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Yesterday, the team at Facebook announced changes in how the platform manages ads related to housing, employment, and credit on the platform. According to the team at Facebook, “These changes are the result of historic settlement agreements with leading civil rights organizations and ongoing input from civil rights experts.” This announcement comes when the report related to the investigation on Facebook by The New York Times got published. The announcement reads, “One of our top priorities is protecting people from discrimination on Facebook.” https://twitter.com/fbnewsroom/status/1108065626340364288 One of the US’ top housing civil rights organizations, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA),  the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and other private parties, had filed litigation against Facebook. These parties wanted to have stronger action towards protection against abuse. According to Facebook’s blog post, civil rights leaders and experts who oversee the Facebook civil rights audit have also raised their concerns regarding this issue. Facebook has taken the concerns of civil rights leaders and have started working towards reviewing their ad tool. Facebook’s blog post reads, “We take their concerns seriously and, as part of our civil rights audit, engaged the noted civil rights law firm Relman, Dane & Colfax to review our ads tools and help us understand what more we could do to guard against misuse.” Though Facebook’s policies prohibit advertisers from using their tools to discriminate, the platform has removed targeting ads related to protected classes such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. https://twitter.com/noamscheiber/status/1108066283596251136 As there is a history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment, and credit but according to Facebook, this harmful behavior should not happen through their ads. Facebook has announced certain changes as part of their settlements with the NFHA, ACLU, CWA and other groups to protect people on Facebook. Changes announced by Facebook The ones who want to run housing, employment or credit ads now won’t be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code. The advertisers who are offering housing, employment and credit opportunities will now have a smaller set of targeted categories for using in their campaigns. Multicultural affinity targeting won’t be available for these ads. Any detailed targeting option that describes or appears to be related to protected classes won’t available. Facebook is working on a tool which will help users to search and view all current housing ads in the US that are targeted to different places across the country. Facebook’s blog post reads, “Housing, employment and credit ads are crucial to helping people buy new homes, start great careers, and gain access to credit. They should never be used to exclude or harm people. Getting this right is deeply important to me and all of us at Facebook because inclusivity is a core value for our company.” To know more about this news, check out Facebook’s blog post. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Facebook has constantly been in news since quite some time now for its data leaks and data privacy concerns. The recent Christchurch attacks got live streamed on Facebook which has already given rise to a lot of controversy about the working of Facebook. Last month, the company came under the radar because of the deplorable working conditions of content moderators. Facebook’s content reviewers were affected by the disturbing content on the platform. The reviewers are affected to an extent that they are tried to overcome their PTSD by having sex and getting into drugs at work, reports The Verge. In January this year, advocacy groups such as Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center among others, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission, requesting the government to intervene into how Facebook operates. FTC has been investigating on Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal based on whether the sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica and other privacy disputes violated a 2011 agreement with the FTC. According to a report by TechCrunch, Facebook has paid teenagers to spy on their behavior and the company has gone to an extent where it has been asking users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. As per a report by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has also collected highly sensitive data through the back doors of other apps, such as ovulation trackers, in order to target ads at users who don’t even have their Facebook accounts linked to those apps. They are even targeting ads at users who aren’t on Facebook. As per a report by The New York Times, Facebook gave 60 phone device makers direct access to its users’ data and this action by Facebook is under criminal investigation. David N. Cicilline, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law writes in a report, “After each misdeed becomes public, Facebook alternates between denial, hollow promises and apology campaigns. But nothing changes. That’s why, as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, I am calling for an investigation into whether Facebook’s conduct has violated antitrust laws.” German antitrust authorities have already issued an order against Facebook’s data collection practices. Even an investigation by the British Parliament has compared Facebook to a company of “digital gangsters” that considers itself “ahead of and beyond the law.” According to David, Facebook is a repeat offender, and when a company repeatedly goes against the laws, action needs to be taken. He further added, “This