Categoría: Tech Roundup

Gooooooood morning, Masses!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning
  Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learn
• Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
  In 2020, we will celebrate that many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our «Annus Mirabilis» 1990-1991
• Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language
• Writing Is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
  Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.
• Robots Are Catching Up to Humans in the Jobs Race
• Stupid Alexa Trick: Speaking French with a Horrible American Accent
• Learning How to Prove: From the Coq Proof Assistant to Textbook Style
• Global Warming, Market Opportunity – On the Lure of Climate Entrepreneurism
• U.S. widens trade blacklist to include some of China’s top AI startups
  The U.S. government widened its trade blacklist to include some of China’s …
• Applying deep learning to Airbnb search
• “Robots” Guarded Buddha’s Relics in Ancient India
• Robel: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots
• New method visualizes groups of neurons as they compute
• The State of Machine Learning Frameworks
  Since deep learning regained prominence in 2012, many machine learning frameworks have clamored to become the new favorite among researchers and industry practitioners. From the early academic outputs Caffe and Theano to the massive industry-backed PyTorch and TensorFlow, this deluge of options makes it difficult to keep track of what
• Twitter analysis: identifying a propaganda bot network
  Conducting a Twitter network analysis uncovers a widespread bot network targeting West Papua with pro-Indonesian Government content on major social platforms.
• Telepresence Robots Are the Future of Remote Work

Blockchain and decentralization

• VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed VPN
  Distributed virtual private networks (dVPNs) are a new form of VPN with no central authority. In a dVPN, users are both VPN clients and relay/exit nodes as in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. While dVPNs make strong privacy claims, they also carry the risk that a user will inadvertently have their machine used to transmit potentially harmful or illegal network traffic. Several incidents have been reported [2] where unaware dVPN users have been (ab)used as exit nodes.
• Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple
  As a reminder, Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run on macOS Catalina. To make this transition easier and to protect users on macOS Catalina who continue to use older versions of software, we’ve adjusted the notarization prerequisites until January 2020.
• Scribe: Transporting petabytes per hour via a distributed, buffered queueing
• IRS issues additional guidance on tax treatment for cryptocurrency
  IR-2019-167, October 9, 2019

  WASHINGTON — As part of a wider effort to assist taxpayers and to enforce the tax laws in a rapidly changing area, the Internal Revenue Service today issued two new pieces of guidance for taxpayers who engage in transactions involving virtual currency.

Cloud and architecture

• GitCF – A RawGit-Like Service Running on CloudFlare Workers
• Easy Serverless GraphQL APIs with Serverless Framework AppSync
• Morpheus: A Vulnerability-Tolerant Secure Architecture
• Court says FCC’s net neutrality repeal can’t stop state laws
• Adventures in parametric textile pattern design
• Schneier slams Australia’s encryption laws and CyberCon speaker bans
  Governments breaking encryption is bad, and ‘will get worse once breaking encryption means people can die’, says one of the world’s leading security experts.
• MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on the Launch of Octopus Cloud 1.0
• Atari VCS Lead Architect Quits, Claims Six Months of Design Work Went Unpaid
• Amazon Workers May Be Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage
• Life Sciences Data Scientist/Engineer and Solution Architect
• 600k concurrent websocket connections on AWS using Node.js
  I recently faced the challenge to get as much power as possible out of a AWS EC2 instance at the lowest possible cost using concurrent persistent websockets. To do this I needed to use a event-driven, non-blocking runtime environment. For this particular purpose Node.js is excellent with its lightweight and fast Chrome V8 engine. Technical decisions …
• AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering
  I’m currently working on a logging project that was initially implemented using AWS Elasticsearch. Having worked with large-scale mainline Elasticsearch clusters for several years, I’m absolutely stunned at how poor Amazon’s implementation is and I can’t fathom why they’re unable to fix or at least

Development and languages

• Streamlit: Turn a Python script into an interactive data analysis tool
  Introducing Streamlit, an app framework built for ML engineers
• Block Storage Issues Across All Regions: Incident Report for DigitalOcean
• I built a syllable dictionary using Python and web scraping
• Monty Python at 50
• Transform Data Without Programming
• Windows Exploitation Tricks: Spoofing Named Pipe Client PID
• Mun Programming Language
  Mun, a programming language empowering creation through iteration.
• The privacy trade-offs of cheap Android smartphones
  Billions of people worldwide access the internet only through their phones. But using a cheap smartphone comes with some serious trade-offs.
• Wazo Platform: build carrier-grade programmable IP communication infrastructures
• Millions of Android Phones Are Vulnerable to Israeli Surveillance Dealer Attack
  Google warns that some of the world’s most popular Android phones are vulnerable, including its own Pixel 2. An Israeli spyware dealer, NSO Group, is believed to have developed the hack.
• Building a constraint programming solver in Julia
• 99% of the Git commands you’ll need at work, demonstrated in a single script
• Timsort, the Python sorting algorithm
  Timsort: A very fast , O(n log n), stable sorting algorithm built for the real world — not constructed in academia.
• What the Formula? Managing State on Android
• GitHub renews $200k contract with ICE
• Defining Types in Shen
• DNA Digital Data Storage
• Salesforce: We Ditched Python for Google’s Go Language in Einstein Analytics
• Amazon EKS Windows Container Support Now Generally Available
• GitHub and US Government Developers
  At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the world and not just internally with employees.
• Qt for Android better than ever before
• JavaScript Illustrated: Promises
• A news aggregator for the Python community written in Python/Django
• CI/CD Pipelines with Gitlab
• Convert Curl Syntax to Python Requests
• Git-remote-s3 – push and pull Git repos to/from s3, encrypted using GPG
• HamWAN: A modern, multi-megabit, IP-based, digital network for amateur radio use

Quote of the week

OAuth is the best that the wrong way of doing things can provide.

        — Mike Stay

Enterprises

• See Google’s Data on Real User Site Performance for Any Site
• V8: Workaround for Intel Gemini Lake Processor Bug
• Tesla Acquires Canadian Battery Specialist, Hibar Systems
  Ontario-based company brings specialist battery manufacturing expertise to global EV giant amid talk of “Tesla’s secret battery lab”
• A Separate Kind of Intelligence
• Tesla Is Changing the Used Car Game
• Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access
  Researchers at Google’s security group Project Zero have found an active vulnerability in Android that affects several popular devices including the Pixel 2, Huawei P20 Pro, and Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. A post from the security group suggests it found the bug last week, and attackers were exploiting it at that moment. The post notes …
• The Netherlands Surpasses Wildest Predictions for Tesla Model 3 Sales
  Normally Norway is the biggest Tesla market in Europe. When the Dutch market absorbs nearly three times the Norwegian number of Model 3s, that is crazy.
• The Google SEO Bible: Everything a Startup Needs to Know
  Over the past year, I’ve built and grown 3 marketplaces in the event sector, all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy.
• An Inside Look at Microsoft’s Newest Flight Simulator
• New Chips for Machine Intelligence
• Atlanta Asks Google Whether It Targeted Black Homeless People
• U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid…
• Whistleblower: Google Boss’ Daughter Scrubbed from Guardian Exposé
• Many Experts Say We Shouldn’t Worry About Superintelligent AI. They’re Wrong
• The Modular PC: Intel’s New Element Brings Project Christine to Life
• Personal information and ads on Twitter
• Postmates’ new IPO delay indicates Wall Street is turning against Silicon Valley
  Can you smell the doom and gloom?
• Artificial Intelligence: What’s to Fear?
• Is Amazon Unstoppable?
• Google gets OK to siphon water for South Carolina plant
• Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram Restricted in Southern Turkey
  Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Turkey has blocked access to social media and messaging platforms in the southern cities of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Hatay, as the …
• Microsoft open sources SandDance, a visual data exploration tool
• Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project
  One week after PayPal left the project

