Tech News

Last week, SUSE, an open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers announced that it is an independent company now. SUSE also finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. According to the official post, SUSE also claims to be “the largest independent open source company.” Novell, a software and services based company, had first acquired SUSE in 2004. Novell then got acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which was then acquired by Micro Focus in 2014. Micro Focus then turned Suse into an independent division and further sold SUSE to EQT in 2018. The newly independent SUSE has brought in addition to its team by adding new leadership roles. Enrica Angelone has joined as SUSE’s Chief Financial Officer, and Sander Huyts, director of sales at SUSE, is the new Chief Operations Officer. Thomas Di Giacomo, former CTO for SUSE, is now the president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. According to SUSE’s blog post, SUSE’s expanded team will be actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise. Nils Brauckmann, CEO at SUSE, said, “ Our genuinely open, open source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them.” He further added, “Our ability to consistently meet these market demands creates a cycle of success, momentum and growth that allows SUSE to continue to deliver the innovation customers need to achieve their digital transformation goals and realize the hybrid and multi-cloud workload management they require to power their own continuous innovation, competitiveness, and growth.” SUSE’s new move is towards capitalizing on market dynamics, creating tremendous value for customers and partners. SUSE’s independent status and EQT’s backing will enable the company’s continued expansion towards driving growth in SUSE’s core business and in emerging technologies, both organically and through add-on acquisitions. As the company has been owned by EQT, so according to few users it’s still not independent. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “Being owned by a Private Equity fund can really not be described as being "independent". Such funds have a typical investment horizon of 5 - 7 years, with potential exits being an IPO, a strategic sale (to a bigger company) or a sale to another PE fund, with the strategic sale probably more typical. In the meantime the fund will impose strict growth targets and strong cost cuts.” Another comment reads, “Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone can call private equity "independent". Our whole last year had selling the company as our top priority. Not something I'd choose in a truly independent position.” To know more about this news, check out SUSE’s official announcement. Google introduces Season of Docs that will connect technical writers and mentors with open source projects Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issues MongoDB withdraws controversial Server Side Public License from the Open Source Initiative’s approval process  

On 13 March, Wednesday, the Godot developers announced the release of a new version of the open source 2D and 3D cross-platform compatible game engine, Godot 3.1. This new version includes the much-requested improvements to the major release, Godot 3.0. Improved features in the Godot 3.1 OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer Rendering is done entirely on sRGB color space (the GLES3 renderer uses linear color space). This is much more efficient and compatible, but it means that HDR will not be supported. Some advanced PBR features such as subsurface scattering are not supported. Unsupported features will not be visible when editing materials. Some shader features will not work and throw an error when used. Also, some post-processing effects are not present either. Unsupported features will not be visible when editing environments. GPU-based Particles will not work as there is no transform feedback support. Users can use the new CPUParticles node instead. Optional typing in GDScript This has been one of the most requested Godot features from day one. GDScript allows to write code in a quick way within a controlled environment. The code editor will now show which lines are safe with a slight highlight of the line number. This will be vital in the future to optimize small pieces of code which may require more performance. Revamped Inspector The Godot inspector has been rewritten from scratch. It includes features such as proper vector field editing, sub-inspectors for resource editing, better custom visual editors for many types of objects, very comfortable to use spin-slider controls, better array and dictionary editing and many more features. Kinematicbody2d (and 3d) improvements Kinematic bodies are among Godot's most useful nodes. They allow creating very game-like character motion with little effort. For Godot 3.1 they have been considerably improved with: Support for snapping the body to the floor. Support for RayCast shapes in kinematic bodies. Support for synchronizing kinematic movement to physics, avoiding a one-frame delay. New Axis Handling system Godot 3.1 uses the novel concept of "action strength". This approach allows using actions for all use cases and it makes it very easy to create in-game customizable mappings and customization screens. Visual Shader Editor This was a pending feature to re-implement in Godot 3.0, but it couldn't be done in time back then. The new version has new features such as PBR outputs, port previews, and easier to use mapping to inputs. 2D Meshes Godot now supports 2D meshes, which can be used from code or converted from sprites to avoid drawing large transparent areas. 2D Skeletons It is now possible to create 2D skeletons with the new Skeleton2D and Bone2D nodes. Additionally, Polygon2D vertices can be assigned bones and weight painted. Adding internal vertices for better deformation is also supported. Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) CSG tools have been added for fast level prototyping, allowing generic primitives and custom meshes to be combined via boolean operations to generate more complex shapes. They can also become colliders to test together with physics. CPU-based particle system Godot 3.0 integrated a GPU-based particle system, which allows emitting millions of particles at little performance cost. The developers added alternative CPUParticles and CPUParticles2D nodes that perform particle processing using the CPU (and draw using the MultiMesh API). These nodes open the window for adding features such as physics interaction, sub-emitters or manual emission, which are not possible using the GPU. More VCS-friendly The new 3.1 version includes some very requested enhancements such as: Folded properties are no longer saved in scenes. This avoids unnecessary history pollution. Non-modified properties are no longer saved. This reduces text files considerably and makes history even more readable. Improved C# support In Godot 3.1, C# projects can be exported to Linux, macOS, and Windows. Support for Android, iOS, and HTML5 will come soon. To know about other improvements in detail, visit the changelog or the official website. Microsoft announces Game stack with Xbox Live integration to Android and iOS OpenAI introduces Neural MMO, a multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents Google teases a game streaming service set for Game Developers Conference