includes removing members of the company’s board, or even top executives, along with other changes to the company’s business model to address dysfunction at the top.” F.T.C. can also pursue other ways to fix this problem. For example, after German antitrust enforcers found that Facebook abused its dominant market position, it required Facebook to stop combining different sources of its users’ data without their consent.” On the other hand, Facebook says, The New York Times has been negative towards it. A report by Redcode states that the argument is partially correct and they have backed it by the data. As per the report by Recode, “Times’ coverage of Facebook has been, on average, almost exclusively negative since the 2016 elections, according to new data analyzed by researcher Joe Hovde, a full-time data analyst at a retail tech company.” Hovde did the analysis by including stories with “Facebook” in the article headline and summary text, and further scored the words on a scale of -5 for very negative words such as ‘curses’ unlikely to show up in the Times article, to +5 for extremely positive, using words such as superb or breathtaking. Though there are enough proofs against Facebook but only time will tell if Facebook is actually involved in deceiving the users or the media is hiding the real picture. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Google is, reportedly, planning to bring Node.js to Fuchsia. Yang Guo, a staff software engineer at Google, posted a tweet, yesterday, where he says he’s looking for a full-time software engineer at Google Munich, Germany, who can port Node.js to Fuchsia. https://twitter.com/hashseed/status/1108016705920364544 “We are interested in bringing JS as a programming language to that platform to add to the list of supported languages,” states Guo. Currently, Fuchsia supports languages such as C/C++, Dart, FIDL, Go, Rust, Python, and Flutter modules. Fuchsia is a new operating system that Google is currently working on. Google has been working over Fuchsia for over two years in the hope that it will replace the much dominant Android. Fuchsia is a capability-based operating system and is based on a new microkernel called "Zircon".   Zircon is the core platform responsible for powering the Fuchsia OS. It is made up of a microkernel (source in kernel/...) and a small set of userspace services, drivers, and libraries (source in system/...) that are necessary for the system to boot, talk to hardware, as well as load and run the userspace processes. The Zircon Kernel is what helps provide syscalls to Fuchsia, thereby, helping it manage processes, threads, virtual memory, inter-process communication, state changes, and locking. Fuchsia can run on a variety of platforms ranging from embedded systems to smartphones, and tablets. Earlier this year in January, 9to5Google published evidence, stating that Fuchsia can also run Android Applications. Apparently, a new change was spotted by the 9to5 team in the Android Open Source Project that makes use of a special version of ART (Android Runtime) to run Android apps. This feature would allow devices such as computers, wearables, etc to leverage Android apps in the Google Play Store. Public reaction to the news is positive, with people supporting the announcement: https://twitter.com/aksharpatel47/status/1108136513575882752 https://twitter.com/damarnez/status/1108090522508410885 https://twitter.com/risyasin/status/1108029764957294593 Google’s Smart Display – A push towards the new OS, Fuchsia Fuchsia’s Xi editor is no longer a Google project Google AI releases Cirq and Open Fermion-Cirq to boost Quantum computation

Yesterday, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 66. In this release, the Firefox team aimed to reduce the online annoyances users face by introducing features like Block Autoplay, scroll anchoring, and more. Key features Firefox 66 is packed with: Block Autoplay Often, when we visit a website for some research or reading an article, it all of a sudden starts playing a video or audio, which is quite distracting. In this release, Firefox prevents websites from playing audio and video automatically by default with a newly-added feature, Block Autoplay. If you have already visited a website and clicked on the play button of a video, Firefox will remember your preference and automatically play videos in the subsequent visits. You can also enable autoplay on your favorite website by adding them to your permission list. For this, you just need to visit the control center by clicking the “i” with a circle on the address bar. Then go to Permissions and select the “allow” option in the drop-down menu. Source: Mozilla Scroll anchoring The text part of a web page loads faster as compared to the images and ads. So, as you are reading the article, these slow-loading ads and images move the text around. Scroll anchoring solves this problem, by remembering where you are so that you are not interrupted by these slow-loading images or ads. Improved search experience If you are someone who opens everything in a new tab and ends up with 20 open tabs, like me, this new feature in Firefox 66 is a savior for you. This version allows you to search tabs from the tab overflow menu, which appears when you have a large number of tabs open in a window. Additionally, Firefox 66 comes with a redesigned new tab for private browsing. Now, when you open a new tab in private browsing, it will show a search bar with your default search engine. To set your default search engine, go to Preferences, Search, then select Default Search Engine. Read the official announcement, to know about other exciting features Firefox 66 comes with. 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 releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more!