Other news

• Scientists implant «memories» into bird brains to teach them songs
• Quantum computers: amazing progress, but probably false supremacy claims
  A 2017 cartoon from this post. For my fellow combinatorialists here is the link to the previous post on Kahn-Park’s result, isoperimetry, Talagrand, nice figures and links.  Quick update (Sep…
• If this woman stays off her smartphone for an entire year, she’ll win $100k
  Could you survive for an entire year without access to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram or any other app?
• Void Linux (Musl) on the Huawei MateBook X Pro
• Quantum gold rush: the private funding pouring into quantum startups
• CBP officer holds journalist’s passport until he agrees he writes ‘propaganda’
• A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
  Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform such numbers into indexes no larger than N? Suppose you have a hash table with a capacity N. Again, you need to transform your hash values (typically 32-bit … Continue reading A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
• Tesla Model 3 = 24% of Small and Midsize Luxury Car Sales in USA
• World’s top banks pour $1.9T into fossil fuel financing since 2015
• The Rich Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You
  The 400 wealthiest Americans now pay a lower rate than the middle class.
• 150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com
• Linus Torvalds Shares His Thoughts on Microsoft’s New-Found Love for Linux
• Evidence-Based Medicine Data Lab, University of Oxford
• Shackleton’s Medical Kit
• Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by Half
• Avoiding the Quantum Winter
• Learn more about iCloud in China mainland
  Learn about the changes to iCloud services in China mainland.
• Hams Must Remove Repeaters from CA Mountaintops or Pay Huge Fees
• Giant Molecules Exist in Two Places at Once in Unprecedented Quantum Experiment
• Obesity Is Weighing on Education, Productivity and the Economy
• MIT Sloan Management Review drops its paywall today
• System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open-Source Firmware
  System76, the Denver-based Linux PC manufacturer and developer of Pop OS, has some stellar news for those of us who prefer our laptops a little more open.
• The Rich Do Pay Higher Taxes Than You
• Re-Enact the Panama Papers Leak: How Mossack Fonseca Was Hacked
• I tried to hack my insomnia with technology
  Fancy trackers and headbands are all part of a growing sleep-tech industry. I decided to put them to the test.
• Back to Basics, Git Essentials Crash Course

Gooooooood morning, Information superhighway!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
  Researchers want to pave their own path. But the growing industry is still dependent on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
• Streamlit launches open source machine learning application dev framework
• Pizza robot makes 300 pizzas per hour
  After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.
• Robots to Cut 200k U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says
• Dutch police take down hornets’ nest of DDoS botnets
  Police seize servers from bulletproof hosting provider that harbored tens of DDoS botnets.
• A Beginner’s Guide to Deep Reinforcement Learning
• A Gentle Introduction to Bayes’ Theorem for Machine Learning
• Green AI
• Xilinx Vitis and Vitis AI Software Development Platforms

Blockchain and decentralization

• Cryptocurrency Startup School
• The World’s Most-Used Cryptocurrency Isn’t Bitcoin
• Paypal Withdraws from Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency
  PayPal was one of several corporate backers of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project.

Cloud and architecture

• The Rosie Pattern Language
• Google Cloud Worth $225B, Deutsche Bank Says

Development and languages

• Sid Sijbrandij: “People don’t want to commute; they just don’t want to miss out”
• Microsoft Offers Windows 7 Extended Update Support to SMBs
• Andrew Yang proposes that your digital data be considered personal property
• Blazor – Build client web apps with C#
• Microsoft introduces Windows 10 X for dual-screen devices
  At its annual Surface hardware event in New York, Microsoft today announced the expected set of updates to its existing hardware lineup. The biggest surprise, though, was surely the announcement of the company’s dual-screen Surface Neo, which will go on sale before the 2020 holiday season. To…
• Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore
• CyberWeb – Building a Web Browser from Scratch on Windows 2000
• Fundamentals of Python Programming
• GitHub has removed their ‘This is note the page you’re looking for’ 404 page

Quote of the week

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

        — Rob Pike

Enterprises

• Amazon and Apple are quietly building rival location networks
  Amazon’s new Sidewalk protocol and Apple’s experiments with ultra-wideband signal a new battleground that gets Amazon out of the house and Apple inside it
• Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix using a MIP solver
• Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS
  DNS over HTTPS will make it harder for ISPs to monitor or modify DNS queries.
• WeTransfer Migrated to Stripe
• The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
  Remote teams configuration and combination. Learn the caveats and nuances of running a remote team and why internal communication is paramount to success.
• Researchers Discover the Tallest Known Tree in the Amazon
• Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition
• SIMD Made Easy with Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler
• Google – polling like it’s the 90s
• Microsoft announces dual-screen Surface Neo
• Microsoft announces new Surface Duo phone
• Tiny Acquires Meteor
• Tesla Delivers Record 97,000 Vehicles in Q3
• Iraq blocks Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram, shuts down internet
  Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory show that Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social and messaging apps have been blocked in Iraq by multiple internet providers as of …
• Evaluating the effectiveness of Google’s “Testing on the Toilet” program
• Troubles with Tesla’s automated parking summon safety regulators
• Vice Media Acquires Refinery29 in a $400M Deal
  The fashion and lifestyle site had something that Vice lacked: an audience made up largely of women.
• Netflix – Evolving Regional Evacuation
• Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
  They need facial scans of people with darker skin
• Amazon Plans $800M Data Center in Argentina
• Egypt activists outraged over Twitter suspensions against anti-Sisi accounts
• Disney Bans Netflix Ads as Streaming’s Marketing Wars Intensify
• Amazon Care

Other news

• Design patterns for hacking together prototypes: object dictionaries
• The myth of the teacher pay gap?
• A Jewish Woman’s Appeal of Murder in Thirteenth-Century England
  Posted by Sara M. Butler; 17 August, 2018. Setting the Scene The period leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in July of 1290 was a time of mounting uncertainty for the Anglo Jewry. …
• How Is Python 2 Supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux After 2020?
  How is Python 2 supported in RHEL after 2020? How long will Python 2.7 be supported within Red Hat products? As per https://pythonclock.org the Python project is retiring development on Python 2 Jan 1st, 2020. What happens after this date? Python2 is available in an Application stream in RHEL8. Can you let me know what that means for the Python 2 lifecycle within RHEL8? Will Python 2 be available for the entire life of RHEL 8? Will Red Hat continue to provide bugfix/security errata to Python 2 after the EOL of the language?
• Was it worth paying €41.7bn to bail out Irish banks?
• No evidence that testosterone reduces cognitive empathy
  In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that testosterone administration did not affect cognitive empathy, a measure of the ability to recognize another’s feelings and motivations. The finding calls into question the theory that the symptoms of autism are caused by a hyper-masculinized brain.
• What are the most indispensable books for indie hackers?
• Brex wants to replace startup bank accounts with Brex Cash
• Google Is Uncovering Hundreds of Race Conditions Within the Linux Kernel
• A new Linux memory controller promises to save lots of RAM
• Doing enterprise financial data visualization after data journalism
• Attorneys say disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes isn’t paying them
  Lawyers representing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes said she hasn’t paid them for more than a year and probably never will, according to court records.

