Safety Check — a tool that checks for compromised passwords, Chrome updates, and other potential security issues in the browser — has been updated to run automatically in the background so that it can be more proactive in protecting users. 

It will now inform users whenever it takes actions, such as revoking permissions from sites that haven’t been visited in a while or flagging potentially unwanted notifications. 

Safety Check also now automatically revokes notification permissions for a site if Google Safe Browsing determines that site deceived users into granting permission in the first place.

In a similar vein, Android users will now be able unsubscribe from site notifications in one click by tapping the “Unsubscribe” button that will now appear in the notifications drawer. This feature is now available on Pixel devices and will be available on more Android devices down the line. 

“This feature has already resulted in a 30 percent reduction in notification volume on supported Pixel devices, and we’re looking forward to bringing it to the broader ecosystem,” Andrew Kamau, product manager from Chrome at Google, wrote in a blog post. 

And finally, Chrome will now offer the ability for users to grant website permissions for a single visit to the site. For instance, a user could grant the site access to the phone’s mic, and then once the user leaves the site, Chrome revokes the permission and the site will have to ask again the next time they visit. 

“With these new features, you can continue to rely on Chrome for a safer browsing experience that gives you even more control over how you explore the internet,” Kamau concluded.

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To avoid memory leaks, the latest version lets the context point to a ScopeInfo in order to break down dependencies. According to the team, there is already a three percent v* memory improvement on mobile devices. For performance, the release will feature array destructuring, object.assign and TypedArray.prototype.sort improvements. In addition, developers can start using trap-based bounds checking on Linux x64 platforms, the team explained.

The version is currently in beta, and will remain in beta until the release of Chrome 68 Stable in a few weeks. More information is available here.

Intel CEO resigns

Brian Krzanich has announced he is resigning as CEO and a memory of the Board of Directors for Intel. Chief financial officer Robert Swan will become the interim CEO, effective immediately.

The resignation comes after the company was informed Krzanich had a consensual relationship with an employee. According to Intel, the company has a non-fraternization policy that applies to all managers.

“The Board believes strongly in Intel’s strategy and we are confident in Bob Swan’s ability to lead the company as we conduct a robust search for our next CEO. Bob has been instrumental to the development and execution of Intel’s strategy, and we know the company will continue to smoothly execute. We appreciate Brian’s many contributions to Intel,” said Intel chairman Andy Bryant.

Google Play updated with new developer features

Google Play is getting a new update to help developers grow and optimize their subscriptions. The Google Play team announced a new subscription center designed to help users view, manage, renew, restore and cancel subscriptions. In addition, the center will also provide a cancellation survey to give developers more feedback into why a user is cancelling.

With the subscription center, Google is also announcing new deep links to enable users to manage subscriptions from their app, email or website. Other features include the ability to accept price changes without setting up a new SKU.

“We strongly believe that by building a great user experience, we build a high quality subscriber base. And by giving you tools and insights to better manage your business, you have the flexibility to do what is best for your business and your customers,” the Google Play team wrote in a post.

Oracle donates code to Apache

Oracle has completed a second donation to Apache NetBeans, the IDE for Java. According to the Apache Software Foundation, Oracle donated 1.5 million lines of code. “This donation constitutes the modules of NetBeans dealing with enterprise Java, JavaScript, PHP, Groovy, as well as miscellaneous features applicable to Mobile and Web development,” Apache wrote in a statement announcing the news.

Apache NetBeans (incubating 9.0) will focus on JavaSE. “After that, or at least separate from that process, we will start relicensing the new code, i.e., from the 2nd donation, once it is in Apache NetBeans Git. Right now, it is a ZIP file, it needs to be moved to Apache NetBeans Git, and we need to do that in the right way, and figure out what the right way is,” Apache wrote.

The post SD Times news digest: V8 6.8, Google Play developer features, and Oracle’s donation to Apache NetBeans appeared first on SD Times.

According to the report, 64% of Chrome traffic on Android is now protected with HTTPS, compared to last year’s 42%. In addition, 75% of Chrome traffic is now protected on ChromeOS and Mac, and 71 of the top 100 websites use HTTPS by default.

“HTTPS is easier and cheaper than ever before, and it enables both the best performance the web offers and powerful new features that are too sensitive for HTTP. There’s never been a better time to migrate,” Emily Schechter, Chrome security product manager, wrote in a post.  

Since the beginning of this year, the company has been marking sites without HTTPS encryption as “not secure” on its browsers. This initiative is meant to help users understand when websites are not secure as well as to motivate site owners to improve website security, according to Google. Website owners can secure their website easily through Let’s Encrypt, a free and automated certificate authority, which Google sponsors.