Microsoft announced the March release of Azure Data Studio, yesterday. This latest Azure Data Studio release explores features such as preview support for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio,  corresponding preview PostgreSQL extension in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and SQL Notebooks, among others. What’s new in Azure Data Studio? PostgreSQL extension for Azure Data Studio There’s new preview support for PostgreSQL in Azure Data Studio. The preview support adds on-premises and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to its existing support for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and SQL Server 2019 big data clusters. The Azure Data Studio extension for PostgreSQL comprises a Tools API service that offers data management and high performant query execution capabilities. Azure Data Studio also provides a modern, keyboard-focused PostgreSQL coding experience, that simplifies your everyday tasks. Users can also run on-demand SQL queries now such as the view and save results as text, JSON, or Excel. There’s also an extension marketplace for Azure Data Studio for developers that help them build and contribute back into the open source ecosystem. Microsoft team states that it is making the new PostgreSQL extension experience open source under the MIT license. This will allow the users to connect to all PostgreSQL databases in case they’re running on Azure (Azure Database for PostgreSQL). SQL Notebooks Using SQL Notebooks, you can easily interleave the written instructions, analysis, diagrams, and the animated GIFs using markdown. You can then add code cells with the SQL code to be executed. The SQL Notebook functionality has been built into the base of Azure Data Studio product and requires no additional extensions to connect to servers and execute the SQL result sets. These SQL notebooks can be used like any other regular query editor. You can get started with SQL notebooks just like a regular query editor. In case you’d like to use other languages such as Python, R, or Scala, you’ll be prompted to install other additional dependencies. PowerShell extension PowerShell extension from Virtual Studio (VS) Code is now featured in the Azure Data Studio marketplace. The new PowerShell extension aligns with the other automation scenarios used by the database administrators and developers. There’s an integrated terminal in Azure Data Studio that makes it easy for users to integrate PowerShell experiences with data. SQL Server dacpac extension Microsoft team mentions that it has been trying to improve the Data-Tier Application Wizard in Azure Data Studio after receiving feedback from the community. Originally shipped with the SQL Server Import extension, this feature will now be shipped as a separate extension. This is because the team plans to bring more features making it easy to use dacpacs and bacpacs in Azure Data Studio. This extension will also be included in the Admin pack for SQL Server, an extension pack that lets you quickly download the popular features from SQL Server Management Studio. Other Changes Community extension highlight: Queryplan.show The Queryplan.show extension adds integration support to visualize query plans using the community extension Queryplan.show. Visual Studio Code Refresh from 1.26.1 to 1.30.2 There have been a few refresh updates from the July release (1.26.1) to the November release (1.30.2) of VS Code. Highlights are as follows: New Settings editor UI making it easy to modify Azure Data Studio settings. Multiline search improvements. Better macOS support. SQL Server 2019 Preview extension The Microsoft team has been moving features from the SQL Server 2019 preview extension into the core Azure Data Studio tool for decades now. Here is a summary of the features moved into the core tool: Jupyter Notebook support has been moved to Azure Data Studio. Bug fixes in the External Data wizards: New schemas typed into the table mapping controls were getting lost. This is fixed now. Oracle type mappings have been updated. For more information, check out the official March release notes for Azure Data Studio. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report Microsoft Azure now supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) Microsoft Azure’s new governance DApp: An enterprise blockchain without mining

One of the largest producers of aluminum in the world, Norsk Hydro, was hit by a cyber attack in the company’s IT system on Monday evening affecting major parts of its smelting operations. The attack which escalated overnight and which is still ongoing has caused the company to resort to manual operations at its smelting facilities. The company's website is currently down and it is posting updates to Facebook. Hydro said that IT systems in most business areas are impacted. According to a statement to BBC, Hydro said that the digital systems at its smelting plants were programmed to ensure machinery worked efficiently. However, these systems had to be turned off. The company is unsure what type of cyber attack it is facing or who is responsible. “We are working to contain and neutralize the attack. It is too early to assess the full impact of the situation. It is too early to assess the impact on customers. We have established a dialogue with all relevant authorities”, the firm updated on their Facebook post. "They are much more reliant today on computerised systems than they were some years ago. But they have the option of reverting back to methods that are not as computerised, so we are able to continue production”, a Hydro spokesperson told BBC. According to Reuters, “The company shut several metal extrusion plants, which transform aluminum ingots into components for car makers, builders, and other industries, while its giant smelters in countries including Norway, Qatar and Brazil were being operated manually.” A Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM) spokesperson said, “We are helping Norsk Hydro with the handling of the situation, and sharing this information with other sectors in Norway and with our international partners.” Hydro is arranging a press meeting on Tuesday, 19 Mar 2019 at 14:00:00 GMT where it will inform everyone about the cyber-attack. We will keep you updated as and when updates to this story is announced. In the meantime, you can check out Norsk Hydro’s Facebook wall for updates. 