theodp writes: In a Medium post, tech-backed Code.org explains how it will be supporting our community during school closures, which includes "a major investment in online education without an in-person instructor" and other offerings. From the signup form for Code Break: "With schools closed and tens of millions of students at home, Code.org is launching Code Break -- a live weekly webcast where our team will teach your children [K-12 computer science] at home while school is closed, and a weekly challenge to engage students of all abilities, even those without computers. [...] Computer science is foundational to all fields of study, but since many schools don't offer it yet, this could be a unique chance to support your child in a fun new learning opportunity."

Interestingly, Code.org will be competing with its own corporate donors for homebound kids' attention. Microsoft is offering limited-time free Minecraft: Education Edition licenses as its way "to help teachers and students stay connected to the classroom" during school closures. And Google has come up with a curated list of distance learning resources for schools affected by COVID-19 (think Google Hangouts and Chromebooks), as has Facebook for Education ("If school is closed, Messenger Kids is a way to continue the social interactions the students might have at school"). Amazon is also pitching CS study for homebound kids: "As classrooms across the U.S. experience educational disruption during the pandemic, Amazon Future Engineer will initially provide free access to our sponsored computer science courses in the United States [thru Aug. 31]. These courses are for independent learners from 6th to 12th grade, or teachers who are teaching remotely to this age group."

The Steam Game Festival is returning for a spring edition starting today, featuring more than 40 indie games you can preview with free-to-play demos. The Verge reports: Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards executive producer and host, first announced the event yesterday on Twitter, saying it was put together to help feature games from indie developers who lost the opportunity to demo their titles at the now-canceled GDC, which was to take place this week in San Francisco. The Steam Game Festival will run from March 18th to March 23rd. The collection features games from a number of the more well-known indie demo day events, many of which participate every year at GDC. That includes Indie MegaBooth and The Mix, as well as smaller events like Day of the Devs and Wings Fund.

Google said today it is pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. From a report: The company cited "adjusted work schedules" as the primary reason for the delay, as most of its engineers are now working from home. The company published an official statement today after ZDNet reached out for comment last night, when Google failed to release Chrome v81. YouTube videos, tweets, and blog posts announcing the new Chrome release were posted online yesterday -- most likely scheduled days or weeks in advance. However, the actual Chrome v81 release never made it to users' devices, and the same videos, tweets, and blog posts were removed shortly after Google's PR realized their mistake.

Nat Friedman: npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

The tech jobs marketplace at Hired.com crunched their data on more than 400,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year to produce their annual "State of Software Engineers" report. Among its surprising insights: software engineers with more than 10 years of experience get 20% fewere interview requests than engineers with 4 to 10 years of experience.

Other insights: Demand for AR/VR talent is up by 1400%, mirroring blockchain's 517% demand growth last year... In large U.S. tech hubs AR/VR engineer salaries range from $135k - $150k... 46% of software engineers rank AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they'd like to learn in 2020... If you work in AR/VR, you may want to move to San Francisco, where they pay $150k/year on average.
The next-highest growth in demand came for "gaming engineers" and "computer vision engineers" -- with both positions seeing a 146% increase in demand over 2018. The next-highest demand growth was for "search engineers" (increasing 137%) and for "machine learning engineers" (increasing 89%). Demand for "blockchain engineers" increased by just 9%.

But they also report that demand for frontend and backend engineers "grew steadily by 17%, which shows that all companies -- not just Silicon Valley tech giants -- are evolving into being tech companies..." The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company. Whether the company is Bank of America, Alaska Airlines, Sainsbury's, or Tesla, investment in top software engineering talent isn't a future ambition, it's a matter of survival.
And the #1 most-desired coding skill was Go (for the second year in a row), "garnering an average of 9.2 interview requests for every Go-skilled candidate..." But there may be a larger trend. All told, the number of interview requests across all languages remained nearly constant year-over-year, with only minor fluctuations in average requests, and zero change in how each language ranked against others. This could suggest that supply for these skills has not yet caught up with demand...