“HTTPS helps keep your browsing safe by securely connecting your browser or app with the websites you visit. HTTPS relies on encryption technology—SSL or TLS—to secure these connections,” the report states. “HTTPS ensures the content you view online hasn’t been eavesdropped on or altered by others on the network, like your internet service provider.”

The report also found HTTPS usage is increasing worldwide with a recent surge in Japan. Japan’s HTTPS adoption went from 31% to 55% in the last year, according to the report.

Google also announced several new security features to better protect users this month. The announcements are part of October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month. New features include: personalized advice from the revamped Security Checkup solution, predictive phishing protection in Chrome and smarter protections for Gmail users. Other HTTPS solutions include managed SSL for Google App Engine and an effort to secure top-level Google domains by default with HTTPS Strict Transport Security.

“Security is top of mind for everyone these days, and with one troubling headline after another, you may be concerned about the security of your information online,” Schechter wrote. “Rest assured: your Google data is secured by the best protections on the planet, and we’ll never stop improving them to ensure your information remains safe.”

More information on how to switch to HTTPS is available here.

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Facebook pledged an additional US$2.65 million investment in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Learning in Machine & Brains program over five years, continuing their support for the institute’s work on artificial intelligence research.

“Facebook’s investment in CIFAR and in the Canadian AI community recognizes the strength of Canadian research in artificial intelligence,” Alan Bernstein, president & CEO of CIFAR, said in the announcement. ”I’m proud of the major part that CIFAR played in helping to spark today’s AI boom, and the part we continue to play in the AI sphere.”

Additionally, Facebook announced the opening of a Facebook AI Research Lab in Montreal, complementing the ones in Menlo Park, New York and Paris. In total, Facebook pledged $7 million in support for Canadian AI initiatives.

VR graphing tool CalcFlow now open source

The developers of the open-source decentralized collaboration platform Matryx have announced that their CalcFlow virtual reality graphing tool is going open source.

Matryx’s aim is to lower the barrier of entry for enthusiasts, academics and professionals to their mathematical modeling tool, while bolstering the platform with community-driven development.

“By releasing both CalcFlow and Matryx as open source software, we’re realizing our vision to provide a platform for decentralized collaboration while enabling our users to help advance the technology as their needs require,” Steve McCloskey, CEO of Matryx, said in the announcement.

FTP to be marked as insecure in Chrome 63

As of the upcoming Chrome 63, FTP sites will be marked as insecure by the browser.

“As part of our ongoing effort to accurately communicate the transport security status of a given page, we’re planning to label resources delivered over the FTP protocol as “Not secure,” beginning in Chrome 63,” Mike Brown, a staff software engineer with Google announced in a post.

The development team behind the decision recommends that developers migrate publicly available downloads, especially executables, from FTP to HTTPS.

The post Facebook invests in CIFAR AI, CalcFlow goes open source and FTP deprecated in Chrome — SD Times News Digest: September 15, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

Other features include PackageReference support in UWP projects, new .NET native compiler distributed as a NuGet package, improved Visual Studio integration integration for XAML controls, support for detecting SDK version specific code, command line arguments in debug mode, and UWP streaming install support.

The full release notes are available here.

Windows Vista support is coming to an end
Microsoft also revealed it will soon end support for its operating system Windows Vista. Support will stop on April 11, 2017. After that time, users should not expect security updates, hot fixes, support options, or online technical content.

“Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences,” Microsoft wrote in a statement.

Kinetise’s source code generator
Kinetise, a rapid development platform provider, recently launched a new platform that allows developers and users to create custom, advanced, feature-rich, performing native mobile apps that connects to any RESTful API from scratch without any coding. The company says this is different from other low-code or no coding tools because it provides more template-based apps.

Features include drag-and-drop editor, ability to download native source code, the ability to modify source code if needed, content presentation, maps, submitting data, user authentication, user roles, parameterized API-calls, GPS tracking, offline scenarios support, custom logic, and local variables.

Rust 1.16 released
The Rust team has announced the latest version of its systems programming language. Version 1.16 is now stable. The largest addition of the release is cargo check, a subcommand to accelerate the development workflow.  In order to support cargo check, rustc — the aspect of the language that compiles the code — was updated to learn to emit the .rmeta file.

“This file will contain only the metadata about a particular crate. cargo check needs this for your dependencies, to let the compiler check types and such from them. It’s also useful for the Rust Language Server, and possibly more tools in the future,” the Rust core team wrote in a post.

Other improvements include the removal of a long-standing diagnostics, library stabilizations, and cargo features.