Gooooooood morning, Human beings!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Sensors and AI are finding their way into the barnyard
• Low-Memory Neural Network Training: A Technical Report
• Weld: Accelerating numpy, scikit and pandas as much as 100x with Rust and LLVM
  After working for weeks with Python’s data science stack and R I started to ask my self if there could not be a common intermediate…
• Researchers used a neural network to retrieve a lost Picasso painting
• Espresso: A Fast End-to-End Neural Speech Recognition Toolkit
• Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?
• Why Are Some Societies More Entrepreneurial than Others?
• I made a neural net that analyzes privacy policies
  Guard is an AI that reads privacy policies for you and uncovers their hidden, filthy secrets.
• Kheiron raises $22M for AI that helps radiologists detect cancer earlier
• 600k Images Removed from AI Database After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias
• “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian
  “Estonian is popularly known as a difficult language to learn. The only other national languages it’s related to are Finnish and Hungarian.”
• MegaBots calls it a day, puts fighting robot up for sale on eBay
• Animal, Vegetable, or Both?
• DOMPurify, Security in the DOM, and Why We Really Need Both
• Echo Frames – Eyeglasses with Alexa
• Prehistoric Babies Drank Animal Milk from Bottles
• Deep Learning with Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems
• Tesla’s Neural Processor in the FSD Chip – WikiChip Fuse
• Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics
• Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study
  The image of bottle water as clean and pure is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic.
• Bot Land, a game where you fight others via code
• We can’t trust AI systems built on deep learning alone
  Gary Marcus, a leader in the field, discusses how we could achieve general intelligence—and why that might make machines safer.
• Monoscopic panoramas to 3D using AI
• A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit
  Tax forms filed by OpenAI provide insight into the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to artificial intelligence specialists across the world.
• Deep learning powers a motion-tracking revolution

Blockchain and decentralization

• Trillion-Dollar Coin
• Bedrock – A modular, WAN-replicated, blockchain-based database
• Telegram quietly snuck its blockchain past regulators
  TON will be the largest blockchain ever when it launches next month, but it’s not on regulators’ radars.
• Doubling the speed of std:uniform_int_distribution in the GNU C++ library
• We need decentralized communication

Cloud and architecture

• Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service
• Serverless: slower and more expensive
• Cleaning up bad bots
• Ten Years of Turning Documents into Data: A Q&A with DocumentCloud
• The Technical Challenges of Building Cloudflare Warp
• A patent lawsuit against GNOME
  A company called Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC has filed a
  lawsuit [PDF] against the GNOME Foundation, alleging that the Shotwell
  photo manager violates patent
  9,936,086. Stay tuned, more details will surely emerge.
• Rimbaud Draws New Followers to the Hometown He Hated
• Application Layering – A Pattern for Extensible Elixir Application Design
  This paper covers building large, maintainable Elixir codebases using Hexagonal Architecture and the Layers pattern.

Development and languages

• Who cares about functional programming?
• .NET Core 3.0
• .NET Core gRPC
• Voidcall – Making of 13kb JavaScript RTS Game
• Steve Jobs, NeXTStep, and Early Object Oriented Programming
• 50 ways to leak your data: apps’ circumvention of the Android permissions system
• Select Sections from Images of Newspaper Clippings Using OpenCV and Python
• The /e/ Google-free, pro-privacy Android clone is now available
• “Stubs” in the .NET Runtime
• Programming Idioms
• GitHub Releases an ImageNet for Code
  We’re announcing the CodeSearchNet Challenge and releasing a large dataset for natural language processing and machine learning.
• New ES2019 JavaScript features
• Privacy in a Digital World
• The Science of Functional Programming
• Running an eBPF program may require lifting the kernel lockdown
• Sentient: a high-level, declarative programming language
• Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows
  660 votes and 445 comments so far on Reddit
• How to Succeed as a Poor Programmer
  In a previous post I outlined why programmers should strive to be good at one thing rather than everything. In this post I discuss how to …
• Creating the Go Programming Language
  Carmen and Jon talk with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer (the creators of Go) about its origins, growth, influence, and future. This an epic episode that dives deep into the history and details of the how’s and why’s of Go, and the choices they’ve made along the way in creating this awesome programing language.
• KDE is adopting GitLab
  Code, test & deploy with GitLab. Everyone can contribute!
• Fugitive on run for seventeen years found living in cave by a drone
  Police used drones to track down a man who evaded detection for almost two decades.
• The Principles behind Differentiable Programming
• Grail Demo from CHM Tape: Visual programming in the 1960s
• DigitalOcean block storage is down
• Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available

Quote of the week

You’re bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.

        — Donald Knuth

Enterprises

• Painting with Math Formulas in Google Sheets
• Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contractor’s vote to unionize
  Last month, more than 66 percent of Google tech contractors signed cards to hold a vote on whether to create a labor union at HCL…
• The Exponent IPO
• “Grassroots” anti-Amazon nonprofit turns out to be retailer astroturfing
• Blockbuster Could Have Bought Netflix for $50M
• NUMA Siloing in the FreeBSD Network Stack
• My Talk at Microsoft – Richard Stallman
• On the Leaked Google/NASA Quantum Supremacy Paper
• Trying To Fill In The Gaps On Google Street View, Starting With Zimbabwe
• How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
  In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
• Google Employees Explain How They Were Retaliated Against for Reporting Abuse
  A leaked document highlights stories of abuse and retaliation against Google employees, told by the employees themselves.
• Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, a startup for controlling computers with the mind
• Rivals aim to document Facebook, Google strong-arming
• China’s “Tesla Killer” Nio slashes thousands of jobs as losses mount
  Electric vehicle startup to raise $200m from chairman and Tencent
• Google contractors in Pittsburgh vote to unionize
• Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual medical clinic for employees
• Google Chrome Keystone is modifying /var symlink on non SIP Macs causing k-panic
  Reports that some AVID Users Macs would no longer boot. It now may be that a Google Chrome Keystone update modifies /var on NON SIP Protected Macs.
• Google wins privacy case: ‘Right to be forgotten’ applies only in EU
• Google Chrome Update Damages macOS File System
• Amazon Sidewalk is a new long-range wireless network
• Amazon Echo Buds
• Amazon Echo Loop
• Immigration Officials Use Google Translate to Vet Refugees
• Apps Selling for Hundreds of Dollars on Google Play Store
• Tesla Software Version 10.0
  It’s here. Software Version 10.0 – our biggest software update ever. We’re raising the bar for what people have come to expect from their cars with new entertainment, gaming, music, and convenience features designed to make your car much more capable, as well as making time spent in your car more fun.
• Twitter launches its ‘Hide Replies’ feature in the US and Japan
• AMD’s Upcoming Ryzen 9 3900 Listed with 12 Zen 2 Cores at 65W
• Alphabet Waymo valuation cut 40% by Morgan Stanley to $105B
• Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
  Alphabet Inc’s Google will stop showing news snippets from European publish…
• Google Achieves Quantum Supremacy. Is Encryption Safe?
  A Financial Times report revealed that Google achieved quantum supremacy. Is it now time to panic about encryption being broken, or do we have nothing to worry about?
• People are reporting collisions with Tesla’s Smart Summon feature
• Bloomberg Misreports on Whatsapp Story
• The Intelligence of Plants
• Humans can acquire TB from deer
• Avoiding Intellectual Phase Lock
• Twitter Executive for Middle East Is British Army ‘Psyops’ Soldier
• WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO
  WeWork’s parent The We Company on Monday filed to withdraw its initial publ…

