Linux fréttir

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser. From a report: WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A .wasm resource is analogous to a Java .class file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust. WebAssembly Web API defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a .wasm resource. The structure of a .wasm resource is optimized to allow execution to begin before the entire resource has been retrieved, which further enhances responsiveness of WebAssembly applications. WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides a JavaScript API for invoking and passing parameters to WebAssembly functions. In Web browsers, WebAssembly's interactions with the host environment are all managed through JavaScript, which means that WebAssembly relies on JavaScript's highly-engineered security model.

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May we suggest a rebrand?

B.ICONIC, the parent of one of Ireland's largest Apple Premium Resellers (APRs), is buying Stormfront – the UK Apple retailer that is, rather than the Aryan social network.…

19.11 brings penguin support and a Visual Studio Code extension

Microsoft's forever-in-preview Azure Sphere received an important update this week, bringing a Linux SDK (also in preview form) and Visual Studio Code support.…

On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced a new plan aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country and dismantling what he referred to as "internet and cable monopolies." From a report: In his sweeping "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, Sanders calls for broadband to be considered a public utility, much like electricity, and calls access "a basic human right." The plan would provide $150 billion in grants and technical assistance to states and communities for the purpose of building out their own "democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks." As part of the new plan, Sanders defines "broadband" as 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up, which is significantly higher than the Federal Communications Commission standard of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. If elected president, Sanders said he would also work to restore net neutrality and ban internet and cable companies from instituting data caps and throttling consumer access to the internet.

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From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone's way. But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry -- raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase's open chat channel. It turns out there's a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled "debase." Keybase's leadership is promising to do something to fix the spam problem -- or at least make it easier to report and block abusers. In a blog post, Krohn and Coynes wrote, "To be clear, the current spam volume isn't dire, YET. Keybase still works great. But we should act quickly." But the measures promised by Keybase won't completely eliminate the issue. And Keybase execs have no interest in getting involved with additional steps that they see as censorship. "Keybase is a private company and we do retain our rights to kick people out," the co-founders said in the blog post. "That hammer will not be used because someone is mostly disliked, as long as they're playing nicely on Keybase."

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But get ready to flip your cables cos it's microUSB

HMD Global, the owner of the once-ubiquitous Nokia brand, today unveiled its latest budget blower, the Nokia 2.3.…

The world's forests are being carved into pieces. In tropical regions, animals are likely to pay a heavy price. From a report: Around the world, humans are fracturing vast forests. Highways snake through the Amazon's rain forests, and Indonesia plans an ambitious transportation grid in Borneo, through some of the largest untouched expanses of tropical forests. If you were to parachute at random into any of the planet's forests, you'd probably land a mile or less from its edge, according to a recent study. Conservation biologists have intensely debated the dangers that the fracturing of woodlands poses to animals. While many studies have shown that extinctions are more common in fragmented environments, others haven't documented much effect. A study published on Thursday may help resolve what has been a strident debate, showing why many species are vulnerable to the fragmenting of forests while others are not. Animals in places with a long history of disturbances are relatively resilient, the researchers found. Species that have existed in stable habitats for thousands of years are far more sensitive. "They are taking a new approach on a global scale," said Anna Hargreaves, an evolutionary ecologist at McGill University in Montreal, said of the scientists. "I find it compelling." The first hints of this risk to biodiversity came in the 1960s, when researchers found that bigger islands tended to host more species than smaller ones. Ecologists began to think of forests as islands, too: When a logging company splits what had been continuous belt of trees, two smaller islands may be formed, each of which might support fewer species than the undisturbed tract had.

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Fix it to a wall, stick it on a shelf

While the public cloud might have once been all the rage, the cold light of day has brought the realisation that bandwidth, compliance and convenience means that something a little more local is needed.…

Scientists have discovered that a single-celled organism, a descendant of some of the earliest living creatures on Earth, is able to colonize a meteorite, growing and synthesizing nutrients. From a report: Their experiment, published on Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, may give us a way to look for the signatures of past life on other planets. "This process was very enigmatic and exciting, how the chemical energy of a stone fragment can be transformed into the biochemical energy of a living entity," said Tetyana Milojevic, the first author of the study. "To find an answer to understand this process, I think it's a great moment." Living on a space rock is just one more oddball accolade that the species, Metallosphaera sedula, can add to its growing list. First isolated from a volcanic field in Italy in 1989, the microbe is considered an extremophile because it prefers to live in conditions that would be uninhabitable to most other organisms. Such organisms are helpful for probing the early history of Earth, with its harsh and inhospitable environments, as well as the possibilities for life in the universe.