WebGL 2.0 available for Chrome users
WebGL 2.0 is currently available for Chrome users with modern graphics hardware on Windows, macOS, Linux, and coming soon, Android.

The WebGL JavaScript API exposes hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the web, according to a Chromium blog, and Chrome 56 brings in support for WebGL 2.0, which is a major upgrade.

WebGL 2.0 comes with new capabilities, and is designed to make it easier to build 3D web apps with fast real-time rendering and reduced video memory consumption. Also, WebGL 2.0 introduces an expanded conformance test suite with over 340,000 test cases, according to the blog.

More information can be found here.

The post Visual Studio 2017 Update Preview, Rust 1.16, Kinetise’s rapid development platform and WebGL 2.0–SD Times news digest: March 17, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

The report revealed that 28% of respondents want to deploy hourly, but no progress has been made when it comes to finding and fixing identified bugs fast. In addition, 14% of respondents revealed they aren’t deploying as fast as they want to.

“What is surprising from this report is the revelation that the speed in fixing identified bugs has remained stagnant,” said Charles Ramsey, CEO of Sauce Labs. “There is huge opportunity for teams to leverage automated testing to identify bugs earlier in the release cycle, immediately evaluate the bug with video playback and other assets, and share those test results across teams to fix them as quickly as possible.”

LogicHub comes out of stealth
A new company wants to help businesses defend against breaches. LogicHub has announced a US$8.4 million series A round of funding and a new approach to threat detection. Its security intelligence automation solution is designed to reduce the chance of a missed breach by more than 10x.

“At the end of the day, experienced cyber analysts are much better at detecting threats and triaging false alarms than the security tools available, but given the magnitude of the challenge, most teams can only inspect a tiny fraction of all security events collected in-depth,” said Kumar Saurabh, cofounder and CEO of LogicHub. “To combat this, LogicHub has found a way to capture and automate the knowledge and expertise of the most skilled cyber analysts, which results in much deeper threat detection.”

Google open-sources Chrome on iOS
Google is releasing the Chrome for iOS code into open source. The company has previously kept the code separate from the Chromium project because of the additional complexity that came with the platform. According to Google, after years of refactoring the code, it is now ready to be moved into open source.

“Given Chrome’s commitment to open-source code, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years making the changes required to upstream the code for Chrome for iOS into Chromium,” wrote Rohit Rao, developer for Google, in a blog post. “Today, that upstreaming is complete, and developers can compile the iOS version of Chromium like they can for other versions of Chromium. Development speed is also faster now that all of the tests for Chrome for iOS are available to the entire Chromium community and automatically run any time that code is checked in.”

Google’s Vulnerability Rewards Program in 2016
Google is releasing the details of its Vulnerability Rewards Program from 2016. According to the company, last year it awarded more than US$3 million total rewards, nearly $1 million each for Android and Chrome vulnerabilities, and more than $9 million since they founded the program in 2010.

In addition, more than 1,000 individual awards were granted to more than 350 security researchers in 59 countries. The biggest single reward was $100,000.

Red Hat and Boston University team up
Red Hat and Boston University are partnering up on a new collaborative research and education initiative. The new initiative will advance research and education on open-source and emerging technologies such as cloud computing, machine learning, automation, and Big Data.

The partnership is a part of a five-year agreement in which Red Hat will provide grants totaling $5 million. The agreement will include a Red Hat emerging technology lab at Boston University, Red Hat graduate fellows, and Red Hat postdoctoral and visiting scientist fellowships.

Dropbox sponsors Pyston releases v0.6.1
Pyston version 0.6.1 was released this week, with performance enhancements that make it 95% faster than CPython on standard benchmarks.

Dropbox is sponsoring this release, and this decision comes because of Dropbox’s ability to write performance-sensitive code in languages like Go. Also, the Pyston team has been spending more time on compatibility than expected, wrote Kevin Modzelewski, a software engineer for Dropbox.

He also wrote that on Dropbox’s server, Pyston is 10% faster on standard Python benchmarks. With this release, the team also announced that it is looking into upstreaming parts of its code back to Python, since the code is now based in theirs, he added.

The post Sauce Lab’s 2017 testing report, LogicHub’s approach to threat detection, and Google open-sources Chrome on iOS—SD Times news digest: Feb. 1, 2017 appeared first on SD Times.

“Starting today, you can build experiences for all of these users, and also test them in VR using Carmel. As new devices are released over time, our frameworks will automatically upgrade your content to work well across all browsers and devices, both in and out of VR,” the Oculus VR team wrote in an announcement.

The Carmel starter kit features samples for Hello WebVR, gamepad, HTML5 navigation, and panoramas.

