To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network's chat feature into a stand-alone experience. [...] Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world's most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users' iPhones. That's about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.

But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. By rewriting it from scratch, it's shrunk Messenger's footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it's replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users. As a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction.

Leading CIOs, CTOs and technology executives on the "Forbes Technology Council" just made some predictions for the future: Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has become, "What's next?" The members of Forbes Technology Council are constantly looking out for new tech trends, and they believe the next jobs to be impacted by automation might not be the ones people expect...

#1. Reminders, Notifications And Reporting
Christy Johnson, AchieveIt: I think as workflow technology expands, any kind of oversight-related job will be delegated to the bots. No human will be taking the time to manually build reports, see who they're missing data from and send those employees a reminder email/plea for a status update. The tech is already around, but I think it still has a long way to go to reach human-level logic and function....

#3. App Development

Katherine Kostereva, Creatio (formerly bpm'online): In the next five years, everyone will become a developer thanks to low-code/no-code technology. It allows users to build apps and processes in a visual integrated development environment with drag and drop features. Hand-coding isn't likely to become obsolete in five years, but we are moving towards a far future where little to no coding is involved in development.

news.com.au reports: The GitHub Arctic Vault program is part of the now Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub...aimed at preserving the information for generations to come...

"We chose to store GitHub's public repositories in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard [a Norwegian island] because it is one of the most remote and geopolitically stable places on Earth and is about a mile down the road from the famous Global Seed Vault," said GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke. Mr Dohmke said open source code in particular was worth preserving... "Ultimately, it's time to create multiple durable backups of the software our world depends on..." Other treasures include the original source code for MS-DOS (the precursor to Microsoft Windows), the open source code that powers Bitcoin, Facebook's React, and the publishing platform Wordpress...

"The Arctic Code Vault was just the beginning of the GitHub Archive Program's journey to secure the world's open source code," GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke told news.com.au. "We've partnered with multiple organisations and advisers to help us maximise the GitHub Archive Program's value and preserve all open-source software for future generations." One of those partners is Norwegian archival experts Piql, who specialise in very-long-term data storage. The company uses around 200 silver halide and polyester film reels designed to last a thousand years to store the information...

The new 1.14 release of the Go programming language "is dotted with performance and security improvements," reports the developer news site DevClass, "but also gives devs more flexibility when it comes to module use."

And they also give a nice overview of Go's development process: Go is the language most containerization projects are built with. The wide adoption of this approach is one of the reasons that made the Go team implement a new feedback-based system for language enhancements. In it, only a limited number of new features are proposed for an upcoming release, giving the community room to weigh in on them. If they decide a change will do more good than harm the feature will make it into the new version. However, since alterations affect a quite wide range of people, they are often heavily disputed. This already led to the abandoning of a proposal thought to improve the language's often discussed error handling. Currently, a couple of new vet checks and minor adjustments are discussed for the 1.15 release.

Updates in Go 1.14 mainly concern the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. The only change to the language allows for methods of embedded interfaces to have the same name and signature as those on the embedding interface. Supposedly to facilitate the creation of somewhat safer applications, version 1.14 includes a hash/maphash package. The hash functions on byte sequences contained in it are meant to help with the implementation of hash tables or similar data structures. The Go team warns though that "the hash functions are collision-resistant but not cryptographically secure...."

Go 1.14 is the last release to run on macOS 10.11 and support 32-bit binaries on Apple's operating system. Meanwhile binaries for Windows come with data execution prevention enabled, experimental support for 64-bit RISC-V on Linux is included, and v1.14 should work with 64-bit ARM architecture on FreeBSD 12.0 or later.

Facebook has canceled the in-person portion of F8, the company's annual developer conference, due to coronavirus concerns. F8 was originally scheduled to take place on May 5th and May 6th later this year. From a report: Instead, Facebook says that it will replace the main F8 conference with "locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content."