5 nation joint Activity Alert Report finds most threat actors use publicly available tools for cyber attacks How social media enabled and amplified the Christchurch terrorist attack Microsoft claims it halted Russian spearphishing cyberattacks

The work collaboration hub, Slack, yesterday, launched Slack Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for its enterprise customers. The feature is introduced to give customers control over their encryption keys used for encrypting and decrypting the files and messages they share on their Slack workspace. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1107646162079637506 Following are some of the advantages Slack EKM brings in: An extra layer of protection Slack EKM allows customers to use their own keys, which are stored in Amazon’s Key Management Service (AWS KMS). This will act as an extra layer of protection allowing privacy-conscious organizations such as banks share data, while also combating the risk. Better visibility into how the keys are being used It logs the usage of your keys to encrypt and decrypt messages and files in AWS KMS’s CloudWatch and CloudTrail. The detailed activity logs provide customers much more visibility into how the keys are being accessed. Administrators can control access very granularly What sets Slack EKM apart from general EKM services is that, in the case of any security threat, instead of revoking access to the entire product, it allows administrators to revoke access granularly. They can revoke access at the organization, workspace, channel, time-frame, and file levels. This type of revocation process ensures that the teams can continue to do their day-to-day work while administrators are taking care of the threat. On a phone interview, Slack Head of Enterprise Product, Ilan Frank told VentureBeat, “So today all data in Slack is encrypted at rest and in transit — but in rest, specifically. We, of course, have keys to those, and this now puts that control in the customer’s hands. It’s a feature that our large customers have been asking for for a very long time.” To know more about Slack EKM, check out Slack’s official website. Slack removed 28 accounts: A step against the spread of hate speech Slack confidentially files to go public Airtable, a Slack-like coding platform for non-techies, raises $100 million in funding

Last week, Cookiebot, a company that provides organizations cookie and online tracking consent solution, published a report named Ad Tech Surveillance on the Public Sector Web. The report highlighted that ad tech companies are pervasively tracking EU citizens who visit non-ad funded government and public sector websites. These companies are systematically tracking the online activity of EU citizens even on sites sharing sensitive health information such as pregnancy, sexual health, cancer or mental illness. How does this tracking happen? Modern websites often include multiple third-party JavaScript technologies to enable features like video players, social sharing widgets, web analytics, and galleries. These scripts in addition to providing the feature can also act as Trojan horses, opening backdoors to the website code. And, through these backdoors tech companies can insert their ad trackers. For instance, the Health Service Executive (HSE), the organization that manages the delivery of all public health services in Ireland, installed a popular social sharing tool named ShareThis on its official website. This tool automatically adds a button on each web page providing users a quick way to share information across social media platforms. But, in the background, it also acts as a “Trojan Horse” by releasing ad trackers from more than 20 ad tech companies into every web page it is installed. What were the key highlights of this report? Google tracks twice as much as any other company The report remarked Google as “the Kingpin of Tracking” revealing that the tech giant tracks more than twice as much as any other company. Google controls the top three tracking domains in the study namely YouTube.com, DoubleClick.net, and Google.com. Using the combination of these domains, Google tracks website visits to 82% of the EU’s main government websites. The report further states that YouTube automatically loaded a tracker from DoubleClick.net, Google’s primary ad serving domain, on government websites of 22 EU member states. “Tracking scripts from youtube-nocookie.com were identified on the Italian, Slovenian, Austrian and Greek government websites, which means these websites are using YouTube’s artfully-named “Privacy-Enhanced Mode” to limit tracking of their citizens. It turns out that this does not “enhance privacy” as much as they might expect,“ says the report. Tracking on government