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.

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.