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, a producer credited with implementing the fabled "Konami Code" that gave players godlike cheats in Contra, Gradius, Castlevania, and other Konami games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, died on Tuesday. He was 61. Polygon reports: Hashimoto was a programmer and producer for the home console port of Gradius, which in 1986 was the first video game to use the Konami Code. Hashimoto put it in the game as an aid for his playtesting, memorably saying that he "obviously couldn't beat it." For unclear reasons, the Konami Code was left in the shipped game, and was later used to playtest other games made by the publisher.

Contra, which launched on the NES in 1988, sold much better than Gradius and is more closely associated with the Konami Code's origins. In it, cheat-code sharers discovered video gaming's Charm of Making -- up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start! -- and were blessed with 30 lives, absolutely critical to a super-tough one-hit-kill side-scroller like Contra. Nostalgia for the Konami Code, if not gratitude for its usefulness to many difficult games of the day, led to its inclusion in numerous other works. A Wikipedia entry on the code counts more than 100 Konami games with the cheat or some version of it inside them. Another 22 games made by other publishers included the code as a tribute, often revealing an Easter egg or secret message. It has also shown up elsewhere in popular culture, most recently in Google Stadia's website (and on its controller), and as a pastime Easter egg in Fortnite in October.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Smithsonian: For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose -- be it a postcard, a beer koozie or a pair of bootie shorts. And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Veteran Silicon Valley executive Thomas Kurian surprised the tech world two years ago when he suddenly left Oracle to become CEO of Google Cloud. The reason may have just gotten a bit clearer. Kurian apparently had an unhappy tenure as head of Oracle's cloud, according to a lawsuit. He felt pressured by top management, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And he clashed with his people at Oracle, berating execs who reported to him for work he considered "atrocious" and "awful," the lawsuit alleges. The suit, filed on behalf of a group of investors led by Union Asset Management Holding AG, a Frankfurt-based investment firm, accused Oracle's top executives of painting an upbeat picture of the tech giant's cloud momentum in 2017 to 2018, even though they knew the company was falling behind in the cloud wars. The suit was originally filed in 2018. The amended suit, which was first reported by the Register, was filed last week. Kurian's email was part of a shareholder lawsuit before a federal court in California which claims that Oracle had misled investors on the state of its cloud business. Oracle rejected the suit's claims. "The suit has no merit and Oracle will vigorously defend against these claims," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger told Business Insider in an email. [...] The suit cited Kurian's email in which he also told Miranda that Oracle's cloud software "was considered so atrocious" that it was simply "a disgrace."

America's Justice Department "has filed a brief in support of Oracle in its Supreme Court battle against Google over whether Java should have copyright protection," reports ZDNet: The Justice Department filed its amicus brief to the Supreme Court this week, joining a mighty list of briefs from major tech companies and industry luminaries — including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun, which Oracle bought in 2010, acquiring Sun-built Java in the process. While Microsoft, IBM and others have backed Google's arguments in the decade-long battle, McNealy, like the Justice Department, is opposing Google. McNealy called Google's description of how it uses Java packages a "woeful mischaracterization of the artful design of the Java packages" and "an insult to the hard-working developers at Sun who made Java such a success...."

Joe Tucci, former CEO of now Dell-owned enterprise storage giant EMC, threw in his two cents against Google. "Accepting Google's invitation to upend that system by eliminating copyright protection for creative and original computer software code would not make the system better — it would instead have sweeping and harmful effects throughout the software industry," Tucci's brief reads.
Oracle is also questioning the motives of Google's allies, reports The Verge: After filing a Supreme Court statement last week, Oracle VP Ken Glueck posted a statement over the weekend assailing the motives of Microsoft, IBM, and the CCIA industry group, all of which have publicly supported Google. Glueck's post comes shortly after two groups — an interdisciplinary panel of academics and the American Conservative Union Foundation — submitted legal briefs supporting Oracle. Both groups argued that Google should be liable for copying code from the Java language for the Android operating system. The ACUF argued that protecting Oracle's code "is fundamental to a well-ordered system of private property rights and indeed the rule of law itself...."