Spotify announced earlier this week that it has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Commission (EC), claiming that Apple’s rules on the App Store ‘limits choice’ and ‘ stifle innovation’ at the expense of user experience. Spotify states that Apple receives a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple’s payment system from Spotify and other similar digital services. “If we pay this tax, it would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn’t something we can do”, states Daniel Ek, CEO, Spotify in a blog post. Ek mentions that in case Spotify decides not to use Apple’s payment system, then a series of technical and experience limited restrictions are applied by Apple. For instance, Customer communication on the app is restricted including its outreach efforts beyond the app. Also, they are not able to send emails to Apple customers in certain cases. Apart from that, Apple also blocks the experience enhancing upgrades on the app on a routine basis. Spotify is not the only one to have stood up against Apple tax. Many companies have chastised and spoken against Apple tax. For instance, companies like Netflix Inc. and video game makers Epic Games Inc. and Valve Corp also complained about the cost of Tax that Apple charges, last year. However, Spotify is the first company to file a complaint against Apple tax that is registered with the EU, a regulatory body that ensures fair competition across the market. Ek states that Spotify is not looking for any special treatment and wants Apple to treat them like other apps on the App Store, including  Uber or Deliveroo, who are neither imposed any Apple tax nor do these apps have the same restrictions as Spotify. Ek also mentioned a list of requests to bring about a change in rules laid out by Apple for the app store. These are as follows: Apps should compete fairly on the merits, and not based on who owns the App Store. All apps should be subject to the same fair set of restrictions (including Apple music). Consumers should be offered a real choice of payment systems. They should not be forced to use systems that have discriminatory tariffs associated with them like Apple’s. App stores should not dictate communications between different app services and users, by placing unfair restrictions on marketing. Spotify has also launched a separate ‘Time to Play Fair microsite’ that is dedicated to making users aware of Apple’s ‘anti-competitive behavior’.  The site illustrates the complaints by Spotify extensively. Horacio Gutierrez, General Counsel, and VP, Business & Legal Affairs at Spotify, confirmed that Spotify has submitted an “economic analysis” to the European Commission, that demonstrates how Apple’s policies have impacted its business. “We are confident that the evidence will show that even though we’ve been successful as a company, and have grown our business, we could have been even more successful if it were not for the restrictions that Apple has placed on our business,” said Guiterrez. Apple’s response to the complaint Apple has responded back to Spotify, addressing the claims of the complaint on a Press release published, yesterday. Apple states that Spotify wants to leverage all the benefits of the App Store without making any Contributions to Marketplace, and it wouldn’t be the business that it is today without the App Store. “We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal. Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work”, states Apple. It also states that the only contribution that it requires is for the digital goods and services that are purchased inside the app with their secure in-app purchase system. Apple agrees that the revenue share is 30 percent but it further states that this is only applicable for the first year of an annual subscription and then drops to 15 percent in the years after. “The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows. Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision.. required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backward for the music industry”, says Apple. Public reaction the news is varied with some sympathizing with Spotify, while others tweeting against Spotify and in support of Apple: https://twitter.com/cassiusdarrow/status/1106504786340253696 https://twitter.com/AvramNate/status/1106042615592570880 https://twitter.com/TonyXLR2/status/1105814168664506368 https://twitter.com/IsleJoseph/status/1105819045218144257 Rene Ritchie, a Canadian blogger, Youtuber, and editor in chief of iMore, also posted a video on his YouTube channel, where he took a deep dive into the Spotify action against Apple in the EU, and called Spotify’s move as “kinda victimy”. Spotify acquires Gimlet and Anchor to expand its podcast services Spotify releases Chartify, a new data visualization library in python for easier chart creation Spotify has “one of the most intricate uses of JavaScript in the world,” says former engineer