According to Robert Half, 67% of IT managers plan to expand their teams in areas such as security, cloud computing and business intelligence, but 89% reported challenges in recruiting that talent. Those challenges in hiring are even greater for roles related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.
Their analysis concludes the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python -- though Python, JavaScript, and Java are engineers' favorite coding languages, "largely because of their useful and well-maintained libraries and packages..."

"Ruby, PHP and Objective C are ranked the least favorite (and least fun) languages for software engineers."

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language. From a report: "Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API ... to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want [sic] to migrate their applications to .NET Core," the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. "Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language ... The future of Visual Basic ... will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic."

When Microsoft released the .NET version of Visual Basic, originally called Visual Basic .NET, alongside C# at the beginning of the .NET era, the two languages were evolved together and had roughly identical feature sets. But this changed over time, with professional developers adopting C# and many fans of classic VB simply giving up on the more complex but powerful .NET versions of the environment. Today, virtually all of Microsoft's relevant developer documentation is in C# only, with VB source code examples ever harder to find.

Apple will move its annual developers conference, WWDC, online instead of hosting an in-person event, the company announced Friday. From a report: WWDC is Apple's annual developer's conference. The company typically announces new software features and sometimes hardware products as thousands of people travel around the world to San Jose, California for workshops about building software for iPhones, iPads, and Macs hosted by Apple employees. Apple said it would donate $1 million to organizations in San Jose to help with expected losses now that the event won't be held in the city.

"Motherboard built and analyzed a database of over 500 iPhones seized by law enforcement," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. "It's a deep dive into the ongoing "Going Dark" conversation." Here's an excerpt from the report: Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

Out of 516 analyzed cases, 295 were marked as executed. Officials from the FBI, DEA, DHS, Homeland Security and Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were able to extract data from iPhones in investigations ranging from arson, to child exploitation, to drug trafficking. And investigators executed warrants against modern iPhones, not just older models. In some cases, investigators obtained photos, text messages, call records, browsing data, cookies, and location data from seized iPhones. Some executed search warrants explicitly mention the type of extraction performed, such as so-called "Logical" or "Advanced Logical" extraction. The latter is a term with a meaning that varies between different phone data extraction companies, but generally it relates to creating a device backup as iTunes does normally and obtaining some more data on top of that, Vladimir Katalov, the CEO of iOS forensics firm Elcomsoft, told Motherboard. Katalov said those backups can contain the sorts of pieces of data that investigators obtained, and is available to all models of iPhone.

theodp writes: We fundamentally believe that coding is a language and that just like other languages are required in school, coding should be required in school," Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in 2016 as Apple coincidentally prepared to launch its Swift Playgrounds app to teach kids to code. Cook later touted Swift as the first programming language that wasn't "too geeky" for students. As such, Cook must be delighted that the West Virginia Dept. of Education (WVDE) has turned to Apple to provide WV teachers with free Professional Development in computer science in order to bring CS to every K-12 student in every WV school as part of its CodeWV initiative. Not too surprisingly, the Apple "Everyone Can Code" curriculum that teachers will be taught to teach requires up-to-date Apple devices and Swift.

Apple's efforts to sell WV on Swift date back to at least 2017, when an Apple lobbyist and Apple employees who refused to disclose their names pitched their wares to WVDE Board members in a controversial closed-door meeting. Teachers seeking an alternative to Apple's professional development do have the option of attending a "$3,000 professional learning program [curriculum] at no cost to them or their school/district thanks to the generous support from [tech-bankrolled and led] Code.org and the West Virginia Department of Education." Like Apple, Code.org has a registered WV education lobbyist.

So, will tech's race to make U.S. kids CS savvy go to the Swift?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter today updated its Developer Policy to clarify rules around data usage, including in academic research, as well as its position on bots, among other things. The policy has also been entirely rewritten in an effort to simplify the language used and make it more conversational, Twitter says. The new policy has been shortened from eight sections to four, and the accompanying Twitter Developer Agreement has been updated to align with the Policy changes, as well. One of the more notable updates to the new policy is a change to the rules to better support non-commercial research.