websites Cookiebot conducted “deep domain scans” on 184,683 pages of all EU official government websites and found ad trackers on 89% of these web pages. The following are the key findings when they analyzed EU government websites: Out of 28 EU member states, 25 government websites had ad trackers. The highest number of tracking companies were found on government websites of the French (52), Latvian (27), Belgian (19) and Greek (18). Spanish, German and the Dutch were at the other end of the spectrum with no commercial trackers found. Tracking on public health service sites GDPR in Article 9 clearly mentions that the processing of information related to a person’s health condition, which comes under “special categories of personal data”, should be prohibited. However, 52% of EU public health service web pages had commercial trackers. The following are the key findings when they analyzed public health service sites: Out of this 52%, the Irish health service shows 73% of their landing pages contain ad trackers. UK, Spain, France, and Italy had ad trackers on 60%, 53%, 47%, and 47% of landing pages respectively. Though Germany showed lowest ad tracking on their web pages, one-third of their landing pages had trackers. The analysis also showed that a single French webpage about abortion being monitored by 21 different companies and another German webpage about maternity leave monitored by 63 companies. To know more in detail, read the full report by Cookiebot. Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation Android Q Beta is now available for developers on all Google Pixel devices

NVIDIA made a series of new announcements, yesterday. These announcements include a new and open, 3D Design Collaboration Platform called Omniverse, NVIDIA T4 GPUs coming to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a new NVIDIA Isaac SDK, and the new Jetson computers. NVIDIA Omniverse NVIDIA Omniverse is an interactive open collaboration platform that can simplify the studio workflows for real-time graphics. NVIDIA Omniverse, announced yesterday,  has also added support for Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology (allows information exchange about modeling, shading, animation, etc across different applications) and Material Definition Language (allows artists to exchange information about surface materials). Other features of Omniverse include watching projects unfold in real-time via Omniverse Viewer or a tool of their choice. The Omniverse Viewer offers very high-quality photorealistic images in real time by taking advantage of rasterization and offering support for NVIDIA RTX RT Cores, CUDA cores, and Tensor Core-enabled AI.    NVIDIA Isaac SDK and the new Jetson Nano Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, and CEO announced NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK, last week, at the GPU Technology Conference. NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK will be made publicly available as the Isaac SDK Robotics developer toolbox in April.  NVIDIA’s Isaac SDK toolbox offers developers access to Isaac applications, Gems (robot capabilities), a Robot Engine and Sim. Isaac SDK makes it easier for the developers to add AI for perception, navigation, and manipulation into next-gen models. NVIDIA Isaac SDK has Isaac Robot Engine at the core that allows developers to build modular and high-speed robotics applications, including robot reference designs. Additionally, the NVIDIA team has also decided to open source their robot hardware reference designs, including Carter autonomous delivery, Kaya, Jetson Nano, Isaac GEMs, Isaac robot engine, and Isaac Sim.  The Isaac SDK robot developer toolbox can be used to create apps using these hardware reference designs. NVIDIA also announced a new AI computer for developers, called Jetson Nano, yesterday. It is available in two versions, the $99 developer kit (for makers, developers, students, etc) and the $129 production-ready module for mass market AI products. The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now and the Jetson Nano module will be made available in June 2019. NVIDIA T4 GPUs NVIDIA team published a blog post yesterday stating that AWS’s new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4 instances will feature NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, in the upcoming weeks.   The new G4 instances will offer a versatile platform to its AWS customers to deploy a wide range of AI services. Customers will be able to pair the G4 instances with NVIDIA GPU acceleration software for accelerating deep learning, machine learning, and data analytics.T4 will also be supported by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. The new EC2 G4 instances also offer support to the next generation of computer graphics to accelerate the workflows of creative and technical professionals. T4 will also be joining other Amazon EC2 instances featuring NVIDIA GPUs, providing developers and data scientists with compute resources available to support different customer needs. Other than that, NVIDIA Research has also come out with a deep learning model called GauGAN that makes use of the generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to convert segmentation maps into lifelike images. GauGAN allows its users to draw their own segmentation maps and manipulate the scene, labeling each segment with labels such as sand, sky, sea or snow. GauGAN has been trained on million images and is able to produce convincing results using its pair of networks, namely, a generator and a discriminator. Also, the research paper behind GauGAN has been accepted as an oral presentation at the CVPR conference in June. NVIDIA announces pre-orders for the Jetson Xavier Developer Kit, an AI chip for autonomous machines at $2499 NVIDIA makes its new “brain for autonomous AI machines”, Jetson AGX Xavier Module, available for purchase NVIDIA launches GeForce Now’s (GFN) ‘recommended router’ program to enhance the overall performance and experience of GFN