Yesterday, Senator Brian Schatz and Senator Roy Blunt introduced a new bill titled, “Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019”. This bill would prohibit companies from using facial recognition technology to identify an end user for different purposes without the user’s consent. According to Blunt, “Consumers are increasingly concerned about how their data is being collected and used, including data collected through facial recognition technology. That’s why we need guardrails to ensure that, as this technology continues to develop, it is implemented responsibly." Brian Schatz said, "Our faces are our identities. They’re personal. So the responsibility is on companies to ask people for their permission before they track and analyze their faces." He further added, "Our bill makes sure that people are given the information and – more importantly  – the control over how their data is shared with companies using facial recognition technology.” The facial recognition tech providers would have to meet security standards set by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In December 2018, Microsoft President Brad Smith, published a blog post, requesting governments to regulate the rapid evolution of Facial Recognition technology. He stated, “Unless we act, we risk waking up five years from now to find that facial recognition services have spread in ways that exacerbate societal issues. By that time, these challenges will be much more difficult to bottle back up.” “Schatz and Blunt's bill appears to propose some similar guidelines, but it does not address the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement — a hot-button issue as police departments across the country implement the technology in their efforts to track and identify potential criminals”, The Hill reports. Regarding the bill, Brad Smith said, “Facial recognition technology creates many new benefits for society and should continue to be developed. Its use, however, needs to be regulated to protect against acts of bias and discrimination, preserve consumer privacy, and uphold our basic democratic freedoms.” To know more visit the official release page, Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019. FastMail expresses issues with Australia’s Assistance and Access bill U.S. Senator introduces a bill that levies jail time and hefty fines for companies violating data breaches Lawmakers introduce new Consumer privacy bill and Malicious Deep Fake Prohibition Act to support consumer privacy and battle deepfakes

Facebook’s top executives, Chris Cox, Head of Products and Chris Daniels, Head of Whatsapp, have announced their exit from the company. It marks yet another highest-level departure at the tech giant amid a controversial shift to combine its various social media platforms. Cox’s unexpected departure, which he and Zuckerberg announced in separate Facebook posts on Thursday, comes months after Cox was promoted in a major reorganization. In May last year, Cox was put in charge of Facebook’s “family of apps,” including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook itself — which together have over 2.7 billion users worldwide. These apps have been distinct until recently, when Zuckerberg announced plans to unify them with a new focus on privacy. “It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, I’ve decided to leave the company,” Cox wrote in his post. “Since I was twenty-three, I’ve poured myself into these walls. This place will forever be a part of me.” Another longtime executive, Chris Daniels also announced his exit on Thursday. Chris moved upward in the reorganization last May and took over WhatsApp after running Internet.org, the company’s philanthropic project to promote global Internet access. “At this point, we have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience, including enabling encryption and interoperability across our services,” Zuckerberg wrote. “As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams.” In his blog post, Zuckerberg said Cox had told him several years ago that he planned to move but that Cox decided to hold off on leaving until the company made more progress combating misinformation and Russian interference — controversies that erupted in the wake of the 2016 election. Zuckerberg said he does not plan to replace Cox. The role of integrating the apps will go to another longtime Zuckerberg deputy and former Head of Growth, Javier Olivan, he said. Cox, who dropped out of a Stanford University graduate degree program to work with Zuckerberg when the company had just 15 engineers, was widely seen as one of the most popular and capable executives at the social network. Cox was a sounding board for Zuckerberg on product ideas. He launched Facebook’s flagship scrolling news feed nearly a decade ago and ran human resources before he was promoted to run the Facebook app in 2014. Cox is one of many senior executives to leave Facebook since the controversies erupted. The company’s Head of Policy Elliot Schrage, its General Counsel Colin Stretch, its Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, along with the heads of WhatsApp and Instagram and its top communications executive, had all announced their exits from the company in the last few years. But the highest profile departures, including Cox, are people in Zuckerberg’s inner circle who have been at Facebook since the earliest days of the company and became fabulously wealthy after the social network’s $104 billion public offering. Cox hinted at the challenges of recent years in his goodbye post. “For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral,” he wrote. “It is tied up in the richness and complexity of social life. As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good. This is our greatest responsibility.” 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 family of apps hits 14 hours outage, longest in its history

Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing its new cutting-edge compression technology, called Project Zipline, yesterday. As a part of this open-source release, Project Zipline compression algorithms, hardware design specifications, and Verilog source code for register transfer language (RTL) has been made available. Apart from the announcement of Project Zipline, the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2019 also started yesterday in San Jose. In the summit, the latest innovations that can make hardware more efficient, flexible, and scalable are shared. Microsoft states that its journey with OCP began in 2014 when it joined the foundation and contributed the server and data center designs that power its global Azure Cloud. Moreover, Microsoft contributes innovations to OCP every year at the summit. Microsoft has again decided to contribute Project Zipline this year. “This contribution will provide collateral for integration into a variety of silicon components across the industry for this new high-performance compression standard. Contributing RTL at this level of detail as open source to OCP is industry leading”, states Microsoft team. Project Zipline is aimed to optimize the hardware implementation for different types of data on cloud storage workloads. Microsoft has been able to achieve higher compression ratios, higher throughput, and lower latency than the other algorithms currently available. This allows for compression without compromise as well as data processing for different industry usage models (from cloud to edge). Microsoft’s Project Zipline compression algorithm produces great results with up to 2X high compression ratios as compared to the commonly used Zlib-L4 64KB model. These enhancements, in turn, produce direct customer benefits for cost savings and allow access to petabytes or exabytes of capacity in a cost-effective way for the customers. Project Zipline has also been optimized for a large variety of datasets, and Microsoft’s release of RTL allows hardware vendors to use the reference design that offers the highest compression, lowest cost, and lowest power in an algorithm. Project Zipline is available to the OCP ecosystem, so vendors can contribute further to benefit Azure and other customers. Microsoft team states that this contribution towards open source will set a “new precedent for driving frictionless collaboration in the OCP ecosystem for new technologies and opening the doors for hardware innovation at the silicon level”. In the future, Microsoft expects Project Zipline compression technology to enter different market segments and usage models such as network data processing, smart SSDs, archival systems, cloud appliances, general purpose microprocessor, IoT, and edge devices. For more information, check out the official Microsoft announcement. Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issue Microsoft researchers introduce a new climate forecasting model and a public dataset to train these models

Yesterday the team at Slack, a platform that helps businesses communicate and collaborate, removed 28 accounts because of their association with hate groups. Slack’s blog post reads, “The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform. When we are made aware of an organization using Slack for illegal, harmful, or other prohibited purposes, we will investigate and take appropriate action and we are updating our terms of service to make that more explicit.” This initiative by Slack comes when just a few days ago Slack messages got leaked by a non-profit media group, Unicorn Riot where members of Identity Evropa promote their racist views. Big tech companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have been also working in the direction of removing hate speech and racist comments. Discord, the voice and text chat platform for gamers has also taken steps in this direction after thousands of private Discord chats getting leaked from Identity Evropa and the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally started doing rounds. The members from Identity Evropa are not considering Discord post the ban by the platform but are instead relying on Slack. A user named Matt told TPM, “Obviously, we won’t be coming back to Discord due to the widespread bans.” In a statement to The Hill, Slack made it clear that their team did not discover the hate groups by looking through users' groups or messages. In a statement to The Hill, a Slack spokesperson said, “We want to be clear that the privacy of our customer data is sacrosanct. In this case, we were informed of the possible use of Slack by hate groups and we were able to determine their affiliation on an organizational level." Few users are happy and feel relieved by this initiative by Slack. https://twitter.com/PredativePulse/status/1106270564350652416 Few others are still skeptical about the platform and are wondering if there are more such hate group channels on the platform. https://twitter.com/Charlottealaine/status/1106181956461621248 Even activists have raised their voice on this issue. Shannon Coulter, an American marketing consultant, and activist tweeted about her concern about this issue. She has a bigger question to platforms like Facebook and YouTube regarding their content. Coulter wants that these platforms take certain action towards platforms that broadcast violent content. According to her, these companies are just focusing on generating revenue based on their real-time content but aren’t much concerned about the right practices and their impact on society. https://twitter.com/shannoncoulter/status/1106403758571843584 To know more about this news in detail, check out Slack’s official blog post. Slack confidentially files to go public Airtable, a Slack-like coding platform for non-techies, raises $100 million in funding Slack has terminated the accounts of some Iranian users, citing U.S. sanctions as the reason  

On Tuesday, Google announced of being one of the founding members of the newly-formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). As a part of its membership, Google will be contributing to two projects namely Spinnaker and Tekton. About Continuous Delivery Foundation The formation of CDF was announced at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit on Tuesday. CDF will act as a “vendor-neutral home” for some of the most important open source projects for continuous delivery and specifications to speed up the release pipeline process. https://twitter.com/linuxfoundation/status/1105515314899492864 The existing CI/CD ecosystem is heavily fragmented, which makes it difficult for developers and companies to decide on particular tooling for their projects. Also, DevOps practitioners often find it very challenging to gather guidance information on software delivery best practices. CDF was formed to make CI/CD tooling easier and define the best practices and guidelines that will enable application developers to deliver better and more secure software at speed. CDF is currently hosting some of the most popularly used CI/CD tools including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. The foundation is backed by 20+ founding members which include Alauda, Alibaba, Anchore, Armory.io, Atos, Autodesk, Capital One, CircleCI, CloudBees, DeployHub, GitLab, Google, HSBC, Huawei, IBM, JFrog, Netflix, Puppet, Rancher, Red Hat, SAP, Snyk, and SumoLogic. Why Google joined CDF? Google as a part of this foundation will be working on Spinnaker and Tekton. Originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google, Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud delivery platform. It comes with various features for making continuous delivery reliable including support for advanced deployment strategies, an open source canary analysis service named Kayenta, and more. The Spinnaker’s user community has great experience in the continuous delivery domain, and by joining CDF Google aims to share that expertise with the broader community. Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It allows you to build, test, and deploy applications across multiple environments such as virtual machines, serverless, Kubernetes, or Firebase. In the next few months, we can expect to see support for results and event triggering in Tekton. Google is also planning to work with CI/CD vendors to build an ecosystem of components that will allow users to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Kubernetes native, and others. Dan Lorenc, Staff Software Engineer at Google Cloud, sharing Google’s motivation behind joining CDF said, “Continuous Delivery is a critical part of modern software development, but today space is heavily fragmented. The Tekton project addresses this problem by working with the open source community and other leading vendors to collaborate on the modernization of CI/CD infrastructure.” Kim Lewandowski, Product Manager at Google Cloud, said, “The ability to deploy code securely and as fast as possible is top of mind for developers across the industry. Only through best practices and industry-led specifications will developers realize a reliable and portable way to take advantage of continuous delivery solutions. Google is excited to be a founding member of the CDF and to work with the community to foster innovation for deploying software anywhere.” To know more, check out the official announcement at the Google Open Source blog. Google Cloud Console Incident Resolved! Cloudflare takes a step towards transparency by expanding its government warrant canaries Google to acquire cloud data migration start-up ‘Alooma’

