News

Cracked - Date for Google I/O 2017   Wednesday 25 January

It's around this time of year that Google announces the date and venue for its annual developer conference, Google I/O. This year it challenged devs to figure it out from a trail of clues.  

Mozilla Looks Into Health of Internet   Wednesday 25 January

Mozilla has released The Internet Health Report v.0.1 covering five key topics: decentralization, digital inclusion, open innovation, privacy and security, and web literacy. It marks the start of an open-source initiative to document the state of the internet.

RethinkDB Closure Analysis   Wednesday 25 January

Now that the dust has settled on the closure of RethinkDB, the chief developer behind RethinkDB has explained why he thinks the project failed, and it makes for sobering reading.

PIX For Windows Introduced   Tuesday 24 January

Microsoft has ported  the Xbox PIX performance tuning and debugging tool to Windows 10.

FSF Sets A New Software Agenda   Tuesday 24 January

The Free Software Foundation has just issued its list of high priority projects and this indicates the critical issues in the open source ecosystem. What does the FSF think we are lacking? And what poses the most dangers?

//No Comment - Fake News Spreads Like Real News, Flu Detector & NNs Detect Clickbait   Monday 23 January

• It's Always April Fools' Day! On the Difficulty of Social Network Misinformation Classification via Propagation Features

• Flu Detector: Estimating influenza-like illness rates from online user-generated content

• We used Neural Networks to Detect Clickbaits: You won’t believe what happened Next!

Asus Tinker Board Takes On Raspberry Pi3   Monday 23 January

Asus has launched a single board computer which shares the general layout of the Raspberry Pi but comes with double the memory and a more powerful CPU, making it almost twice as fast on benchmark tests.

Style Transfer Makes A Movie   Sunday 22 January

It is only a few months ago that neural network based style transfer was the latest thing. Now we have a short and serious movie which contains sections that were generated by style transfer. The director is actress Kristen Stewart who also co-authors the paper.

AI Prevails Against Human Poker Champions   Saturday 21 January

Libratus, an artificial intelligence developed at Carnegie Mellon, is currently taking on four of the world's best professional poker players in a 20-day match at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, in which 120,000 hands of No Limit Texas Hold'em will be played.

//No Comment - Kinect for X-Rays, Kinect as a Baby Monitor & Full Body Motion Tracking With HoloLens   Friday 20 January

The whole subject of depth cameras has more or less dropped out of sight. The Kinect in particular has been declared dead more than once recently, but this is simply a reflection of how high the hype reached before the inevitable crash. Depth cameras are still important and we are still innovating and finding new things to try out.

Google Buys Twitter Dev Platform   Friday 20 January

Google has bought Fabric, Twitter's developer platform, to add it to its Developer Products division alongside Firebase. 

Mycroft On Raspberry Pi An Open Source Alexa   Thursday 19 January

The latest big surprise hit Amazon's Alexa. Voice control seems to be the next big thing, but Amazon makes it hard to extend its reach to really new skills. An alternative is Mycroft, an open source AI with voice control. The good news is that now you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with no fuss.

Get Ready for Expanded Pwn2Own 2017   Thursday 19 January

This year's Pwn2Own hacking contest will be the 10th anniversary edition and the first to be entirely run by Trend Micro. It will feature more targets and more prize money for security researchers who successfully execute zero-day exploits.

ScaleOut Adds Data-Parallel API   Thursday 19 January

ScaleOut Software has released a new version of its in-memory data grid with new features for .NET developers and a new API for data-parallel computing. 

The Core

AWS Lambda For The Impatient Part 2   Sunday 22 January

In the first part of the AWS Lambda for the Impatient tutorial series we set out to create our very first lambda function and call it through an open, public, unrestricted and unauthenticated endpoint.This time around we add security so that calling our lambdas will require the client to authenticate through an IAM Role and User name.

CSS For Programmers - Building a Custom CSS Button   Thursday 19 January

CSS - it's all about presentation and style, the sort of thing designers worry about, not programmers. In fact CSS is more important than HTML5. After all, it actually controls how the UI looks and even how it behaves. If you plan to build a custom control then it is CSS you need to learn.