The team at Linux has put in a lot of efforts on Linux RC 5.1. Last week, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, announced that the two-week long merge window for Linux 5.1 is finally coming to an end. The first Release Candidate of Linux kernel 5.1 is finally ready for testing. Let’s have a look at the changes and new features which will be coming in Linux RC 5.1. What’s expected in Linux RC 5.1? Intel graphics With this release, the Intel Fastboot is enabled by default. The Intel graphics driver eliminates unnecessary mode-set operations at boot-time by default. The ones on older Intel graphics can still toggle the feature with the i915.fastboot=1 kernel parameter. Fastboot comes with a clean, flicker-free Linux boot experience. This release comes with Intel HDCP 2.2 support. There is an added support for Coffeelake GVT  for Intel's graphics virtualization tech. Virtual memory support This release comes with Nouveau DRM driver that has heterogeneous memory management hook-ups, which provides shared virtual memory support. This release comes with support for AMDGPU Vega 10/20 BACO and other Vega enhancements. There is a new DRM driver in this release known as the Arm Komeda display driver. Added Support This release comes with Support for the Bitmain SoC as a dual-core A53 combined with a single RISC-V core. This release comes with new Arm support including the Socionext Milbeaut, NXP i.MX8QuadXPlus, and a few Rensas SoCs. New accelerator This release comes with Habana Labs Goya accelerator along with its new driver. A new accelerator subsystem is expected in the Linux kernel. The accelerator is based on AI having open-source, mainline kernel support. Power management This release comes with Icelake PMC core support for dealing with the power management controller registers on the CPUs. To know more about this news in detail, check out Linux Kernel’s mailing list. The Linux Foundation announces the CHIPS Alliance project for deeper open source hardware integration Announcing Linux 5.0! Linux use-after-free vulnerability found in Linux 2.6 through 4.20.11

Yesterday, IBM launched its Blockchain World Wire, a global blockchain network for cross-border payments that will make use of Stablecoin by U.S. dollars and cryptocurrency to make near real-time cross border financial transactions. It is based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) for regulated financial firms. IBM Blockchain World Wire is a real-time global payments network that works towards clearing and settling foreign exchange, cross border payments and remittances. Currently, this network can transfer funds to more than 50 countries using 47 digital coins backed by fiat currencies. According to IBM, World Wire is the first blockchain network of its kind to integrate payment messaging and clearing and settlement on a single unified network while allowing participants to dynamically choose from a variety of digital assets for settlement. According to a report by Cheddar, six international banks have signed letters of intent to issue their own Stablecoins backed by their national fiat currencies including Brazil’s Banco Bradesco, South Korea’s Bank Busan and the Philippines’ Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation on IBM’s Blockchain World Wire. Advantages of Blockchain World Wire Faster payment processing Blockchain World Wire provides simultaneous clearing and settlement and eliminates multiple parties processing transactions. Lower costs The World Wire comes with reduced capital requirements for cross-border transactions. Even the clearing costs have been lowered. Transparency The World Wire provides end-to-end transparency and one exchange fee between all currencies which makes it easier. If two financial institutions that are transacting agree upon using either a Stablecoin, central bank digital currency or another digital asset as the bridge asset between any two currencies then they will be provided with trade and important settlement instructions. The institutions can use their existing payment systems by connecting it to World Wire’s APIs in order to convert the first fiat currency into the digital asset. Further, the World Wire converts the digital asset into the second fiat currency, that completes the transaction. The transaction details are recorded onto an immutable blockchain for clearing purpose. Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Blockchain, said, “We’ve created a new type of payment network designed to accelerate remittances and transform cross-border payments to facilitate the movement of money in countries that need it most. By creating a network where financial institutions support multiple digital assets, we expect to spur innovation and improve financial inclusion worldwide.” To know more about this news, check out IBM’s official website. Google expands its Blockchain search tools, adds six new cryptocurrencies in BigQuery Public Datasets Blockchain governance and uses beyond finance – Carnegie Mellon university podcast Stable version of OpenZeppelin 2.0, a framework for smart blockchain contracts, released!