Microsoft has good news for all the game developers out there. It launched a new initiative, called Microsoft Game Stack yesterday, which includes an amalgamation of different Microsoft tools and services into a single robust ecosystem to ‘empower game developers’. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a rookie indie developer or an AAA studio, this developer-focused platform will make the game development process ten times easier for you. The main goal of Game Stack is to help developers easily find different tools and services required for game development at one spot. These tools range from Azure, PlayFab, DirectX, Visual Studio, to  Xbox Live, App Center, and Havok. Cloud plays a major role in Game Stack and it makes use of Azure to fulfill this requirement. Source: Microsoft Azure is globally available in 54 regions will help scale its Project xCloud (a service that streams games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices) to provide an uninterrupted gaming experience for players worldwide. Not to forget, companies like Rare, Ubisoft and Wizards of the Coast are already hosting multiplayer game servers and storing their player data on Azure. It is also capable of analyzing game telemetry, protecting games from DDOS attacks, and training AI. Moreover, Microsoft Game Stack is device agnostic which makes it really convenient for the gamers. Another great component of Game Stack is a backend service for operating and building new games, called PlayFab. PlayFab offers game development services, real-time analytics, and LiveOps capabilities to Game Stack. PlayFab is also device agnostic. It supports iOS, Android, PC, Web, Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and all the other major game engines such as Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has also released a preview for five new PlayFab services. Out of these five, one, called, PlayFab Matchmaking is open for public preview, while other four including PlayFab Party, PlayFab Insights, PlayFab PubSub, and PlayFab user-generated Content are in private preview. Game Stack also comes with Xbox Live, one of the most engaging and interactive gaming communities in the world. Xbox Live will be providing identity and community services in the Game Stack. Microsoft has also expanded the cross-platform capabilities of Xbox Live under Game Stack with a new SDK for iOS and Android devices. Mobile developers will be able to easily connect with some of the most highly engaged and passionate gamers on the planet using Xbox Live. Other benefits of the Xbox Live SDK includes more focus on building games and leveraging Microsoft‘s trusted identity network to offer support for log-in, privacy, online safety and child accounts. Apart from that, there are features like gamerscore, and “hero” stats, that help keep the gamers engaged. Also, components such as Visual Studio, Mixer, DirectX, Azure App Center, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Havok are all a part of Game Stack. For more information, check out the official Microsoft Game Stack blog post. Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issue Microsoft researchers introduce a new climate forecasting model and a public dataset to train these models

Yesterday, Google announced the stable release of the Android Jetpack Navigation component. This component is a suite of libraries and tooling to help developers implement navigation in their apps, whether it is incorporating simple button clicks or more complex navigation patterns such as app bars and navigation drawers. Some features of Android Jetpack Navigation Handle basic user actions You can make basic user actions like Up and Back buttons work consistently across devices and screens for better user experience. Deep linking Deep linking gets complicated as your app gets more complex. With deep linking, you can enable users to land directly on any part of your app. In the Navigation component, deep linking is a first-class citizen to make your app navigation more consistent and predictable. Reducing the chances of runtime crashes It ensures the type safety of arguments that are passed from one screen to another. This, as a result, will decrease the chances of runtime crashes as users navigate in your app. Adhering to Material Design guidelines You will be able to add navigation experiences like navigation drawers and navigation bottom bars to make your app navigation more aligned with Material Design guidelines. Navigation Editor You can use the Navigation Editor to easily visualize and manipulate the navigation graph, a resource file that contains all of your destinations and actions, for your app. The Navigation Editor is available in Android Studio 3.3 and above. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement. Android Q Beta is now available for developers on all Google Pixel devices Android Studio 3.5 Canary 7 releases! Android Things is now more inclined towards smart displays and speakers than general purpose IoT devices