Earlier this year, Google garnered around two dozen briefs supporting its position. But Oracle claims that in reality, "Google appears to be virtually alone — at least among the technology community." Glueck says Google's most prominent backers had ulterior motives or "parochial agendas"; either they were working closely with Google, or they had their own designs on Java...

Even if you accept Oracle's arguments wholeheartedly, there's a long list of other Google backers from the tech community. Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology signed on to amicus briefs last month, as did several prominent tech pioneers, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. The CCIA brief was signed by the Internet Association, a trade group representing many of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. Patreon, Reddit, Etsy, the Mozilla Corporation, and other midsized tech companies also backed a brief raising "fundamental concerns" about Oracle's assertions.

A former YC partner co-founded a recruiting company for technical hiring, and one of its software engineers is long-time Slashdot reader compumike. He now writes: Like the decade-old Fizz Buzz Test, there are some questions that are trivial for anyone who can build software at a professional level, but are likely to stump anyone who can't hack it. I analyzed the data from over 100,000 programmers to reveal how five multiple-choice questions easily separate the real software engineers from the rest.
The questions (and the data about correct answers) come from Triplebyte's own coder-recruiting quiz, and "98% of successful engineers answer at least 4 of 5 correctly," explains Mike's article. ("Successful" engineers are defined as those who went on to receive an inbound message from a company matching their preferences through Triplebyte's platform.) "I'm confident that if you're an engineering manager running an interview, you wouldn't give an offer to someone who performed below that line."

Question 1: What kind of SQL statement retrieves data from a table?

• LOOKUP
• READ
• FETCH
• SELECT

In a new article in Forbes, a Business Technology professor at the Villanova School of Business argues that the way we build software applications is changing: If you're living in the 21st century you turn to your cloud provider for help where many of the most powerful technologies are now offered as-a-service. When your requirements cannot be completely fulfilled from cloud offerings, you build something. But what does "building" mean? What does "programming" mean...? You can program from scratch. You can go to Github (where you can find code of all flavors). Or you can — if you're a little lazier — turn to low-code or no-code programming platforms to develop your applications.

All of this falls under the umbrella of what, the Gartner Group defines as the "democratization of expertise":

"Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training...."

[T]he new repositories, platforms and tools are enabling a whole new set of what we used to call "programming." As Satya Nadella said, "Every business will become a software business, build applications, use advanced analytics and provide SAAS services," and as Sajjad Daya says so well in Hackernoon, "Coding takes too long for it to be both profitable and competitively priced. That's not the case with no-code platforms, though. The platforms do the complicated programming automatically, slashing development time..."

The technology democracy has forever changed corporate strategy. And what does this mean? It means that the technical team scales on cue. But "technical" means competencies around Github, low-code/no-code platforms and especially business domains... [A]ll of this levels the technology playing field among companies — so long as they understand the skills and competencies they need.

We live in a world where billions of login credentials have been stolen, enabling the brute-force cyberattacks known as "credential stuffing", reports CSO Online. And it's being made easier by APIs: New data from security and content delivery company Akamai shows that one in every five attempts to gain unauthorized access to user accounts is now done through application programming interfaces (APIs) instead of user-facing login pages. According to a report released today, between December 2017 and November 2019, Akamai observed 85.4 billion credential abuse attacks against companies worldwide that use its services. Of those attacks, around 16.5 billion, or nearly 20%, targeted hostnames that were clearly identified as API endpoints.

However, in the financial industry, the percentage of attacks that targeted APIs rose sharply between May and September 2019, at times reaching 75%.

"API usage and widespread adoption have enabled criminals to automate their attacks," the company said in its report. "This is why the volume of credential stuffing incidents has continued to grow year over year, and why such attacks remain a steady and constant risk across all market segments."
APIs also make it easier to extract information automatically, the article notes, while security experts "have long expressed concerns that implementation errors in banking APIs and the lack of a common development standard could increase the risk of data breaches."

