connect to Elasticsearch as a backend datastore. With this release, Elasticsearch SQL gets generally available. Canvas Canvas that helps users to showcase and present live data from Elasticsearch with pixel-perfect precision, becomes generally available with this release. Kibana localization In this release, Kibana’s first localization, which is now available in simplified Chinese. Kibana also introduces a new localization framework that provides support for additional languages. Functionbeat Functionbeat is a Beat that deploys as a function in serverless computing frameworks, as well as streams, cloud infrastructure logs, and metrics into Elasticsearch. The Functionbeat is now generally available and it supports the AWS Lambda framework and can stream data from CloudWatch Logs, SQS, and Kinesis. Upgrade Assistant The Upgrade Assistant in this release will help users in preparing their existing Elastic Stack environment for the upgrade to 7.0. The Upgrade Assistant includes both APIs and UIs and works as an important cluster checkup tool to help plan the upgrade. It also helps in identifying things like deprecation warnings to enable a smoother upgrade experience. To know more about this release, check out Elastic’s blog post. Microsoft brings PostgreSQL extension and SQL Notebooks functionality to Azure Data Studio Core CPython developer unveils a new project that can analyze his phone’s ‘silent connections’ How to handle backup and recovery with PostgreSQL 11 [Tutorial]  

IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) released the first version of Ethics guidelines for automation and Intelligent systems, titled “Ethically Aligned Design (EAD): A vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems”, earlier this week. EAD guidelines feature scientific analysis and resources, high-level principles as well as actionable recommendations for ethical implementation of autonomous and intelligent systems (A/IS). “We offer high-level General Principles in Ethically Aligned Design that we consider to be imperatives for creating and operating A/IS that further human values and ensure trustworthiness”, reads EAD. The EAD guideline explains eight high-level ethical principles that can be applied to all types of autonomous and intelligent systems (A/IS), irrespective of whether they are physical robots, software systems or algorithmic chatbots. Eight General Principles in EAD Human Rights As mentioned in EAD, A/IS shall be created and operated in such a way that it respects, promotes, and protects internationally the recognized human rights. These rights should be fully taken into consideration by individuals, companies, research institutions, and governments to reflect the principle that A/IS respects and fulfills the human rights, freedoms, human dignity, and cultural diversity. Well-being EAD states that A/IS creators should focus on improving human well-being as a primary success criterion for development. EAD recommends that A/IS should prioritize human well-being as the outcome in all system designs. It should use the best available and widely accepted “well-being metrics” as their reference point. Data Agency A/IS creators should put more emphasis on empowering individuals with an added ability to access and securely share their data. A/IS creators should focus on maintaining people’s capacity to have control over their identity. Organizations and governments, should test and implement technologies that allow the individuals to specify their online agent for case-by-case authorization decisions. For minors, current guardianship approaches should be implemented to determine their suitability in this context. Effectiveness Creators should provide evidence of the effectiveness and fitness for the purpose of A/IS. EAD recommends that creators engaged in the development of A/IS should focus on defining the metrics to serve as valid and meaningful gauges of the effectiveness of the system. Creators of A/IS should design systems where the metrics on specific deployments of the system can be aggregated to deliver information on the effectiveness of the system across different deployments. Also, industry associations and other organizations (IEEE and ISO) should collaborate to develop standards for reporting on the effectiveness of A/IS. Transparency EAD states that the basis of a particular A/IS decision should always be discoverable. It recommends that new standards should be developed in a way that it describes measurable and testable levels of transparency. Also, these standards would offer designers with a guide for self-assessing transparency during development and suggest mechanisms for improving transparency. Accountability As per EAD, A/IS should be created and operated in a way so that it offers an “unambiguous rationale” for decisions made. EAD states that in order to address the issues of responsibility and Accountability,  courts should clarify the “responsibility, culpability, liability, and accountability” for A/IS prior to the development and deployment. It also states that designers and developers of A/IS should be made aware of the diversity in existing cultural norms among these A/IS. Awareness of Misuse EAD states that creators should offer protection against all potential misuses and risks of A/IS in operation. EAD recommends that creators should be made aware of methods of misuse. It also states that A/IS should be designed in ways that can minimize the opportunity for these systems. Public awareness should be improved surrounding the issues of potential A/IS technology misuse. Competence EAD states that the creators should specify and operators should adhere to the knowledge and skill required for safe operation. It also mentions that the creators of A/IS should clearly specify the types and levels of knowledge required to understand and operate any given application of A/IS. Also, creators of A/IS should provide the affected parties with information on the role of the operator and the implications of operator error. Rich and detailed documentation should be made accessible to the experts and the general public. For more information, check out the official Ethically Aligned Design guidelines IEEE Computer Society predicts top ten tech trends for 2019: assisted transportation, chatbots, and deep learning accelerators among others What the IEEE 2018 programming languages survey reveals to us 2019 Deloitte tech trends predictions: AI-fueled firms, NoOps, DevSecOps, intelligent interfaces, and more