Facebook has said a "server configuration change" was to blame for an 14-hour outage of its services, which took down the Facebook social media service, its Messenger and WhatsApp, and Instagram apps. "Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience," said Facebook in a tweet. The outage started at around 09:00 Pacific Time (16:00 UTC) on Wednesday and wasn't fully resolved until 23:00 (06:00 UTC) – an extraordinary delay for a service used by billions globally. That brief and vague explanation – with no promise of an in-depth report to come – has left users and observers surprised and disappointed. Any company providing a service of similar size and impact, such as a network operator, would be expected to provide constant updates and make its executives available to publicly explain what went wrong. It's not like Facebook is allergic to revealing technical details about itself: it has a whole sub-site dedicated to its internal software and data-center engineering work, though there's not a word about its latest outage. In contrast, Google suffered a cloud platform outage, too, for about four hours yesterday, and its postmortem is detailed: a key part of its backend storage system was overloaded with requests after changes were made to counter a sudden demand for space to hold object metadata, ultimately causing services to stall. Similarly in January Microsoft faced an outage of approximately 4 hours which affected its various cloud services. They identified it as third party network provider issue affecting authentication to Microsoft accounts and they immediately shifted them to an alternate network provider. Further providing the users a detailed report on the outage issue. Unlike almost every other company running a communications service for millions of users, Facebook does not even provide a system status dashboard for the public. It has a dashboard for app developers. "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution," it noted a few hours ago, somewhat stating the bleeding obvious. While communications companies go out of their way to reach out to media outlets and explain major multi-hour outages in order to maintain public confidence in their network. Facebook seems to feel no obligation to do so. We need fair explanation! Digging into the limited explanation of a "server configuration change" as the source of the problem, that terminology is so vague as to be useless: What sort of change? On what servers? What was the change intended to achieve? Was it tested beforehand? Was it rolled out gradually, or suddenly across all regions – and if the latter, why? Why was a rollback not immediately initiated? And if it was, why didn't it work? Why did it take 14 hours to resolve? These some are questions that you would expect a huge technology company to provide answers to. Instead, the best explanation we've found is a hypothetical rundown by Facebook's former chief information security officer Alex Stamos who assumes that Facebook engineers did initiate an automated rollback but that "the automated system doesn't know how to handle the problem, and gets stuck in some kind of loop that causes more damage. Humans have to step in, stop it, and restart a complex web of interdependent services on hundreds of thousands of systems." Just this month, US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made the argument that services like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have become so large and so fundamental in the digital era that they should be viewed – and legislated as – "platform utilities" and the revenue making aspects (products, ads etc) of these companies should be broken off as separate entities. When Facebook even refuses to provide a proper explanation for a 14-hour outage, the argument that there needs to be legislative oversight only grows stronger. Related to this, yesterday it was revealed by New York Times that Facebook is being investigated by a grand jury for possible criminal charges for sharing people's private data with other companies without seeking the consent of, or even informing, those that were affected. Is there more to this than meets the eye? The other big question is how a "server configuration change" led to not just Facebook but also its Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services going down. One theory which could float around is that Facebook has either connected them up or attempted to connect them up at a low level, merging them into one broad platform. In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced that his instant-chat applications and social network be intertwined. Was the outage as a result of Facebook trying to combine systems and get ahead of regulators, especially when this month, an open debate opened up over whether Facebook's takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp should be rolled back? The timing of it all makes today’s breaking news of two important top executives leaving Facebook in less than a year, even more enigmatic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes about the departure of Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer and Chris Daniel, Whatsapp Vice President on his blog. We wait and watch for Facebook to come up with detailed explanation though very much unlikely of them. Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours outage, longest in its history Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report Facebook deletes and then restores Warren’s campaign ads after she announced plans to break up Facebook