Yet the EU's "Payment Services Directive" included a push for third-party interoperability among financial institutions, so "most banks started implementing such APIs... Even if no similar regulatory requirements exist in non-EU countries, market forces are pushing financial institutions in the same direction since they need to innovate and keep up with the competition."

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The Guardian reports: To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a "deep learning" algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli. Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to.

Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named "halicin" after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent. Writing in the journal Cell, the researchers describe how they treated numerous drug-resistant infections with halicin, a compound that was originally developed to treat diabetes, but which fell by the wayside before it reached the clinic. Tests on bacteria collected from patients showed that halicin killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug that causes TB, and strains of Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics that are considered the last resort for such infections. Halicin also cleared C difficile and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in mice. Three days after being set loose on a database of about 1.5 billion compounds, the algorithm returned a shortlist of 23 potential antibiotics, of which two appear to be particularly potent.

"[The senior researcher] now wants to use the algorithm to find antibiotics that are more selective in the bacteria they kill," adds The Guardian. "This would mean that taking the antibiotic kills only the bugs causing an infection, and not all the healthy bacteria that live in the gut. More ambitiously, the scientists aim to use the algorithm to design potent new antibiotics from scratch."

A group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google, and Amazon Web Services are working on Gretel, an early-stage startup that aims to help developers safely share and collaborate with sensitive data in real time. TechCrunch reports: It's not as niche of a problem as you might think, said Alex Watson, one of the co-founders. Developers can face this problem at any company, he said. Often, developers don't need full access to a bank of user data -- they just need a portion or a sample to work with. In many cases, developers could suffice with data that looks like real user data. "It starts with making data safe to share," Watson said. "There's all these really cool use cases that people have been able to do with data." He said companies like GitHub, a widely used source code sharing platform, helped to make source code accessible and collaboration easy. "But there's no GitHub equivalent for data," he said.

And that's how Watson and his co-founders, John Myers, Ali Golshan and Laszlo Bock came up with Gretel. "We're building right now software that enables developers to automatically check out an anonymized version of the data set," said Watson. This so-called "synthetic data" is essentially artificial data that looks and works just like regular sensitive user data. Gretel uses machine learning to categorize the data -- like names, addresses and other customer identifiers -- and classify as many labels to the data as possible. Once that data is labeled, it can be applied access policies. Then, the platform applies differential privacy -- a technique used to anonymize vast amounts of data -- so that it's no longer tied to customer information. "It's an entirely fake data set that was generated by machine learning," said Watson. The startup has already raised $3.5 million in seed funding. "Gretel said it will charge customers based on consumption -- a similar structure to how Amazon prices access to its cloud computing services," adds TechCrunch.

kimanaw shares a report: The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet's Google, boosting Oracle's bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Google's use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracle's co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Google's "verbatim copying" of Oracle's code into a competing product wasn't necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched the first Android 11 developer preview, available for download now at developer.android.com. The preview includes a preview SDK for developers with system images for the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, and the official Android Emulator. While it's the fifth year running that Google has released the first developer preview of the next Android version in Q1, this is the earliest developer preview yet. Android N (later named Android Nougat), Android O (Android Oreo), Android P (Android Pie), and Android Q (Android 10) were all first shown off in the month of March. Last year, Google used the Android Beta Program, which lets you get early Android builds via over-the-air updates on select devices. This year, however, Google is not making the first preview available as a beta (you'll need to manually flash your device). In other words, Android 11 is not ready for early adopters to try, just developers.

TechRadar shares some surprising results from a new survey of enterprises using COBOL and mainframe technologies: According to a survey by Micro Focus, which follows data gathered in previous 2017 survey, 70 percent favor modernization as an approach for implementing strategic change. This is opposed to replacing or retiring their key COBOL applications as they continue to provide a low-risk and effective means of transforming IT to support digital business initiatives...

