An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 50 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, adding the usual slew of developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. As announced in November 2015, Chrome now no longer supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, nor OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Chrome 50 allows sites to include notification data payloads with their push messages. This eliminates the final server check -- the initial version relied on service workers to proactively fetch the information for a notification from the server, leading to problems when there were multiple messages in flight or when the device was on a poor network connection. Push notification payloads must be encrypted. Sites can now detect when a notification is closed by the user, resulting in better analytics and allowing for cross-device notification dismissal. The look of notifications can now be customized with timestamps and icons. Chrome 50 also brings support for declarative preload.

An anonymous reader writes: At this year's F8 developer conference, Facebook announced a new tool called Account Kit, which can be used by app developers to support phone number-based login systems. Every time the user wants to login, they have to enter their phone number. Facebook will then send them a verification code via SMS, which they have to enter on the site. The system was already tested live, and Facebook expects it to be widely adopted, allowing sites to offer users accounts that don't require them to memorize a new password. Each developer has a 100,000 free confirmation SMS messages per month quota. Facebook claims to support SMS login operations for over 230 countries and regions, and in 40 different languages.

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers found a new ransomware yesterday called Jigsaw which will first lock your files and ask for a 0.4 Bitcoin ($150 USD) payment. If users don't pay, every hour the ransomware deletes your files. If the user restarts their PC, the ransomware also deletes 1,000 more files. The good news is there's a free Decrypter available to unlock the ransomware. The Decrypter was built by Michael Gillespie, who announced yesterday on Softpedia the ID Ransomware service, which tells infected victims what kind of ransomware infection they have by allowing them to upload an encrypted file and the ransom note.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla seems to think a new future for Firefox [lies in Chrome]. While they claim that it is only about new ways of browser design, it is also an open secret that they are running into more and more problems lately with web compatibility. [Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser. The project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology, Gecko, but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.] The benefit of Chromium/Electron would be that it is a solution they could pull much faster forward than their own Servo plans [Servo being Mozilla's Rust-based web engine]. What the real outcome of all this will be, only Mozilla knows so far. But inside Mozilla there is much resistance against such plans... Interesting times are ahead.

Facebook is getting even more serious about 360-degree videos and content. At its developer conference, the social juggernaut announced the Surround 360, a 17-lens 3D VR camera. It's not available commercially yet. but the company has opened the design for anyone to modify. All the parts can be bought later this summer for about $30,000. Popular Science reports: The hardware is also coupled with custom software that automatically stitches together the immense amount of high-resolution video the camera records, and permits wireless control of the camera. "We care a lot about just kickstarting and inspiring the ecosystem as much as we can," said Chris Cox, chief product officer at Facebook. While the company isn't manufacturing or selling the cameras, Cox says the team sees it as a high-end "reference camera" that the rest of the community could base their designs on. According to Cox, making VR video breaks down into three steps: capture, processing, and delivery. Facebook already has a clear advantage in the delivery of this content, so now the plan is to break down the barriers for capture and processing.Also at the conference, Facebook announced it was opening up Live Video feature to developers. This would allow developers to integrate live streaming into third-party apps and also stream from any device.

Josh Constine, reporting for TechCrunch: Facebook will now allow businesses to deliver automated customer support, ecommerce guidance, content, and interactive experience through "Bots on Messenger", Facebook's term for chatbots. By providing utility through its huge developer and business ecosystem, Facebook could boost loyalty with Messenger, one-up SMS, and keep up chat competitors like Kik, Line and Telegram that have their own bot platforms. Beyond just text, chatbots will be able to respond with structured messages that include images, links, and call to action buttons. These could let users make a restaurant reservation, review an ecommerce order, and more. Facebook is not the only company -- let alone the first -- which has a bot store. Messaging apps Telegram and Kik offer similar functionalities. Popular communication service Slack has also been ramping up its efforts around bots and figuring out different ways to enhance its customers' experience. Two weeks ago, Microsoft also announced a bot platform.

snydeq writes: Flame wars in the bug tracker might be exactly the right (harsh) feedback your code needs, writes Peter Wayner in his run-down of the insults no programmer wants to hear about their code or coding skills. "The technology world is a bit different than the pretty, coiffed world of suits and salesdroids where everyone is polite, even when they hate your guts and think you're an idiot. Suit-clad managers may smile and hide their real message by the way they say you're doing "great, real great pal," but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look-out, feelings." Instead of posting this story in a click-bait fashion as presented from InfoWorld, we thought we'd ask the developers of Slashdot: What are some insults no developer wants to hear? Some of the classic insults include: N00b, /dev/null, Eye Candy, Fanboi, and [Nothing]. Are there any insults you are familiar with that aren't mentioned in the list?

prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: UbuntuBSD maintainer and lead developer Jon Boden is now looking for a way for his operating system to contribute to the Ubuntu community and, eventually, become an official Ubuntu flavor. Just two weeks ago, [Softpedia] introduced the ubuntuBSD project, whose main design goal is to bring users an operating system powered by the FreeBSD kernel while offering them the familiarity of the Ubuntu Linux OS. Right now, ubuntuBSD is in heavy development, with a fourth Beta build out the door, and it looks like the developer already seeks official status and wants to contribute all of his work to the main Ubuntu channels. [Canonical has yet to respond.]

prisoninmate writes: To celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, due for release later this month, on April 21, Canonical put together an interesting infographic, showing the world how popular Ubuntu is. From the infographic, it looks like there are over 60 million Ubuntu images launched by Docker users, 14 million Vagrant images of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from HashiCorp, 20 million launches of Ubuntu instances during 2015 in public and private clouds, as well as bare metal, and 2 million new Ubuntu Cloud instances launched in November 2015. Ubuntu is used on the International Space Station, on the servers of popular online services like Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Dropbox, PayPal, Wikipedia, and Instagram, in Google, Tesla, George Hotz, and Uber cars. It is also employed at Bloomberg, Weta Digital and Walmart, at the Brigham Young University to control the Mars Rover, and it is even behind the largest supercomputer in the world.

Andrey Akselrod, CTO and a co-founder of Smartling, writes for TechCrunch: DevOps, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of DevOps is just about over. It's a "Perfect Storm" scenario in some ways. Lots of events coming together that drastically change the status quo. And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices. DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground. The premise was to automate the development and deployment tools that require collaborations between both disciplines. But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set. Thus, most companies resolved to create DevOps teams that combined the expertise of both sides to support their developers. The old model of throwing the code over the wall to system administrators who would deploy it stopped working with agile processes and continuous deployment practices. Whose responsibility is it when something goes wrong -- the person deploying the code or the developer? Developers don't know much about deploying and systems administrators don't know much about how the code is supposed to work.

v3rgEz writes: Jeff Bezos is bullish on the cloud, pegging AWS' sales for this year at $10 billion in a recent letter to shareholders. But he said there was a surprising source of that success: The company's willingness to fail. That said, with AWS now spanning 70 different services, Amazon can afford to fail some as long as few, like EC2 and S3, keep winning. Bezos wrote: "One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Android Studio 2.0, the latest version of its integrated development environment (IDE), with a long list of new features. You can download the new version for Windows, Mac, and Linux now directly from Android.com/SDK. In November, Google unveiled Android Studio 2.0, the second major version of its IDE. Version 2.0 brings a slew of improvements, including Instant Run, a faster Android emulator, and app indexing improvements. Google released a beta in February, though it didn't say when the final version would be ready ([VentureBeat] speculated in time for its I/O developer conference in May, and the company debuted with a month to spare). The full feature list includes Instant Run, Android Emulator, Cloud Test Lab, App Indexing, and GPU Debugger Preview.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has plans to make Apple's Swift object-oriented language a "first-class" language for Android, reports The Next Web. The publication, citing sources, adds that Google doesn't mean to replace the current first-class language for Android -- Java -- at least, "initially." Google sees an "upside" in using Swift, which Apple made open source last year. But a ton of things need to fall into place for this to work. From the report, "All told, Google would have to effectively recreate its efforts with Java -- for Swift. If the company is motivated enough, it's very possible to do so without compromising on its open source values or ruffling any developer feathers along the way." The company is also discussing internally about making Kotlin as a first-class language for Android. "Unlike Swift, Kotlin works with Android Studio, Google's IDE for Android development. Unfortunately, sources tell The Next Web that Google's current mindset is that Kotlin is a bit too slow when compiling."

An anonymous reader writes: Blizzard is threatening legal action against the popular "pirate" servers for World of Warcraft. The Nostalrius servers have been operating for nearly a year, running version 1.12 of the original World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006. Admins say that 800K registered accounts and 150K active players were working through quest progressions reproduced to precisely match the game of a decade ago. Nostalrius' team says its French hosting provider has been issued a formal letter asking it to shut down the servers or face a potential copyright infringement lawsuit as hosting private servers is explicitly against Blizzard's Terms of Use. Blizzard says the rule "isn't an issue because of 'lost' subscription fees from players choosing these illegitimate servers over the real WoW servers -- it simply boils down to the fact that private servers are illegal, and that's that." Nostalrius' servers will be shut down on April 10, but the team says it "will still be publicly providing everything needed in order to setup your own 'Nostalrius' if you are willing to."

darthcamaro writes: The 13th release of OpenStack, codenamed Mitaka is now generally available with updates across all major projects. Among the biggest new capabilities in OpenStack Mitaka however isn't a new project or a new feature in a single existing project, but rather the official debut of the OpenStack Client, which creates for the first time a unified command line interface to control the cloud.

According to eWEEK: "The OpenStack client is a command line client that unifies access across all the main projects," Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, told eWEEK. So if an administrator wants to create a user, a block storage device or a virtual server, or attach to a network, all those functions are now enabled in the single tool that is the OpenStack client. The OpenStack client provides a standardized set of commands, whereas previously, each project had its own command line client, Bryce said. He added that the OpenStack client can be run locally or in the cloud, and can be configured to control multiple OpenStack clouds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from WordPress Tavern: Authorities have not yet identified the hacker behind the Panama Papers breach, nor have they isolated the exact attack vector. It is clear that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that protected the assets of the rich and powerful by setting up shell companies, had employed a dangerously loose policy towards web security and communications. The firm ran its unencrypted emails through an outdated (2009) version of Microsoft's Outlook Web Access. Outdated open source software running the frontend of the firm's websites is also now suspected to have provided a vector for the compromise. Forbes has identified outdated WordPress and Drupal installations as security holes that may have led to the data leak. [WordPress Tavern Editor Sarah Gooding] found that the firm's WordPress-powered site is currently running on version 4.1 (released in December 2014), based on its version of autosave.js, which is identical to the autosave.js file shipped in 4.1. The main site is also loading a number of outdated scripts and plugins. Its active theme is a three-year-old version of Twenty Eleven (1.5), which oddly resides in a directory labeled for /twentyten/. The Mossack Fonseca client portal changelog.txt file is public, showing that its Drupal installation hasn't been updated for three years. Since the release of version 7.23, the software has received 25 security updates, which means that the version it is running includes highly critical known vulnerabilities that could have given the hacker access to the server.

TechnoidNash quotes a report from Techie News: Rembrandt van Rijn was one of the most influential classical painters, and the world lost his amazing talent when he died nearly four centuries ago. And yet his newest masterpiece was unveiled only yesterday. How? By scanning and analyzing Rembrandt's works, a computer was able to create a new painting in near-perfect mimicry of Rembrandt's style. It has been named, appropriately, "The Next Rembrandt." The computer used machine-learning algorithms to create the portrait, which was then 3D-printed to give it the same texture as an oil painting. "The Next Rembrant," was a collaboration between Microsoft, ING, Delft University of Technology and two Dutch art museums -- Mauritshuis and Rembrandthuis.

An anonymous reader writes: The scenario which all parents hate seems to have materialized in the form of an Android app [called Magic Kinder] that lets strangers send texts, images, and videos to kids. All of this is facilitated by a simple app design and lack of encryption, which allows attackers to manipulate HTTP requests and send any content they like to any of the app's users. Currently, because the app developer did not respond, the issues are still present in the app. Fortunately, the app hasn't been installed on more than 11,000 devices.

prisoninmate writes: Budgie-Remix maintainer David Mohammed informs Softpedia about the progress made with the upcoming operating system, whose ultimate goal is to become an official Ubuntu Linux flavor, possibly under the name of Ubuntu Budgie. Even Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a Google+ comment last month that it will definitely support if there is a community around the packaging. Since their initial report, it looks like the developer managed to get in contact with the Ubuntu MATE project leader Martin Wimpress, who urged him to target Ubuntu 16.10 for an official status of his soon-to-be-named Ubuntu flavor built on top of the Budgie desktop environment created by the team of developers from Solus Project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: China appears to be censoring social media posts on the Panama Papers document leak which has named several members of China's elite, including President Xi Jinping's brother-in-law. Hundreds of posts on networks such as Sina Weibo and Wechat on the topic have been deleted since Monday morning. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the Panama Papers show that Mr. Deng acquired two offshore companies in 2009, at a time when Mr. Xi was rising in politics. State media appeared to black out the news. But many on microblogging network Sina Weibo and mobile chat network Wechat were discussing the topic on Monday morning, sharing Chinese translations of details of the story, including information on Mr. Deng. A hashtag created on the topic quickly trended. Checks by the BBC found that by the end of the day many of those posts had disappeared, with at least 481 discussions deleted from the hashtag's Weibo topic page, and other posts shared on Wechat also deleted. The website Freeweibo.com, which actively tracks censorship on Weibo, listed "Panama" as the second-most censored term on the network.