Google released Android Q beta along with a preview SDK for developers, yesterday. Android Q beta is available for any Pixel device, including the first-gen Pixel and Pixel XL. Also, Google has given no clue about which Q-named snack the operating system will be named after. Android Q developer Beta explores a number of additional privacy and security features for users such as Google Play Protect and runtime permissions. Android Q beta also includes other features such as new APIs for connectivity, new media codecs, camera capabilities, NNAPI (Neural Networks API) extensions, Vulkan 1.1 support, and faster app startup, among others. What’s new in Android Q beta? More control over apps Android Q offers users more control when apps can get the location. Android Q allows users to give apps permission that makes sure it never tracks their location. It only allows the app to see user location when the app is running or when it is open in the background. More privacy protections Users can control apps' access to the Photos and Videos or the Audio collections with the help of new runtime permissions. In the case of Downloads, apps use the system file picker, which allows the users to decide the download files that the app can access. There are also other changes for developers that allow them to figure out how these apps can use shared areas on external storage. Foldables and innovative new screens Android Q brings changes to onResume and onPause that enables support for multi-resume and notifies your app when it has focus. The resizeableActivity manifest attribute has also been changed to help users better manage how the app is displayed on foldable and large screens. Sharing shortcuts Android Q comes with a new feature called Sharing Shortcuts that allows the users to jump directly into another app to share content. It allows the developers to publish share targets that launch a specific activity in their apps. These share targets are also shown to the users in the share UI. Google has also expanded the ShortcutInfo API to make the integration of both features easier. Settings Panels There’s a new Settings Panel API, which makes use of the Slices feature in Android 9 Pie.A settings panel is a floating UI and shows the system settings that users might need, such as internet connectivity, NFC, and audio volume. Connectivity permissions, privacy, and security Google has increased the protection on Android Q, for Bluetooth, Cellular, and Wi-Fi by requiring the FINE location permission instead. Google has also added new Wi-Fi standard support, WPA3, and Enhanced Open. This improves security for home, work networks as well as open/public networks Improved internet connectivity Wi-Fi stack has been refactored on Android Q to improve privacy, performance, and common use-cases such as managing IoT devices and suggesting internet connections without location permission.  These network connection APIs make it easier to manage IoT devices over local Wi-Fi, for peer-to-peer functions like configuring, downloading, or printing. Wi-Fi performance mode Users can request adaptive Wi-Fi in Android Q by allowing high performance and low latency modes. These are highly beneficial for cases where low latency is important to the user experience including real-time gaming, active voice calls, and similar use-cases. Dynamic depth format for photos Apps can request a Dynamic Depth image in Android Q consisting of a JPEG, XMP metadata related to depth related elements. Requesting for a JPEG + Dynamic Depth image makes it possible for the users to offer specialized blurs and bokeh options in your app. Users can also use the data to create 3D images or support AR photography use-cases in the future. New audio and video codecs Android Q comes with support for the open source video codec AV1. This allows media providers to stream high-quality video content on Android devices that use less bandwidth. Android Q also supports audio encoding using Opus i.e. a codec optimized for speech and music streaming, along with HDR10+ for high dynamic range video. There’s also a MediaCodecInfo API which allows users to determine the video rendering capabilities of an Android device. Native MIDI API Android Q introduces a native MIDI API for apps that perform audio processing in C++. It allows users to communicate with MIDI devices through the NDK. This API also allows MIDI data to be retrieved inside an audio callback with the help of a non-blocking read, enabling low latency processing of MIDI messages. ANGLE on Vulkan Google developers are working on adding experimental support for ANGLE on top of Vulkan in Android Q. ANGLE refers to a graphics abstraction layer that is designed for high-performance OpenGL compatibility across implementations. Google is also planning to add support for OpenGL ES 2.0, with ES 3.0 in Android Q. Neural Networks API 1.2 Google has added 60 new ops including ARGMAX, ARGMIN, quantized LSTM,  in Android Q, alongside a range of performance optimizations. Google is also working with hardware vendors and popular machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow to optimize and enable support for NNAPI 1.2. ART performance Android Q offers a range of new improvements to the ART runtime that helps the apps start faster and consume less memory. Since Android Nougat, ART has provided Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), that helps speed up the app startup over time by identifying and precompiling the frequently executed parts of your code. Also, to aid with the initial app startup, Google Play can now deliver the cloud-based profiles along with APKs. These cloud-based profiles allow ART to pre-compile parts of your app even before it's run. This enhances the overall optimization process. Other features include extended support for passive authentication methods in Android Q. These methods include the face and adding implicit and explicit authentication flows. Android Q also adds support for TLS 1.3,  which is a major revision to the TLS standard that includes performance benefits and enhanced security. For more information, check out the official Android Q blog post. Android Q will reportedly give network carriers more control over network devices Android Studio 3.5 Canary 7 releases! Android Things is now more inclined towards smart displays and speakers than general purpose IoT devices