Yesterday, the team at Google open-sourced Sandboxed API, a tool that Google has been using internally for its data centers for years. It is a project for sandboxing C and C++ libraries running on Linux systems. Google has made the Sandboxed API available on GitHub. Sandboxed API helps coders to automate the process of porting their existing C and C++ code in order to run on top of Sandbox2, which is Google's custom-made sandbox environment for Linux operating systems. Sandbox2 has also been open-sourced and is included with Sandboxed API GitHub repository. Christian Blichmann & Robert Swiecki, from Google's ISE Sandboxing team, said, "Many popular software containment tools might not sufficiently isolate the rest of the OS, and those which do, might require time-consuming redefinition of security boundaries for each and every project that should be sandboxed." The idea behind introducing sandboxing The idea behind sandboxing is to prevent bugs from spreading from one process to another, or the underlying operating system and the kernel. Many software projects process data that are externally generated and potentially could be untrusted. For instance, the conversion of user-provided picture files into different formats or executing user-generated software code. In case, a software library that parses such data is complex, then there is a high possibility that it might fall victim to certain types of security vulnerabilities such as memory corruption bugs or other problems related to the parsing logic. These vulnerabilities can have a serious impact on security. In order to overcome these challenges, developers prefer software isolation method known as sandboxing. With the help of sandboxing methods, developers make sure that only resources such as files, networking connections, and other operating system resources are accessible to the code involved in parsing user-generated content. The team plans to have an added support more operating systems and plans to bring Sandboxed API to the Unix-like systems like the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and macOS. Google also aims to bring CMake support to the API. To know more about this news in detail, check out Google’s blog post. Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation #GooglePayoutsForAll: A digital protest against Google’s $135 million execs payout for misconduct

From the past few months, Facebook and Microsoft together have been working on a new architecture based on the Open Rack standards. Last week, Facebook announced a new initiative that aims to build uniformity around the Rack & Power design. The Rack & Power Project Group is responsible for setting the rack standards designed for data centers, integrating the rack into the data center infrastructure. This project comes under a larger initiative started by Facebook called Open Compute Project. Why a new version of Open Rack is needed? Today, the industry is turning to AI and ML systems to solve several difficult problems. Though these systems are helpful, at the same time, they require increased power density at both the component level and the system level. The ever-increasing bandwidth speed demand for networking systems has also led to similar problems. So, in order to improve the overall system performance, it is important to get memory, processors, and system fabrics as close together as possible. This new architecture of Open Rack will come with greater benefits as compared to the current version, Open Rack V2. “For this next version, we are collaborating to create flexible, interoperable, and scalable solutions for the community through a common OCP architecture. Accomplishing this goal will enable wider adoption of OCP technologies across multiple industries, which will benefit operators, solution providers, original design manufacturers, and configuration managers,” shared Facebook in the blog post. What are the goals of this initiative? This new initiative aims to achieve the following goals A common OCP rack architecture to enable greater sharing between Microsoft and Facebook. Creating a flexible frame and power infrastructure that will support a wide range of solutions across the OCP community Apart from the features need by Facebook, this architecture will come with additional features for the larger community, including physical security for solutions deployed in co-location facilities. New thermal solutions will be introduced such as liquid cooling manifolds, door-based heat exchanges, and defined physical and thermal interfaces. These solutions are currently under development by the Advanced Cooling Solutions sub-project. Introducing new power and battery backup solutions that scale across different rack power levels and also accommodate different power input types. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement on Facebook. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

Last week, Reinder Nijhoff, a computer vision researcher, created a project that does real-time ray tracing in WebGL1 using Nvidia’s RTX graphics card. This demo was inspired by Metro's real-time global illumination. https://twitter.com/ReinderNijhoff/status/1106193109376008193 This demo uses a hybrid rendering engine created using WebGL1. It renders all the polygons in a frame with the help of traditional rasterization technologies and then combines the result with ray traced shadows, diffuse GI, and reflections. Credits: Reinder Nijhoff What is the ray tracing technique? In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for rendering 3D graphics with very complex light interactions. Basically, in this technique, an algorithm traces the path of light and then simulates the way the light will interact with the virtual objects. There are three ways light interacts with the virtual objects: It can be reflected from one object to another causing reflection. It can be blocked by objects causing shadows. It can pass through transparent or semi-transparent objects causing refractions. All these interactions are then combined to determine the final color of a pixel. Ray tracing has been used for offline rendering due to its ability to accurately model the physical behavior