Google’s official plan to move to HTML5 by default
Google has announced its rollout plan for implementing HTML5 By Default. The company first announced it would be moving to HTML5 four months ago to provide a safer and power-efficient experience, it said. HTML5 By Default will disable Adobe Flash Player unless specified.

“The feature will be rolled out to users over a few months,” wrote Eric Deily, technical program manager at Google, in a blog post. “HTML5 By Default will be enabled for 1% of users of Chrome 55 Stable in the next few days. The feature is also enabled for 50% of Chrome 56 beta users. With Chrome 56 stable in February, we plan to enable it for all users.”

Segment teams up with Google BigQuery
Segment announced its beta integration with BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse. This will allow developers who build data pipelines to pipe all of their company’s first- and third-party customer data using a single API.

BigQuery and Segment will also allow developers to pipe petabytes of raw data from websites, apps, servers, and cloud sources like Salesforce and Zendesk, according to an announcement from a marketing spokesperson at Segment, JJ Nguyen. Developers can also adjust their cluster sizes, add more machines, and manage large data sets as they grow.

Other features of BigQuery are its ability to continuously self-optimize, its ability to scale and power thousands of servers, and its low costs for storage, so managing data querying costs can be controlled through Google’s cost controls and query caching, the company said.

Apple details Swift 3.1 release process
Apple is currently working on version 3.1 of its programming language, Swift. After 3.1, the company plans to move its focus to the development of Swift 4. Swift 3.1 will be designed to be source compatible with Swift 3.0, and feature improvements to its core language, package manager, Swift on Linux, compiler, and standard library.

According to the team, source compatibility will be a top priority.

BlackBerry announces Enterprise of Things platform
As BlackBerry aims to make a move toward software, the company has announced a new mobile-native approach. Its new mobile-security platform is designed for the “Enterprise of Things.” According to the company, the enterprise faces data breaches and cybersecurity threats almost every day. The new platform is designed to help businesses manage and secure devices, connect things, and secure communications.

“Businesses must be able to confidentially and reliably transmit sensitive data between endpoints to keep people, information and goods safe,” said John Chen, executive chairman and CEO of BlackBerry. “BlackBerry is uniquely qualified to address this emerging market now because of our deep experience, industry leadership and ongoing product innovation that addresses future business needs.”

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According to Google’s Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, vice president of product management, approximately 1% of users on Linux, Mac and Windows actively use Chrome packaged apps. Most of the hosted apps today are implemented as regular web apps, according to Google. All Chrome apps will remain supported and maintained on Chrome OS in the future, and additional enhancements will only apply to Chrome OS devices, including kiosks. Developers will still be able to build Chrome apps or Android apps for Chrome OS.

Starting in the second half of 2017, the Chrome Web Store will no longer show Chrome apps for Linux, Mac and Windows. And in 2018, users on these platforms will not be able to load Chrome apps at all. In late 2016, newly published Chrome apps will be available to users on Chrome OS only.

Microsoft acquires Genee to power AI experiences in Office 365
Microsoft will acquire Genee, an artificial intelligence-powered scheduling service, as a way to implement automated functions in Office 365.

According to a blog post by Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Outlook and Office 365, “Genee uses natural language processing and optimized decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one.” As Microsoft continues to build out Office 365 productivity capabilities and services, the Genee team will help it advance its intelligence skills to the digital experience, the company said.

U.S. Department of Education launches EQUIP experiment for low-income students
In order to give low-income students access to federal student aid, the U.S. Department of Education is inviting eight partnerships between institutions of higher education and non-traditional providers to participate in what it calls the EQUIP (Education Quality through Innovation Partnerships) experiment.

The DOE’s goals of this experiment include testing new ways of getting Americans with diverse backgrounds innovative learning opportunities; strengthening approaches for processes that focus on learning; and giving students opportunities including coding boot camps and online courses.

According to the DOE, “As part of an experiment designed to explore the efficacy of the approach, EQUIP will enable students at the selected colleges and universities to receive federal financial aid for programs that exceed the 50% cap, thereby increasing access for students to new types of programs and allowing the Department to consider whether those programs resulted in positive student outcomes and how to track meaningful quality measures.”

Selected sites include Colorado State University Global Campus, SUNY Empire State College, and the University of Texas at Austin, to name a few. A full list of sites is available here.

FBI launches bank robbery tracking mobile app
The FBI has launched an app for iPhones, iPads, iPods and Android smartphones, which should make it easy for the public to view photos and information about bank robberies all over the country.

