Tech roundup 39: a journal published by a bot

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

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas Lee todas las entradas de Javi López G.