Earlier this month, Uber open-sourced Pelton, a unified resource scheduler that manages resources across distinct workloads. Pelton, first introduced in November last year, is built on top of Mesos. “By allowing others in the cluster management community to leverage unified schedulers and workload co-location, Peloton will open the door for more efficient resource utilization and management across the community”, states the Uber team. Peloton is designed for web-scale companies such as Uber that consist of millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. Peloton comes with advanced resource management capabilities such as elastic resource sharing, hierarchical max-min fairness, resource overcommits, and workload preemption. Peloton uses Mesos to aggregate resources from different hosts and then further launch tasks as Docker containers. Peloton also makes use of hierarchical resource pools to manage elastic and cluster-wide resources more efficiently. Before Peloton was released, each workload at Uber comprised its own cluster which resulted in various inefficiencies. However, with Peloton, mixed workloads can be colocated in shared clusters for better resource utilization. Peloton feature highlights Elastic Resource Sharing: Peloton supports hierarchical resource pools that help elastically share resources among different teams. Resource Overcommit and Task Preemption: Peloton helps with improving cluster utilization by scheduling workloads that use slack resources. Optimized for Big Data Workloads:  Support has been provided for advanced Apache Spark features such as dynamic resource allocation. Optimized for Machine Learning: There is support provided for GPU and Gang scheduling for TensorFlow and Horovod. High Scalability: Users can scale to millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. “Open sourcing Peloton will enable greater industry collaboration and open up the software to feedback and contributions from industry engineers, independent developers, and academics across the world”, states the Uber team. Uber and Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles Uber and GM Cruise are open sourcing their Automation Visualization Systems Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox Lockbox on Android, a password manager for Firefox web browser users. Firebox Lockbox will help users to access their logins stored in their Firefox browser from their mobile device. Lockbox is one of the projects by Mozilla developed through a Test Flight program. Also, it is free and users don’t have to do any extra setup for it. The user passwords securely sync from the Firefox browser to the Firefox Lockbox app. Mozilla has also taken care of security as the Lockbox app can be locked with facial recognition or a fingerprint (depending on device support). The user passwords are also encrypted well, in a way this prevents Mozilla from reading user data. Users have to simply sign in to their Firefox account and Firefox Lockbox will manage all the passwords that users have saved in Firefox. The passwords will be available both online and offline, once they are synced. With Firefox Lockbox, it’s easy to keep track of passwords across devices as it automatically fills in the user passwords saved on the desktop to the apps like Facebook or Yelp, on users’ mobile device. Few users think that this is an amazing project, however, the Chrome users are expecting a Chrome plugin. Others are also worried about the longevity of Firefox Lockup. A user commented on HackerNews, “I think this is wonderful, but I have two concerns. First, if there isn't a Chrome plugin, it's not going to be of much use to me. I still use Chrome on my laptop (for a multitude of reasons) and if Lockbox doesn't interoperate with it, it's not a useful tool. Second, I worry about the longevity of the project. Other than Firefox, Mozilla is not known for their long-term support of consumer products. Persona? Firefox OS? Thunderbird? I don't want to switch to a product that's only going to be retired in a year.” Few others think that Lockbox’s UI is very simple. Another comment reads, “Am I missing something, or is this landing page really nothing more than a screenshot and an app button? I know minimal pages are trendy, but that seems like taking it a bit too far.” Read more about this news on Mozilla’s blog post. Mozilla’s Firefox Send is now publicly available as an encrypted file sharing service Mozilla Firefox will soon support ‘letterboxing’, an anti-fingerprinting technique of the Tor Browser Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust

Developers frequently encounter NullPointerExceptions while developing or maintaining a Java application. They often don't contain a message which makes it difficult for the developers to find the cause of the exception. Java Enhancement Proposal (JEP) proposes to enhance the exception text to notify what was null and which action failed. For instance: a.to_b.to_c = null; a.to_b.to_c.to_d.num = 99; The above code will print java.lang.NullPointerException and which doesn’t highlight what value is null. A message like 'a.to_b.to_c' is null and cannot read field 'to_d' will highlight where the exception is thrown. Basic algorithm to compute the message In case of an exception, the instruction that caused the exception, is known by the virtual machine. The instruction gets stored in the 'backtrace' datastructure of a throwable object which is held in a field private to the jvm implementation. In order to assemble a string as a.to_b.to_c, the bytecodes need to be visited in reverse execution order while starting at the bytecode that raised the exception. If a developer or tester knows which bytecode pushed the null value, then it's easy to print the message. A simple data flow analysis is run on the bytecodes to understand as to which previous instruction pushed the null value. This data flow analysis simulates the execution stack that does not contain the values computed by the bytecodes. Instead, it contains information about which bytecode pushed the value to the stack. The analysis will run until the information for the bytecode that raised the exception becomes available. With this information, it becomes easy to assemble the message. An exception message is usually passed to the constructor of Throwable that writes it to its private field 'detailMessage'. In case the message is computed only on access, then it can’t be passed to the Throwable constructor. Since the field is private, there is no natural way to store the message in it. To overcome this, developers can make detailMessage package-private or can use a shared secret for writing it or can write to the detailMessage field via JNI. How should the message content be displayed The message should only be printed if the NullPointerException is raised by the runtime. In case, the exception is explicitly constructed, it won’t make sense to add the message and it could be misleading as no NullPointerException was encountered. As the original message won’t get regained so the message should try resembling code as possible. This makes it easy to understand and compact. The message should contain information from the code like class names, method names, field names and variable names. Testing done by the OpenJDK team The basic implementation of testing for regressions of the messages is in use in SAP's internal Java virtual machine since 2006. The team at OpenJDK has run all jtreg tests, many jck tests and many other tests on the current implementation. They have found no issues so far. Proposed risks to it This proposal has certain risks which include imposing overhead on retrieving the message of a NullPointerMessage. Though the risk of breaking something in the virtual machine is very low. The implementation needs to be extended in case more bytecodes are added to the Bytecode specification. Another issue that was raised is printing the field names or local names might impose a security problem. To know more about this news, check out OpenJDK’s blog post. Introducing ‘Quarkus’, a Kubernetes native Java framework for GraalVM & OpenJDK HotSpot The OpenJDK Transition: Things to know and do Apache NetBeans IDE 10.0 released with support for JDK 11, JUnit 5 and more!