Investigations into Facebook's data handling keep piling up. Yesterday, The New York Times reported about the federal prosecutors being in the midst of a criminal investigation into the data deals Facebook arranged with tech companies. It's not known when the investigation began or what the focus is, but a New York grand jury reportedly used subpoenas to obtain records from two or more "prominent makers of smartphones." The deals included heavyweights like Apple, Microsoft and Sony. The grand jury inquiry was on behalf of the US attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York. Facebook had data-sharing arrangements with more than 150 companies, according to a December report in the New York Times. The deals helped Facebook gain more users, and its partners were able to access user data without obtaining consent. Many of the partnerships ended years ago, but the deals with Amazon and Apple were ongoing at the time of the story. These deals typically revolved around making it easier to fill out contacts, share content and otherwise integrate Facebook with devices and websites. There's a concern that these deals weren't always transparent to everyday users. Microsoft's Bing deal mapped the friends of Facebook users without explicit permission. Privacy advocates said the partnerships seemed to violate a 2011 consent agreement between Facebook and the F.T.C., stemming from allegations that the company had shared data in ways that deceived consumers. F.T.C. officials, who spent the past year investigating whether Facebook violated the 2011 agreement, are now weighing the sharing deals as they negotiate a possible multibillion-dollar fine which would be the largest penalty ever imposed by any trader. To add to the worry, the 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposed last week that Facebook and other big tech giants should be broken up. That was the latest in a rising tide of calls for regulation and antitrust action against Silicon Valley. Repeatedly in the past couple of years we have seen Facebook facing a widening inquiry from the US federal government as well as from governments of other nations. The federal agencies and the Department of Justice have been looking into how the political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal data of up to 87 million Americans. The company has been juggling a number of scandals and investigations since then. Currently it is also facing a longest outage of its services and applications due to an unknown technical issue since yesterday. Facebook confirmed the investigations in a statement. “We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously,” a Facebook spokesman told the Times on Wednesday. “We’ve provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so.” Read the detailed coverage on the NY Times blog. Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours outage, longest in its history Facebook deletes and then restores Warren’s campaign ads after she announced plans to break up Facebook Facebook open-sources homomorphic hashing for secure update propagation

On Tuesday, Brendan Colloran, a data scientist at Mozilla, introduced an experimental tool called Iodide. This tool allows data scientists to create interactive documents using web technologies. As the tool is currently in alpha stage, it is not recommended to use it for critical work. Why Iodide is needed? Data scientists not only need to write code and analyze data, as a part of their job, they also have to share results and insights with the decision making teams. While they have a wide range of tools for analyzing the data like Jupyter Notebook and RStudio, there are a very few options for sharing the results in an effective way using web technologies. Often times, data scientists just copy the key figures and summary statistics to a Google Doc. Iodide aims to eliminate the round trips between exploring data in code and creating an understandable report. It also aims to make collaboration among data scientist very convenient. When a data scientist is reading another’s final report and wants to look at the code behind it, he can easily do so. How does Iodide work? Iodide provides a “explore view”, which consists of a set of panes. These include an editor for writing code, a console for viewing the output from code, and a workspace viewer for examining the variables you’ve created. In addition to these, it also has a “report preview” pane which shows the preview of your report. Source: Mozilla When you click on the REPORT button, the contents of your report preview will expand to fill the entire window. This is very useful for the readers who are not interested in the technical details as it will hide the code. Source: Mozilla Once the report is ready, users can send a link directly to their colleagues and collaborators. This will give them access to the clean and readable document as well as the underlying code and the editing environment. So, in case, they want to review your code, they can switch to the “explore mode”. If they want to use your code for their own work, they can fork it and start working on their own version, similar to the GitHub fork option. To know more in detail, check the blog post shared by Mozilla. 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 shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey

Yesterday, the team at GNOME released the latest version of GNOME 3, GNOME 3.32, a free open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. This release comes with improvements to desktop, web and much more. What’s new in GNOME 3.32? Fractional Scaling Fractional scaling is available as an experimental option that includes several fractional values with good visual quality on any given monitor. This feature is a major enhancement for the GNOME desktop. It requires manually adding scale-monitor-framebuffer to the settings keyorg.gnome.mutter.experimental-features. Improved data structures in GNOME desktop This release comes with improvements to foundation data structures in the GNOME Desktop for faster and snappier feel to the animations, icons and top shell panel. The search database has been improved which helps in searching faster. Even the on-screen keyboard has been improved, it now supports an emoji chooser. New automation mode in the GNOME Web GNOME Web now comes with a new automation mode which allows the application to be controlled by WebDriver. The reader mode has been enhanced now that features a set of customizable preferences and an improved style. With this release, the touchpad users can now take advantage of more gestures while browsing. For example, swipe left or right to go back or forward through browsing history. New settings for permissions Settings come with a new “Application Permissions” panel that shows resources and permissions for various applications, including installed Flatpak applications. Users can now grant permissions to certain resources when requested by the application. The Sound settings have been enhanced for supporting a vertical layout and an intuitive placement of options. With this release, the night light color temperature can now be adjusted for a warmer or cooler setting. GNOME Boxes GNOME Boxes tries to enable 3D acceleration for virtual machines if both the guest and host support it. This leads to better performance of graphics-intensive guest applications such as games and video editors. Application Management from multiple sources This release can handle apps available from multiple sources, such as Flatpak and distribution repositories. With this release, Flatpak app entries now can list the permissions required on the details page. This will give users a comprehensive understanding of what data the software will need access to. Even browsing application details will get faster now with the new XML parsing library used in this release. To know more about this release, check out the official announcement. GNOME team adds Fractional Scaling support in the upcoming GNOME 3.32 GNOME 3.32 says goodbye to application menus Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes