PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers take existing mobile games to Steam and Discord. The initial launch will include several high-profile developers like KOG, Funplus, Fabled Game Studio, and many others whose games will be available directly on Steam. Mobile developers have started allocating large budgets to game development, and that means mobile games can be competitive on Steam without a ton of modification.

With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.

Starting with macOS Catalina, Macs will now use zsh as the default login shell and interactive shell across the operating system. From a report: All newly created user accounts in macOS Catalina will use zsh by default. Bash will still be available, but Apple is signaling that developers should start moving to zsh on macOS Mojave or earlier in anticipation of bash eventually going away in macOS. Apple hasn't explained exactly why it's making this change, but bash isn't exactly a modern shell as it's implemented in macOS, and a switch to something less aging makes a lot more sense for the company. Apple is stuck using version 3.2 of bash that has been licensed under GPLv2, as newer versions are licensed under GPLv3. Apple has kept clear of using GPLv3 packages in macOS as the license is generally more restrictive to companies like Apple that sign their own code and it includes explicit patent grants, too.

In addition to the "Sign in With Apple" button, Apple announced another privacy-focused measure at its WWDC on Monday: developers are no longer permitted to include third-party ads or analytics tools in apps in the App Store's kid category. Engadget reports: The company laid out the rule in its updated guidelines for app submissions, confirming a report from last week that it would add such additional protections for younger users. Developers are also prohibited from including external links or in-app purchases, unless they're in a section of the app only accessible to parents. Apple also urged developers to be mindful of privacy laws in various jurisdictions regarding the data they collect from kids.

Apple today announced SwiftUI, a framework that complements its open source compiled programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux, and other platforms alongside a reimagined development experience in Xcode 11. VentureBeat reports: SwiftUI lets developers specify UI with simple declarations. In practice, it reduces hundreds of lines of code to just a few, and it provides default support for common features like localization for right-to-left languages. That's in addition to built-in support for animated transitions, live previews, and the newly announced dark mode and accessibility tools in iOS.

Apple says it's fully integrated with the aforementioned Xcode development experience and native frameworks for Apple Watch, tvOS, and macOS apps. Within the new Xcode, speaking of, library views live in a left-side drawer from which they can be dragged and dropped onto the app design canvas; as they're added, code populates the editor on the left. Meanwhile, views can be adjusted with custom-tailored inspectors or the code converted into a scalable list, and previews can run directly on connected Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After long anticipation, Apple finally announced today that it's killing iTunes at its developer conference WWDC held in San Jose. Instead, it will be replaced by three new apps: Music, TV, and the Podcasts app. You can sync your iPhone directly through the finder app.

Onstage at WWDC, Apple announced that iPad's software will now exist inside its own vertical OS. The new iPadOS doesn't look dramatically different from iOS 12, but the name change undoubtedly makes it easier for Apple to introduce functionality to iPads that won't exist in any capacity on the iPhone. Here's is the list of features it offers: 1. Chances are the best update is that desktop sites are now the default in Safari, hallelujah!!
2. You'll be able to bring widgets to the home screen that are just a swipe away. You'll also be able to fit more app icons on each screen.
3. Changes in iPadOS include an update to the Files app which will allow you share folders in iCloud drive, there's a new column view and you'll be able to grab files from USB-C flash drives.
4. You'll be able to bring up multiple windows of the same app, which wasn't previously possible and there are a lot of small interface changes that make it easier to multi-task with your larger screen real estate.
5. Apple Pencil latency is dropping from 20ms to 9ms, Apple is bringing a PencilKit developer API so that third-party app developers can integrate some new controls.

Apple today announced a "Sign in with Apple" button -- that is similar to sign-in buttons from Twitter, Facebook or Google that allow users to quickly login to a range of services using their social media account. But unlike any existing solution, Apple is focusing on privacy. From a report: More importantly, you can choose to hide your email address, and Apple will generate a random email ID visible to only to that particular app that'll forward all emails to your main email ID. Plus, this method creates a unique random email for each app, so that they can't track you and your personal data. The new sign-in feature is available across MacOS, iOS, and websites.

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino is your typical Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) developer, and writes that "in recent years Docker has been the hottest thing since sliced bread." You are expected to "dockerize" your setups and be able to launch a whole string of processes to boot up various containers with databases and your primary PHP monolith with the launch of a single script. All fine and dandy this far.

However, I can't shake the notion that much of this -- especially in the context of LAMP -- seems overkill. If Apache, MariaDB/MySQL and PHP are running, getting your project or multiple projects to run is trivial. The benefits of having Docker seem negilible, especially having each project lug its own setup along. Yes, you can have your entire compiler and Continuous Integration stack with SASS, Gulp, Babel, Webpack and whatnot in one neat bundle, but that doesn't seem to dimish the usual problems with the recent bloat in frontend tooling, to the contrary....

But shouldn't tooling be standardised anyway? And shouldn't Docker then just be an option, who couldn't be bothered to have (L)AMP on their bare metal? I'm still skeptical of this Dockerization fad. I get it makes sense if you need to scale microsevices easy and fast in production, but for 'traditional' development and traditional setups, it just doesn't seem to fit all that well.

What are your experiences with using Docker in a development environment? Is Dockerization a fad or something really useful? And should I put up with the effort to make Docker a standard for my development and deployment setups?
The original submission ends with "Educated Slashdot opinions requested." So leave your best answers in the comments.

Is Dockerization a fad?

Russ Cox (along with Rob Pike) is the tech lead for Google's Go team and its Go project. This week he responded on the Google group golang-nuts to a blogger who'd argued that "Go is Google's language, not ours."

First Cox points to a talk at Gophercon 2015 -- and its accompanying blog post -- which argued that Go's open source status is critical to its long-term success. He noted this week that "good ideas come from outside Google as often as they come from inside Google.... But getting to yes on every suggested new feature is not and never has been a goal." No one can speak for the entire Go community: it is large, it contains multitudes. As best we can, we try to hear all the many different perspectives of the Go community. We encourage bug reports and experience reports, and we run the annual Go user survey, and we hang out here on golang-nuts and on gophers slack precisely because all those mechanisms help us hear you better. We try to listen not just to the feature requests but the underlying problems people are having, and we try, as I said in the Gophercon talk, to find the small number of changes that solve 90% of the problems instead of the much more complex solution that gets to 99%. We try to add as little as possible to solve as much as possible.

In short, we aim to listen to everyone's problems and address as many of them as possible, but at the same time we don't aim to accept everyone's offered solutions. Instead we aim to create space for thoughtful discussions about the offered solutions and revisions to them, and to work toward a consensus about how to move forward...

The "proposal review" group meets roughly weekly to review proposal issues and make sure the process is working. We handle trivial yes and trivial no answers, but our primary job is to shepherd suggested proposals, bring in the necessary voices, and make sure discussions are proceeding constructively. We have talked in the past about whether to explicitly look for people outside Google to sit in our weekly meeting, but if that's really important, then we are not doing our job right. Again, our primary job is to make sure the issues get appropriate discussion on the issue tracker, where everyone can participate, and to lead that discussion toward a solution with broad agreement and acceptance. If you skim through any of the accepted proposals you will see how we spend most of our meetings nudging conversations along and trying to make sure we hear from everyone who has a stake in a particular decision.

It remains an explicit goal to enable anyone with a good piece of code or a good idea to be able to contribute it to the project, and we've continued to revise both the code contribution and proposal contribution docs as we find gaps. But as I said in 2015, the most important thing we the original authors of Go can do is to provide consistency of vision, to keep Go feeling like a coherent system, to keep Go Go. People may disagree with individual decisions. We may get some flat wrong. But we hope that the overall result still works well for everyone, and the decision process we have seems far more likely to preserve a coherent, understandable system than a standards committee or other process.
His conclusion? The Go language belongs to the Go community -- and, because it's open source, "the freedom to fork hopefully keeps me and the other current Go leadership honest."

dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D. 3D Games will look as good as movies or reality. Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with. High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores. Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world. TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D. 3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware. 3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap."

Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Google has found itself under fire for plans to limit the effectiveness of popular ad blocking extensions in Chrome. While Google says the changes are necessary to protect the "user experience" and improve extension security, developers and consumer advocates say the company's real motive is money and control. In the wake of ongoing backlash to the proposal, Chrome software security engineer Chris Palmer took to Twitter this week to claim the move was intended to help improve the end-user browsing experience, and paid enterprise users would be exempt from the changes.

Chrome security leader Justin Schuh also said the changes were driven by privacy and security concerns. Adblock developers, however, aren't buying it. uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill, for example, argued this week that if user experience was the goal, there were other solutions that wouldn't hamstring existing extensions. "Web pages load slow because of bloat, not because of the blocking ability of the webRequest API -- at least for well crafted extensions," Hill said. Hill said that Google's motivation here had little to do with the end user experience, and far more to do with protecting advertising revenues from the rising popularity of adblock extensions. The team behind the EFF's Privacy Badger ad-blocking extension also spoke out against the changes. "Google's claim that these new limitations are needed to improve performance is at odds with the state of the internet," the organization said. "Sites today are bloated with trackers that consume data and slow down the user experience. Tracker blockers have improved the performance and user experience of many sites and the user experience. Why not let independent developers innovate where the Chrome team isn't?"

It's pretty much a given that next week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference will bring new versions of MacOS and iOS. The real question is just how much convergence there will be between the 2 operating systems. From a report: The Mac remains popular even as the bulk of Apple's business is now selling phones and tablets, both of which have been increasing in computing power. Apple has long said it doesn't plan to merge its mobile and computer operating systems, but the two have been moving closer together recently. Apple offered a "sneak peek" last year at its multiyear effort (known internally as Marzipan) to allow programs written for iOS devices like the iPad to run on Macs with minimal changes.

Last year, the company said it was testing the technology first with its own apps, like Stocks and Voice Memos, and would offer other developers a chance to adapt their apps over time. Developers are champing at the bit for their taste of Marzipan, and WWDC could offer them a way in. Apple is likely to preview upgrades to its TV and watch operating systems and perhaps give a few more details on some of its new services, such as Arcade, a subscription iOS game service due out this fall.

theodp writes: It's not just Hollywood that's running out of new story ideas. Fueled by a $1.1 million NSF award, PBS stalwart Roadtrip Nation is casting Computer Science Roadtrip (apply by June 14, kids!), which will send three young adults interested in computer science on a road trip across the country in a green RV to meet inspiring professionals working with cutting-edge technology. "This trip is about highlighting exciting careers connected to computer science and innovation," explains Roadtrip Nation, which just a few years back partnered with Microsoft on The Code Trip Roadtrip, which also sent three young people on a road trip across the country in a green RV to interview inspiring professionals (including Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes) and "inform others of the many career routes one can take with a computer science background."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Someone posting on Chinese social network Weibo claims to have used facial recognition to cross-reference women's photos on social media with faces pulled from videos on adult platforms like Pornhub. In a Monday post on Weibo, the user, who says he's based in Germany, claimed to have "successfully identified more than 100,000 young ladies" in the adult industry "on a global scale." According to Weibo posts, the user and some of his programming friends used facial recognition to detect faces in porn content using photos from social platforms. His reasoning for making this program, he wrote, is "to have the right to know on both sides of the marriage." After public outcry, he later claimed his intention was to allow women, with or without their fiancees, to check if they are on porn sites and to send a copyright takedown request.

Whether the Weibo user's claims are trustworthy or not is beside the point, now that experts in feminist studies and machine learning have decried this project as algorithmically-targeted harassment. This kind of program's existence is both possible and frightening, and has started a conversation around whether such a program would be an ethically or legally responsible use of AI. Just as we saw with deepfakes, which used AI to swap the faces of female celebrities onto the bodies of porn performers, the use of machine learning to control and extort women's bodily autonomy demonstrates deep misogyny. It's a threat that didn't begin with deepfakes, but certainly reached a public sphere with that technology -- although in the years since, women have been left behind in the mainstream narrative, which has focused on the technology's possible use for disinformation.

Trailrunner7 shares a report: All of the current versions of Docker have a vulnerability that can allow an attacker to get read-write access to any path on the host server. The weakness is the result of a race condition in the Docker software and while there's a fix in the works, it has not yet been integrated. The bug is the result of the way that the Docker software handles some symbolic links, which are files that have paths to other directories or files. Researcher Aleksa Sarai discovered that in some situations, an attacker can insert his own symlink into a path during a short time window between the time that the path has been resolved and the time it is operated on. This is a variant of the time of check to time of use (TOCTOU) problem, specifically with the "docker cp" command, which copies files to and from containers.

"The basic premise of this attack is that FollowSymlinkInScope suffers from a fairly fundamental TOCTOU attack. The purpose of FollowSymlinkInScope is to take a given path and safely resolve it as though the process was inside the container. After the full path has been resolved, the resolved path is passed around a bit and then operated on a bit later (in the case of 'docker cp' it is opened when creating the archive that is streamed to the client)," Sarai said in his advisory on the problem. "If an attacker can add a symlink component to the path after the resolution but beforeit is operated on, then you could end up resolving the symlink path component on the host as root. In the case of 'docker cp' this gives you read and write access to any path on the host."

As it faces both an antitrust lawsuit with huge implications and a formal EU investigation over its App Store tactics, Apple today defended itself against Spotify and other critics of the company's massively successful software storefront. From a report: "Today, the App Store is more vibrant and innovative than ever, offering equal opportunities to developers to deliver their apps and services across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch," reads a new page at Apple's website titled "App Store -- Principles and Practices." "We're proud of the store we've built and the way we've built it." Apple says it has paid out $120 billion to App Store developers worldwide since the platform launched, and the company again touts the quick approval process and efficient work of its app review team, which now "represents 81 languages across three time zones." Sixty percent of the approximately 100,000 apps and app updates reviewed each week are approved, with rejections mostly stemming from "minor bugs, followed by privacy concerns." Apple notes that anyone who feels that they were unjustly rejected can have their situation looked at by the App Store Review Board.

But the most interesting parts of this new site relate to competition. In one section, Apple goes over the core, built-in apps on iOS and lists the many popular third-party options that are available from the App Store in each category as alternatives. The company fails to mention that none of these apps can be chosen as the default messaging app, maps service, email client, web browser, or music player. That limitation isn't always a deal-breaker -- just ask WhatsApp, which is more popular than iMessage in many countries -- but it still gives Apple's services an advantage. [...] The message here seems to be that if companies don't like Apple's policies, they've got other options. Go find your riches on Android or make a Roku app.

Few home-grown Google products have been as successful as Chrome. Launched in 2008, it has more than 63% of the market and about 70% on desktop computers, according to StatCounter data. Mozilla's Firefox is far behind, while Apple's Safari is the default browser for iPhones. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers are punchlines. From a report: Google won by offering consumers a fast, customizable browser for free, while embracing open web standards. Now that Chrome is the clear leader, it controls how the standards are set. That's sparking concern Google is using the browser and its Chromium open-source underpinnings to elbow out online competitors and tilt entire industries in its favor. Most major browsers are now built on the Chromium software code base that Google maintains. Opera, an indie browser that's been used by techies for years, swapped its code base for Chromium in 2013. Even Microsoft is making the switch this year. That creates a snowball effect, where fewer web developers build for niche browsers, leading those browsers to switch over to Chromium to avoid getting left behind.

This leaves Chrome's competitors relying on Google employees who do most of the work to keep Chromium software code up to date. Chromium is open source, so anyone can suggest changes to it, but the majority of programmers who approve contributions are Google employees, and any major disagreements get settled by a small circle of senior Google employees. Chrome is so ascendant these days that web developers often don't bother to test their sites on competing browsers. Google services including YouTube, Docs and Gmail sometimes don't work as well on rival browsers, sending frustrated users to Chrome. Instead of just another ship slicing through the sea of the web, Chrome is becoming the ocean.

Restricted access to US technology is shaping up to have a big impact on Huawei. Now some Chinese software developers are wondering if the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China might soon affect them. From a report: It all revolves around US-based GitHub, the world's largest code hosting platform. Countless open source code projects are based on GitHub, allowing people from around the world to view and collaborate on projects. And as of last year, GitHub is now owned by Microsoft. The fears started when GitHub's export control rules caught the attention of China's developer community. It says that content developed on GitHub needs to comply with US export laws, including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), the same regulations used to restrict exports to Huawei and affiliated companies.

"For developers, source code is a very important resource," said Liu Chen, director of operations for Open Source China (OSChina), which calls itself the largest open source community in China. Fears about losing access to GitHub might be overblown. Apache Software Foundation (ASF), another US-based organization that offers open source software, published an announcement on Wednesday saying that open source software and collaboration on open source code are not subject to the EAR. Nevertheless, the export control rules seen on GitHub mean some in the community remain concerned. The mere prospect of losing access to such an important aspect of their work is alarming.

"Learn to build quantum algorithms from the ground up with a quantum computer simulated in your browser," suggests a new online course.

"The very concept of a quantum computer can be daunting, let alone programming it, but Microsoft thinks it can offer a helping hand," reports Engadget: Microsoft is partnering with Alphabet's X and Brilliant on an online curriculum for quantum computing. The course starts with basic concepts and gradually introduces you to Microsoft's Q# language, teaching you how to write 'simple' quantum algorithms before moving on to truly complicated scenarios. You can handle everything on the web (including quantum circuit puzzles), and there's a simulator to verify that you're on the right track.
The course "features Q# programming exercises with Python as the host language," explains Microsoft's press release.

The course's web page promises that by the end of the course, "you'll know your way around the world of quantum information, have experimented with the ins and outs of quantum circuits, and have written your first 100 lines of quantum code -- while remaining blissfully ignorant about detailed quantum physics."

A post this week on Microsoft's developer blog explains "what we, the Python team, have done to make Python easier to install on Windows" after the next update.

TLDR: Typing 'python' in Windows' Command Prompt will take you to the Microsoft Store's Python page: Microsoft has been involved with the Python community for over twelve years, and currently employ four of the key contributors to the language and primary runtime. The growth of Python has been incredible, as it finds homes among data scientists, web developers, system administrators, and students, and roughly half of this work is already happening on Windows. And yet, Python developers on Windows find themselves facing more friction than on other platforms. It's been widely known for many years that Windows is the only mainstream operating system that does not include a Python interpreter out of the box... So we made things easier.

First, we helped the community release their distribution of Python to the Microsoft Store. This version of Python is fully maintained by the community, installs easily on Windows 10, and automatically makes common commands such as python, pip and idle available (as well as equivalents with version numbers python3 and python3.7, for all the commands, just like on Linux). Finally, with the May 2019 Windows Update, we are completing the picture. While Python continues to remain completely independent from the operating system, every install of Windows will include python and python3 commands that take you directly to the Python store page. We believe that the Microsoft Store package is perfect for users starting out with Python, and given our experience with and participation in the Python community we are pleased to endorse it as the default choice.
And while this fix is only for Python, the Microsoft post adds that "Over time, we plan to extend similar integration to other developer tools and reduce the getting started friction."