Twitter data is used to study topics like spam, abuse, and other areas related to conversation health, the company noted, and it wants these efforts to continue. The revised policy now allows the use of the Twitter API for academic research purposes. In addition, Twitter is simplifying its rules around the redistribution of Twitter data to aid researchers. Now, researchers will be able to share an unlimited number of Tweet IDs and/or User IDs, if they're doing so on behalf of an academic institution and for the sole purpose of non-commercial research, such as peer review, says Twitter. The company is also revising rules to clarify how developers are to proceed when the use cases for Twitter data change. In the new policy, developers are informed that they must notify the company of any "substantive" modification to their use case and receive approval before using Twitter content for that purpose. Not doing so will result in suspension and termination of their API and data access, Twitter warns.

The policy additionally outlines when and where "off-Twitter matching" is permitted, meaning when a Twitter account is being associated with a profile built using other data. Either the developer will need to obtain opt-in consent from the user in question, or they can only proceed if the information was provided by the person or is based on publicly available data. [...] Finally, the revamped policy clarifies that not all bots are bad. Some even enhance the Twitter experience, the company says, or provide useful information. Going forward, developers must specify if they're operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, "it's easier for everyone on Twitter to know what's a bot – and what's not."

bigwophh writes: As the number of publishers pulling out of Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud game streaming service continues to grow, the company has found an ally in Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, who vowed on Twitter to "wholeheartedly" support the company's efforts. He also took potshots at Apple and Google over the royalty rate each one charges on their respective app stores and expects them to go to battle as game streaming gains momentum. "Just waiting till later this year when Google is lobbying against Apple for blocking Stadia from iOS, while Google blocks GeForce Now, xCloud, and Fortnite from Google Play, and this whole rotten structure begins collapsing in on itself," Sweeney added. It remains to be seen how things will pan out with GeForce Now. Nvidia maintains that "game removals will be few and far between" and that it has 1,500 additional games queued up. However, Nvidia only has so much control over the developers willing to continue supporting the platform. "Epic is wholeheartedly supporting Nvidia's GeForce Now service with Fortnite and with Epic Games Store titles that choose to participate (including exclusives), and we'll be improving the integration over time," Sweeney wrote. He also called GeForce Now "the most developer-friendly and publisher-friendly of the major streaming services," which is based on Nvidia not charging any "tax" on game revenues.

"Game companies who want to move the game industry towards a healthier state for everyone should be supporting this kind of service!" Sweeney wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Lambda School, the controversial coding bootcamp, is threatening a former employee for speaking out about problems at the school. In an article published on February 11th, Sabrina Baez, Lambda's former head of career services, told The Verge that she was called a "feisty Latina" and a "bulldog" when she pushed for a diversity initiative at the school. Baez had signed a severance agreement when she left Lambda after the incidents; the school sent her a letter claiming she violated that agreement by speaking to reporters and is demanding the return of her severance money (roughly $36,000). The Verge has seen that letter, which also says Lambda is prepared to file a lawsuit to collect.

Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn't received any documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez's name in the article. She has decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is threatening legal action. [...] The Verge's reporting went beyond Baez's experience, detailing ongoing issues Lambda faces with unhappy students and regulatory hurdles. In January, students from the school's User Experience Design program wrote a letter to the school calling the program "a very bad experience" and "not worth the money." They asked to get out of their income sharing agreements (ISAs), which are the bedrock of Lambda's program. The school is also operating without state approval in California, meaning the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education cannot step in to help students if there is a dispute with the school. In the case of the User Experience program, the agency didn't have to: Lambda let the students out of their ISAs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: A federal jury couldn't reach a verdict on whether a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for leaking a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks, convicting him instead on lesser charges stemming from the leak (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). Joshua Schulte, 31 years old, was convicted of making false statements and contempt of court -- charges that related to Mr. Schulte's conduct after the March 7, 2017 publication of the CIA materials, dubbed Vault 7 by WikiLeaks. The jury said Monday they were deadlocked on the remaining eight counts, including the illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information. The hung jury, following a week of jury deliberations, marks a blow to the Justice Department in its crackdown on government leaks. One former top CIA official who testified called the leak "the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor." The government could choose to prosecute Mr. Schulte again on the deadlocked charges.

An anonymous reader quotes SD Times: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced plans to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform ("forge") this year. Members of the FSF tech team are currently reviewing ethical web-based software that will help teams work on their projects, with features like merge requests, bug tracking, and other common tools.

"Infrastructure is very important for free software, and it's unfortunate that so much free software development currently relies on sites that don't publish their source code, and require or encourage the use of proprietary software," FSF wrote in a blog post. "Our GNU ethical repository criteria aim to set a high standard for free software code hosting, and we hope to meet that with our new forge."

As of now, the team said it has been researching a list of candidate programs and analyzing them in terms of ethical and practical criteria.
The FSF blog post adds that "We plan on contributing improvements upstream for the new forge software we choose, to boost its score on those criteria...

"We'll communicate with the upstream developers to request improvements and help clarify any questions related to the ethical repository criteria."

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Python is tying with Java as the second most popular programming language behind JavaScript, according to developer analyst RedMonk's latest ranking.

The second spot for Python is the highest position it's ever attained in RedMonk's list of top programming languages, which is based on an analysis of GitHub and Stack Overflow data. Historically, Python has been steady in fourth position but it rose to third spot three years ago in RedMonk's tables... Python has been rising across several programming language popularity indexes, including Tiobe and IEEE Spectrum.

Microsoft-maintained TypeScript for large-scale JavaScript projects has also risen one place to ninth position along with C... Rust is a popular language among developers who discuss technical challenges on StackOverflow, but it hasn't moved from its spot at 21.

Dan Luu, writing in a blog post: The sleight of hand that's happening when someone says that we can keep software simple and compatible by making everything handle text is the pretense that text data doesn't have a structure that needs to be parsed4. In some cases, we can just think of everything as a single space separated line, or maybe a table with some row and column separators that we specify (with some behavior that isn't consistent across tools, of course). That adds some hassle when it works, and then there are the cases where serializing data to a flat text format adds considerable complexity since the structure of data means that simple flattening requires significant parsing work to re-ingest the data in a meaningful way. Another reason commands now have more options is that people have added convenience flags for functionality that could have been done by cobbling together a series of commands. These go all the way back to v7 unix, where ls has an option to reverse the sort order (which could have been done by passing the output to tac).

[...] Over time, more convenience options have been added. For example, to pick a command that originally has zero options, mv can move and create a backup (three options; two are different ways to specify a backup, one of which takes an argument and the other of which takes zero explicit arguments and reads an implicit argument from the VERSION_CONTROL environment variable; one option allows overriding the default backup suffix). mv now also has options to never overwrite and to only overwrite if the file is newer. mkdir is another program that used to have no options where, excluding security things for SELinux or SMACK as well as help and version options, the added options are convenience flags: setting the permissions of the new directory and making parent directories if they don't exist. If we look at tail, which originally had one option (-number, telling tail where to start), it's added both formatting and convenience options For formatting, it has -z, which makes the line delimiter null instead of a newline. Some examples of convenience options are -f to print when there are new changes, -s to set the sleep interval between checking for -f changes, --retry to retry if the file isn't accessible.

Google has announced that it will not host an in-person I/O 2020 over coronavirus concerns. The company is looking into an alternative format. 9to5Google reports: Google I/O 2020 was announced in January, with the ticket application and drawing process taking place late last month. Hosted at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, it's right across the street from the Googleplex headquarters. "Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre," reads a statement on the Google I/O website.

Those that purchased tickets will be fully refunded by March 13, while registered guests this year will automatically be able to purchase I/O 2021 passes. Looking forward, the company is going to "explore other ways to evolve Google I/O to best connect with our developer community." At this time, Google does not look to be committing to the original May 12-14 timeframe. Meanwhile, Google will be providing $1 million to local Mountain View organizations to help with the lack of I/O and its over 7,000 attendees. This is specifically aimed at helping raise awareness about the coronavirus, as well as aiding small businesses, increasing STEM education, and supporting organizations working with unhoused neighbors.

AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pull metadata from Freedb to save the user having to type it in manually, but the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz. This wouldn't be the first time Freedb shut down. In 2006, the site shut down due to a disagreement among its developers, only to be brought back to life a few months later.

It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.