Other news

• WeWTF, Part Deux
• Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash
  Critics claim they try to suppress anti-Chinese views to keep lucrative Chinese students happy
• Denmark’s Jyske Bank lowers its negative rates on deposits
  (Adds CEO quote, background)
• CodeTips – Learn to programme, with little or no prior experience
• Reverse Engineering – The Golden Age of Computer Hacking
• Hacker Who Revealed Soccer Secrets Is Charged with 147 Crimes
  Rui Pinto ran a website called Football Leaks and won praise as a whistle-blower. Portugal’s authorities consider him a criminal.
• Woman treated by doctors after her blood turned blue
• An AI learned to play hide-and-seek. Strategies it came up with were astounding
• Hacking the Brain
  In
  an increasingly complex information society, demands for cognitive
  functioning are growing steadily. In recent years, numerous strategies
  to augment brain function have been proposed. Evidence for their efficacy
  (or lack thereof) and side effects has …
• Viable Quantum Supercomputer
• 600k travelers are stranded after Thomas Cook declares bankruptcy
  The 178-year-old tour operator failed to secure a £200 million rescue on Sunday, leading it to suspend its flights and bookings.
• Went to update payment info, showed me some random person’s credit card info
• Gridgarden: A cool game to learn CSS Grid
  A game for learning CSS grid layout
• Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ
• Tmux Tutorial
• Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals
• Woman discovers Renaissance masterpiece in kitchen
• To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight
• CentOS Stream and CentOS Linux 8 Released
• WeWork, Bankers Have Discussed Laying Off One-Third of Workforce
  As WeWork investors jousted over Adam Neumann’s future at the company he built, a parallel debate by WeWork executives and bankers has centered on just how deeply WeWork should cut costs to save its business.In recent days, a group of executives from WeWork’s parent company and bankers have been …
• Want to Reduce Suicides? Follow the Data to Medical Offices, Motels, etc.
• OSSU: A path to a free self-taught education in computer science
  :mortar_board: Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science! – ossu/computer-science
• Takotsubo cardiomyopathy triggered by wasabi consumption
• A Quantum Perceptron – First Steps in QML
• How the U.S. Hacked Isis
• AI becoming so expensive it is freezing out universities
  A.I. research is becoming increasingly expensive, leaving few people with easy access to the computing firepower necessary to develop the technology.
• Understanding Disk Usage in Linux
• Proof emerges that a quantum computer can outperform a classical one
• US doctors are hoping to start offering women vaginal fluid transplants
• MyPayrollHR CEO Arrested, Admits to $70M Fraud
• Hacking Voi Scooters: How I Created $100k Worth of Free Rides
• Learn Just a Little Awk: An Awk Tutorial by Example
• SBCL 20: Steel Bank Common Lisp’s 20th Anniversary Workshop
• Online courses vs. colleges for software engineering
  Proud dropouts sometimes swear by online courses, because the project-based learning that they provide is hands-on, and also representative of the how the real world is going to be. On the other hand, proud academics sometimes like to brag about equations and theorems that are really not relevant, but still sound academically enlightening.

  I’ve done numerous Udacity nanodegrees and paid Coursera courses. I’m also currently pursuing my masters online from Georgia Tech in computer science (it’s OMSCS program). I’m going to make a contrast between the two approaches, highlighting their merits and demerits.

  Vocational education can be v

• Learn X in Y Minutes
• Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
• Forever 21, Which Helped Popularize Fast Fashion, to File for Bankruptcy
  The retailer fell victim to the eroding power of shopping malls and said it would cease operations in 40 countries and close up to 178 stores in the U.S.
• Belgian startup Magnax has found a way to mass-produce the axial-flux motor
• Automation will drastically reduce police and city budgets
• Yahoo engineer admits hacking Yahoo accounts searching for images
  SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into the accounts of some 6,000 Yahoo users in search of sexual photos and videos. 

Gooooooood morning, Public!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• In Aging Singapore, 65-Year-Olds Are Learning How to Code
• The ‘last Botticelli’?
• Machine-learning Mendeleevs have rediscovered the periodic table
• Neural Modules (NeMo): A toolkit for conversational AI
  Neural Modules: a toolkit for conversational AI. Contribute to NVIDIA/NeMo development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Attention Mechanism in Deep Learning
  What is Attention, and why is it used in state-of-the-art models? This article discusses the types of Attention and walks you through their implementations.
• Comprehensive Guide on Data Visualization with Pandas
• Bottled Water Is Sucking Florida Dry
  The state’s aquifers are shrinking, yet corporations want to appropriate even more of them.
• Researchers build microscopic biohybrid robots propelled by muscles, nerves
• Malware botnet Emotet awakes and resumes its global spamming campaign
• Open sourcing crypto-arbitrage bot in Python – back to the dawn of crypto hype
• A neural network to auto-complete your thoughts
• Language Both Enraptures and Deceives Us
• Project Ihmehimmeli: Temporal Coding in Spiking Neural Networks
• Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cause, study suggests
• AI competitions don’t produce useful models
• The BeagleBone AI is Available
• Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
• Bots Help Moderate Stack Overflow

Blockchain and decentralization

• Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
  Handshake can make the internet more secure by providing a distributed alternative to Certificate Authorities (CAs) and making domain names censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, and tamper-proof.
• Announcing Yugabyte DB 2.0 GA: Jepsen Tested, High-Performance Distributed SQL
• Tildamail – Private Email with Decentralized Storage (Your Desktop, S3, IPFS)

Cloud and architecture

• Modern Applications at AWS
• Understanding Data Transfer in AWS (infographic)
• AWS Fargate Deep Dive: What it is, when to use it
• For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable AWS Truth to the thread
  “For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable @awscloud Truth to the thread.”
• Purdue Pharma Files for Bankruptcy to Wipe Out 2k Lawsuits
• United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden
• US Files Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden for Violation of CIA and NSA NDAs
  The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA.
• Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated
• Interpreting Rope Channels: The Birth of Greek Monumental Architecture
• Dust cloud sparked explosion in primitive life on Earth, say scientists
• The C4 model for visualising software architecture

Development and languages

• Z – A dynamic functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript
• Maintaining the Kernel’s Web of Trust
• “DataGlyph” Embedded Digital Data
• AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android
• How two dead accounts allowed remote crash of any Instagram Android user
• Schism, a self-hosting Scheme to WebAssembly compiler
• Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) Entirely with C# and .NET
• Statistical tool for analyzing a Git repository
• Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO
  GitLab’s CEO says he’s going public on November 18, 2020. Investors love it, pouring in $268 million at a $2.75 billion valuation.
• Pain Points of Web Development with WordPress
• Create and apply simple filters to an image using OpenCV and Python
• Python Tests That Write Themselves
• Git Blame-Someone-Else
• The cost of parsing JSON
• Welcoming Semmle to the GitHub Family
  Today we’re announcing a big step in securing the open source supply chain: we’re welcoming Semmle to the GitHub family.
• Python Is Eating the World
  Frustrated by programming language shortcomings, Guido van Rossum created Python. With the language now used by millions, Nick Heath talks to van Rossum about Python’s past and explores what’s next.
• Requests moved to Python Software Foundation
• The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
• Wikipedia’s JavaScript Initialisation on a Budget
• Why I Prefer Functional Programming
• Working with GitHub Actions
• Game Programming Vexations Part 4: High Level vs. Low Level
• Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python
• Cascadia Code, a Font for Windows Terminal and VSCode
• French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games
• Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
• Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah

Quote of the week

We have persistant(sic) objects, they’re called files.

        — Ken Thompson

Enterprises

• Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon
  And the shopping platform has plans to take on Amazon next.
• Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech
• Tesla’s a Game Changer When It Comes to Windshield Wipers
• Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation
• Google ML/AI Comic
• The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone. We Went There to See for Ourselves.
• Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
  The e-commerce giant overcame internal dissent from engineers and lawyers, people familiar with the move say.
• Netflix acquires the global streaming rights to ‘Seinfeld’
• What the Ctenophore says about the evolution of intelligence
• Anti-intellectualism in American Life
• WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources
  WeWork owner The We Company has postponed its initial public offering (IPO), wal…
• Google Fi Unlimited Plan
• Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook
• How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters
• Microsoft AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles
  Open source simulator for autonomous vehicles built on Unreal Engine / Unity, from Microsoft AI & Research – microsoft/AirSim
• Andrew Mason’s Descript raises $15M and acquires Lyrebird
• Cisco offered DataDog more than $7B before IPO
• 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week
  While New Yorkers repelled the ecommerce giant’s expansion plans, job applications are flying in from other places
• Tesla earns its first-ever safety award from IIHS for Model 3
• Huawei Mate 30 phones launch without Google apps
• Amazon Signs Climate Pledge to Advance Paris Climate Accords Goals by 10 Years
• Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
  Amazon will be stepping up its efforts to reduce its climate impact, CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday. The company will be ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks from Michigan’s Rivian as part of this commitment, Bezos said. The commerce giant will seek to meet its goal of becoming car…
• Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
  Stripe’s latest funding round values the company at $35 billion, putting the financial technology firm above Airbnb and Palantir.
• Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens
• Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe
• Twitter discloses 10k accounts suspended for fomenting political discord
• Edward Snowden says he didn’t cooperate with Russian intelligence services
• Google announces €3B EU data centre investment
  Sundar Pichai has said Google plans to invest 3 billion euros (£2.6 billion) to expand its data centres across Europe in the next two years.
• Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
  Google announced today that it was investing €3 billion (approximately US$3.3 billion) to expand its data center presence in Europe. What’s more, the company pledged the data centers would be environmentally friendly. This new investment is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invest…
• How the “grassroots” campaign against Amazon is funded by its rivals
  Walmart, Oracle and mall owner Simon Property Group are secret funders behind a nonprofit that has been highly critical of the e-commerce giant.
• AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

