News

Go Language Of The Year With Dart Catching Up   Wednesday 11 January

At the end of the year we always take a look at the dubious results offered by the TIOBE index. Don't get too hung up on issues of accuracy, this is more about the feeling of the programming community rather than anything else.

Google Closing Much Of Hangouts API   Wednesday 11 January

Google is shutting the Hangouts API, so that even existing apps that use it will cease working from April onwards.

Reviewing the Stats for Android Versions   Wednesday 11 January

The latest statistics relating to Android Versions show a familiar pattern. The latest version Nougat still has an insignificant share while the largest pie slice belongs not to the previous version (Marshmallow) but to the one before that. Also significant is the fact that Froyo has dropped off the chart.

//No Comment - Let's Encrypt, IoT Security & Obfuscation   Tuesday 10 January

• No domain left behind: Is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?

• Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

• Obfuscation using Encryption 

The Computer Science Breakthrough Of The Decade Now Reinstated!   Tuesday 10 January

This is almost unprecedented. First we have a major result in computer science. A couple of months later  it is suddenly retracted, causing a wave of disappointment through the community. But to our great relief it is reinstated after only a few days.

Action Resulting From Oracle Survey   Tuesday 10 January

At last year's JavaOne Anil Gaur, vice president of Oracle's Cloud Application Foundation group, announced a survey to help determine priorities for the revised road map for Java EE. The survey results are now available, together with the revised Java EE 8 proposals.

New Facebook Computer Vision Tags   Monday 09 January

Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags is a new Chrome and Firefox extension that overlays all images appearing on your Facebook timeline with a neural-network derived classification. This reveals what Facebook's algorithms makes of them. Should we be worried?

Actions On Google   Monday 09 January

Google has opened up Actions on Google, its developer platform for Google Assistant. It can now be used to add Conversation Actions that provide a way to give your users information, services, and assistance. 

//No Comment - Motion-Planning Chip, Robot Alexa & BB8 autonomous car   Sunday 08 January

• Motion-Planning Chip Speeds Robots

• Lynx: The First Video-Enabled Humanoid Robot with Amazon Alexa

• NVIDIA Self-Driving Car Demo at CES 2017

Facebook Hacker Cup 2017 Kicks Off   Saturday 07 January

Of all the coding competitions, the Facebook Hacker Cup seems the most exciting. It is accessible to almost everybody and while you have to be an elite coder to get to the finals there's a lot along the way for all comers. Start today and who knows you might one day join the elite ranks.

//No Comment - Unums,1×n Jigsaw Puzzles are Hard & P ? = NP   Friday 06 January

• The Unum Number Format: Mathematical Foundations, Implementation and Comparison to IEEE 754 Floating-Point Numbers

• Even  1×n  Edge-Matching and Jigsaw Puzzles are Really Hard 

• P ? = NP 

AlphaGo Revealed As Mystery Player On Winning Streak   Friday 06 January

A mysterious unknown Go player appeared on Chinese online platforms at the end of December and beat the world's top ranked players one after another. On January 4th Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis revealed the player to be a new prototype version of AlphaGo.

Spark BI Gets Fine Grain Security   Friday 06 January

There's a new technique for adding fine grain security when using Apache Hive and Spark to work with large data sets.

Conexant Releases Alexa Voice DK For Raspberry Pi   Thursday 05 January

Conexant and Amazon have launched an Alexa Voice Service development kit for the Raspberry Pi 3. The kit includes a voice Input processor with a dual microphone board that you can use to add voice recognition at a distance to Raspberry Pi voice-controlled smart home IoT applications.

The Core

How to Authenticate a Device in the Industrial Internet of Things   Monday 09 January

When it comes to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), device security offers a very distinctive set of challenges. This tutorial provides a hands-on guide to authenticating devices on the GE Predix platform.

JavaScript Data Structures - Array Object   Thursday 05 January

When JavaScript was first introduced to the world it didn't have a dedicated Array data structure - it simply didn't need one, but it got one nevertheless!

Here we look at the Array object, which is easy to use, but can cause a lot of confusion if you don't think about it in the right way.