This is further supported by the results of the survey with an increase in the size of the average application code base which grew from 8.4m in 2017 to 9.9m this year, showing continued investment, re-use and expansion in core business systems.
"92 percent of respondents felt as though their organization's COBOL applications are strategic in comparison to 84 percent of respondents in 2017," according to the official survey results. The survey spanned 40 different countries, and involved COBOL-connected architects, developers, development managers and IT executives.

"COBOL's credentials as a strong digital technology appear to be set for another decade," according to Micro Focus' senior vice president of application modernization and connectivity. "With 60 years of experience supporting mission-critical applications and business systems, COBOL continues to evolve as a flexible and resilient computer language that will remain relevant and important for businesses around the world."

"Now budding Python developers can read up on the National Security Agency's own Python training materials," reports ZDNet: Software engineer Chris Swenson filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA for access to its Python training materials and received a lightly redacted 400-page printout of the agency's COMP 3321 Python training course. Swenson has since scanned the documents, ran OCR on the text to make it searchable, and hosted it on Digital Oceans Spaces. The material has also been uploaded to the Internet Archive...

"If you don't know any programming languages yet, Python is a good place to start. If you already know a different language, it's easy to pick Python on the side. Python isn't entirely free of frustration and confusion, but hopefully you can avoid those parts until long after you get some good use out of Python," writes the NSA...

Swenson told ZDNet that it was "mostly just curiosity" that motivated him to ask the NSA about its Python training material. He also said the NSA had excluded some course material, but that he'll keep trying to get more from the agency... Python developer Kushal Das has pulled out some interesting details from the material. He found that the NSA has an internal Python package index, that its GitLab instance is gitlab.coi.nsa.ic.gov, and that it has a Jupyter gallery that runs over HTTPS. NSA also offers git installation instructions for CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and Windows, but not Debian.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It comes as no surprise that the guidance computers aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft were impossibly primitive compared to the pocket computers we all carry around 50 years later. But on his website, an Apple developer analyzed the tech specs even further and found that even something as simple as a modern USB charger is packed with more processing power. Forrest Heller, a software developer who formerly worked on Occipital's Structure 3D scanner accessory for mobile devices, but who now works for Apple, broke down the numbers when it comes to the processing power, memory, and storage capacity of Google's 18W Pixel charger, Huawei's 40W SuperCharge, the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 charger, and the Apollo 11 guidance computer, also referred to as the AGC. It's not easy to directly compare those modern devices with the 50-year-old AGC, which was custom developed by NASA for controlling and automating the guidance and navigation systems aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

In a time when computers were the size of giant rooms, the AGC was contained in a box just a few feet in length because it was one of the first computers to be made with integrated circuits. Instead of plopping in an off the shelf processor, NASA's engineers designed and built the AGC with somewhere around 5,600 electronic gates that were capable of performing nearly 40,000 simple mathematical calculations every second. While we measure processor speeds in gigahertz these days, the AGC chugged along at 1.024 MHz. By comparison, the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 USB-C charger includes a Cypress CYPD4225 processor running at 48 MHz with the twice the RAM of the AGC, and almost twice the storage space for software instructions.

minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA's job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation, unlike modern languages, which can pack dozens of operations with multiple options into one line. The simplicity becomes obvious .... The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 36k of ROM to hold the compiled version."

You didn't need security, function was the only thing that counted, and you only had to do one thing. A Go app compiled with version 1.7 that only prints "Hello World" is 1.6 megabytes alone, and the Go world was totally thrilled with this news because it was 2.3 megabytes before." And you didn't need to deal with lawyers. There are 22 thousand words in the basic Terms of Service for renting a machine in Amazon's cloud. There is also an entirely different TOS for using the website to rent the machine. Then each individual product often has its own TOS, like this one for Activate. Add them up and they're much longer than the 36 thousand instruction words in the ROM in the Lunar Lander's computer.