Other news

• How kiteboarding was invented
• Ransomware hackers are targeting managed service providers for local governments
• Linux Kernel Fastboot
• How do wombats make cubed poo?
• PineTime Is a $25 Smartwatch / Companion for PinePhone Linux Phone
  We’ve recently seen Linux smartphones are coming in a few weeks or months, but the $150 PinePhone may not come alone, and soon be joined by a $25
• Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties
• An important quantum algorithm may be a property of nature
  Evidence that quantum searches are an ordinary feature of electron behavior may explain the genetic code, one of the greatest puzzles in biology.
• Women make up 54% of new students entering Iranian universities
• A small programming course for everyone
• Crash course into Elm, and how to compare it with React
  A complete guide on how to use Elm with React: If you’ve ever worked with Redux – in the context of a React application or not – you may have heard numerous times that it was inspired not only by Flux (which it followed) but also by the Elm architecture….
• Banks Warm to Mortgage Bonds That Burned Them in 2008
• Linux Kernel 5.3 Released
  Now that Linux kernel 5.3 is officially released we take a quick look at the new and notable changes this kernel update brings.
  Linux 5.3 was announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing L…
• Linux Kernel 5.3
• Square Wants to Be a Bank but Doesn’t Want to Be Taxed Like One
  Square has lent billions to small businesses and consumers and applied for a banking license, but it says it isn’t a financial company.
• A basement hacker transformed Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600
  Garry Kitchen’s unlikely story is told in this excerpt from the book Arcade Perfect.
• Brain may not need body movements to learn virtual spaces
• Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don’t Matter
• Study suggest Neolithic Britons processed raw milk to reduce its lactose content
• GoCardless launches US debit payments solution
• IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer
• Switzerland in the age of automatic exchange of banking information
  A year ago, Switzerland began to pass on data on the bank accounts held by foreigners in Swiss banks to around 30 countries.
• Our Journey to the First Paying Customer
• Linux Terminal Goods
• Advanced hackers are infecting IT providers in hopes of hitting their customers
• Team closes in on “holy grail” of room temperature quantum computing chips
• The Mysterious Death of the Hacker Who Turned in Chelsea Manning
• Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
• EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers
• Scotland’s minimum unit pricing may have reduced Glasgow drinking deaths
  Minimum unit pricing may have contributed to the number of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow falling by more than a fifth, according to new research.
• What’s new in civic tech: National Day of Civic Hacking

Gooooooood morning, W3!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles
• When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says
• wehatecaptchas – we’ll keep the bots out without annoying your users
• Build Superhuman Reinforcement Learning in 10 Minutes
• Two California hikers found a family’s message in a bottle and helped save them
• The beauty of functional languages in deep learning – Clojure and Haskell
  Functional languages such as Clojure and Haskell can often represent the complexity with cleaner code that’s closer to the mathematics of the model.
• Building a license plate reader from scratch with deep learning
• New York state wants both renewables and nukes
• Using Deep Learning to Inform Differential Diagnoses of Skin Diseases
  Posted by Yuan Liu, PhD, Software Engineer and Peggy Bui, MD, Technical Program Manager, Google Health An estimated 1.9 billion people w…
• A bot to stress test text-based MMORPGs (MUDs) written in Scala 3
  A bot written in Scala 3 to stress test text-based MMORPGs (MUDs). – ryanberckmans/noric-bot
• Request for Comments on Patenting Artificial Intelligence Inventions
  The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is interested in gathering information on patent-related issues regarding artificial intelligence inventions for purposes of evaluating whether further examination guidance is needed to promote the reliability and predictability of patenting…

Blockchain and decentralization

• What Happened to the Guys Who Invested Their Life Savings in Cryptocurrency?
  It was the “summer of crypto love” — private Telegram groups were ablaze with altcoin (every cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin) chatter, Bitcoin whales were breaching…
• Hugo and IPFS: how this blog works (and scales to serve 5k% spikes instantly)
• 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
  “🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

  Tx: https://t.co/VWb8slswa8”

• Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log
• Load Handling vs. Data Integrity: Tradeoffs in Distributed Data Store Design
• Verifying smart contracts in Libra’s Move language
• The Blockchain-Based ‘Handshake’ Solution: An Answer to DNS Security Issues

Cloud and architecture

• I am stupefied every day by the awfulness of the AWS web console
• California bill will drive a national debate over how to reshape labor laws
  A bill will drive a national debate over how to reshape labor laws so that workers get their fair share in a service and knowledge economy.
• Cloudflare S-1/Amendment

Development and languages

• IEEE Spectrum: Top Programming Languages 2019
• Our journey to type checking 4M lines of Python
• How Steep Is That Sidewalk? A Digital Map for People with Disabilities
• Most programmers don’t know what Expect can do for them
• Some Strategies for Fast Lexical Analysis When Parsing Programming Languages
• Sunsetting Python 2
  The official home of the Python Programming Language
• Improving our homemade JavaScript obfuscator
• ProjectPSX – A C# coded emulator of the original Playstation
  Experimental C# Playstation Emulator. Contribute to BluestormDNA/ProjectPSX development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Running GitHub on Rails 6.0
  On August 26, 2019, the GitHub application was deployed to production with 100% of traffic on the newest Rails version: 6.0. Read more about our process for upgrading, what we learned, and what’s next.
• Gitlab: Maturity
• Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
  The Ada programming language was born in the mid-1970s, when the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the UK’s Ministry Of Defence sought to replace the hundreds of specialized programming lang…
• Metronomes in JavaScript
• Natural Language in Python Using SpaCy: An Introduction
• How I decide between many programming languages
• E.U.’S New Digital Czar: ‘Most Powerful Regulator of Big Tech on the Planet’
• The Drawbacks of Python
• A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
• Digital Hearing Aids Turn the Whole World into a Giant MP3 File
• MathSharp, a vector and matrix library written in C# using hardware intrinsics
• Simple SFTP Hosting at Rsync.net
• Types for Python HTTP APIs