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UK regulators hash out cheat sheet to avoid total meltdown

The Bank of England has teamed up with other regulators to offer UK banks a little advice on sorting out their woeful IT systems.…

Netflix is plowing 30 billion rupees ($420 million) this year and next to produce more local content in India, one of the biggest and most-crowded markets for the worldâ(TM)s largest paid streaming-service provider. From a report: "You'll start to see a lot of stuff hit the screen, big investment," Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said at an event in New Delhi on Friday. "We're really trying to invest in that becoming more Indian in the content offering." The Los Gatos, California-based company is jostling with other giants such as Walt Disney Co.-owned Hotstar and Amazon.com Prime for a slice of the growing market as more Indians use smartphones to view videos. The companies are offering relatively cheaper packages to lure paying subscribers in a country used to free YouTube offerings. Hastings has said Netflix's goal is to attract 100 million customers in India -- almost 25 times its estimated subscriber base there as of this year. The world's second-most populous country is a priority for company, which is effectively blocked in China. Disney's Hotstar, which is already the leader in India, will get a boost soon when the entertainment giant eventually introduces Disney+, a new streaming service it started last month in some markets.

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Save yourself a few quid and we'll see you in May 2020

Event If DevOps, containers, CI/CD and serverless are on your agenda for next year, grabbing a blind-bird ticket for our Continuous Lifecycle London conference should be top of your end-of-year todo list.…

NVM, we'll give you a toggle to deactivate UWB... in the future-ture-ture

For a company that prizes itself on its privacy credentials, Apple received a bit of a bloody nose earlier this week when long-time security journalist Brian Krebs revealed the iPhone 11 Pro intermittently seeks the user’s location — even when there are no applications with location permissions in use.…

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest. Most of the lives cut short were children aged under five. The situation has been described by health experts as staggering, an outrage, a tragedy and easily preventable with vaccines. Huge progress has been made since the year 2000, but there is concern that incidence of measles is now edging up. In 2018, the U.K. - along with Albania, the Czech Republic and Greece, lost their measles elimination status. And 2019 could be even worse. The U.S. is reporting its highest number of cases for 25 years, while there are large outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Ukraine. The Pacific nation of Samoa has declared a state of emergency and unvaccinated families are hanging red flags outside their homes to help medical teams find them. [...] What is going on? In short, not enough children are being vaccinated. In order to stop measles spreading, 95% of children need to get the two doses of the vaccine. But the figures have been stubbornly stuck for years at around 86% for the first jab, and 69% for the second. The biggest problem is access to vaccines, particular in poor countries.

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Come with us through the gates of Jenkins Land to admire the Java dinosaurs within

DevOps World Lisbon Love was in the air at the CloudBees-sponsored DevOps World in Lisbon this week as the 900 or so attendees were treated to public displays of affection with Google both on stage and behind the scenes.…

Too soon for New Year Resolutions?

Cybercriminals will continue to exploit tried-and-tested fraud methods but also adopt a couple of new takes and targets in the year ahead.…

Great job, now let's do some applied AI with the big boys

Mustafa Suleyman, one of the founders of DeepMind, is to join Google's applied AI division.…

sandbagger writes: BioShock: After Midnight is an original story detailing events that took place in Rapture before the protagonist of the first BioShock game arrived at the city of Rapture. It's a sprawling noir story, following a private eye, an Adam fiend whose fallen in love with Atlas, and the crazed cult members of Sofia Lamb.

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How the worst mobe I ever used maimed an American teen

Comment Earlier this year, I reviewed arguably the worst phone I've ever used in eight years of covering tech for a living: the Doogee S40. I've always prided myself on my fairness, but I genuinely couldn't find a silver lining to this appalling waste of rare-earth metals. It had a crap screen, a weak camera, and was frustratingly slow to use.…

Behold the 'heaving monstrosity of pulsing evil'

On Call Friday has arrived once again with a tale from the smouldering world of On Call.…