With this app, bank robberies can be sorted by the date they occurred, what category they fall under (such as those committed by armed, serial robbers), the FBI field office working on the case, and the state where the robbery occurred, according to the FBI. The app contains a quick access link directly to the FBI online so users can quickly contact the FBI if they have any information on a robbery.

The app works with BankRobbers.fbi.gov, and it can be downloaded for free from Apple’s app store or Google Play.

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According to the company’s blog, “90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support page analytics,” causing the plugin to slows things down. Starting in September, Chrome 53 will begin to block Flash in favor of HTML5, which is light, fast, and saves battery life, according to the company.

Google explains this is a similar change to one it made last September when Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42.

The company’s upcoming December release of Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, and this will happen to all sites except those that only support Flash. Users will be prompted to enable Flash when they visit a site  if they are visiting sites that only support Flash.

Apple developer beta available 

New beta downloads are now available for Apple developers that want to build and test apps for the latest operating systems.

The company announced beta 5 of Xcode 8 is now available. This release includes Swift 3 and SDKs that allow developers to create apps with the latest release of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

The company recently released the fourth beta pre-release builds of the major platforms a little over a week ago. These releases are leading up to Apple’s final public launch of its software.

Mozilla awards PyPy funding for Python 3.5 support

Mozilla recently awarded US$200,000 to PyPy, a Python JIT compiler, as part of its Mozilla Open Source Support initiative. PyPy will use the funding to implement Python 3.5 features in PyPy.

PyPy wants to see more support of Python 3.x since recent Python 3.5 development has been attracting more users. The long-term goal, according to a PyPy blog, is to “get a version of PyPy3 that is as good as PyPy2, including its performance and its cpyext layer.”

The funding from Mozilla will also be used to pay four core PyPy developers to work on the missing features and big performance issues with PyPy. By doing so, PyPy hopes that this will speed up the progress of catching up with Python 3.x significantly.

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Jacob Rossi, an engineer for Microsoft Edge, tweeted: “Lots of questions on this: yes we’re working on a porting tool to run Chrome extensions in Edge. Not yet finished and not all APIs supported.”

“Since the beginning of the Microsoft Edge project, our road map has always included extensions in order to support a vibrant community of developer innovation on top of the browser, enabling new and interesting scenarios for our customers,” wrote Drew DeBruyne, general manager for Microsoft Edge, in a blog post last week.

A tutorial to learn the basics of CSS
On the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), developers can find Web guides to help them learn basic language features. For those who are looking to get started with CSS, there is a tutorial that introduces developers to the basic features and language of CSS.

The tutorial includes sample exercises that developers can try on their own computers to see the effects of CSS and features that work in modern browsers. The tutorial is for beginners and anyone who wants to review the basics of CSS. For more advanced resources, MDN has a list of other tutorials.

To get started, a text editor, a modern browser, and some experience working with both are needed. The information section of the tutorial is designed to teach users how CSS works. In the second part of the tutorial, there are examples that show the scope of CSS with other Web and Mozilla technologies.

A full list of tutorials is here.

Searchkit update gives developers more extension abilities
Searchkit, an open-source suite of UI components built in React, has announced version 0.8. This release is focused on giving developers the ability to extend and customize Searchkit’s components to their requirements.

According to Searchkit, this is its biggest release to date. Its developers said they realized that some of its components were selectable lists in disguise, and the business logic was nearly identical. The Searchkit team had to separate the rendering logic from its components so they could enable component reuse.

From this, “We were able to increase the number of ways for Searchkit components to render,” wrote contributor Siavash Etemadieh on Searchkit’s blog. “For example, before MenuFilter was only able to render one list of options. With this release, MenuFilter can support seven different ways of displaying options.”

Going forward, Potdevin wrote that they will continue to grow the collection of list components, and now it is “really straightforward to implement your own.”

New open-source tool for Java developers
A new open-source tool wants to help Java developers create better tests and make it simpler for them to refactor procedural code. Called interface-it, it is a Java 8 mixin interface code generator designed to replace static imports with mixin interfaces. According to the project’s creator, static imports make it more difficult to understand code.

“The interface-it library uses reflection to auto-generate Java code for mixin classes that delegate to static methods,” according to the project’s GitHub page. “This can be useful in unit tests, because libraries like Mockito and AssertJ use a lot of static methods. With a generated mixin, you can replace static methods by inherited methods. It’s also useful for refactoring legacy code. You can replace static calls with calls to a mixin interface—reducing the coupling in the design because the mixin can be overridden (and mocked in unit tests).”

The post Microsoft is working on a Chrome extension porting tool, a CSS tutorial, and Searchkit 0.8—SD Times news digest: March 21, 2016 appeared first on SD Times.