Quote of the week

i’ve wondered whether Linux sysfs should be called syphilis

        — forsyth

Enterprises

• How Did a Nissan Leaf Beat a Tesla Model S in a Race?
  The Nissan LEAF certainly doesn’t have a reputation as a serious performance car. With far less power than any Tesla, «semi-independent» rear suspension like you’d find under a Chevy Cavalier, and many similarities with the Versa, the LEAF is widely regarded as an economy car, not a luxury or sports car. It certainly isn’t seen as a real competitor to a Tesla, even an older Model S.
• Why No One Is Beating Tesla’s Range
• Google’s Chrome Has My Dead Grandpa’s Data and He Never Used the Internet
• Lithium-ion test results to be used as benchmarks for new battery technologies
• Glibc sysdeps: dl_platform detection effectively performs “cripple AMD”
• Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech
• Tesla Model 3 = 12.4% of All Norwegian Vehicle Sales January–July 2019
  California’s a huge market for Tesla, the Netherlands loves Tesla, Switzerland loves Tesla, but no state or country is as Tesla obsessed as Norway.
• Wunderlist founder wants to buy his app back from Microsoft
  Four years after selling his company to Microsoft, 6Wunderkinder cofounder Christian Reber wants to buy the product back from the software giant. 
• Tesla battery researcher unveils new cell that could last 1M miles
• Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war
  A new type of arms race could be on the cards
• Google Feedback on TypeScript 3.5
  We recently upgraded Google to use TypeScript 3.5. Here is some feedback on the upgrade. (For background, recall that Google is a monorepo of billions of lines of code. We use a single version of T…
• Google bans family cafe for offensive content for posting photo of British dish
• 50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google
• Nearly Every State Is Launching an Antitrust Investigation of Google
• Amazon Employees Pledge to Walk Out as Part of Global Climate Strike
• Troubles Mount for the We Company as Softbank Reportedly Calls for Shelving IPO
• I Lost My $50k Twitter Username
• Search Engine on the Top of Twitter to Find Jobs
  Tweet Jobs an Search Engine on the Top of Twitter to find latest jobs in real time. Find Remote Jobs, Software Jobs, React Developer, Content Writer, Product manager, Marketing jobs & Blockchain Jobs in the top companies.
• WeWork Bonds Drop Below Par for First Time Since IPO Filing
• The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs
• Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of the WeWork IPO
• Stripe Corporate Card
  Set custom spending controls, reconcile expenses automatically with software like Expensify, and earn extra cash back where you spend the most each month.
• Michael Bloomberg launches $160M initiative to ban flavored e-cigarettes
  The pledge follows investigations into deaths from an unknown lung illness linked to vaping.
• Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences
• Google and Mayo Clinic will transform the future of healthcare
• Google collects face data now – what it means and how to opt out
• Why Teslas Aren’t the Future
• Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board
  Most low cost (sub $100) single board computers are based on Arm processors because Intel processors are normally more expensive, but there are some
• Google Maps shows sunken car where missing man’s body was found
  William Moldt went missing in mysterious circumstances 22 years ago after a night out in Florida.
• Google to pay $1B in France to settle fiscal fraud probe
  Google agreed to pay close to 1 billion euros ($1.10 billion) to French authorit…
• Elevating original reporting in Search
  Google makes ranking changes to highlight original reporting.
• WeWork considers IPO valuation of as low as $10B
  WeWork owner The We Company may seek a valuation in its upcoming initial public …
• Google account required to contribute to Google open-source
• When a hospital sling costs 900% more than at Amazon, something is very wrong
  This is yet another example of in-your-face medical pricing that often reflects not what things really cost but what healthcare businesses think they can get away with.

Other news

• Apple Hints China Behind ‘Billion Device iPhone Hack’ That Google Reported
• Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics
• Here’s what I’ve learned about climate change and it’s terrifying
• The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno elites
• Julia Academy: Learn ML, Parallel Programming, Julia and More
• Large Waterloo student rental companies get hacked over shady business practices
• A report on Chinese digital surveillance and hacking of Uyghurs
• The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu
• GCC eBPF for Linux port has landed
• Quantum Darwinism spotted in diamond spin
• Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and puts liens on homes
  Over six years, the public institution took people to court more than 36,000 times, an analysis finds.
• Where Quantum Probability Comes From
• Khashoggi children have received houses in Saudi Arabia and monthly payments
• Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip Sentenced to Death in Secret Trial
• Hackers Hit Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a ‘SIM Swap.’ You’re at Risk, Too
  Hackers have been targeting regular people and celebrities with the attack. Last week, it was used to hijack the Twitter account of Twitter’s C.E.O.
• NY Payroll Company Vanishes with $35M
• SoftBank and WeWork Are as Bad as Each Other
• A $60k Patrol Boat and a Single Deck Gun Changed the Course of Korean War
• What wartime ‘munitionettes’ teach us about burnout
• The P-TECH program reboots vocational education
• New zine: HTTP: Learn your browser’s language
• ChocoPy: A Programming Language for Compilers Courses
• How to Pay Remote Workers
• Huawei Just Started Selling Laptops with a Beautiful Linux OS Pre-Installed
• If you have something important to say, it’s wrong to say in paywall publication
• Simjacker: SIM card flaw lets hackers hijack any phone by sending SMS

Gooooooood morning, Humans!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Simple Python Package to Extract Deep Learning Features
• David Silver DeepMind Guest Lecture (Advanced Topics: Machine Learning COMPGI13)
• Police hijack a botnet and remotely kill 850k malware infections
  In a rare feat, French police have hijacked and neutralized a massive cryptocurrency mining botnet controlling close to a million infected computers. The notorious Retadup malware infects computers and starts mining cryptocurrency by sapping power from a computer’s processor. Although the mal…
• Waze Hijacked L.A. Can Anyone Put the Genie Back in the Bottle?
  Traffic apps turned the city’s neighborhoods into «shortcuts.» Now furious residents are attempting to take them back, street by street
• We Let Machine Learning Design Logos
• Reach Robotics is closing
• US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons
  New weapons like hypersonic missiles are potentially reducing the amount of time that nuclear decision makers have to respond to an attack. Two US deterrence experts are proposing an artificial intelligence-based nuclear command, control, and communications system to ease this time pressure. It’s a risky solution.
• fast visual-inertial odometry/SLAM for AR/VR/Robotics
• The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot
• Stegasuras: Neural Linguistic Steganography
• NeurIPS Accepted Papers 2019
• Taken Photos – Free Stock Photos Annotated by AI
• Replay in biological and artificial neural networks
• New micro-robots can break apart and remove biofilm or plaque from a tooth
  With a precise, controlled movement, microrobots cleared a glass plate of a biofilm, as shown in this time-lapse image. Credit:

Blockchain and decentralization

• Brazil’s leading payment processor begins accepting Bitcoin
• Decentralized Secret Sharing
• Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

Cloud and architecture

• AWS EC2/RDS Outage in us-east-1
• New Texas laws: Illegal to send unsolicited nude photos
  As states push to criminalize the sharing of intimate photos to get revenge on former sex partners, Texas is teaming with Bumble to crack down on people who send unsolicited nude images on dating apps and elsewhere in cyberspace.
• Dark Patterns
  Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use them.
• Create FreeBSD Current OpenStack Image on OVH Public Cloud
• Improved VPC Networking for AWS Lambda
• Growing a SaaS: Avoid Confusing Dual Offers
• A browser extension that replaces occurrences of ‘serverless’ with ‘CGI-bin’
• Amazon AWS had a power failure, their backup generators failed
• 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End
• Cloudflare-sync – Tool for using Cloudflare as a dynamic DNS provider
• Venus’ Ocean of Air and Clouds
• Ancient Turing Pattern Builds Feathers, Hair – and Now, Shark Skin
  A primordial developmental toolkit shared by all vertebrates, and described by a theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, sets the growth pattern for all types of skin structures.
• Run a private CA and issue certificates to cloud VMs with step-ca v0.11
• APIs are the next big SaaS wave

Development and languages

• Lumen: An alternative BEAM implementation, designed for WebAssembly
  An alternative BEAM implementation, designed for WebAssembly – lumen/lumen
• Facebook uploads all system libraries on your Android
• Libgphoto2 Controls Digital Cameras
• Magritte: A Language for Pipe-Based Programming
• Windows System Call Table
• Reference Capabilities for Safe Parallel Array Programming
  The array is a fundamental data structure that provides an efficient way to store and retrieve non-sparse data contiguous in memory. Arrays are important for the performance of many memory-intensive applications due to the design of modern memory hierarchies: contiguous storage facilitates spatial locality and predictive access patterns which enables prefetching. Operations on large arrays often lend themselves well to parallelisation, such as a fork-join style divide-and-conquer algorithm for sorting. For parallel operations on arrays to be deterministic, data-race freedom must be guaranteed. For operations on arrays of primitive data, data-race freedom is obtained by coordinating accesses so that no two threads operate on the same array indices. This is however not enough for arrays of non-primitives due to aliasing: accesses of separate array elements may return pointers to the same object, or overlapping structures. Reference capabilities have been used successfully in the past to statically guarantee the absence of data-races in object-oriented programs. This paper presents the first extension of reference capabilities—called array capabilities—that support concurrent and parallel operations on arrays of both primitive and non-primitive values. In addition to element access, array capabilities support the abstract manipulation of arrays, logical splitting of arrays into subarrays, and merging subarrays. These operations allow expressing a wide range of array use cases. (edited) This paper presents the array capability design space and show how it applies to a number of array use cases. The core ideas are formalised and proven sound in a simple calculus, along with a proof that shows that well-typed programs with array capabilities are free from data-races.
• Android 10
  All the latest features, improvements, and new controls you get in Android 10. From new privacy controls to support for foldables and 5G.
• Subsistence Programming
• Debugging WebAssembly
• Metaphysics and JavaScript
• Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick
• Mach kernel
• Windows File Manager Re-Release
• Differentiable Programming Mega-Proposal
• PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity
• Multi language programming playground for developers. Extremely fast.

Quote of the week

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

        — Wirth’s law

Enterprises

• Famous Graphics Chips: Microsoft’s Talisman
• Google is ramping up its efforts to make replace SMS with RCS
• Cue: A new configuration language from Google
  Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
• Committed to a Safer Google Play for Families
• Amazon Has a Nuclear Option Against Walmart and Other Competitors
• Tesla Batteries Are Keeping Zimbabwe’s Economy Running
• Fuck Off Google
• Google patents application: Batch normalization layers
• We, the peoples of the Amazon, are full of fear. Soon you will be too
• Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos to America’s Streets
• China sows disinformation on Hong Kong using porn accounts on Twitter
  The accounts were purchased because of their large follower count, and then used to spam Twitter with information about the Hong Kong protests.
• Why the Amazon Basics Keyboard Is My Favorite Keyboard
  I’ve been typing for 20+ years and this is one of my favorite general purpose / programming keyboards when factoring in a few things.
• Google’s GDPR Workaround
  Brave presents new RTB evidence, and has uncovered a mechanism by which Google appears to be circumventing its purported GDPR privacy protections.
• Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers
  Evidence submitted to Irish regulator accuses tech giant of ‘exploiting personal data’
• Google, YouTube to Pay $170M Penalty over Collecting Kids’ Personal Info
• Amazon’s Shipping Empire Is Challenging UPS and FedEx
• Google has secret webpages that feed your personal data to advertisers
• Tesla’s Autopilot found partly to blame for 2018 crash on the 405
• Google: Enabling developers and organizations to use differential privacy
  News and insights on Google platforms, tools, and events.
• Intel to Launch Core I9-9900KS Next Month: 5 GHz on All Cores
• Stripe Capital
  Access the funds you need to grow your business. Stripe Capital provides access to fast financing with one flat fee and flexible payments.
• How Amazon Hooked America on Fast Delivery, Avoiding Responsibility for Crashes
• Announcement of the 2019 Fellowship Awardees and Highlights from the Google PhD
• How to do a code review
  Google’s Engineering Practices documentation
• The Human Cost of Amazon’s Fast, Free Shipping
• Richard Stallman at Microsoft (no, we do not dream)
  Le fondateur du mouvement des logiciels libres a été invité chez Microsoft, où il a donné une conférence.
• Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week
• Fancy Zones, a tiling window manager from Microsoft
  Windows system utilities to maximize productivity. Contribute to microsoft/PowerToys development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Feds Demand Apple and Google Hand over Names of 10k Users of a Gun Scope App
• New Google and Facebook Inquiries
• Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer
  In an attempt to dispel the idea that if you have to google stuff you’re not a proper engineer, this is a list of nearly everything I googled in a week at work, where I’m a software engineer with several years’ experience.
  Obviously these weren’t all googled in a row (although you can probably spot that a few were), but throughout the day. I can’t remember the context of everything I was googling, but hopefully it’ll make you feel a little better next time you have to google something.
• WeWork’s List of Potential Conflicts Adds to Questions Ahead of IPO

Other news

• Linux Pressure Stall Information (PSI) by Example
• How to Make Billions of Dollars Reducing Loneliness
• I find journaling indispensable and how you can too
  A simple thing, on paper. Get a piece of it out and start writing. Or typing – doesn’t really matter. Anything and everything that comes to mind. It’s weird and unnatural at first – push through it. Save it, or burn it. Don’t overthink it. Wait a few days, and do it again, and again, and keep doing it. Four years into it and I’m just beginning to grasp the immensity of the benefits this simple habit has brought to my life – so I hope to share some of them with you.
• Sources say China used iPhone hacks to target Uyghur Muslims
• How to learn things at 1000x the speed
  Throughout my schooling and career, I’ve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got a simple question and failed miserably after… | Pranay Prakash | I care about tech and work on reference implementations for idealistic projects
• How the Aspiring Can Learn to Write Like Economists
• How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran
• Netherlands played crucial role in infecting Iran with the Stuxnet virus
• Good Code Design from Linux
  Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux …
• ‘Small’ cut to cholesterol can reduce heart attack and stroke risk by 80pc
• OpenBSD was Right – Linux Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman
• Woman is first to receive cornea made from ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells
• Why does Linux still use the GPLv2?
• Teardown of a Failed Linux LTS Spectre Fix
• How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
  Cassava is very dangerous if not prepared properly, so how did people develop and share that knowledge?
• Microsoft Controlling Linux Means That Open Source Wins, Apparently
• How U.S. Banks Took Over the World
• Lab-Testing Startup UBiome Files for Bankruptcy
• A hierarchy of software engineering discourse
• How to learn D3.js
• Why Americans pay more for lunch than Britons do

AI, bots and robots

• The Rise of the Peer Review Bots
• Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants
• OpenSpiel: A Framework for Reinforcement Learning in Games
• Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks
  Posted by Adam Gaier, Student Researcher and David Ha, Staff Research Scientist, Google Research, Tokyo When training a neural network …
• A 2019 Guide to Speech Synthesis with Deep Learning
• Machine learning primitives in rustc
• The Death of Alexander the Great: One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries
• Cops Hijack Botnet, Remotely Wipe Malware from 850k Computers
• Scurrying Roaches Help Researchers Steady Staggering Robots
• Growing up in post-communist Romania – thoughts on learning English
• Robotic thread is designed to slip through the brain’s blood vessels
• Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Starsky Robotics Front-End Software Engineer-Teleoperations
• Neural Networks Are Essentially Polynomial Regression
• Sugar: Open-source software learning platform for children
  Sugar Labs contributes to and helps maintain the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform, which promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities.