of light in the real world. Due to its computationally intensive nature, ray tracing was often not the first choice for real-time rendering. However, this changed with the introduction of Nvidia RTX graphics card as it adds custom acceleration hardware and makes real-time ray tracing relatively straightforward. What was this demo about? The project’s prototype was based on a forward renderer that first draws all the geometry in the scene. Next, the shader used to rasterize (converting an image into pixels) the geometry, calculates the direct lighting. Additionally, the shader also casts random rays from the surface of the rendered geometry to collect the indirect light reflection due to non-shiny surfaces using a ray tracer. The author started with a very simple scene for the prototype that included a single light and rendered only a few spheres and cubes. This made the ray tracing code pretty much straightforward. Once the prototype was complete, he wanted to take the prototype to the next level by adding more geometry and a lot of lights to the scene. Despite the complexity of the environment, Nijhoff wanted to perform ray tracing of the scene in real-time. Generally, to speed up the ray trace process, a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is used as an acceleration structure. However, when using WebGL1 shaders it is difficult to pre-calculate and use BVH. This is why Nijhoff decided to use a Wolfenstein 3D level for this demo. To know more in detail, check out the original post shared by Reinder Nijhoff. Unity switches to WebAssembly as the output format for the Unity WebGL build target NVIDIA shows off GeForce RTX, real-time raytracing GPUs, as the holy grail of computer graphics to gamers Introducing SCRIPT-8, an 8-bit JavaScript-based fantasy computer to make retro-looking games  

Two fatal air crashes in Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 model in less than six months have aroused a lot of questions on the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) safety analysis procedure. Per CNBC, the State’s Department of Transportation started their investigation after a new Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea in October last year killing 189 passengers. A similar air crash was reported this month on March 10 when a second Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after take-off, killing all 157 people on board. Post these incidents, authorities around the world — including the U.S., Europe, China, and Indonesia have grounded Boeing 737 Max planes. Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges told the Wall Street Journal, “Clear similarities were noted between Ethiopian Air Flight 302 and Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610, which will be the subject of further study during the investigation.” The FAA is responsible for certifying an aircraft as airworthy by putting out bulletins and advisories on problems and fixes. It is often considered as the go-to agency for many aviation flight authorities around the world. Boeing's flight safety control system, MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) was  “added to the Max-8 series because new, heavier and larger engines replaced the old engines and as a result, the updated Max planes had a strong tendency to pitch nose up”, the Asia Time reported. “The new engine, CFM Leap-1B, was selected by Boeing because it was much more fuel efficient than the older models, one of the big reasons customers want the 737 Max.” The DOT investigation suspected that the flight safety system played a role in the fatal crash in Indonesia. The WSJ reported in November last year, that Boeing failed to warn the airline industry about a potentially dangerous feature in its new flight-control system. According to the Asia Times, “Almost every expert today puts the blame for both flight disasters on faulty software that took over running the plane’s flight control system. Many have pointed to Boeing’s alleged lack of transparency in telling pilots what to do if the software malfunctioned. In addition, there had been at least eight pilot-reported flight control incidents prior to the first Lion Air crash.” Trevor Sumner, a software engineer and the CEO of PERCH Interactive tweeted saying that the 737 MAX tragedies were not a software problem. Instead, it was an economic problem as the “737 engines used too much fuel, so they decided to install more efficient engines with bigger fans and make the 737MAX.” https://twitter.com/trevorsumner/status/1106934369158078470 In spite of the system complied with all the applicable FAA regulations, “the black box data retrieved after the Lion Air crash indicates that a single faulty sensor — a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane’s “angle of attack,” the angle between the airflow and the wing — triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash”, the Seattle Times reported. According to the Seattle Times, “Since MCAS was supposed to activate only in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope, Boeing decided that 737 pilots needed no extra training on the system — and indeed that they didn’t even need to know about it. It was not mentioned in their flight manuals. That stance allowed the new jet to earn a common “type rating” with existing 737 models, allowing airlines to minimize training of pilots moving to the MAX.” According to a detailed FAA briefing to legislators, Boeing plans to change the MCAS software to give the system input from both angle-of-attack sensors. Boeing also plans to update pilot training requirements and flight crew manuals to include MCAS. After two fatal crashes in less than six months involving the same plane model, authorities around the world — including the U.S., Europe, China, and Indonesia — grounded Boeing 737 Max planes. To know more about this news in detail, read more at The Seattle Times. The tug of war between Google and Oracle over API copyright issue has the future of software development in the crossfires F5 Networks is acquiring NGINX, a popular web server software for $670 million 18 people in tech every programmer and software engineer needs to follow in 2019