Blockchain and decentralization

• Moscow’s blockchain voting system cracked a month before election
• a distributed PGP keyserver based on the dat protocol
  a distributed PGP keyserver project based on the dat protocol – tdjsnelling/dat-keyserver
• Australian who says he invented Bitcoin ordered to hand over up to $5bn
• Portugal Tax Authority: Bitcoin Trading and Payments Are Tax-Free

Cloud and architecture

• Software Architecture Guide
  Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system’s internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
• Enabling a permanent revolution in internet architecture
• Using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare Workers for free image hosting
  Learn how to setup your own, free image hosting using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare Workers.
• iPaaS – Integration Platform as a Service
• Private cloud at home – no server needed, no complicated installation
• EU governments choose independence from US cloud providers with Nextcloud
• NextStep – Product to help SaaS companies improve conversion rates
• Tufts Ph.D. ‘Punished’ for Reporting Adviser’s Fabricated Research: Lawsuit
• Introduction to Event-Driven Architectures with RabbitMQ
  

  Event-driven architectures (EDA) gather several useful patterns to deliver maintainable code,

• FileKit: An open source end-to-end encrypted cloud storage service in JavaScript
• The Unum Pattern

Development and languages

• Environment and the programming language Self, part 4
• Life of Brian: why the Monty Python film was banned and became a box office hit
  Forty years after Life of Brian was first released, Nicholas Barber looks at why the Monty Python film was banned – and went on to become a box office hit.
• Steps to Protecting Your Digital Home
• Intel and Rust: The Future of Systems Programming
• Banned C standard library functions in Git source code
  Git Source Code Mirror – This is a publish-only repository and all pull requests are ignored. Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements. – git/git
• Programming shape using kirigami tessellations
• Salsify – video codec and transport protocol thats better than WebRTC
• Android 10: Google Confirms 193 Security Vulnerabilities Need Fixing
• How Facebook Tracks You on Android
• The A-Z of Programming Languages: Interviews with programming language creators
• Zero-Config Documentation Websites for Python
• Useless Windows 10 Features
• Macron says France and U.S. reached digital tax deal
• Unison (Programming Language)
• Mid or Senior Python Engineer
• If you must run Windows 10
• Python rounds float values by converting them to string and then back
• New Android Warning: 100M+ Users Installed App with Malware
• CamScanner, a malicious Android app with more than 100M downloads in Google Play
• Google just deleted my nearly 10-year-old free and open-source Android app
  google@play-store: sudo rm -rf org.mtransit.android*
• Connective – Large-scale reactive programming in Javascript/Typescript
• Cryptographic key used to sign one of Facebook’s Android apps compromised
• The Baseline Interpreter: A Faster JavaScript Interpreter in Firefox 70
  Modern web applications load and execute a lot more JavaScript code than they did just a few years ago. While JIT (just-in-time) compilers have been very successful in making JavaScript …
• Facebook scans system libraries on Android and uploads them to their server

Quote of the week

The only places for icons is in a church, a burning church at that.

        — mhat

Enterprises

• The Amazon in Brazil is on fire – how bad is it?
  Thousands of fires are ravaging the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. How bad are they?
• More Fires Now Burning in Angola, Congo Than Amazon
• Modern Artificial Intelligence for Ancient Games
• Does the Amazon provide 20% of our oxygen?
  The news is full of the surge in deforestation and fires in the Amazon rainforest, and and I have been fielding various media enquiries about what is causing this rise and what it means for our…
• Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph
• What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time?
  “What happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time on a Windows 10 machine? When I launched Google Chrome for the first time (and let it sit for a minute), 32 requests were made, and 7.26 MB of data downloaded.”
• Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel
• Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature
  Publishers say it is a ‘quintessential’ violation of copyright law
• Tesla Model 3 Cost of Ownership Slightly Cheaper Than a Camry
• Elon Musk Gambled Tesla to Save SolarCity
• The Amazon Is Not the ‘Lungs of the World’
  Amazon deforestation is 75% below its 2004 high. Fires are up just 7% higher than their 10-year average. And fires in the forest itself aren’t increasing. Here’s why everyone got it wrong.
• Keeping Tesla Roadsters Alive Is Serious Work
  If you have a Tesla Roadster and you live in the Pacific Northwest, you probably know Carl Medlock.
• Google Calendar Event Injection with MailSniper
• Former Star Google and Uber Engineer Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets
  Anthony Levandowski, one of Silicon Valley’s foremost technologists on autonomous cars, was charged with theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google.
• Book Review: Reframing Superintelligence
• Lessons from Stripe
  How working at Stripe changed my outlook on optimism, ambition, and recruiting.
• Rust is the future, C is the new Assembly: Josh Triplett (Intel)
• Feds ordered Google location dragnet to solve Wisconsin bank robbery
  Another reverse location search warrant
• Reasons Not to Use Google
• Microsoft Is Killing ePub Support in Edge Classic
• Google begins penalising domain leasing
• Netflix “13 Reasons Why” linked to 29% increase in teen suicides 1 month later
• Banned from Google Ads for Using Apple Card
  Companies like Google have waged war on virtual cards and left Apple Card users without service.
• On-Device, Real-Time Hand Tracking with MediaPipe
  Posted by Valentin Bazarevsky and Fan Zhang, Research Engineers, Google Research The ability to perceive the shape and motion of hands c…
• Is Twitter Aiding India’s Quest to Silence Kashmiris?

Other news

• Quantum Air buys Bye’s electric airplanes
• PacVim – PacVim is a game that teaches you vim commands
• Federal fraud indictment: KU professor secretly worked for Chinese university
• Quantum Interference Between Light Sources Separated by 150M Kilometers
• FreeBSD’s Executive Director Calls for Linux and BSD Devs to Work Together
• The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
  For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don’t know there’s anything wrong with it.
• I Took a Pay Cut for a More Meaningful Job
• From Mac to Linux – the setup I’ve grown to love
• Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
  I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt.
• Woman Finds Yellow Diamond While Watching YouTube Video on How to Find Diamonds
• The Women of ‘LIFE’ Magazine
• How to compile a Linux kernel in the 21st century – Opensource.com
• What Netflix’s ‘Great Hack’ Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica
• Linux package managers are slow
• You’re paying too much for business software
• Lessons we learned when debugging a scaling problem on GitLab.com
• Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum
• I created Postwoman, an online, open-source API request builder
• Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition
  Firefox Developer Edition is the blazing fast browser that offers cutting edge developer tools and latest features like CSS Grid support and framework debugging
• The Math That Takes Newton into the Quantum World
  In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the…
• Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform
• Coursera acquires Rhyme Softworks, an online platform for hands-on projects
• We Reduced Deployment Times by 95%
• exFAT in the Linux kernel
  We’re pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoft’s exFAT technology to the Linux kernel.
• Rich Families Are Legally Separating from Their Kids to Pay Less for College
  It’s the latest tactic the wealthy use to game the system.
• IBM has released the Power Architecture instruction set to the Linux Foundation
  “With great power comes great responsibility.” – Uncle Ben Remember PowerPC? Nah, me neither. But now it can be yours. For free. Srsly.  IBM has released the Power Architecture instruction set to t…
• Bontrager’s WaveCel material more effective at preventing concussions than MIPS
  We hear lots of noise about ‘revolutionary’ new products in cycling. They are essentially never revolutionary, and frequently aren’t even new. But when Trek starts teasing a new product with the tag, “A change like this happens once every 30 years,” we’re pretty sure it’s a big deal. Speculation started. Was the lime green material …
• Towards parallel Linux kernel test runs
• A deep dive into Linux namespaces, part 4
• From the Battlefield to ‘Little Women’
• DDSketch: A fast, fully-mergeable quantile sketch with relative-error guarantees
• Uber proposes policy that would pay drivers a minimum wage of $21 per hour
  On the heels of a driver-led protest outside Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, where drivers showed their support for gig worker protections legislation (via Assembly Bill 5) and demanded a union, Uber is circulating a petition urging people to “protect ridesharing in California.&#8221…
• How software made me loathe my luxury car
  I am the disgruntled owner of a 2015 BMW 320d xDrive. That’s a luxury car, at least to a Dane. And I’m a bit surprised that it’s come to this point. It is…
• Linux kernel drivers in Rust might become an option in the future
• How to Teach an Iris Scanner That the Eye It’s Looking at Is Dead
• Quantum radar has been demonstrated for the first time
• The Portuguese Bank Note Crisis of 1925
• Websites have been quietly hacking iPhones for years, says Google
• Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked
• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Account Hacked
  Mr. Dorsey’s account began posting racial epithets, profanities and bomb threats on Friday afternoon. A company spokesman confirmed it was hacked.
• Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account briefly taken over by hackers
  The co-founder and CEO’s account was used to retweet a flurry of highly offensive messages.